The Gare d’Orsay in Paris of 1898-1900 (Plate [183A]) by V.-A.-F. Laloux (1856-1937) is no more to be compared with the Americans’ station than his Hôtel de Ville at Tours of 1904-5 with their clubs and banks—his best work, closer to the tradition of Duquesney and Hittorff, was an earlier station, that at Tours of 1895-8. Yet Laloux was often considered the most accomplished French traditional architect of the period.[[514]] Moreover, the McKim, Mead & White repertory of stylistic modes was wide: much wider than that of the French, although Laloux did produce in Saint-Martin at Tours, completed in 1904, a domed basilica still in the line of the earlier French Romanesquoid churches, though not at all of the quality of Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge of the sixties.
McKim, Mead & White exploited a vernacular Colonial Revival, as in the E. D. Morgan house of 1900 at Wheatley Hills, Long Island, as well as a more formal Neo-Georgian, at which several others, such as Delano & Aldrich[[515]] and Charles A. Platt (1861-1933), were quite as competent as they. But they could also shade their Classicism towards the Byzantine, as in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York completed in 1906, or adapt it to industrial uses, as in the I.R.T. Power Station in New York of 1903. They could even extend it upward into skyscrapers, as in the New York Municipal Building completed in 1908, concentrating all their attention on the ground floor and the crowning feature while ignoring the many-storeyed shank between; or spread it thin over large apartment houses such as that they built in 1918 at 998 Fifth Avenue, one of the best examples of the apparently solid blocks that walled one side of that thoroughfare above 57th Street facing Central Park and soon turned Park Avenue from 46th to 96th Street into a man-made canyon. The one thing they and their contemporaries seemed to be unable to do was to make their architecture live, even with the derivative vitality of the Scandinavians. Frozen ideals of stylistic ‘correctness’ stifled such expression of individual personality as gives real character to the work of a Tengbom or a Kampmann even when it comes closest to theirs.
In popular estimation certain buildings that made use of Gothic rather than Classical, Renaissance, or Georgian forms had a higher reputation. Cass Gilbert’s already-mentioned Woolworth Building finished in 1913 (Plate [178]) initiated a considerable range of Gothic skyscrapers, including Howells & Hood’s Chicago Tribune Tower of 1923-5, but it remains in the judgement of posterity the most notable example of this sort of applied medieval design. Despite the considerable acclaim it received when new, such an equally characteristic Romanesquoid example as the Shelton Hotel of 1929 by Arthur Loomis Harmon (b. 1901) rivals Gilbert’s no more in interest than in height. The New York Telephone Company Building, completed in 1926 by Ralph Walker (b. 1889) at the beginning of his career with the firm of McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin, is more original. Its fortress-like masses, somewhat frivolously relieved by ornamental touches borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925, and its isolated location at the Hudson River’s edge, ensure that its bold silhouette will long vie, for the visitor arriving from abroad, with the so much taller and richer silhouette of the Woolworth Building. Most of the other individual big buildings of the twenties in New York and other large American cities are no more than incidental elements in the man-made mountain ranges of their skylines.
Curiously enough the ‘correct’ Gothic churches of this period do not receive today as favourable a response as the large-scale medievalizing secular work that is necessarily so very unlike real work of the Middle Ages. Those of Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), then the most esteemed Gothic practitioner, are lifeless and even crude beside Bodley’s and Pearson’s in England from which they largely derive. His first church, All Saints’, Ashmont, outside Boston which was built in 1892 is by its early date the least anachronistic. Cram’s former partner Goodhue’s St. Vincent Ferrer in New York completed in 1916, a competent and well-scaled example of Late Gothic that is more Continental than English in character, is rather more successful than any of their joint work or that which Cram did later with his other partner Ferguson. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924), responsible also, as has been noted, for the Spanish Colonial revival in California, moved on in the early twenties just before his death to an eclectic sort of semi-modernism best represented by his Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln. This is vaguely Byzantinesque, yet towered instead of being domed in what had been the tradition for state capitals ever since Bulfinch’s in Boston. His contemporary Los Angeles Public Library is starker and more like a project by Tony Garnier.
There were other architects to match McKim, Mead & White directly at their own academic exercises: most notably John Russell Pope (1874-1937), with his Temple of Scottish Rite in Washington completed in 1916, a grandiose reconstruction of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus; and Henry Bacon (1866-1924), with his Lincoln Memorial completed the following year (Plate [180]). The latter is a peripteral Greek Doric temple of white marble with a high attic that might almost have been designed in Paris in the 1780s—no mean compliment. Equally French in spirit, but with no such evident prototypes, is the Grand Central Station in New York, built in 1903-13 by Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore.[[516]] More efficiently organized than the Pennsylvania Station, its concourse is one of the grandest spaces the early twentieth century ever enclosed (Plate [177B]).
Compared to most work of these decades by French architects, all trained like the American leaders at the École des Beaux-Arts, the greater ‘correctness’ of the detailing of these buildings is notable. The boast of ‘good taste’ was not altogether a hollow one, although it is at best a negative rather than a positive criterion for architecture.
So extensive was American building production during the twenties that it is difficult to know how to epitomize it.[[517]] On the one hand, there are the later skyscrapers, essaying new stylistic garments as the older ones lost their piquancy. Even before the Romanesquoid of Harmon’s Shelton Hotel had come the massive simplicity of Walker’s Telephone Building. But for all the playing around with superficially novel decoration borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925 in the succeeding years, there was no basic renewal of form before next decade opened. Just after the crash of 1929 terminated the boom, the second skyscraper age came to a belated close with the erection in the early thirties of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s Empire State Building and the initiation of the Rockefeller Center project.[[518]] There a more urbanistic grouping, extending over a considerable area, replaced the earlier ideal of building single structures of ever greater height that had just reached its climax with the Empire State Building. This change in approach, recognized ever since as a turning point, was for a long time hardly at all followed up. However, the spaced skyscrapers of Pittsburgh’s rebuilt Golden Triangle and, since then, various projects of urban renewal for big and middle-sized cities from coast to coast are shifting the emphasis from individual structures to the wholesale reorganization of very large areas (see Chapter [25] and [Epilogue]).
In the terms of this chapter neither the Empire State Building nor Rockefeller Center are examples of traditional architecture, even if it is hardly proper to consider them ‘modern’ in the sense of the European architecture of their day. Although likewise no example of the new architecture as then understood in Europe like Howe & Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of 1932 (Plate [169]), such a clean-cut skyscraper as Hood’s vertically striped Daily News Building in New York marked with more distinction than its outsize rivals the end of traditional design in this field.
Almost as remarkable as the skyscrapers of the twenties in size and elaboration were the groups of new buildings in which so many academic institutions, both new and old, variously housed themselves. The mode is Classical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built by Welles Bosworth (b. 1869) in 1912-15 on the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.; ‘Georgian-Colonial’ in the range of ‘Houses’ that Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott[[519]] built in the twenties for Harvard, also along the Charles River in Cambridge; it is Gothic at Cram & Ferguson’s Graduate College at Princeton, N.J. (Plate [177A]) completed in 1913, in the Harkness Quadrangle, designed in 1917, and other later buildings for Yale at New Haven, Conn., by James Gamble Rogers (1867-1947), and at the Men’s Campus by Horace Trumbauer (1869-1938) at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; it is even, by exception, Byzantinoid at Cram’s Rice Institute at Houston, Texas, opened in 1912. The usual modes for such work were what was known as ‘Collegiate’ Gothic, based rather loosely on work at Oxford and Cambridge that was quite as likely to be nineteenth-century as medieval in date, and Neo-Georgian in an Anglo-American version, usually too grand to be plausibly Colonial yet too casually composed to be properly Anglo-Palladian. Curiously enough, the Gothic Cram’s Neo-Georgian Sweet Briar College in Virginia of 1901-6 is more successful than much of his own medievalizing work or than comparable work by those who specialized in eighteenth-century design.
The technical competence of American architects in this period was very great, the sums of money available almost unlimited, and the avowed standards of design only the vague ones of ‘taste’ and ‘correctness’, by this time little more than a schoolmasterish respect for precedent in detail, though rarely in over-all composition.[[520]] Far less than in Scandinavia is it possible to define the particular ways in which the period expressed itself, for express itself America in these decades undoubtedly did. Yet, when Americans of this period worked abroad, what they produced is readily distinguishable from the work of local traditionalists. The American Academy on the Gianicolo in Rome, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1913, has a certain chaste precision in its High Renaissance detailing no Italian could then have achieved even if he had wanted to. In London Helmle & Corbett’s[[521]] Bush House, rising between the Strand and Aldwych, has a clarity of form and a sense of urbanistic responsibility that few comparable buildings of its period designed by leading British architects display; up to a point, the same is true of Carrère & Hastings’s[[522]] Devonshire House in Piccadilly of 1924-6. The Ritz Hotel of 1906 across the street by the Anglo-French firm of Mewès & Davis,[[523]] both of them trained at the École des Beaux-Arts as was Thomas Hastings, is bolder in scale, less priggish, but it also lacks the suavity and finish of its neighbour. Bolder also, indeed too monumental for its size, is Barclays Bank of 1926 by W. Curtis Green (b. 1875), near by in Piccadilly across Arlington Street. Of more nearly comparable quality is Green’s earlier Westminster Bank of 1922-3 on the north side of Piccadilly.