Somewhere between the extreme professional competence of the traditional architects of America, a competence almost wholly anonymous in its results, and the intensely personal expression of the Scandinavians lies the pattern that the best traditional architecture, such as Green’s, followed in England in the early twentieth century. But before turning to that a good deal more should first be said concerning both the competence and the anonymity of American production, since that competence and even that anonymity came to be accepted throughout the western world as desirable[[524]] characteristics of modern architecture by a great many architects, at least in the mid century.
Partnerships were not unknown in the nineteenth century, although professional alliances between strong personalities rarely lasted for long. When the partner was not an equal the historian is often justified in writing, say, of G. G. Scott and forgetting Moffatt or, with rather less justification, only of Sullivan while ignoring Adler. But architectural firms that include three or more named partners, with still other members listed only on the letter-head; others such as D. H. Burnham and Company and Albert Kahn Incorporated, or ‘partnerships’, such as McKim, Mead & White or Cram & Ferguson, which continued to function under the same name for decades after the death of the original partners like so many firms of lawyers: these are more or less peculiar to the twentieth century and first became common in the United States. Today, moreover, an architect of European background like Mies van der Rohe does not undertake large-scale operations in America, such as the group of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology or a fortiori his tall blocks of flats in Chicago and the Seagram skyscraper in New York, without associating himself with such large local firms. Wright and Gropius solved the problem somewhat differently; but the Taliesin Fellowship and TAC provided them respectively with the relatively modest and idiosyncratic equivalents of the organization of the big Harrison & Abramowitz firm in New York or of one of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon.
The development of the characteristic large-scale American architectural office seems to have begun in Chicago. Burnham, on the death of his designing partner Root in 1891, just after they had undertaken the primary responsibility for the general planning and building of the World’s Fair of 1893, had to set up an organization of which he was no more than the executive head. But the office of McKim, his closest associate in carrying out the Fair, was certainly already far advanced along a parallel road. There is a definite connexion here also with the rise of the skyscraper, for those very large commercial buildings already required a vast amount of uninspired draughting that could be efficiently undertaken only by a large force of assistants working in what came later to be derisively called ‘plan-factories’.
The same is even more true of industrial work. Here Albert Kahn took the lead around 1905 in developing a type of subdivision and flow of work in his office in Detroit comparable to the new methods of mass-production that his motor-car factories were specifically designed to facilitate. Such patterns are found at their extreme in the group[[525]] of firms that together produced Rockefeller Center, in the Harrison & Abramowitz office which is in effect their heir, and in the largely post-war expansion of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Abroad, more characteristically, such organizations have been built up in offices under a public authority such as those of the London and the Hertfordshire County Councils, the City Architects’ Offices in various German cities, or the Banco Obrero housing agency in Venezuela.
‘Plan-factories’ are undoubtedly conducive to speed and to a certain sort of competence in the execution of large projects, but it must be evident that the architecture they produce will necessarily be anonymous. In defining the character of their competence, moreover, one must be careful not to imply too much. Only such team-work, perhaps, can organize the logistics of building production in such a way that extensive and ramified ventures are carried rapidly to completion, a desideratum of the first order in a boom period for skyscrapers that must be finished quickly in order to begin repaying their enormous cost. Efficiency is of a different sort of consequence where large-scale building schemes of a more public and social nature are being undertaken, but none the less extremely important. Le Corbusier’s Unité at Marseilles, produced without an elaborate office organization, took some six years to build; as a result it was no longer ‘low-cost housing’ when it was finally completed.
Yet competence in the sections of a big office that deal with the plumbing, say, or the electrical system is no assurance that the quite different sort of competence required in the design department will be available. Moreover, a brilliant initial design may or may not survive intact the various modifications that other departments bring to it as the preparatory paper-work for the building moves through successive stages to ultimate execution. At best, even when a particular designer’s name is associated with a particular building, as is that of Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Lever House (Plate [189]), his responsibility is of a very different order from Wright’s for the Price Tower-although not perhaps so different from Mies’s for the Seagram skyscraper.
The situation in England in the first third of the century was rather different from that in America despite a nineteenth-century inheritance which was in many aspects common to both countries. One architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, had a personal capacity for invention along traditional lines superior to that of any American of his generation. This was not, however, of the order of individualistic intensity of an Östberg or a Jensen Klint, nor was he able, in the way of an Asplund or even a Hood, to accept around 1930 the discipline of the newer architecture of the day. Lutyens built no skyscrapers, nor did he develop the sort of office organization that made them possible in America. This was, however, occurring to some extent by the twenties and thirties in other big English offices, such as those of Sir John Burnet & Tait[[526]] and of Curtis Green.
All the same, it fell to Lutyens’s lot to build some of the biggest business structures erected anywhere outside America in these years, and his career culminated in the design and construction of an imperial capital such as came the way of no American. His competence was of a more nineteenth-century order than that of the Americans, and there was certainly nothing anonymous about his work. He was, moreover, still an inspiriting figure in an England where architecture, under the difficult economic conditions since the last war, tended to become anonymous without becoming especially competent, except for public housing and for schools (see Chapter [25]).
Lutyens’s beginnings were very remote from the world of business and governmental buildings with which his career wound up (see Chapter [15]). Very early houses, such as Ruckmans of 1894 at Oakwood Park or Sullingstead of 1896 at Hascombe, both in Surrey, followed directly in the line of Shaw’s Surrey manor-houses with their tile-hung walls, free and easy composition, and simple domesticity of tone. They are, indeed, superior to most of Shaw’s—the first of which, Glen Andred, was built almost thirty years earlier and the last about this time—because of Lutyens’s respect for Webb and the resultant superiority of his craftsmanship. In his finest early houses, such as Deanery Gardens at Sonning of 1901 (Plate [182B]), he rivalled Voysey. He was already inclined, however, like Webb in many of his later houses, to use considerable stylistic detail, usually Neo-Georgian, in his interiors, and here and there on exteriors as well.
Perhaps the revolution—or counter-revolution—in his development represented by his Heathcote of 1906 at Ilkley in Yorkshire has been somewhat exaggerated. Yet the design of this, completely symmetrical and quite elaborately Palladian in detail, did represent as great a shift in approach, taken in one jump, as that from Shaw’s Glen Andred of the late sixties to his Chesters of the early nineties. It was, however, practically the same shift. Eclectic like almost all the traditional architects of his generation, Lutyens still occasionally remodelled medieval houses, but the main line of his development henceforth was certainly Neo-Georgian. Yet it was usually Neo-Georgian with an important difference from what had become by this time in England as in America a rather drearily codified mode. Nashdom at Taplow in Buckinghamshire, built in 1909, is a vast white-painted house, plain, regular, massive, and hardly at all archaeological. Yet this is so handsomely proportioned and so well built that one could well believe it to be the result of some generations-long process of accretion in the eighteenth century. Great Maytham in Kent of 1910 is Queen Anne, but not the Queen Anne of the 1870s. Here a great mansion of the early eighteenth century was re-created with such a plausibility of craftsmanship that after only half a century it was hard to believe it was not two hundred and fifty years old. A somewhat smaller house, the Salutation at Sandwich of 1912, is similar and perhaps even more remarkable as an example of what is almost ‘productive archaeology’ on the part of a man who was not, in fact, at all archaeologically minded. Such houses are the twentieth-century equivalents of Devey’s in the nineteenth century, but they often have a witty originality in the handling of traditional detail that has aptly been called ‘naughty’ and is peculiarly personal to Lutyens.[[527]]