The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. In one sense, there was a certain fitness in adapting the Greek methods of building to America. Originally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden building. Its columns were trees, its cornices exposed beams; and the fact that in America one could again build mightily in wood may have furnished an extra incentive to the erection of these colossal buildings. The fact that the Greek mode in America was well under way before the first example of it had appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows perhaps that time and place both favored its introduction on this side of the Atlantic: for the availability of certain materials often, no doubt, directs the imagination to certain forms.
On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent was a bad one. For one thing, since the Greek cella had no source of light except the doorway, it was necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation, and to break up the interior; and it was only in the South that the vast shadowed retreats formed by porches and second-story balconies proved a happy adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek architecture was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir Reginald Blomfield well says, “may have been more successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often remained bleak.
Even on the esthetic side, the Greek style of building was not a full-blown success. With all their strict arrangement of the classic orders, with all their nice proportions, the muted white exteriors resembled a genuine Greek temple in the way that a sepia photograph would represent a sunrise—the warm tones, the colors, the dancing procession of sculptures were absent; it was a thinned and watered Greece that they called to mind. Indeed, the disciples of the Age of Reason and white perukes would have been horrified, I have no doubt, at the “barbarism” of the original Greek temples, as they would doubtless also have been at the meanness of the dwellings in which Pericles or Thucydides must have lived. Once the temple-house ceased to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, it ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to live in a temple? That is a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest. Small wonder that the temple lingered longest in the South, where, down to the Civil War, gangs of slaves supported the dignity of the masters and a large household diminished the chilly sense of solitude.
It was in public architecture that the early republic succeeded best, and it was here that its influence lingered longest, for down to 1840 well-designed buildings in the classic mode, like the Sub-Treasury building in New York, were still put up. The work of McComb in New York, Hoadley in Connecticut, Latrobe in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to mention only a few of the leading architects, represents the high-water mark of professional design in America; and the fact that in spite of the many hands that worked upon it the Capitol at Washington is still a fairly coherent structure is a witness to the strength of their tradition. For all its minor felicities, however, we must not make the mistake of the modern revivalists, like Mr. Fiske Kimball, who urge the acceptance of the classic tradition in America as a foundation for a general modern style. Form and function are too far divorced in the classic mode to permit the growth of an architecture which will proceed on all fours in houses and public buildings, and factories and barns; moreover, there are too many new structures in the modern world which the builders of Rome or the Renaissance have not even dimly anticipated. In medieval building the town hall is a different sort of building from the cathedral: using the same elements, perhaps, it nevertheless contrives an altogether different effect. In the architecture of the early republic, on the other hand, the treasury building might be a church, and the church might be a mansion, for any external differentiation one can observe—in fact, the only ecclesiastical feeling that goes with the churches of the time is a cold deism, or an equally cold Protestant faith which has lost entirely the memories and associations of the intervening centuries. This sort of architecture achieves order and dignity, not by composing differences, but by canceling them. Its standards do not inhere in the building, but are laid on outside of it. When the purpose of the structure happens to conform to the style, the result may be admirable in every way. When it does not happen to conform the result is tedious and banal; and, to tell the truth, a great deal of the architecture of the early republic is tedious and banal.
IV
One further effect of the classic mode has still to be noted: the introduction of formal city design, by the French engineer, Major L’Enfant, in the laying out of Washington. Stirred by the memory of the grand design of Paris under Louis XIV, with its radiating avenues that cut through the city in the way that riding lanes cut through the hunting forest, L’Enfant sought to superimpose a dignified pattern upon the rectangular plan provided by the commissioners of Washington. By putting the major public buildings in key positions, by providing for a proper physical relation between the various departments of the government, by planning spacious avenues of approach, culminating in squares, triangles, and round-points, Major L’Enfant gave great dignity to the new capital city, and even though in the years that followed his plan was often ignored and overridden, it still maintained a monumental framework for the administrative buildings of the American State.
Unfortunately, if Washington has the coherence of a formal plan, it also has its abstractness: contrived to set off and serve the buildings of the government, it exercised no control over domestic building, over business, over the manifold economic functions of the developing city. The framework was excellent, if cities could live by government alone. By laying too much stress on formal order, the exponents of classic taste paved the way for the all too formal order of the gridiron plan, and since the gridiron development was suited to hasty commercial exploitation, while the mode of Washington was not, it was in this mold that the architecture of the nineteenth century was cast.
Within a short while after its introduction in New York in 1811 the effects of the rectangular streets and rectangular lots became evident; whereas the prints of New York before 1825 show a constant variety in the elevation and layout of houses, those after this date resemble more and more standardized boxes. Long monotonous streets that terminated nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses—this was the net contribution of the formal plan. Classical taste was not responsible for these enormities—but on the whole it did nothing to check them, and since the thrifty merchants of New York could not understand L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, they seized upon that part of it which was intelligible: its regularity, its appearance of order.
With the new forces that were at work on the American scene, with the disintegration of classical culture under the combined influence of pioneer enterprise, mechanical invention, overseas commerce, and the almost religious cult of utilitarianism, all this was indeed inevitable. What happened to the proud, Roman-patterned republic of 1789 is a matter of common knowledge. Benjamin Latrobe, the British architect who contributed so much to the Capitol at Washington—including a new order of corn stalks and tobacco leaves—was a witness to the disintegration of the age and the dissolution of its world of ideas; and there is a familiar ring to his commentary upon it:
“I remember [he says in his autobiography] the time when I was over head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature.... Social Compacts were my hobbies; the American Revolution—I ask its pardon, for it deserves better company—was a sort of dream of the Golden Age; and the French Revolution was the Golden Age itself. I should be ashamed to confess all this if I had not a thousand companions in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those generally men of ardent, benevolent, and well-informed minds and excellent hearts. Alas! experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken, and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so delightfully is translated and turned to raggedness. A dozen years’ residence at the Republican court of Washington had affected wonderfully the advance of riper years.”