For my own part, I think we have at last acquired a criterion which will enable us to sum up the architecture of the imperial age, and deal justly with these railroad stations and stadiums, these sewers and circuses, these aqueducts and parkways and grand avenues. Our imperial architecture is an architecture of compensation: it provides grandiloquent stones for people who have been deprived of bread and sunlight and all that keeps man from becoming vile. Behind the monumental façades of our metropolises trudges a landless proletariat, doomed to the servile routine of the factory system; and beyond the great cities lies a countryside whose goods are drained away, whose children are uprooted from the soil on the prospect of easy gain and endless amusements, and whose remaining cultivators are steadily drifting into the ranks of an abject tenantry. This is not a casual observation: it is the translation of the last three census reports into plain English. Can one take the pretensions of this architecture seriously; can one worry about its esthetics or take full delight in such finer forms as Mr. Pope’s Temple of the Scottish Rite in Washington, or Mr. Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial? Yes, perhaps—if one refuses to look beyond the mask.
Even in some of its proudest buildings, the imperial show wears thin; and one need not peer into the slums beyond in order to realize its defects. The rear of the Metropolitan Museum or the Brooklyn Museum, for example, might be the rear of a row of Bronx tenements or Long Island City factories, so gaunt and barren and hideous is their aspect. If the imperial age was foreshadowed in the World’s Fair, it has received its apotheosis in the museum. In contrast to the local museums one still finds occasionally in Europe, which are little more than extensions of the local curio cabinet, the imperial museum is essentially a loot-heap, a comprehensive repository for plunder. The sage Viollet-le-Duc once patly said that he preferred to see his apples hanging on a tree, rather than arranged in rows in the fruit shop: but the animus of the museum is to value the plucked fruit more than the tree that bore it.
Into the museum come the disjecta membra of other lands, other cultures, other civilizations. All that had once been a living faith and practice is here reduced to a separate specimen, pattern, or form. For the museum, the world of art has already been created: the future is restricted to a duplication of the perfected past. This animus is identic with that which made the Romans so skillful in copying Greek statues and so dull in carving their own; a desirable habit of humility were it not for the fact that the works of art in the past could not have been created had our ancestors been so punctual in respect to finished designs. The one thing the museum cannot attempt to do is to supply a soil for living art: all that it can present is a pattern for reproduction. To the extent that an insincere or imitative art is better than no art at all, the Imperial Age marked an advance: to the extent, however, that a living art is a fresh gesture of the spirit, the museum confessed all too plainly that the age had no fresh gestures to make; on that score, it was a failure, and the copying of period furniture and the design of period architecture were the livid proofs of that failure.
The museum is a manifestation of our curiosity, our acquisitiveness, our essentially predatory culture; and these qualities were copiously exhibited in the architecture of imperialism. It would be foolish to reproach the great run of architects for exploiting the characteristics of their age; for even those who in belief and design have remained outside the age—such resolute advocates of a medieval polity as Dr. Ralph Adams Cram—have not been able to divert its currents. In so far as we have learned to care more for empire than for a community of freemen, living the good life, more for dominion over palm and pine than for the humane discipline of ourselves, the architect has but enshrined our desires. The opulence, the waste of resources and energies, the perversion of human effort represented in this architecture are but the outcome of our general scheme of working and living. Architecture, like government, is about as good as a community deserves. The shell that we create for ourselves marks our spiritual development as plainly as that of a snail denotes its species. If sometimes architecture becomes frozen music, we have ourselves to thank when it is a pompous blare of meaningless sounds.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE AGE OF THE MACHINE
I
Since 1910 the momentum of the Imperial Age seems to have slackened a little: at any rate, in architecture it has lost much of the original energy which had been given to it by the success of the Chicago Exposition. It may be, as Henry Adams hinted, that the rate of change in the modern world has altered, so that processes which required centuries for their consummation before the coming of the dynamo have been accelerated into decades.
With events and buildings so close to us, it is almost impossible to rate their relative importance; all that I can do in the present chapter is to single out one or two of the more important threads which, it seems to me, are bound to give the predominant color to the fabric of our architecture. It is fairly easy to see, however, why the imperial order has not stamped every aspect of our building: for one thing, eclecticism has not merely persisted, but the new familiarity that the American architect has gained with authentic European and Asiatic work outside the province of the classic has increased the range of eclecticism. So the baroque architecture of Spain, which flourished so well in Mexico, and the ecclesiastical architecture of Byzantium and Syria, have added a new charm to our motlied wardrobe: from the first came new lessons in ornament and color, applied with great success by Mr. Bertram Goodhue in the Panama-Pacific Exposition, and now budding lustily in southern villas and gardens; and from the second the architect is learning the importance of mass and outline—the essentials in monolithic construction.
Apart from this, however, the imperial regime has been stalled by its own weight. The cost of cutting through new streets, widening grand avenues, and in general putting on a monumental front has put the pure architect at a disadvantage: there is the same disparity between his plans and the actual aims of the commercial community as there is, quite often, between the prospectus and the actual organization of an industry. Within the precincts of the modern city, the engineer, whose utilitarian eye has never blinked at the necessity for profitable enterprise, and whose interest in human beings as loads, weights, stresses, or units pays no attention to their qualitative demands as human beings—within these precincts, I say, the engineer has recovered his supremacy.
Here, in fact, is the paradox of American architecture. In our suburban houses we have frequently achieved the excellence of Forest Hills and Bronxville; in our public buildings we tend more easily to approach the strength and originality of Mr. Goodhue’s State Capitol for Nebraska; in fact, never before have the individual achievements of American architects been so rich, so varied, and so promising. In that part of architecture which lies outside the purlieus of our commercial system—I mean the prosperous country homes and college buildings and churches and municipal institutions—a tradition of good building and tactful design has been established. At this point, unfortunately, the scope of the architect has become narrowed: the forces that create the great majority of our buildings lie quite outside the cultivated field in which he works. Through the mechanical reorganization of the entire milieu, the place of architecture has become restricted; and even when architecture takes root in some unnoticed crevice, it blooms only to be cut down at the first “business opportunity.”