There are various other adjustments of roads and road-junctions, mostly of a minor sort but important in the aggregate, which ought to be made in order to adapt what were designed as park drives for horse-drawn vehicles to use as automobile roads in a botanical garden; but we will here mention only one, the very confusing junction in the Fruticetum north of the Water Gardens. This ought to be radically changed and simplified for the convenience and safety of traffic, and we believe it can at the same time be so handled in connection with the readjustment of the Fruticetum planting as to improve the appearance of this part of the Garden very materially.
PART V
VICINITY OF THE MUSEUM
Three main problems are here presented which we have found very perplexing, and the best solution of which we do not yet feel confident that we have found. One problem is that of the appearance of the Museum building in relation to its surroundings and of those surroundings in relation to it. The second problem is that of the most effective use, for the purposes of the Garden, of the area immediately surrounding the Museum and lying between it and Conservatory Range No. 1 and westward to the railroad. The third is that of making a far better impression upon the great number of visitors who enter the Garden in this vicinity, both from the rapid transit lines and by automobile; and at the same time, while making such a strongly agreeable immediate impression, inducing them to disperse rapidly to various parts of the Garden instead of congesting near the entrances.
As to the first, our frank opinion is that the present conditions are esthetically very bad. Considered simply as a piece of architecture, apart from relation to surroundings and without allowance for any limiting conditions which may have necessitated the present design, the exterior of the Museum building could not, we believe, be regarded by any competent critic as an artistic success. The story above the main cornice is peculiarly unfortunate in its effect on the silhouette and general proportions of the building. And for a building situated, as this is, in a large open landscape, the high-shouldered effect thus produced is particularly unhappy. Looking forward to the time when extensive additions will be made to the north, it would seem worth while seriously to consider the total elimination or radical change of the present top story at that time. It may even be worth while to consider, in connection with the possibility of very extensive future additions, whether the present building could be entirely enclosed in and masked by such extensions, with a radical change of architectural character; as was done with the original ugly units of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The effect of the building is very much worse as seen from a westerly direction, where the ground falls away rapidly from the basement level of this high building-mass and where there are no supporting trees near it, than as seen from southerly and southeasterly directions, where the ground is more nearly level and there are numerous large trees to compose with it.
It was doubtless this rapid falling-away of the ground to the westward which dictated the narrowness of the formally symmetrical treatment of the axial approach to the building from the southwest. The strip of land occupied by this approach, with its four rows of fine tulip trees, is in considerable fill all along its northwestern edge and this fill drops off abruptly and rather skimpily to what appears to be the original natural surface of the ground just outside the outermost row of trees; whereas the façade of the building extends far beyond this line.
The result is to divide the landscape opposite the long façade of the building into three distinct parts, of three totally different characters, the combined relations of which to the building seem to us most unfortunate.
The formal treatment on the axis is too narrow to furnish in itself an adequate setting for the frontage of so wide a building, and yet is so massive that, instead of seeming a mere incident within a unified open space relating as a whole to the whole façade, it almost completely divides the open space. This effect is exaggerated by the marked lack of symmetry between the two resulting pieces of open space on opposite sides of the axis, both as to levels and as to the presence and absence of trees.
In relation to so big a building, emphatically symmetrical in design, the formal treatment on the axis seems to us, therefore, an unfortunate compromise between two alternative schemes either of which might be good.
In one of these possible schemes the building would face upon a broad park-like space of more or less undulating topography, not rigidly symmetrical about the axis of the building, but not so markedly unsymmetrical as to the grades in immediate contact with the walls of the building or its terraces as to produce a limping effect. In such a scheme, not predicated upon extending the perfect symmetry of the building far beyond its walls, the approach road, instead of being straight and axial for a distance of some 400 feet (or about half-way across the topographic unit in front of the building) and there breaking into asymmetry, would probably sweep up on curving lines from right and left to a formal forecourt in immediate contact with the building.