AMERICA REVISITED
BUT the most typically American buildings are still the skyscrapers. These fall architecturally into three main classes. There is the soap-box or barrack type, there is the embodied spirit of ferro-concrete, and there is the fairy-story.
Soap-boxes need not detain us long. They can be very boring, but they can be impressive, especially when they border both sides of a big street, and boast cornices. Then they sometimes give the effect of Italian palaces of the Renaissance : Fifth Avenue, just south of the park, has many of them. But too often the cornice has been left out—and, indeed, everything- left out except the perforated box ; and one gets the dull monotony of much of Park and Madison Avenues.
The fairy-story, of course, makes the greatest immediate impression. Who can forget the Woolworth Tower (that monument reared on dimes and nickels), as seen from the river as the liner passes, or when it pulls the eye up to incredible heights as you emerge from the subway at City Hall ? It is like a cross between a cathedral and one of Mad King Ludwig's palaces, manured to fantastic heights by the glorious megalomaniac spirit of New York. What matter if the tower is too big for the body, so that the form reminds you of Alice after she had nibbled the " tall " side of the mushroom ; what matter if ecclesias- tical Tudor Gothic, richly gilt, seems out of place in an office-building ? It is a fairy-story come gigantically and triumphantly to life, and can never be forgotten.
There are many other fairy-stories, in many styles. There is a simple square tower terminating in a step- pyramid, out of which in one chimney-hole it pours its united smoke—Ainerica crowned with Egypt or Aztec Mexico. There is the new Standard Oil building, still more deliberately Egyptian, and a bit gauche and self- toriscious. There is the Radiator building, which has certainly shown New York that the skyscraper is ready for anything—a tower ending in a massive fortification of Gothicity a la Grimm. But it is its colour which gets you—dark chocolate, with the battlements and pinnacles atop all solidly gilded. Why, 0 why, did the architect not try to relieve his chocolate with thin lines of gilt empanelling the windows and gently picking out struc- ture ? Then it might have been lovely instead of only startling.
The Tribune building in Chicago, now almost com- plete, is by the same hand, but will be far more successful. It, again, is to be a tower, crowned Gothically and trium- phantly with pinnacles and flying buttresses, but all bril- liant white. It should compel wonder inevitably and magically, and be a fitting end to Michigan Avenue, which is surely the finest street of skyscrapers in the world, partly for the intrinsic merit of the buildings, partly for the fact that, being open all along one side, it reveals a great façade.
As another type of treatment we may take the Bush building in New York. Strange as is its first effect, one comes to cherish it. It tapers ever so slightly and is capped with a charming storey with gabled top which is rather like Noah's Ark, and is illuminated at night by invisible lights. In parenthesi, this method of lighting, familiar to Londoners from its use at Selfridge's, is most effective with high buildings, and adds a new joy . to architecture. The Wrigley building at Chicago, flooded from top to bottom by batteries of searchlights on neighbouring roofs ; the pillared top gallery of the Texas Company's building in Houston, seen bright from ten miles off across the plain at night ; best of all, the beautiful dome of the State Capitol of Wisconsin mirrored in the lake from across a bay—how lovely they look ! I wonder why it was that Arnold Bennett abused the practice so in Those United States? I suppose through the power of association, because he had only seen it used before on music halls.
But to return to the Bush building. The architects have let the construction speak, in the vertical panels between the windows that take the eye from ground to top. On one side which would otherwise be flat they have introduced into the pale grey wall vertical lines of black and white, symbolizing (without any pretence at realism) some structure, and agreeably filling the space. Finally, they have taken a recess running right up this flank, and bridged it twenty-five storeys up with a single pointed arch—a completely novel and very exciting use of that Gothic feature.
It is interesting to know that our own Bush building in Kingsway (hOw dignified it is in comparison with the heavy Anglo-French which dominates the rest of that thoroughfare !) is by the same firm. It is difficult to imagine two buildings more different. They resemble each other only in their success. We lament the absence of a modern style, but perhaps we cannot get away far enough from our knowledge ; and perhaps this :kind of eclecticism will be the right answer to knowledge.
The New York Bush building might equally well have been treated under my third heading ; for, in spite of a certain delicate and unreal look, it is also, and very definitely, committed to the ferro-concrete style, to the expression of its materials and of their limitations. One problem of the skyscraper is to retain proportion in spite of height : another is to keep any effect of surface when that surface must be per- forated from top to bottom with innumerable black dots of windows. I believe the vertical panel to be the 'answer to both—the long, flat, unadorned panel, slightly protruding between the vertical window-rows, and sweeping the eye up, right up and away towards the sky. Perhaps the Heckscher building and the Shelton Hotel are the finest examples of this most genuine skyscraper architecture in New York. They both are real " tower- houses," to use the German phrase, tapering in fine proportion, real unities from base to top. The Shelton in particular conveys the idea of a really new archi- tectural form, growing as it does because it must, vitally buttressed, adorned becomingly and with restraint— a building full of promise for the future.
Of public buildings that are not skyscrapers I have no space to speak—except to say that there are in America more railroad stations that are also fine buildings than in all the rest of the world ; and that in particular the Pennsylvania railroad station in New York is one of the great buildings of the modern age. And I would like to say of the new Harkness Memorial Tower at Yale that to my mind it is the most beautiful and most convincingly alive and yet unselfconscious piece of Gothic that has- been built since the Renaissance.
I cannot end without telling something of one of the most interesting collections of architectural drawings which I have seen—the book which contains all the designs submitted for the Chicago Tribune building (won by the white Gothic fairy-tale I spoke of above). The competition was international, and there were apparently no restrictions on the fancy of competitors, save that the building was to be capable of being built, and to be built in Chicago. The result was astounding. There were perhaps a dozen to fifteen fine designs —and some of these were fine indeed. One from Sweden was lovely, and one by Goodhue in its severe beauty made a deeper though, I suppose, less obvious appeal than the winner.
Of the others, half were mere mediocrity—mainly soap- boxes with something stuck on top. The rest were fantastic, often to a degree that I should not have believed possible. One soap-box was relieved by pillars at the four corners, starting from halfway up—pillars supporting nothing that could not equally well be taken by plain angles, but none the less a trifle of ten storeys high. But this paled before one archi- tect's dream—of a cubical base out of which sprang all the rest of the building in the form of one single gigantic pillar, Doric-capped, and doubtless with smoke issuing from its top, with windows in rows between its ribs ! Then there was an Italian—with a design that was Italianissinto : rich and gorgeous late Palladian, the whole top consisting of a stupendous arch, full of offices, with a vast quadriga or other similar gewgaw on top. This was followed by a very steep truncated step-pyramid in thirty-five or forty storeys ; the slightly sloping walls must have added interest to the office suites within. Numerous were the designs in which, on top of a per- fectly ordinary block of a building, beauty or romance had been achieved by adding something which was no more and no less than a complete classic temple, or a complete church-tower, as isolated from the rest as if it had been added later by other hands (this is, of course, one of the great difficulties which the skyscraper presents to all but masters of proportion—to unify the dull mass of offices below with an eye-catching crown). The German designs, to my surprise, were uniformly hideous, or else so bizarre that they quite obviously would not have fitted into any conceivable American surroundings.
The emblem of the Tribune is a globe. Many were the globes atop, but only one man dared to make the whole top into one gigantic globe, habitable like its prototype ; one, however, was sufficient ! But enough ! If it was depressing to find such banality and such folly, it was refreshing to see such variety, and encouraging to find the" prizes and mentions going to the best.
I do not know whether it is a universal rule, as it has certainly been a frequent fact, that architecture is the first of the arts to develop in a young civilization or a new cultural epoch. Certainly it is the art which is most flourishing in America to-day, and is further the only art which is really part of the general life of the country.
American literature is waking up ; but people are more afraid of new ideas in books than in buildings, and the best writers are too often only in rebellion. However, the architecture is there, and the feeling for it is growing. It is worth seeing for itself, and worth thinking about as the first blossom of a genuine American artistic culture—something not a mere reflection of England, like New England literature, nor a partial and temporary thing like the aristocratic Southern Colonial houses, but a direct outcome of the main current of modern American life.
Previous page
