American Architecture

D

The Columbian Exposition and Its Influence

Many architects and civic leaders at the end of the 19th century found the new office skyscrapers individually impressive, but not designed with any consideration for one another or for the city as a whole. Rather than being planned as integrated ensembles, cities seemed simply to happen by accident. This situation changed after the Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair held in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of explorer Christopher Columbus in the Western Hemisphere. Scheduled for 1892, the fair was delayed for a year by organization problems. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and Burnham planned the Columbian Exposition as an example of how to design several buildings and the open spaces around them to form a cohesive group. They also integrated water from Lake Michigan as an important part of the design in the form of lagoons. For the sake of unity, all the architects involved in designing the major buildings for the fair agreed to use a classical Roman style, because it was the one style in which they had all been trained.

This choice of style inaugurated a wave of large-scale classical public buildings—such as city halls, art museums, and public libraries—and for a time this impeded the development of a distinctly American form of public building. However, the fair’s design also influenced hundreds of cities across the nation to hire urban planners or to set up permanent urban planning boards or committees to make sure that growth was not only sensible and systematic, but also resulted in beautiful buildings, parks, and urban spaces. This nationwide activity became known as the City Beautiful movement and lasted from 1893 to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

VII

The Modern Movement: 1920s to 1970s

From 1910 on, a small group of architects in Europe had developed an extremely lean and functionally efficient architecture, stripped of virtually all ornament. This austere architecture had limited appeal in the United States, although a few architects in New York, Chicago, and the Los Angeles area independently developed their own versions of such a modern architecture. Best known among these are Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra, all of whom worked in southern California. European-inspired modernism made its first appearance in the United States in the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) building (1929-1932) in Philadelphia. Its design was prepared by George Howe, an American architect, and by William Lescaze, an architect born and trained in Switzerland. The building’s lack of historical ornament, its smooth and polished stone surfaces, and its large planes of glass closely link it with the European modern movement, as do its upper offices in a tall, flat-topped slab with bands of windows.

The first modern European movement to have a wide influence in America was art deco, with its simplified shapes and geometric ornament. But American architects did not fully embrace European modernism until after World War II (1939-1945), when architects who had emigrated from Germany introduced it in the United States.

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A

Historicism

The 20 or so years following World War I (1914-1918) brought not only a renewed use of historical precedent in residential, business, and governmental architecture, but also a determined search for a clearly modern architecture. For governmental buildings, architects and government officials felt that classical architecture was particularly appropriate. The Supreme Court Building (1933-1935) designed by Cass Gilbert in Washington, D.C., provides a good example. From a distance, its inspiration from a classical temple is obvious. At close range, however, the building’s sculpture in particular shows a degree of simplification and abstraction that connects it with art deco modernism of the time.

In the suburbs, which continued to expand rapidly with the rise of private ownership of automobiles, residences were built in historic styles that carried with them the romance of the past, such as colonial revival, late medieval Tudor, and Mediterranean. The best of these houses were designed by trained architects. Such houses exhibited a sure knowledge of architectural history in their accurate details, while at the same time satisfying modern living requirements. The various rooms might be in historic styles different from that used for the exterior, but seldom were historic periods mixed in any single room. These historically based residences are called period houses.

Another new building type that arose after World War I exploited historical references to the utmost: large motion-picture palaces. Just as the movies evoked emotions through an illusionistic medium, so too the movie palaces exploited elaborate ornamentation, designed to give the illusion of France or Spain in the glorious past, or of less familiar locales such as China, Maya Mexico, or ancient Egypt. (Egypt became especially popular after the discovery of the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922.) Some large movie houses, known as atmospheric theaters, had auditoriums designed to resemble town squares, with walls presenting a series of building facades and a smooth plaster vault painted blue to suggest open sky.

Even office skyscrapers continued to have designs based on historical styles into the 1920s. A competition for a new office tower for the Chicago Tribune newspaper, held in 1922, demonstrated dramatically the continued appeal of such designs. Most of the 270 entries to the competition, which came in from around the world, were executed in historically based styles, although some, primarily from Europe, were dramatically modern in style. The conservative jury selected a Gothic design from the firm of Howells & Hood, which drew its inspiration from a late Gothic tower added to the Rouen Cathedral in France in 1485.

B

Early European Modernism and Art Deco

European architectural developments did have an impact on American architecture, and no development more so than a small international exposition held in Paris in 1925 devoted to the decorative arts. This exposition immediately influenced many American patrons and architects who desired to create a modern design that was not so austere or lacking in ornament as the modernism developed by the Bauhaus school in Germany or by Le Corbusier in France. The modernism that stemmed from the Paris exposition quickly came to be called art deco in a shortened version of the exposition’s name, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts). It was a modernism that was not too modern and that incorporated elegant materials, including new materials such as aluminum, stainless steel, and early plastics. Art deco used a great deal of ornament with stylistic motifs such as zigzags and multiple curved forms. Its bold linear or flat geometric patterns were accentuated by strong color contrasts. In the 1930s, art deco detailing became somewhat less exaggerated and shifted toward linear continuity and smooth rounded surfaces in a style that came to be called streamlined moderne.

In the ever-larger office skyscrapers of the 1920s, American architects moved from historic detailing to more original and abstract art deco detailing. Skyscrapers in the art deco style had a soaring shaft with office space, upper floors that were set back from the floors below, and at the top additional setbacks that created a pyramid or spire in a final flourish. (Building and zoning ordinances in many American cities required setbacks of upper floors to allow light and air to reach the streets.) The best example of art deco style is the Chrysler Building (1928-1930) in New York City, by William Van Alen.

A race to build the tallest skyscraper also characterized the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Chrysler Building briefly held the record, with 77 floors and a needlelike spire that reached 319 m (1,046 feet). The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, almost immediately broke that record. Designed by architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, with engineers H. C. Balcom and Associates, the Empire State Building has 102 stories and a dramatic art deco spire that soars to a height of 381 m (1,250 ft). The Empire State Building’s record height remained unsurpassed for nearly 40 years.

C

The International Style

The center of modern architecture in Europe was the Bauhaus, a design school in Germany established in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius. Located first in Weimar, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925. Gropius resigned the directorship in 1928 and left Germany in 1934, after Adolf Hitler became Germany’s leader. Architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe assumed the directorship of the Bauhaus from 1930 until the Nazi regime disbanded it in 1933. In 1932 an exhibition held at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York featured the work of Gropius and other European architects who had defined the modernist design philosophy, including Mies, J. J. P. Oud, and Le Corbusier. The organizers of the exhibition, museum curator Philip Johnson and architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, prepared a small book to accompany it. Both the book and the exhibition were entitled The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, and they introduced the American public to the new European approach to design. Although the initial public reaction to the International Style was not overly enthusiastic, the power of Johnson and Hitchcock’s arguments in its favor gradually gained it broader acceptance. In the book they defined International Style modernism, discussing its rejection of historical styles and applied ornament and its emphasis on pure utilitarian functionalism. International Style architects, they noted, favored enclosed spatial volumes over opaque enclosing materials, smooth industrial finishes (especially metals and glass), and open, nonsymmetrical plans without any dominant axis.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style work, published in Germany in 1911, had exerted a strong influence on the French and German architects who developed the International Style. Their modernism, in turn, influenced Wright himself, as demonstrated in portions of his best-known building, Fallingwater (1935-1938), located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wright had received far fewer commissions in the late 1920s and early 1930s than he had in the first years of the century, in part because of the Depression. Fallingwater, a private weekend house built for Pittsburgh department-store magnate Edgar Kaufmann, reestablished Wright as a major American architect.

Wright positioned the house directly over a stream, giving rise to the house’s name, and on a spot used by Kaufmann and his family to view a lush rhododendron forest. To merge the house with its landscape, Wright used rough limestone and created strongly horizontal wings that appear to extend from the rocky ledges of the site. Like houses in the International Style, Fallingwater lacks conventional interior walls, although stone piers enclose the kitchen. The arrangement of Fallingwater’s rough limestone vertical piers and smooth concrete horizontal planes in a somewhat abstract composition also shows the influence of the International Style.