CHAPTER 24 - Notes

Footnote 511:

‘Historicism’ is a clumsy term matched by no viable adjective. It does, however, express more accurately than ‘traditionalism’, ‘revivalism’, or ‘eclecticism’ a certain aspect of architecture which was common throughout the last five hundred years, and not unknown in early ages. Quite simply, it means the re-use of forms borrowed from the architectural styles of the past, usually in more or less new combinations. It is late in this book to introduce a definition; but historicism is always so much taken for granted in discussing the architecture of the nineteenth century that it is only after the appearance as an alternative of exclusive modernism, rejecting all borrowed forms, that the older attitude needs to be isolated in order to discuss its continuance in this century. Characteristically, the architecture of two-thirds of the period covered by this book balanced a moderate sort of modernism with more or less of historicism. This is as true of most of the novel projects of Ledoux in the 1780s as it is of a considerable part of the work of the first generation of modern architects. However, only the traditional architects remained firmly attached to the concept of historicism in the twentieth century; men like Behrens and Perret were, through much of their careers at least, in highly significant revolt against it, quite as Ledoux had been in his day.

Footnote 512:

See Östberg, R., _The Stockholm Town Hall_, Stockholm, 1929.

Footnote 513:

The decline is perhaps to be related at its start to the death of their associate Joseph M. Wells in 1890. Never a member of the firm, he had nevertheless been personally responsible for the design of the Villard houses (Plate 109B) that had opened the academic phase of the firm’s career. Later, the death of White and the retirement of McKim in the early years of the new century removed the two controlling personalities from the firm. Henceforth the office was a ‘plan-factory’, with high professional standards undoubtedly, but without direction other than that already established in the late eighties and nineties by the founders. In 1961 the firm finally came to an end with the death of J. K. Smith, the only surviving partner who had known the founders.

Footnote 514:

J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920), a pupil of Gilbert who had worked with Garnier on the Opéra and succeeded Labrouste at the Bibliothèque Nationale, had at least as high a reputation, and was the teacher of several prominent English and American architects. His severe academic style, emulated later by his Anglo-Saxon pupils, was well established by the time he designed the Faculty of Medicine at Bordeaux in the early nineties. Nénot was one of Pascal’s French pupils.

Footnote 515:

William Adams Delano (b. 1874) was a pupil of Laloux; Chester Holmes Aldrich (b. 1878) was also trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. For an attempt to reassess the ‘traditional’ houses of this period, see Lane, J., ‘The Period House in the Nineteen-Twenties’, _Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_, XX (1961), 185-90.

Footnote 516:

The controversy as to which firm should receive credit for the design of the Grand Central Station once waxed hot. The organization of the tremendous complex was probably the work of Charles A. Reed (?-1911) and Allen H. Stem (1856-1931), who had already built other big stations in Troy, N.Y., in 1901-4 and in Tacoma in 1909-11—as, moreover, their successors, Felheimer & Wagner, have done also: Buffalo and North Station, Boston, both begun in 1927, and Cincinnati in 1929-33. Whitney Warren (1864-1943) and Charles D. Wetmore (1866-1941), who also worked with Reed & Stem on the Detroit station completed in 1913, were doubtless more responsible for the dignified and well-scaled detailing. See Marshall, D., _Grand Central_, New York, 1946.

Footnote 517:

Books of the period, such as _American Architecture_ of 1928 by the distinguished architectural historian Fiske Kimball, or _American Architecture of Today_, also of 1928, by the then Dean of the Harvard University School of Architecture, G. H. Edgell, offer the later writer very little assistance. Kimball in the twenties was too ready to consider the continuance of the academic tradition assured—his chapter on Sullivan and Wright was entitled ‘The Lost Cause’—while Edgell offers such a miscellany of buildings that no clear picture emerges. Several attempts within the period to select its major monuments fixed on much the same lot as are given prominence here; but such selections hardly help to organize the work of the day in historical terms.

Footnote 518:

See Weisman, W., ‘Towards a New Environment: the Way of the Price Mechanism; the Rockefeller Centre’, _Architectural Review_, CVIII (1950), 399-405; ‘Who Designed Rockefeller Center?’, _Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_, X (1951), 11-17; and ‘The First “Mature” Skyscraper’, _Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_, XVIII (1959), 54-9.

Footnote 519:

This firm were the successors of Richardson, and Henry Richardson Shepley, now its head, is Richardson’s grandson. See Forbes, J. D., ‘Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, Architects—An Introduction’, _Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_, XVII (1958), 19-31.

Footnote 520:

‘Compositionalism’ has been suggested by Colin Rowe as a name for the style-phase with which this section deals. Composition was then conceived by many architects and theorists as an absolute to which the re-use of any sort of stylistic forms could be accommodated. It is at least open to suspicion, for example, that Rogers’s Pierson College at Yale was designed originally with Gothic forms and then re-cast as Neo-Georgian. Later eyes than our own will doubtless find it possible to identify the period characteristics of traditional work of the twenties in the way many critics already feel able to do with the nineteenth-century revivals. The period-designation ‘President Harding’ may some day perhaps be as meaningful as ‘General Grant’, if hardly comparable to ‘Victorian’!

Footnote 521:

Harvey Wiley Corbett (b. 1873), a pupil of Pascal at the École des Beaux-Arts, was probably the designer.

Footnote 522:

Carrère was dead by this time, but the firm name remained unchanged; as has been mentioned earlier, Professor Sir Charles Reilly was consultant, and he probably made some real contribution to the design.

Footnote 523:

C.-F. Mewès (1858-1947) and Arthur Joseph Davis (1878-1951), both pupils of Pascal, like Corbett.

Footnote 524:

Gropius is very insistent on the desirability of anonymous team-work in architecture. His TAC, the one-time Tecton group in London, and other firms with similar names are examples of this ideal which aims, of course, at something rather different from the anonymity of the large commercial firms. Theirs is fact rather than ideal.

Footnote 525:

See Weisman, W., ‘Group Practice’, _Architectural Review_, CXIV (1953), 145-51.

Footnote 526:

Sir John J. Burnet (1857-1938), another pupil of Pascal at the École; Thomas S. Tait (1882-1954).

Footnote 527:

See Pevsner, N., ‘Building with Wit; the Architecture of Sir E. Lutyens’, _Architectural Review_, CX (1951), 217-25.

Footnote 528:

See Purdom, C. B., _The Garden City_, London, 1913; and Culpin, E. G., _The Garden City Movement Up-to-Date_, London, 1913.

Footnote 529:

See Macfadyen, D., _Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement_, London, 1933.

Footnote 530:

See Unwin, R., _Town Planning and Modern Architecture at the Hampstead Garden Suburb_, London, 1909.

Footnote 531:

Some of the other large buildings were the work of Sir Herbert Baker, who was also responsible for another dominion capital at Pretoria in South Africa. Of his rival’s intervention at New Delhi Lutyens remarked characteristically, ‘It was my Bakerloo’.

Footnote 532:

See Drysdale, G., ‘The Work of Leonard Stokes’, _Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects_, XXXIV (1927), 163-77, and Roberts, H. V. M., ‘Leonard Aloysius Stokes’, _Architectural Review_, C (1946), 173-7.

Footnote 533:

The New-Zealand-born Connell’s High-and-Over in Bucks of 1927 is very superior, however, to Tait’s Le Chateau at Silverend in Essex, and a year earlier.