Chapter 2
Since the Prudential building there have been other tall office buildings, by other hands, truthful in the main, less rigid, less monotonous, more superficially pleasing, yet they somehow fail to impart the feeling of utter sincerity and fresh originality inspired by this building. One feels that here democracy has at last found utterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of the Long Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, and all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive, delicate ornament which covers the whole with a garment of fresh beauty is like the very texture of their dreams. The building is able to speak thus powerfully to the imagination because its creator is a poet and prophet of democracy. In his own chosen language he declares, as Whitman did in verse, his faith in the people of "these states"--"A Nation announcing itself." Others will doubtless follow who will make a richer music, commensurate with the future's richer life, but such democracy as is ours stands here proclaimed, just as such feudalism as is still ours stands proclaimed in the Erie County Bank just across the way. The massive rough stone walls of this building, its pointed towers and many dormered chateau-like roof unconsciously symbolize the attempt to impose upon the living present a moribund and alien order. Democracy is thus afflicted, and the fact must needs find architectural expression.
In the field of domestic architecture these dramatic contrasts are less evident, less sharply marked. Domestic life varies little from age to age; a cottage is a cottage the world over, and some manorial mansion on the James River, built in Colonial days, remains a fitting habitation (assuming the addition of electric lights and sanitary plumbing) for one of our Captains of Industry, however little an ancient tobacco warehouse would serve him as a place of business. This fact is so well recognized that the finest type of modern country house follows, in general, this or some other equally admirable model, though it is amusing to note the millionaire's preference for a feudal castle, a French chateau, or an Italian villa of the decadence.
The "man of moderate means," so called, provides himself with no difficulty with a comfortable house, undistinguished but unpretentious, which fits him like a glove. There is a piazza towards the street, a bay-window in the living room, a sleeping-porch for the children, and a box of a garage for the flivver in the bit of a back yard.
For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily nor so successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of the speculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving him as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale of indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home.
It is an eloquent commentary upon our national attitude toward a most vital matter that in this feverish hustle to produce ships, airplanes, clothing and munitions on a vast scale, the housing of the workers was either overlooked entirely, or received eleventh-hour consideration, and only now, after a year of participation in the war, is it beginning to be adequately and officially dealt with--how efficiently and intelligently remains to be seen. The housing of the soldiers was another matter: that necessity was plain and urgent, and the miracle has been accomplished, but except by indirection it has contributed nothing to the permanent housing problem.
Other aspects of our life which have found architectural expression fall neither in the commercial nor in the domestic category--the great hotels, for example, which partake of the nature of both, and our passenger railway terminals, which partake of the nature of neither. These latter deserve especial consideration in this connection, by reason of their important function. The railway is of the very essence of the modern, even though (with what sublime unreason) Imperial Rome is written large over New York's most magnificent portal.
Think not that in an age of unfaith mankind gives up the building of temples. Temples inevitably arise where the tide of life flows strongest; for there God manifests, in however strange a guise. That tide is nowhere stronger than in the railroad, which is the arterial system of our civilization. All arteries lead to and from the heart, and thus the railroad terminus becomes the beating heart at the center of modern life. It is a true instinct therefore which prompts to the making of the terminal building a very temple, a monument to the conquest of space through the harnessing of the giant horses of electricity and steam. This conquest must be celebrated on a scale commensurate with its importance, and in obedience to this necessity the Pennsylvania station raised its proud head amid the push-cart architecture of that portion of New York in which it stands. It is not therefore open to the criticism often passed upon it, that it is too grand, but it is the wrong kind of grandeur. If there be truth in the contention that the living needs of today cannot be grafted upon the dead stump of any ancient grandeur, the futility of every attempt to accomplish this impossible will somehow, somewhere, reveal itself to the discerning eye. Let us seek out, in this building, the place of this betrayal.
It is not necessarily in the main façade, though this is not a face, but a mask--and a mask can, after its kind, always be made beautiful; it is not in the nobly vaulted corridor, lined with shops--for all we know the arcades of Imperial Rome were similarly lined; nor is it in the splendid vestibule, leading into the magnificent waiting room, in which a subject of the Cæsars would have felt more perfectly at home, perhaps, than do we. But beyond this passenger concourse, where the elevators and stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded the construction of a great enclosure, supported only on slender columns and far-flung trusses roofed with glass. Now latticed columns, steel trusses, and wire glass are inventions of the modern world too useful to be dispensed with. Rome could not help the architect here. The mode to which he was inexorably self-committed in the rest of the building demanded massive masonry, cornices, mouldings; a tribute to Cæsar which could be paid everywhere but in this place. The architect's problem then became to reconcile two diametrically different systems. But between the west wall of the ancient Roman baths and the modern skeleton construction of the roof of the human greenhouse there is no attempt at fusion. The slender latticed columns cut unpleasantly through the granite cornices and mouldings; the first century A.D. and the twentieth are here in incongruous juxtaposition--a little thing, easily overlooked, yet how revealing! How reassuring of the fact "God is not mocked!"
The New York Central terminal speaks to the eye in a modern tongue, with however French an accent. Its façade suggests a portal, reminding the beholder that a railway station is in a very literal sense a city gate placed just as appropriately in the center of the municipality as in ancient times it was placed in the circuit of the outer walls.
Neither edifice will stand the acid test of Mr. Sullivan's formula, that a building is an organism and should follow the law of organisms, which decrees that the form must everywhere follow and express the function, the function determining and creating its appropriate form. Here are two eminent examples of "arranged" architecture. Before organic architecture can come into being our inchoate national life must itself become organic. Arranged architecture, of the sort we see everywhere, despite its falsity, is a true expression of the conditions which gave it birth.
The grandeur of Rome, the splendour of Paris--what just and adequate expression do they give of modern American life? Then shall we find in our great hotels, say, such expression? Truly they represent, in the phrase of Henry James, "a realized ideal" and a study of them should reveal that ideal. From such a study we can only conclude that it is life without effort or responsibility, with every physical need luxuriously gratified. But these hotels nevertheless represent democracy, it may be urged, for the reason that every one may there buy board and lodging and mercenary service if he has the price. The exceeding greatness of that price, however, makes of it a badge of nobility which converts these democratic hostelries into feudal castles, more inaccessible to the Long Denied than as though entered by a drawbridge and surrounded by a moat.
We need not even glance at the churches, for the tides of our spiritual life flow no longer in full volume through their portals; neither may the colleges long detain us, for architecturally considered they give forth a confusion of tongues which has its analogue in the confusion of ideas in the collective academic head.
Is our search for some sign of democracy ended, and is it vain? No, democracy exists in the secret heart of the people, all the people, but it is a thing so new, so strange, so secret and sacred--the ideal of brotherhood--that it is unmanifest yet in time and space. It is a thing born not with the Declaration of Independence, but only yesterday, with the call to a new crusade. The National Army is its cradle, and it is nurtured wherever communities unite to serve the sacred cause. Although menaced by the bloody sword of Imperialism in Europe, it perhaps stands in no less danger from the secret poison of graft and greed and treachery here at home. But it is a spiritual birth, and therefore it cannot perish, but will live to write itself on space in terms of beauty such as the world has never known.
II
DURING THE WAR
The best thing that can be said about our immediate architectural past is that it is past, for it has contributed little of value to an architecture of democracy. During that neo-feudal period the architect prospered, having his place at the baronial table; but now poor Tom's a-cold on a war-swept heath, with food only for reflection. This is but natural; the architect, in so far as he is an artist, is a purveyor of beauty; and the abnormal conditions inevitable to a state of war are devastating to so feminine and tender a thing, even though war be the very soil from which new beauty springs. With Mars in mid-heaven how afflicted is the horoscope of all artists! The skilled hand of the musician is put to coarser uses; the eye that learned its lessons from the sunset must learn the trick of making invisible warships and great guns. Let the architect serve the war-god likewise, in any capacity that offers, confident that this troubling of the waters will bring about a new precipitation; that once the war is over, men will turn from those "old, unhappy, far-off things" to pastures beautiful and new.
In whatever way the war may complicate the architect's personal problem, it should simplify and clarify his attitude toward his art. With no matter what seriousness and sincerity he may have undertaken his personal search for truth and beauty, he will come to question, as never before, both its direction and its results. He is bound to perceive, if he does not perceive already, that the war's arrestment of architecture (in all but its most utilitarian and ephemeral phases) is no great loss to the world for the reason that our architecture was uninspired, unoriginal, done without joy, without reverence, without conviction: a thing which any wind of a new spirit was bound to make appear foolish to a generation with sight rendered clairvoyant through its dedication to great and regenerative ends.
He will come to perceive that between the Civil War and the crusade that is now upon us, we were under the evil spell of materialism. Now materialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a government by the _demos_, or over-soul; it is equally the negation of joy, the negation of reverence, and it is without conviction because it cannot believe even in itself. Reflecting thus, he can scarcely fail to realize that materialism, everywhere entrenched, was entrenched strongest in the camps of the rich---not the idle rich, for materialism is so terrible a taskmaster that it makes its votaries its slaves. These slaves, in turn, made a slave of the artist, a minister to their pride and pretence. His art thus lacked that "sad sincerity" which alone might have saved it in a crisis. When the storm broke militant democracy turned to the engineer, who produced buildings at record speed, by the mile, with only such architectural assistance as could be first and easiest fished up from the dragnet of the draft.
In one direction only does there appear to be open water. Toward the general housing problem the architectural profession has been spurred into activity by reason of the war, and to its credit be it said, it is now thoroughly aroused. The American Institute of Architects sent a commissioner to England to study housing in its latest manifestations, and some of the ablest and most influential members of that organization have placed their services at the disposal of the government. Moreover, there is a manifest disposition, on the part of architects everywhere, to help in this matter all they can. The danger dwells in the possibility that their advice will not be heeded, their services not be fully utilized, but through chicanery, ignorance, or inanition, we will relapse into the tentative, "expensively provisional" methods which have governed the housing of workers hitherto. Even so, architects will doubtless recapture, and more than recapture, their imperiled prestige, but under what changed conditions, and with what an altered attitude toward their art and their craft!
They will find that they must unlearn certain things the schools had taught them: preoccupation with the relative merits of Gothic and Classic--tweedledum and tweedledee. Furthermore, they must learn certain neglected lessons from the engineer, lessons that they will be able immeasurably to better, for although the engineer is a very monster of competence and efficiency within his limits, these are sharply marked, and to any detailed knowledge of that "beautiful necessity" which determines spatial rhythm and counterpoint he is a stranger. The ideal relation between architect and engineer is that of a happily wedded pair--strength married to beauty; in the period just passed or passing they have been as disgruntled divorcés.
The author has in mind one child of such a happy union brought about by the war; the building is the Red Cross Community Club House at Camp Sherman, which, in the pursuit of his destiny, and for the furtherance of his education, he inhabited for two memorable weeks. He learned there more lessons than a few, and encountered more tangled skeins of destiny than he is ever likely to unravel. The matter has so direct a bearing, both on the subject of architecture and of democracy, that it is worth discussing at some length.
This club house stands, surrounded by its tributary dormitories, on a government reservation, immediately adjacent to the camp itself, the whole constituting what is known as the Community Center. By the payment of a dollar any soldier is free to entertain his relatives and friends there, and it is open to all the soldiers at all times. Because the iron discipline of the army is relaxed as soon as the limits of the camp are overpassed, the atmosphere is favourable to social life.
The building occupies its acre of ground invitingly, though exteriorly of no particular distinction. It is the interior that entitles it to consideration as a contribution to an architecture of that new-born democracy of which our army camps have been the cradle. The plan of this interior is cruciform, two hundred feet in each dimension. Built by the Red Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the larger uses of that organization, the symbolic appropriateness of this particular geometrical figure should not pass unremarked. The cross is divided into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries and mezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms of the cross in its upper stages, leaving the clear-story surrounding the crossing unimpeded and well defined. The light comes for the most part from high windows, filtering down, in tempered brightness to the floor. The bones of the structure are everywhere in evidence, and an element of its beauty, by reason of the admirably direct and logical arrangement of posts and trusses. The vertical walls are covered with plaster-board of a light buff color, converted into good sized panels by means of wooden strips finished with a thin grey stain. The structural wood work is stained in similar fashion, the iron rods, straps, and bolts being painted black. This color scheme is completed and a little enlivened by red stripes and crosses placed at appropriate intervals in the general design.
The building attained its final synthesis through the collaboration of a Cleveland architect and a National Army captain of engineers. It is so single in its appeal that one does not care to inquire too closely into the part of each in the performance; both are in evidence, for an architect seldom succeeds in being so direct and simple, while an engineer seldom succeeds in being so gracious and altogether suave.
Entirely aside from its æsthetic interest--based as this is on beauty of organism almost alone--the building is notable for the success with which it fulfils and co-ordinates its manifold functions: those of a dormitory, a restaurant, a ballroom, a theatre, and a lounge. The arm of the cross containing the principal entrance accommodates the office, coat room, telephones, news and cigar stand, while leaving the central nave unimpeded, so that from the door one gets the unusual effect of an interior vista two hundred feet long. The restaurant occupies the entire left transept, with a great brick fireplace at the far end. There is another fireplace in the centre of the side of the arm beyond the crossing; that part which would correspond in a cathedral to the choir and apse being given over to the uses of a reading and writing room. The right transept forms a theatre, on occasion, terminating as it does with a stage. The central floor spaces are kept everywhere free except in the restaurant, the sides and angles being filled in with leather-covered sofas, wicker and wooden chairs and tables, arranged in groups favourable to comfort and conversation. Two stairways, at the right and left of the restaurant, give access to the ample balcony and to the bedrooms, which occupy three of the four ends of the arms of the cross at this level.
The appearance and atmosphere of this great interior is inspiring; particularly of an evening, when it is thronged with soldiers, and civilian guests. The strains of music, the hum of many voices, the rhythmic shuffle on the waxed floor of the feet of the dancers--these eminently social sounds mingle and lose themselves in the spaces of the roof, like the voice of many waters. Tobacco smoke ascends like incense, blue above the prevailing green-brown of the crowd, shot here and there with brighter colors from the women's hats and dresses, in the kaleidoscopic shifting of the dance. Long parallel rows of orange lights, grouped low down on the lofty pillars, reflect themselves on the polished floor, and like the patina of time on painted canvas impart to the entire animated picture an incomparable tone. For the lighting, either by accident or by inspiration, is an achievement of the happiest, an example of the friendliness of fate to him who attempts a free solution of his problem. The brackets consist merely of a cruciform arrangement of planed pine boards about each column, with the end grain painted red. On the under side of each arm of the cross is a single electric bulb enclosed within an orange-coloured shade to kill the glare. The light makes the bare wood of the fixture appear incandescent, defining its geometry in rose colour with the most beautiful effect.
The club house is the centre of the social and ceremonial life of the camp, for balls, dinners, receptions, conferences, concerts without number; and it has been the scene of a military wedding--the daughter of a major-general to the grandson of an ex-president. To these events the unassuming, but pervasive beauty of the place lends a dignity new to our social life. In our army camps social life is truly democratic, as any one who has experienced it does not need to be told. Not alone have the conditions of conscription conspired to make it so, but there is a manifest _will-to-democracy_--the growing of a new flower of the spirit, sown in a community of sacrifice, to reach its maturity, perhaps, only in a community of suffering.
The author may seem to have over-praised this Community Club House; with the whole country to draw from for examples it may well appear fatuous to concentrate the reader's attention, for so long, on a building in a remote part of the Middle West: cheap, temporary, and requiring only twenty-one days for its erection. But of the transvaluation of values brought about by the war, this building is an eminent example: it stands in symbolic relation to the times; it represents what may be called the architecture of Service; it is among the first of the new temples of the new democracy, dedicated to the uses of simple, rational social life. Notwithstanding that it fills a felt need, common to every community, there is nothing like it in any of our towns and cities; there are only such poor and partial substitutes as the hotel, the saloon, the dance hall, the lodge room and the club. It is scarcely conceivable that the men and women who have experienced its benefits and its beauty should not demand and have similar buildings in their own home towns.
Beyond the oasis of the Community Club House at Camp Sherman stretch the cantonments--a Euclidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofs and ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines. This is the architecture of Need in contradistinction to the architecture of Greed, symbolized in the shop-window prettiness of those sanitary suburbs of our cities created by the real estate agent and the speculative builder. Neither contain any enduring element of beauty.