Part 7

The contract system of building means that directly the contract is signed, the architect, representing the interests of his client, and the contractor are there watching one another like rival detectives in a divorce case. The contractor to obtain the contract has probably put in too low a price. Everywhere in material and labour he is anxious to save except where he can find, as in practice he always can, excuse in the specifications and drawings for extras, when he is equally anxious to spend unnecessary money. I do not want to suggest that the majority of builders are not honest. Without any dishonesty in carrying out a contract, which he knows will be strictly enforced against him, the builder uses his wits to make the best living he can. If he has done a good deal of work for the same architect he may take a long view and say “I had better not do such and such a thing, because if discovered this particular architect will not ask me to tender for his work again.” I admit this often happens and to a certain extent the rigours of the contract system are thereby tempered. But who, outside a lunatic asylum, under such a system and under modern conditions, would expect good craftsmanship to flourish and good sound building to arise? That it does flourish now and then, and that good sound buildings are put up occasionally is a miracle, which I, as an architect, can only put down to some strange innate goodness in the breasts of many builders. I am afraid this goodness is chiefly to be found in those who are styled old-fashioned, in firms that have a tradition and in craftsmen who love their work, whatever they may in a monetary sense make from it.

But why should this state of affairs exist? Why should the builder be on one side and the architect on the other? Why should they not be colleagues from first to last, each helping the other with his experience? The answer is that this happy state of affairs can only take place to the benefit of everyone concerned, and particularly of the building owner, if the ordinary contract based on cut-throat tendering is abolished. By far the most satisfactory work it has been my lot to carry out, as well as the most enjoyable, has been that done under a different system—a system of actual cost plus a fixed profit. In this, to begin with, a careful estimate is made by independent quantity surveyors of the cost of the proposed work, and both the builder and the architect’s remuneration is fixed from the outset. If the building costs more than the estimate, neither profits by the excess. Of course the architect’s commission of six per cent. is so small that it cannot be considered any temptation to him to increase the cost of the building for the sake of it. Still it is more satisfactory, as an example to everyone, and more pleasant for the owner, to know exactly what he is going to pay each person.

What is the result? Everyone starts on the building operations as friends and helpers. In place of antagonistic individual effort you have team work. The larger experience of materials, which the average builder who works for many architects possesses, is placed at the architect’s and consequently at the client’s disposal. If he suggests red deal instead of yellow for a certain piece of work the architect has no reason to suppose he has some hidden motive behind his suggestion. Under the present system the architect is wont to jump to the conclusion that the yellow must be the better, because the builder has suggested the red, and, if the yellow is in the contract, he will insist on it till all is blue, and if the contractor makes a loss, he will take care to make it good elsewhere. And after all, the red might have been better for the particular position. We all know, however, even as free-traders, that the desire to buy in the cheapest market has many qualifications. Among them is human nature, and there is a great deal of human nature in building, and especially in good building. If when we set out to build we want real value for our money, as well as buildings which will be of real value to the country when we have done with them, the sooner we abolish the ordinary form of building contract the better. That is why I have called it the Anti-Social Contract.

XVIII.

AN INDICTMENT OF COAL SMOKE.

A LARGE northern city without smoke, or indeed any English town where human beings for business reasons have to live in close proximity, is a little difficult to conceive. If it came about suddenly we who live in such places might feel not a little naked and awkward, so accustomed are we to our own dirt. We are apt, indeed, to think that dirt and dignity go hand in hand. A poet friend of mine, who had gone to live in Leeds, told me that one day on visiting his bank in that city, instead of finding it the massive gloomy black pile he expected, it stood out before him as a trifling white building in glazed terra-cotta lately washed. All its dignity and half its financial credit in his eyes had gone. Such it is to be suddenly clean in black surroundings; where before the crudeness of the architecture had been decently covered in soot it now stood forth unashamed in all its absurdity. It was a test the Leeds bank building could not stand, and it is one very few of our more modern classical buildings could. To them the smoke deposit is a grateful one, softening their crudities.

Manchester, however, has lately been cleaning, with the aid of a sandblast, some of her older classical buildings dating from a pre-smoke era, and these have stood the test nobly. The Theatre Royal is a good example. From this one might argue, and I think with some fairness, that as the pall over our towns has become heavier so our architecture has deteriorated. I think it is really a case of cause and effect, though admittedly other things aided in the decline. What is the use of Greek delicacy and refinement in mouldings and ornament when an oily black deposit will very quickly obliterate them and, as has been proved time after time, in a few short decades crumble them away? The good architect is likely to give up hope, and devote himself to clean buildings in the country, where not only mouldings but even texture counts. So we have in our smoky English towns our heavy over-ornamented buildings trying by over-emphasis in every direction to force their way through the grime, and in a clean smokeless town, like New York, light gay buildings with clean line and surface and delicate ornament leaping up to the light and trusting to their general shape and mass for their main effect. The sunny city brings about bright clean-shaven buildings, the smoky one be-whiskered coalheavers grinning at us in their oily facetiousness.

What Manchester or Leeds would be like in a few years’ time for an architect to work in if the tons of tarry acids and soot from their domestic chimneys—the chief offenders—went down the sewers, as such refuse should as long as it remains refuse, instead of falling on our heads and our buildings, is difficult to imagine. They would, one may be sure, be towns of peculiar beauty, a beauty, too, very different to that of the sunny towns of the Mediterranean. Instead of the bright colours belonging to a lower latitude we should have the far more beautiful half-tones and pearly greys belonging to our northern climate. Our buildings to correspond would have to be more delicately modelled, with less strongly marked shadows. Deep porticoes would rarely be used save to mark points of special importance. The architect, instead of being a man accustomed to think in black lines, would become sensitive, not only to every shade of colour, but to every modulation of surface and texture. No longer could we tolerate the hard, bright, cheery reds of our machine-made pressed bricks. The black joints, too, in which we set our brickwork, grinding cinders into our mortar where the south uses sand, would seem to be what they are, so many dirty lines drawn across the fair faces of our buildings, and thereby adding most unnecessarily to the gloom. A vulgar moulding too, an over-emphasized piece of ornament, would become so conspicuous in proper daylight, when all the surroundings would be clean, that the author of it would begin to be cut by his fellow-architects, and even his lay friends as a man of bad and flamboyant taste. For it must be remembered we have already reached the stage where a sin against taste, when realised, is far worse than one against morals. Indeed, the reactions of clean air and the beautifully tempered sunlight which really belongs to Lancashire would be infinite. With the coating of soot removed from our lungs as well as the black from our buildings we should probably all talk with the sprightliness of the Athenians of old. An architectural public opinion would be one of the first things to form, and woe betide the architect and client who spoilt with his coarse work our modern Athens. An effect which old Athens lacked we could have in abundance. The foliage of beautiful feathery yet rounded trees suited to a town, which grow in our climate but not in hers, might make the foil to the buildings of our main streets which the London plane trees do to the painted buildings of the London squares. Our parks, too, would become clean. They might then cease to be the dreary recreation grounds, with asphalt paths and a weedy sprinkling of grass, we now assume, unrightly I think, to be all that is possible in the heart of a city.

All this I realise may be thought fanciful, though it is fancy based on fact. Here, then, are solid facts no one can dispute. Sir Frank Baines, chief architect to the Office of Works, than whom no one has more experience of the upkeep of buildings, stated in his evidence before the Committee on Smoke Abatement that the cost of the upkeep of a building would be reduced by at least half if a smoke-free atmosphere obtained. The material damage to Manchester by its own smoke has been calculated at £1,000,000 a year. But more important even than these figures is the disrepute and disregard into which its soot has brought such towns. There is the story, probably apocryphal and certainly unwarranted, though useful enough in pointing a moral, of the Cabinet Minister who had a speaking engagement, and not feeling very well went to see a leading consultant, and asked whether he was fit to keep his engagement, which happened to be in Manchester. “Manchester?” said the consultant, “certainly not. Nobody is well enough to go to Manchester.”

Owing to their smoke and dirt, no one now lives in our northern manufacturing towns who can afford to live outside them. They have become mere workshops, and, with the Englishman’s disregard for the surroundings in which he works, they are yearly losing what little amenities are left. When the eighteenth-century merchant lived in his square dignified Georgian mansion, with its touch of Dutch brightness and cleanliness, and walked to his equally dignified counting-house, the appearance of the city he walked through was a thing of some consideration to him. Now, when he motors into it for a few hours in the middle of the week and is landed at his office door with hardly time to see the buildings he passes, having his attention directed chiefly to the traffic and the policemen, not only his interest in his town but his knowledge of it is infinitely less. The place he makes money in is not worthy of his thoughts except for that purpose. With the more influential classes feeling like this, it is no wonder that the others feel even less interest and responsibility as they hurry away in their tram-cars to their distant suburbs. So the rot, started by the smoke, spreads until the town becomes the black, formless, slightly smelling abomination we begin to believe it must be. Yet all the time there are Paris, Vienna, New York, Düsseldorf, and Cologne, indeed almost any town but one of our own, to show that in reality the town is and may be something very different—the highest and finest expression of communal life, the place where service and work and the consequent enjoyment of them can alone be carried to the highest pitch.

XIX. THE BUSH BUILDINGS OF NEW YORK AND LONDON.

NOTHING could illustrate better the versatility of the leading American architects or the eclectic character of modern American architecture than the Bush Buildings in New York and London. If we wanted to go further we could illustrate this thesis from two other almost equally important works by the same architects, Messrs. Hemle and Corbett. There is their great and splendid Italian basilican church at Brooklyn and their Washington Memorial Masonic Temple, a vast and powerful monumental building in what we should call in England Neo-Grec architecture. These four great structures, either of which is sufficiently striking and competent in every implication of the word, to make the fame of an ordinary English architect, are therefore at the four poles of architectural expression, if we exclude modern attempts at futuristic design. In the England of the end of last century we should have explained this phenomenon easily enough, or at any rate the younger men would, on the simple hypothesis of ghostly designers. But that will not do in this case or in the similar cases of other American firms like Messrs. York and Sawyer, or McKim, Mead and White, which show the same universality in their work. In Mr. Corbett’s case, for his partnership is frankly and openly that of a designer and a business man, from experience of his office I happen to know that all this diverse yet splendid achievement is the work of one man, Mr. Corbett himself. Yet this does not measure his output of creative energy. Apart from his lesser architectural work, like apartment houses and the four great buildings mentioned, all erected or in the course of erection within the span of a few years—for he is still a young man as measured by the heads of the architectural profession in this country—Mr. Corbett finds time to carry on the most successful design atelier in Columbia University. Two nights a week he criticises the _projets_ of some 25-30 young architects, making the constructive suggestions every teacher worth his salt has to make. I met him late one night when he told me he had that evening sketched fifteen different solutions to the same problem on as many student drawing boards. How does this extreme competence, combined with almost absolute freedom from a predilection for any particular form of expression, arise? Obviously it is an intellectual phenomenon divorced from faith in any particular tradition. The only answer I can find to it, and I think it is a satisfactory answer, is that it lies in a combination of the extremely logical Beaux Arts system of education with the alertness of the quick-moving American mind, always open to fresh ideas. Mr. Corbett was trained in Paris, and after that had the usual period of assistantship in great offices like Mr. Cass Gilbert’s and Messrs. McKim, Mead and White’s. In his own case he has never believed in nor possessed a great office staff as measured by American standards. He once told me that he felt fifteen draughtsmen were as many as any man could feed with ideas. After that they began to feed you. It seems a rational limit though one knows it is one often exceeded even in England.

With these preliminary remarks let us consider his two great Bush Buildings both designed to answer the same programme—a permanent exhibition of travellers’ samples—and both converted or partially converted to office purposes, as foreseen would be the case, while the idea of such an exhibition gradually obtained acceptance. The programme from the outset therefore obviously divides itself into two aspects, that of providing large unencumbered exhibition floor space capable of temporary sub-division into offices, and that of giving the total building in each case the commanding appearance, which will make it a prominent feature in a great city. We know how well Mr. Corbett, even in the small section of his total scheme which has been built already, has solved this two-sided problem in London. His New York building, perhaps, is less well know. Let us therefore start with that.

In New York Mr. Bush had chosen a site for his venture in 42nd Street, a street which seems to me roughly to correspond to the Strand. That is to say it is a street half way between the City and the West End, near to the great commercial hotels, most of which are indeed in it. It is in a growing neighbourhood too, into which important industrial concerns are continually moving from the crowded down-town area. Hence under American conditions the surrounding buildings are continually getting larger and higher. The site Mr. Bush was able to buy was a very narrow one, some fifty feet wide, in the centre of a city block. It would only get light, therefore, back and front. Further any buildings rising above its fellows must be prepared in such circumstances for the blank return walls, which are one of the ugliest features of American building conditions. If the site was a narrow restricted one it was however 200 feet deep, and compares therefore, in total area to about two-thirds of that occupied by the central block of the London building. To develop fully such a site it is obvious that only a portion of the building could rise to any height, because only a portion of the total depth could be lit from either end. Mr. Corbett chose to take up the front portion using some 90 feet of depth for the purpose. We, in England, with our duller climate, would consider 90 feet a great depth to be lit from either end, or from a small enclave in one side, which might some day be built up. To get his exhibition floor area then, and to give the striking character his building demanded, this area of 90 by 50 feet was made into a tower, and a very lofty one at that. It is 450 feet high—higher, that is to say, than the cross on St. Paul’s. To build a great tower on so narrow a base was in itself no small engineering undertaking, especially as the large exhibition rooms on each floor made cross bracing against wind pressure a difficulty. To make an oblong tower with the two longer walls not only blank, but devoid of all projections, however slight, for adjacent owners in America do not grant accommodation of that kind, a beautiful and graceful object was an architectural undertaking which it required no small ability to accomplish. The choice of Gothic as the form of expression to be used was probably dictated by the simple fact that Gothic lines would emphasize the height of the tower—its main characteristic—and any other style would diminish it. One can at any rate imagine the architect trained in logical French methods arguing in that way. The difficulty of the blank returns was overcome very ingeniously by imitation details of long mullion-like lines in three coloured bricks, black ones being used for the darkest shadows, which are made to correspond to the natural average angle of the sun, while white bricks are used for the high lights. The very thought of this would make Ruskin turn in his grave. Yet the result is undeniably effective, and one cannot see how so good a result on an absolutely plain face could be otherwise obtained. But the tower, of course, does not really rely to any great extent on this successful architectural camouflage. It relies on its undoubted grace, which is largely due to the very beautiful double lantern or 8 or 9 stories which surmounts it. This lantern by being set in from the main wall faces is freed from restrictions. The upper portion of it sets in again and the architects have here their own office with all New York from river to river and mountain range to mountain range at their feet. At night the lantern top is illuminated by flood lighting, and floats high in the sky, a golden casket of extraordinary and romantic beauty.

The building is Gothic throughout, with elaborate bank and club rooms on the lower floors, but one must frankly admit that while it is far better Gothic than that of the Woolworth Building, it is like the interior of our own Houses of Parliament, Gothic without the touch of the Gothic craftsman, and the variety and interest of Gothic designers. My own feeling is that no human being can design Gothic detail on paper in the quantity which these great buildings require and give it the real interest and spontaneity of the old work. Sir Giles Scott has got nearer it than anyone in his Liverpool Cathedral by departing very largely from precedent. Mr. Corbett has departed from precedent too, but his thirty odd floors, like the endless corridors of the House of Commons, call for a greater output of ability in Gothic designing and craftsmanship than the whole world possesses at the present time, and it must be remembered as stated above, Mr. Corbett is his own designer.

Let us turn now to his London building. It is so well known and so much has been written about it that it is not necessary to describe it in any detail. One may notice, however, how the dual aspect of the problem has here too been solved. The great doorway with its giant columns and semi-dome facing down Kingsway, with the crowning tower above, emphasize the semi-public character of the proposed commercial exhibition or museum. The great mass of plain stone face showing everywhere in cliff-like walls, among its complicated neighbours, all piers columns and architectural trappings of every sort, marks the London Bush building as being as distinctive a unit in London as is the graceful tower piercing the sky in New York. If it ever fulfils its owners’ conception and becomes a great depository of current articles of commerce, it will stand out to the world as such a depository. The man in the street will easily recognise it as such. There is rightly more than a touch of the warehouse character in it. The architect seems to me, therefore, to have solved that side of the problem better even in London than he has in New York. The New York building is a more obvious advertisement. Its tower is simply a beckoning finger. No one would expect a graceful Gothic tower to be a storehouse of samples. The other half of the problem is equally well solved by the London building. The great floors, admirably and evenly lit by the evenly spaced windows, make excellent exhibition galleries. In the meantime they make almost equally good office floors. The regular spacing of the windows, which allows them to be smaller than is usual in London and thereby gives the greater wall spaces we all desire, makes each floor readily divisible to suit tenants. The practical conditions of the problem seem therefore to have been solved as admirably as the more spiritual ones.

The measure of success which this central block only of the whole London conception has achieved is extraordinary, when one remembers that a great deal of it will not be seen when the two big wing blocks are built, and was so designed. There is a baldness about the flanks as at present exposed, which will be very suited to the two garden courts, when they are completed, but which is not so happy now. The fact, too, that the main central block is not axial with Kingsway will not then be so apparent. It is not axial because its axis is a necessary compromise between the centre of Kingsway and the centre of the curve on the Strand front. This deflection of the axis of the central block was, in my opinion, very much to be preferred to a break in the back of the block itself—the only alternative.