Since the features that govern the construction of modern buildings are conditioned by external canons of mechanism, purpose and adaptation to need play a small part in the design, and the esthetic element itself enters largely by accident. The plan of the modern building is not fundamental to its treatment; it derives automatically from the methods and materials employed. The skyscraper is inevitably a honeycomb of cubes, draped with a fireproof material: as mechanically conceived, it is readily convertible: the floors are of uniform height and the windows of uniform spacing, and with no great difficulty the hotel becomes an office building, the office building a loft; and I confidently look forward to seeing the tower floors become apartments—indeed this conversion has already taken place on a small scale. Where the need of spanning a great space without using pillars exists, as in a theater or an auditorium, structural steel has given the architect great freedom; and in these departments he has learned to use his material well; for here steel can do economically and esthetically what masonry can do only at an unseemly cost, or not at all.
What is weak in some of our buildings, however, is not the employment of certain materials, but the application of a single formula to every problem. In the bare mechanical shell of the modern skyscraper there is precious little place for architectural modulation and detail; the development of the skyscraper has been towards the pure mechanical form. Our first tall buildings were designed for the most part by men who thought in terms of established architectural forms: Burnham and Root’s Monadnock Building, in Chicago, which has exerted such a powerful influence over the new school of German architects, was an almost isolated exception; and, significantly enough, it did not employ the steel skeleton! The academic architects compared the skyscraper to a column, with a base, a shaft, and a capital; and they sought to relieve its empty face with an elaborate modeling of surface, like that of the old Flatiron Building. Then the skyscraper was treated as a tower, and its vertical lines were accented by piers which simulated the acrobatic leap of stone construction: the Woolworth Tower and the Bush Tower were both designed in this fashion, and, in spite of numerous defects in detail, they remain with the new Shelton Hotel in New York among the most satisfactory examples of the skyscraper.
Neither column nor buttress has anything to do with the internal construction of the skyscraper; both forms are “false” or “applied.” Under the veracious lead of the late Mr. Louis Sullivan, the buildings of the machine period have accepted the logic of the draped cube, and the only gestures of traditional architecture that remain are the ornaments that cling to the very highest and the very lowest stories. Those buildings which do not follow this logic for the most part accentuate the clumsy unimaginativeness of the designer: the new Standard Oil building in New York, with its vestigial orders, shows an interesting profile across the harbor almost in spite of itself, but at a closer range will not bear criticism.
An ornamentalist, like Mr. Louis Sullivan, is perhaps at his best against the simple planes of the modern building: but a different order of imagination, an imagination like that of the Norman builders, is powerless in the face of this problem—or it becomes brutal. If modern building has become engineering, modern architecture retains a precarious foothold as ornament, or to put it more frankly, as scene painting. Indeed, what is the bare interior of a modern office or apartment house but a stage, waiting for the scenery to be shifted, and a new play to be put on. It is due to this similarity, I believe, that modern interior decoration has so boldly accepted the standards and effects of stage-design. A newspaper critic referred to Mr. Norman-Bel Geddes as having lined the interior of the Century Theater with a cathedral: well, in the same way, the interior of a modern skyscraper is lined with a factory, an office, or a home.
It is not for nothing that almost every detail of the mechanized building follows a standard pattern and preserves a studious anonymity. Except for the short run of the entrance, the original architect has no part in its interior development. If the architect himself is largely paralyzed by his problem, what shall we say of the artisans, and of the surviving handicraft workers who still contribute their quota of effort to the laying of bricks and stones, to the joining of pipes, to the plastering of ceilings? Gone are most of their opportunities for the exercise of skilled intelligence, to say nothing of art: they might as well make paper-boxes or pans for all the personal stamp they can give to their work. Bound to follow the architect’s design, as the printer is supposed to follow the author’s words, it is no wonder that they behave like the poor drudge in the Chicago Exposition who left bare or half-ornamented the columns which the architect had not bothered to duplicate in full in the haste of
