IV
The chief justification for our achievements in mechanical architecture has been brought forth by those who believe it has provided the basis for a new style. Unfortunately, the enthusiasts who have put the esthetic achievements of mechanical architecture in a niche by themselves, and who have serenely disregarded all its lapses and failures and inefficiencies, have centered their attention mainly upon its weakest feature—the skyscraper. I cannot help thinking that they have looked in the wrong place. The economic and social reasons for regarding the skyscraper as undesirable have been briefly alluded to; if they needed any further confirmation, a week’s experience of the miseries of rapid transit would perhaps be sufficient. It remains to point out that the esthetic reasons are just as sound.
All the current praise of the skyscraper boils down to the fact that the more recent buildings have ceased to be as bad as their prototypes. Granted. The uneasy hemming and hawing of ornament, which once agitated the whole façade, has now been reduced to a concentrated gesture; and the zoning ordinances that have been established in many large American cities have transformed the older, top-heavy building into a tower or a pyramid. That this is something of an advance is beyond dispute; in New York one need only compare the Fisk Tire Building with the United States Tire Building, representing respectively the later and the earlier work of the same architects, to see what a virtue can be made of legal necessity. A great architecture, however, is something to be seen and felt and lived in. By this criterion most of our pretentious buildings are rather pathetic.
When one approaches Manhattan Island, for instance, from the Staten Island Ferry or the Brooklyn Bridge, the great towers on the tip of the island sometimes look like the fairy stalagmites of an opened grotto; and from an occasional vantage point on the twentieth floor of an office building one may now and again recapture this impression. But need I point out that one can count on one’s fingers the number of buildings in New York or Chicago that one can approach from the street in similar fashion? For the millions who fill the pavements and shuttle back and forth in tubes, the skyscraper as a tall, cloudward building does not exist. Its esthetic features are the entrance, the elevator, and the window-pocked wall; and if there has been any unique efflorescence of a fresh style at these points, I have been unable to discover it.
What our critics have learned to admire in our great buildings is their photographs—and that is another story. In an article chiefly devoted to praise of the skyscraper, in a number of The Arts, the majority of the illustrations were taken from a point that the man in the street never reaches. In short, it is an architecture, not for men, but for angels and aviators!
If buildings are to be experienced directly, and not through the vicarious agency of the photograph, the skyscraper defeats its own ends; for a city built so that tall buildings could be approached and appreciated would have avenues ten times the width of the present ones; and a city so generously planned would have no need for the sort of building whose sole economic purpose is to make the most of monopoly and congestion. In order to accommodate the office-dwellers in the Chicago Loop, for example, if a minimum of twenty stories were the restriction, the streets would have to be 241 feet wide, according to a calculation of Mr. Raymond Unwin, in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.
One need not dwell upon the way in which these obdurate, overwhelming masses take away from the little people who walk in their shadows any semblance of dignity as human beings; it is perhaps inevitable that one of the greatest mechanical achievements in a thoroughly dehumanized civilization should, no doubt unconsciously, achieve this wry purpose. It is enough to point out that the virtues of the skyscraper are mainly exercises in technique. They have precious little to do with the human arts of seeing, feeling, and living, or with the noble architectural end of making buildings which stimulate and enhance these arts.
A building that one cannot readily see, a building that reduces the passerby to a mere mote, whirled and buffeted by the winds of traffic, a building that has no accommodating grace or perfection in its interior furnishing, beyond its excellent lavatories—in what sense is such a building a great work of architecture, or how can the mere manner of its construction create a great style? One might as well say, with Robert Dale Owen, that the brummagem gothic of the Smithsonian Institution was a return to organic architecture. Consider what painful efforts of interior decoration are necessary before the skyscraper-apartment can recapture the faded perfume of the home. Indeed, it takes no very discerning eye to see that in a short time we shall be back again in interiors belonging to the period of the ottoman and the whatnot, in order to restore a homely sense of comfort and esthetic ease to the eviscerated structure of the modern fireproof apartment. What chiefly distinguishes our modern American work in this department from that of the disreputable ’eighties is that the earlier architects were conscious of their emptiness, and attempted feverishly to hide it: whereas our moderns do not regard emptiness as a serious lapse, and are inclined to boast about it.
There is a sense, of course, in which these modern colossi express our civilization. It is a romantic notion,
