The Idea of Amrrican Building

What is the American building? It is Protestantism given space and materials and turned into architecture. Change any one of these ingredients and the building changes instantly, as a simple look at Holland or Mexico will show. The American building is that familiar place where we practice and fulfill the ritual transactions of our lives; here we may live or work, study or trade, find comfort or be laid in our coffin—the American building cannot help but be like us. It is the American himself, naivete bundled with generosity, the idealistic in service of the materialistic, a thing perpetually divided between the communal and the individual, yearning always for the former but choosing by ancient instinct the latter.

It has all the virtues and vices of the Protestant Reformation: the mercantile stance, the distrust of the sensual, and the capacity to make redemptive myths out of everything. And, like the American, it elbows for itself a large parcel of open space. In the end it is the ultimate nonconformist, the self-sufficient loner resting at a wary but amiable distance from its fellows.

This essay introduces G. E. Kidder Smith’s remarkable and eclectic catalogue of American buildings. It proposes several motifs that run through his book, touching lofty skyscrapers and stately Georgian piles alike. These themes, of course, are only some strands of the comprehensive fabric of American architecture, and the thoughtful reader who has seen some of this country or who has thought about it will discover others.

Through all these themes, inevitably—perhaps tragically—land is the one theme that embraces all the others. Upon his first visit to the United States, no foreigner, no matter how well informed, fails to be struck by America’s profligate relationship to the land. Since its beginnings, American architecture has always been stamped by the extravagant and deliberate use of space. In no other Western country is the proportion of unbuilt to built land so high; nowhere else does the idea of land itself play so central a role, especially in houses.

The characteristic image of the American house, even if drawn by a city-dwelling child, requires open space on all four sides. Fewer than four is unacceptable: better four cramped slivers of yard than two generous yards at the cost of having a party wall. Every American suburban house has in it the idea of Jefferson’s ideal villa—Monticello perched on its mountaintop above Charlottesville—even if the villa is a 1947-vintage Cape Cod replica and the mountaintop merely a street in Levittown.

From Levittown’s Cape Cod imagery to aluminum Georgian pediments that crest the doors of mobile homes, our enduring domestic symbols are invariably Colonial, which is less of an anachronism than it seems. Colonial architecture evokes the image of the first settler and the claiming of land, unlike the infill house, which defers to the character of an existing and stable community. American suburbs still tend to be Colonial in the broadest sense: new settlements, based on a process of radical land clearing and rapid development, with no need to heed what was there.

The most characteristic domestic form, however, remains the New England saltbox, which was already recognizable in its basic outlines in the 1670s. This was among the first of many American building types that originated in the progressive and incremental variations of an existing type in response to local conditions, and not from conscious invention. Originally the form was something of an improvisation: a shed-roof addition to an existing two-story, central- chimney house extended the gable downward to the rear to encompass a pair of additional rooms. This served to differentiate the formal street front, generally oriented to the south, from the now sheltered northern exposure, within which the kitchen functions huddled. As this irregular but quite sensible addition spread, it soon began to look normal and resolved, and soon new houses were planned from the beginning with the unequal roof form.

But if the New England winter found its ideal solution to in the form of the saltbox, the summer posed another problem entirely. The central dilemma was to devise a structure that suited both winter and summer; in much of the United States, a house had to be able to huddle like a shivering man in February, but stretch out like an overheated sun- bather in July. The solution was a house that in its core was a cosy, compact volume but that opened up to nature in an attached wooden porch of generous dimensions and multiple breezy outlooks (fig. 1).

The porch is one of those cultural achievements, like the Italian piazza or the Finnish sauna, that is inseparable from a certain national character of life. A conscious adaptation to the climate, it is also an unconscious adaptation to America’s social or moral climate. It reinterpreted the stoa of Greece in characteristically private American terms—not as a communal or civic meeting space, but a transitional zone at once public and private. Here the American individual presented himself to public view at the front of his private dwelling, addressing the pedestrian in conversation.

This architectural expression of openness and hospitality has no close counterpart in Europe, and certainly not in the more private architecture of England. At their climax, in the late nineteenth century, these wraparound verandas might embrace a full three sides of a house, like the endless tiered decks of a Victorian resort hotel. But their heyday has passed and since the 1940s they have been amputated in large numbers as the automobile and television have together eliminated the citizen-pedestrian. There is no more tragic sign of the atrophying of public life in this country.

Nature is not absent from European architecture, which knows a rustic mode and has its share of grottoes, hermitages, and picturesque parks. But in the European tradition, nature is the cultivated landscape of antiquity rather than the primal one of North America; it is the tilled nature of Nicolas Poussin and Gellee Claude, not the convulsive geology of Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz and Charles Lyell. Europe, haunted for centuries by the memory of Rome, measured its buildings not against the land but against the dream architecture of antiquity, and remained ever pessimistic about matching it.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fantasies were tinged by a sense of inferiority to Rome, even as he trumped its scale. Long after Europe embraced Romanticism and its cult of the natural, and came to understand Edmund Burke’s doctrine of the sublime, it lagged in applying these lessons to architecture. It is true that the English writer John Ruskin proposed buildings whose sculptural power might evoke the Alps. But it is also true that H. H. Richardson first realized such structures in the rock cliffs he raised in the heart of Chicago, and in Pittsburgh with his Allegheny County Courthouse (although his stratified geologic language was rather more like that of the Dakotas than the Alps). In more recent decades, Frank Lloyd Wright stands out for his quixotic attempt to embrace the machine and nature simultaneously, from the conch-like spiral ramp of the Guggenheim Museum to the moraine-like scatter of concrete at Fallingwater.

The most direct consequence of this profligacy with the land is that the American building typically reads as a detached object in space. Even in the city the skyscraper is no mannerly herd animal, shoulder to shoulder with buildings of similar height, materials, and expression; instead it rises in solitude. The tower pulls back from all sides to form a separate episode of personality, as lonely and distinct as the New England saltbox house on its bleak and snowy slope. Raymond Hood’s blazing Radiator Building beveled its corners inward to suggest an independent tower, while Skidmore, Owings & Merrill placed the shaft of their Lever Building in an urban plaza invented for that purpose.

At all costs, the building must read as an autonomous individual rather than as part of a continuous front, even at the cost of unbuilt urban land. The American city is not a collection of equal buildings arranged in ordered tiers, but rather a collection of competing and rambunctious individuals, engaged in the rude business of shouting one another down. Oddly enough, an eerie premonition of this skyscraper war came to Erastus Salisbury Field, painting in isolation near Amherst, in 1867. In that year he began his Historical Monument of the American Republic, a reverie about the founding of the nation that prophesied a height war still another generation in the future and even Minneapolis-like sky- walks that were a full century away (fig. 2).

But for all the irregularity of Field’s fevered vision of America, the plan of the American city is insistently and rigidly ordered. These twin fac- tors—schematic order in two dimensions and riotous disorder in three—are reflexes of the same understanding of space. The American relationship to the land is quite unlike the English one, what has recently been called “the Tory view of landscape.” Proximity to existing things, which counts for so much in the conservative English appreciation of the landscape, counts for practically nothing here. Instead the American sense of space, in which space itself is parceled off in the neutral coordinates of an uninflected grid, is fundamentally Cartesian. From the design of Philadelphia in 1682 (fig. 3) to the great gridding of the Midwest and West in the nineteenth century, the gridiron remains the standard American form of the city, even on the Monopoly board (fig. 4).

With its Cartesian space, identical lots, numbered streets, and with no sweeping Baroque diagonals converging at some central place of power, this is the ideal city of the Protestant Reformation, embracing the ideal geometry of the Renaissance and eliminating the spatial dynamics of Catholic urbanism.

It is a peculiar habit of American thought to freight the commercial with spiritual meaning. The prim grid might function as a symbol of ideal order. New Haven, for example, as John Archer has shown, was paced off in regular quadrants to reproduce the actual dimensions of the camps of the Israelites in the wilderness, identifying it as a New Jerusalem. And pietist communities from the Moravians and Ephrata Cloisterers to the Harmonists and Shakers used rectilinearity as a sacred planning tool, conflating righteousness with the right angle.

But between this heavenly geometry and the plot plan of the real-estate speculator there is precious little difference. Charles Dickens noted this irony during his American trip and celebrated it in his Martin Chuzzlewit, where the one-eyed huckster Zephaniah Scadder ruled off a miasmic swamp into a gridded new “Eden.” Not every grid, as Dickens noted, is religious or even egalitarian—and even the Monopoly board is only egalitarian at the beginning of play. For little houses give way to big hotels, and typically, as is ever the case in the American city, once they are replaced by bigger buildings, they are swept away for good, leaving no memory of what was there.

The American traveller in Europe is frequently startled to discover the extent to which Continental manners are based on collective thinking. But Continental buildings likewise tend toward collective values, architectural manners that are corsetted by ancient consensus and policed by municipal authority. Height lines conform, materials and style respect the examples of neighbors, and even the plan must defer to precedent and zoning.

The odd European who violated this protocol of the collective, such as Adolf Loos, who proposed an unconventional building on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna, faced official meddling and public ridicule. (Loos seemed to have learned his architectural manners during his years in wild Chicago.) By these European standards, every American building is an unruly loner. This is that second tough fiber in the genetic makeup of the American building: the conception of the building as an individual thing, and not an element of a communal order. In particular, commercial architecture has always shown the greatest impulse to differentiate and define.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, America’s most striking buildings were not civic structures, which as often as not were timid, cringing essays in Classicism—some of America’s least distinguished architecture. Instead they were mighty urban banks, company offices, and department stores—the great sprawl of capitalism expressed in architecture. At heart, America remains a commercial society and as a consequence has given the world consistently successful commercial architects. Nowhere else were overstatement, self-aggrandizement, and jaunty confidence projected with more vitality and more cheek. The best of these are invariably gone, and are missing from this book.

The more startling a building was in its day, the more likely it was to shock a later generation, who reached for architecture’s great blue pencil, the wrecking ball. Such was the fate of Frank Furness, America’s most ardent Victorian imagin- er. Furness gave Philadelphia an even dozen banks in the 1870s and 1880s, each more startling than the last, and often arrayed across the street from one another as if in combat, which they were. These often terrifying buildings, Gothic behemoths suspended on Gothic columns and arches, were made to celebrate the savings institution they housed—advertising jingles executed in terra-cotta and colored granite. But every advertising jingle wears and grates by repetition, and virtually all of these banks are now gone.

Furness’s architectural hitting streak stood unmatched until Raymond Hood’s spectacular run of New York skyscrapers in the 1920s. Hood’s designs also depended on vivid architectural imagery, brilliant color, and a sense of architectural physiognomy played so broadly that it touched on caricature. Buildings such as the Chicago Tribune Tower and the Radiator Building—that gleaming architectural radiator rendered in black and gold—embody titanic commercial forces and energies at their most primal. These works, and their ilk from the 1920s, represent the last moment when American architecture was largely free of theory, and when architects subordinated their judgement to strongly individualistic clients, whose yardstick for success was neither theoretical nor academic, but rather vigorous in expression and lucidity of commercial content.

In the 1980s, commercial architecture once again enjoyed a brief season of prestige as it had not enjoyed since the 1920s. Its celebrated apostles, including Helmut Jahn and Michael Graves, entered the stage blithely, but also rather nervously, cribbing their best ideas from tried and true models such as the Chrysler Building. The apologetic posture is telling, for since the Depression architects have never felt fully confident in producing unabashedly loud commercial architecture. A death blow was dealt by the Depression, and the model of architectur al practice that was imported from Europe in its wake was itself fundamentally incapable of comprehending the demands of a commercial society. As a result the modern architect seems unable to desist from parodying the very product he is selling. Only rarely, as in Helmut Jahn’s unbuilt Trump Tower, does anything approach the swagger of the Empire State Building. Then again, swaggering in our culture is less likely to be performed by architecture, and more often by the intangible coin of celebrity and media attention. Perhaps these assets are less easily seized in court.

If the brashness of the American building is the brashness of vitality and energy, it is also touched with a certain poignant insecurity. Many a swagger conceals a shudder, and many an aggressive American building shows the deportment of the nervous bumpkin squeezed into an ill-fitting tuxedo, the same discomfort, the same nervous overstatement. This is the legacy of a society with an open class structure where it is the privilege of each individual to shape his own fortune and status. Being negotiable and elastic, American social status has always required a certain number of rhetorical devices and status marks to prop it up.

And from an early age, architecture was enlisted in this mission, communicating success and wealth, good taste and good breeding. Unfortunately these pairs of qualities were generally inversely related. This book records some of the wilder examples, such as Samuel Sloan’s fantasia on a Persian theme for the planter Haller Nutt at Natchez, Mississippi; E. T. Potter’s rollicking belly laugh of a house at Hartford, Connecticut for Mark Twain; and that gingerbread epiphany at Eureka, California, the Samuel and Joseph C. Newson’s Carson Mansion.

All these examples are Victorian, for in that overheated epoch of social change the natural connection between the personality of the owner and his house was pushed to white-hot intensity. Nowhere was this observed more keenly than in Andrew Jackson Downing’s The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), which understood that the house was the public calling card of the family. For them, the villa “should above all things, manifest individuality. It should say something of the character of the family within—as much as possible of their life and history, their tastes and associations, should mould and fashion themselves upon its walls.” Downing’s was no rarefied treatise on the French or German model, no exercise in abstract system-building.

Nor did he begin with a prescribed set of historical forms. Instead he was the first to show how the architect must address the nature of American life itself, in all its restless, quivering nature. His was the first classic of American architectural literature and he was soon followed by a host of imitators, including Samuel Sloan, Calvert Vaux, George E. Woodward, A. J. Bicknell, Palliser & Company, and, in our century, Gustav Stickley. In their pattern books, all historical styles were marshalled out to stand for nuances of achievement, personality or wealth. This indiscriminate shoplifting of the past was the peculiar privilege of the American architect, who saw himself as the inheritor of the legacy of the old world, and who regarded architectural history as Thomas Cole did in The Architect’s Dream (fig. 5), his tribute to his friend Ithiel Town—as a Sears Catalogue of possibilities. When Sears itself began to offer pattern book houses in the early twentieth century, the circle closed.

America is hardly unique in tarting up architecture in the service of social representation, and the hand of individualism and commercialism rests on many a European building. But in Europe, these forces were resisted by a web of restraining factors, among them the cautioning influence of architectural academies, the snob appeal of official patronage, the aesthetic control of municipal authorities, and the brake of vernacular tradition. In America, however, these restraints were absent; it was all spur and no bridle. No formal schools of architecture existed before the 1860s, and even in the present municipal authorities have rarely been able to exercise any aesthetic restriction whatsoever. The occasional expectoration of public disapproval (for example, the ridicule given a crass “folly”) often expressed as much envy as outraged taste, which rather tended to blunt the effect of criticism.

In short, a cauldron of fierce social energies and an indulgent attitude toward their expression emerged: such is the mental atmosphere under which American architecture blossomed. Even so, these forces would have exhausted themselves swiftly if not allowed to pour themselves out upon a material that was equally flexible, permissive, and capable of limitless expression. Without wood (and without the lessons taught by wood) American architecture would have tended to remain a provincial, rather conventional variant of northern European architecture.

The American reliance on wood as the primary material of construction is the legacy of the seventeenth century, when the continent was still largely covered by the world’s largest surviving temperate forest. All along the coast, the first line of Colonial buildings was built with the felled timbers of this forest: oaks, pines, hemlocks, and chestnuts, marvelously dense woods, superbly impervious to insects and rot. Where the forest melted away, the houses rose. A retreating line of trees was fashioned into houses—first saltboxes, then Greek temples, the Gothic cottages, and then, on the West coast, into bungalows. But if it was a permanent loss, at least it was a trade, and left a gain in the form of a sturdy, honest house. Unfortunately, much subsequent development has claimed these houses and given precious little in return.

The earliest wood buildings were the mighty houses of colonial New England, which were raised on a joined oak frame and built in accordance with the rules of the English joiner. The near medieval Fairbanks House in Dedham, Massachusetts (1636) is perhaps the most ancient of all. Adaptations were swiftly made to climate and to new social circumstances, but the great expressive potential of wood was first realized in the van of the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, the industrialization of the building process led to the balloon frame, which supplanted the heavy joined frame. Mill-sawn boards replaced the riven clapboards and heavy frame while factory-milled nails replaced the old mortise and tenon joint (fig. 6).

Other building processes were changed or created by the Industrial Revolution. In 1849 James Bogardus patented designs for an all-iron building, while Robert Mook designed a concrete house in Port Chester, New York. But in this lengthening pageant of new materials, the lessons of wood lingered with the American builder. Iron and concrete were used rather freely, but always in terms of the liberating example of wood. Above all, wood is a material of planarity and suggests that buildings are arrangements of folded planes, boxes with the thinnest of walls that define an internal volume. Even when realized in three dimensions, there is a brittle thin- ness—a sense that architecture is only an affair of outlines and contours, but not of solids.

Even in a wildly elaborate and decorative structure, one often finds a certain schematic quality. Such is the mentality of the carpenter, the tendency to conceive of each elevation of the building as a two-dimensional object. This carpenter’s mentality stamps much of American architecture, even buildings of brick or steel, and it separates American architecture absolutely and sharply from those countries, such as Italy and France, where architecture was conceived historically in masonry and has always remained a much more plastic affair. A keen observer such as Charles Dickens was taken aback when he encountered this difference, and in his classic American Notes he grasped for words to describe it, speaking of “sharp outlines,” “razorlike edges,” and the “clean cardboard colonnades” of New England.

Even the cast-iron front was itself a thin planar object, like wood, whose form could be varied as cheaply and as infinitely as any advertising billboard, which in fact it was. And like the wood front, its Neo-Romanesque or Neo-Gothic or Neo- Egyptian facade could be cast without any particular structural relationship to the building behind it. The cost of this is an architecture that is, in historical and physical terms, only inches deep (fig. 7). Here was the beginning of the great divorce of construction and expression, the beginning of those “sheds” and “billboards” that Robert Venturi sees as so essential to the spirit of American architecture.

In the twentieth century, American architects were innoculated with the ideas of European Modernism. They continued to embrace new materials and methods, but now with a theoretical self-concsciousness. Modern materials were not to be used as cheap and durable substitutes for traditional materials; instead their use was to be governed by certain absolute and rather deterministic principles. Most potent of these was the Modernist doctrine of the machine, with its great imperative of standardization, the law that pushed irresistibly to the replication of interchangable parts. The architectural corollary of this was also standardization, but of a higher order: for example, the doctrine that housing must be designed in serried rows of identical units.

Nothing could be further from the mood of American architects who, when exposed to modern materials and rational modes of buildings, regularly used them as instruments of individual expression. Even Frank Lloyd Wright, that champion of new building processes, constantly fondled in his imagination the union of the machine with individuality of expression. His American System-Built houses of 1913—15 were based on an ingenious system of prefabricated concrete elements that could be assembled into houses of dramatically different character, thereby achieving the Victorian goal of variety through the modern technique of standardization.

But through it all, a certain schematic flatness has survived in the American conception of the building. In earlier times, this was due as much to available architectural source material as it was to the use of wood. Throughout the eighteenth century architectural inspiration came from Italy, as filtered through those English pattern books, such as James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture (1728) and Colin Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (1716-25), that were the mainstay of architectural practice. In Newport, Rhode Island, Peter Harrison, one of America’s first professional architects, regularly plundered these sources, emulating the distant and monumental stone architecture of the Italian Renaissance.

But neither he nor his contemporaries knew their Italian models first hand, only imagining them through the two-dimensional plates of their reference books. In the execution of their versions, these classical prototypes were shrunk in scale, and often simplified and flattened out (as they were pre-flattened in the pattern book engravings). Moldings and cornices projected rather shallowly; the plastic conception of the original turned into a planar affair.

Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia (1817-25) betrays this same schematic quality. Often called America’s finest man-made object, it is a surpassing achievement, a vista of infinite nature at one end with an architectural embodiment of rational order, in the form of his Pantheon of a library, at the other. The subtlety of its landscaping and brilliant siting are precisely what one would expect from a man with an intimate relationship to the land, one that was marinated in economic, political, and religious associations. But for all of his intellectual strengths, Jefferson was at heart an American with little experience or sensitivity for plastic expression. When he came to draft his buildings, he reverted to his standard graph paper, that wonderfully rational drafting aid, allowing the convenient extraction of dimensions and volumes (fig. 8).

How far apart this is—at the risk of seeming ridiculous—from the world of Michelangelo, who might build a full- scale wood mock-up of a cornice and hoist it aloft in order to gauge its sculptural qualities under conditions of light and shadow. Contrast this with Jefferson’s intellectual working method, and his cherished graphs: Jefferson the Platonist fussing with the Classical proportions and Jefferson the frugal planter counting cubic masses of brick. Seldom were American idealism and pragmatism wed so successfully, or seamlessly.

But idealism and pragmatism, though opposites, do not embrace the whole spectrum of human possibilities. There is a whole lobe of the human heart that American architecture does not address, and this is where an honest evaluation of the American building must end.

Notes:
1. Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
2. For a contemporary overview of the vivid commercial architecture of this period, see the reprint of Masterpieces of American Architecture, with essays by George E. Thomas and Michael J. Lewis (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).

3. A. J. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: Appleton, 1850), 262.
4. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842). See for instance the section on Worcester, Massachusetts in chapter five