A History of American Architecture
Buildings in their Cultural and Technological Context
by Mark Gelernter
University Press of New England
$50.00 cloth
400 pages
198 illus.
100 figures
ISBN: 0-87451-940-03
Architectural histories, like other histories, come in 3 flavors. The cultural history sees architecture as a physical manifestation of a society’s economy and culture. Here, a surging interest in Gothic detailing is the understandable reaction to industrialization, or a particular cornice bracket is seen as the natural result of a new class of entrepreneurs and a rising stock market.
The second approach sees architecture as the answer to a particular set of technological questions. This approach is particularly useful when the architects or cultures in question are little known. In the absence of personalities there is much to say about how climate, materials and building methods lead clearly to a particular architectural style.
In the great man approach, history is seen as leapfrogging from one great mind to another. Richardson to Sullivan to Wright becomes the architectural equivalent of a Tinkers to Evans to Chance double play. These great minds and buildings establish the trunk from which all other architects are to branch.
A history of American architecture is a particularly difficult enterprise. Besides balancing these approaches, an American history must find a way to define its boundaries. The history of the American republic is easily identifiable, the lines demarcating its gestation, creation and growth are clear and easily recognizable. As Mark Gelernter shows in his History of American Architecture, the lines demarcating America’s architectural heritage are not anywhere as clear.
First is the question of Native American dwellings and cultures. If a prime component of architecture is a response to landscape and climate the uniqueness of the North American lands is perhaps best expressed by the peoples whose architecture was born and developed here. The almost complete disjunction from Native American to colonial architecture is less easy to understand than the enormous difference in political systems.
Then there is influence of Europe. Europe so dominated the architectural thinking of the new settlers that one sometimes wonders why an American History is necessary, except as footnote to Europe. The self assurance the American founding fathers had in setting up a revolutionary new republic and all its new institutions compares oddly with lack of assurance and of early American architecture.
Architectural histories, like other histories, come in 3 flavors. The cultural history sees architecture as a physical manifestation of a society’s economy and culture. Here, a surging interest in Gothic detailing is the understandable reaction to industrialization, or a particular cornice bracket is seen as the natural result of a new class of entrepreneurs and a rising stock market.
The second approach sees architecture as the answer to a particular set of technological questions. This approach is particularly useful when the architects or cultures in question are little known. In the absence of personalities there is much to say about how climate, materials and building methods lead clearly to a particular architectural style.
In the great man approach, history is seen as leapfrogging from one great mind to another. Richardson to Sullivan to Wright becomes the architectural equivalent of a Tinkers to Evans to Chance double play. These great minds and buildings establish the trunk from which all other architects are to branch.
A history of American architecture is a particularly difficult enterprise. Besides balancing these approaches, an American history must find a way to define its boundaries. The history of the American republic is easily identifiable, the lines demarcating its gestation, creation and growth are clear and easily recognizable. As Mark Gelernter shows in his History of American Architecture, the lines demarcating America’s architectural heritage are not anywhere as clear.
First is the question of Native American dwellings and cultures. If a prime component of architecture is a response to landscape and climate the uniqueness of the North American lands is perhaps best expressed by the peoples whose architecture was born and developed here. The almost complete disjunction from Native American to colonial architecture is less easy to understand than the enormous difference in political systems.
Then there is influence of Europe. Europe so dominated the architectural thinking of the new settlers that one sometimes wonders why an American History is necessary, except as footnote to Europe. The self assurance the American founding fathers had in setting up a revolutionary new republic and all its new institutions compares oddly with lack of assurance and of early American architecture.
Gelernter confronts these problems head on, trying to make a virtue out of necessity. While cognizant of technological issues and the great single practitioners, his is primarily a cultural history. Well written, he covers a broad range of intellectual as well as architectural history. He accepts the boundaries of the continental US without question, but liberally mixes in large chunks of European history as needed. His history traces an arc of development from the simple imitation of the European forms to self-assured invention.
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| Abenaki long house |
He begins his history with a chapter comparing Neolithic shelter and construction on both continents and proceeds to compare development of architectural ideas in native American cultures with those of Europe. While brief, his outline does lend an interesting perspective by seeing native American and European architectural development as parallel processes rather than completely different ones.
The early history of the country looked directly to Europe for inspiration in architectural matters. Gelernter covers the intellectual developments of Europe in this time and how the ideas found their way to the new continent. It becomes clear that while the forms of architectural styles move across the ocean, the rich intellectual climate in Europe generating the various styles didn’t always make it. Architecture has this ability to translate itself into new cultures with little of its generating ideas intact. The increasing use of pattern books in this country to disseminate architectural ideas shows how the architectural form can slip by its generating meanings.
In this context, Thomas Jefferson’s work looks especially innovative. His Virginia State Capitol was his first major attempt to find an architectural expression that would be distinctive enough for the new nation. Influenced by his time in France, he used an ancient temple, the Maison Carree, as his model. We can see Jefferson flexing his stylistic muscles on pursuing this rigorous Greek classical temple form as a model for architectural expression in the new country. First by looking to a French source for the building he went against the current style of English Baroque. Secondly he actually predated European developments by making the building fully functioning as a state capitol. The notion that a pure building type like the Greek Temple could be filled with all the rooms and functions of a working legislature and government was quite new. Jefferson insisted that the Greek form be held to rigorously, in a cultural milieu that wouldn’t accept building for building’s sake. In some ways the idea of rigorous exterior form with relatively free construction of interior spaces based on function is a clumsy match, but it also in a way presaged the American conflict between following the pattern book and creating a new architecture.
More successful for Jefferson was his later work at Monticello. Here we find a fully matured artist, creating a building that clearly shows its various stylistic sources and yet also showed a unique and personal complexity of expression, in plan section and elevation. The buildings subtle complexity never disrupts its stately Palladian feel.
It was not until after the civil war that American architecture began to invent its own styles. The stick and shingle styles, developed by Richardson and Mckim Mead and White among others, creating massing and ornament based on wood construction and the newly invented balloon frame. One of the most common construction issues for American architecture was how to make wood buildings look like their masonry models from Europe. It seems appropriate that some of the more inventive architectural styles from America would be based on wood construction methods.
The turn of the century saw great changes in both culture and technology. New methods of construction, programs and building types seemed to require a burst of inventiveness. Louis Sulivan and the ‘Chicago School’ architects where in the middle of this change. Sullivan, an early innovator of the skyscraper, searching for a philosophical justification for the new forms being created notion of organic architecture. An idea that was to be very influential to Frank Lloyd Wright (a student of Sullivan’s) it seemed to hearken to the country’s agrarian heritage while also creating an image of the wild profusion of growth that seemed to reflect the country’s rapid industrialization.
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| Johnson Wax Corporation Building Interior from Balcony |
Wright developed the idea of organic architecture in his own way. In a group of houses he built in the beginning of the century he created the revolutionary new prairie style. As Gelernter writes, “Wright successfully fused the spirit of the two broad traditions that we have seen weaving in and out of Western architectural history, the rationalism of Classicism, the picturesque of the Gothic and its Arts and Crafts derivatives. Where the former had traditionally excelled at satisfying our need for intellectual understanding and order, and the latter had excelled at satisfying our nee d for emotional stimulation and variety, Wright managed to answer both equally well in the same building”.
A German press published Wright’s work and it was to become a highly influential work to the fledging modern movement in Europe. Meanwhile, Wright created a scandal in Chicago by travelling to Europe with the wife of a client which put his career on hold for several years. Ironically, his ideas where more influential in Europe than in the states, and it was through the lens of European interpretations of his work that he would gain influence in his own country. Showing yet again how tightly bound America was and is to European influence in architecture.
