The Groundbreakers

Architects in American History - Their Places and Times

Charles E. Dagit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351481779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Dissertations et monographies sur l'architecture

If there is anything to be learned from the history of American architecture it is that it reflects the American adventure in creativity and inventiveness, and the desire to be unique and expressive. In The Groundbreakers, Charles E. Dagit, Jr. examines pioneering American architects and the historical events and trends that gave rise to their achievements. These architects, the caliber of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, created their own distinct, personal styles, and represented the rich heritages of their specific geographical regions.The American pioneer spirit of individualism is alive and well in the architectural world, and like other American innovations, architecture as practiced in the United States is constantly renewing itself and finding new ways to capture the imagination. This book will be of interest to historians, architects, and students in American studies. Illustrations add dimension to the author's observations.

1 The American Dream

Where and when did American architecture begin to find the expression that differentiated its unique culture of exploration and invention from the rest of the world, and in particular its European forebears?

How did these beginnings spread, and why did they become the architectural manifestation of an emerging way of life that was developing in a new and energetic country? What were the ingredients that nurtured and fueled a quest for the unique?

Who were the patrons bold enough to risk investing in revolutionary buildings, and why did they do it?

Where did the financial and technological resources come from that provided the wherewithal for new and sometimes outrageous architectural compositions?

In order to comprehend American architecture one must first understand the human spirit. That spirit proved to be the generator of a revolution in government that turned the world upside down and propelled America to an unparalleled explosion of energy that drove invention and innovation.

Human existence, indeed our very essence, is bound up with the desire to create, because we are imbued with a pervasive quest for the new, the undiscovered, which drives mankind to seek that which has not yet even been imagined. Our search is an endless one that compels us to explore the unknown, to chart new territory, to break from the norm, and to offer entirely new ways of thinking.

Jefferson understood this fundamental imperative—that humans, once freed from providing for necessity, undertake a “pursuit of happiness.” That concept was astonishing at the time. Mankind did not seek happiness, it was thought, we merely sought survival. We sought maintenance of our well-being, which at the time of the American Revolution was threatened by unwarranted and certainly unpopular taxes. But Jefferson dreamed of a higher plane of human existence. He proclaimed that each one of us has the right to pursue that illusive and intangible state called happiness.

Jefferson once noted that he was a farmer so that his children could become poets. He knew that our human endeavors lead us to pursue art, architecture, music, poetry, and literature in our quest for the holy grail of happiness. Attainment of that holy grail would achieve heaven on earth, and in my view he believed that it is in the realm of the arts where we can get a glimpse of ecstasy, where we experience the highest levels of creative invention. This invention transcends the practical. While practical invention does create those artifacts that enhance our daily lives, it is in the arts where the sublime is encountered. In architecture this drive is ever present; the need for the new, the bold, the profound, the shocking, the extraordinary, always reforming our environment and fashioning new ways to live.

How did this revolution in America generate a new architecture that sprang from invention and innovation? As the Enlightenment spread, so too did the impetus for independent thinking. Certainly in architecture, a field that was continually evolving as an ever more uninhibited and responsive breeding ground of creativity, this momentum took flight. To be sure, an expansion of knowledge coupled with the free exchange of ideas intensifies the impulse to create and to explore. But in what way does this translate into architectural expression? Here we confront an age-old adage: architecture both leads and follows culture. Why is Janus oft-cited as the god of architecture? Because Janus looks to the future while gazing in the looking glass at the past. Which comes first, cultural evolution or architectural expression? Or do they dovetail, and are they mutually nourishing?

Art and architecture, philosophy and religion, economics, politics, government, and culture—how are they related? They are inseparably bound together and act as one throughout history. This is evidenced in the architecture of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, ancient Greece and Rome, and one can cite numerous examples of the cultural impact on our own built environment. From Edwardian, Georgian, Queen Anne, Victorian, and through the architecture of the twenty-first century, time and again the values of the culture are manifested in the arts and architecture of a society. It is no accident then that the Pantheon was created in the Roman Empire when it was on the brink of Christianity. That building is a magnificent expression of either all gods or one. We will go on a journey into the American ethos that produced the genius of architecture that expresses our nation and its ideals.

Going back two millennia, we see that early Christian architecture begins the public manifestation of the monumentality of the institution of the Church. The cultural impact on its architecture is obvious. Initially the atrium garden was the space in front of the church where the unbaptized remained during the secret rite of the mass. Saint Peter’s Basilica is the ultimate embodiment of this concept, opening the atrium in an expression of outstretched arms welcoming the world. St. Peter’s was designed just as the Reformation began, and the Reformation ended in 1648, some twenty-two years after the Basilica was completed. The Counter-Reformation’s goal of uniting the various religious factions is personified in the great symbolic architectural gesture of Bernini’s Piazza.

The architecture of the Gothic age is an expression of medieval values toward religion, with the cathedral serving as the teacher of the faith to the illiterate populace. The symbols on the façades of these buildings are the transcript of the religious dogma of the time. By the seventeenth century, the emergence of the power of the aristocracy put in motion the secularization of architecture in the palaces of France and palazzos of Florence, proclaiming the influence of the royals throughout Europe. And so in the evolution of European architecture, influence moved from the religious to domestic and then to public architecture as secular institutions emerged. In England one can observe how architecture shifted from religious to secular in the great manor houses built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally financial, political, and educational institutions became the major enterprises in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And in the twentieth century the transforming modern architectural icon, the office tower, expressed the new religion of the power of wealth.

David P. Handlin states that “Architecture should not and indeed never be divorced from its cultural context . . .”¹ There is perhaps no better historical example that illustrates this premise than Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Florence in its moment in history was the cultural and economic center of Europe. It achieved that position through a series of inventions advanced by the Medici and other banking families, Pazzi and Pitti among them, that emerged in that city at that time. Florence had been at the trading crossroads of Europe for a number of centuries thanks to its easy connection with the port of Venice, through which passed a steady stream of goods from the East such as spices, fabrics, and other sought-after imports. It was the major stop on the thoroughfare from Venice and Rome to Northern Europe, and therefore became a thriving center of commerce. Thus Florence, using the fabrics that flowed into the city, established a flourishing textile center.

The Medici acquired considerable wealth from the textile business, which allowed them then to venture into banking. Banking was probably initiated by the Knights Templar during the Crusades, and the Medici took this institution of finance to the next level with their new ledger device called double-entry bookkeeping. This innovation gave birth to the burgeoning banking empire of Florence and the Medici, providing the newfound luxury of undisputed trust that this accounting system ensured. Florence had been a republic and a city-state beginning in the thirteenth century, and one of its earliest inventions was the florin. This was the first coin minted since the 700s, and it became the currency of Europe for three hundred years.

The city further flourished when the Medici took control of the mechanics of city government through the accession of Cosimo di Giovanni degli Medici (1389–1464) as unelected, but behind the scenes undisputed, authority of the Signori, which was the city’s elected governing body. Through Cosimo’s leadership—it was he who started the boom in the city’s fortunes—and then through his heirs, Piero and Lorenzo “the Magnificent,” the city excelled in the arts and in the sciences unlike any other center in Europe at the time. The city produced the coinage, textiles, armaments, and even common artifacts that rivaled any in the civilized world.

There arose philosophers, Savaronola (1452–1498) among them, who helped shape the city, and Machiavelli (1469–1527), who became the father of political science and perhaps one of the greatest political plotters of all time. From this climate, thanks to the Medici, there emerged a profusion of artisans and sculptors—architect Alberti, sculptors Ghiberti and Donatello, artist and architect Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate Renaissance man. Certainly one of the most influential among them was Brunelleschi (1377– 1446). It was he who, through the patronage of Cosimo, raised the great dome of the Cathedral, known as the Duomo. This was an architectural and scientific feat rivaling the Pantheon. It created a dome as large as the Pantheon in size but one that was born of the marvel of mathematics. Science gave Brunelleschi the tool to invent the massive iron chain that supported and channeled the horizontal forces inherent in a dome and transferred them vertically to the ground.

Beyond that majestic feat was Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective with the help of the mathematician Paolo del Pozzo Toscarelli, who had consulted on the design of the dome. Toscarelli helped Brunelleschi paint the Baptistery of the Duomo in accurate perspective, which was a method of imaging heretofore unknown in the medieval world. It was Brunelleschi and Paolo Toscarelli who first developed the gridded map that produced an entirely new kind of cartography. Paolo’s thinking and innovation generated a mapping system that introduced the device of longitude and latitude that is still used today. Along with this breakthrough Paolo developed the concept of the knot, which is the nautical measurement that enabled sailors to plot their positions relative to the North Star. His reputation throughout Europe eventually found its way to Christopher Columbus and others, who were intrigued by Paolo’s theory that the grid of the earth must extend all the way around the globe. Today we live in a quite different world because of the Medici and the brilliance they created which was Renaissance Florence.

There are countless instances of architecture expressing the cultural values of a people. As we explore the beginnings of American architecture from the seventeenth into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we witness American history dramatically playing out in the buildings of each of the eras of American architecture.

Note

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1David P. Handlin, American Architecture, World of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 14.

2 Beginnings of American Architecture

It was here in America that we proclaimed the intrinsic value of the individual in declaring the common man’s right of self-determination, and we confirmed that in our newly constituted bottom-up form of government. It is not a great leap, then, to expect that architecture in America would respond to the needs and desires of individuals, evolving into a force that created previously unimagined environments. Not that there have not been architectural revolutions in Europe, the International Style eventually being a prominent one, but it was here in America that architecture first began to interact with technology and the demands of market forces, shattering the shackles of tradition and introducing a new model for other societies to follow. Analogous and parallel to our political revolution was our architectural revolution—that is not only natural, indeed it was inevitable.

The architecture of change and the new is where America flourished. But this phenomenon of architectural experimentation did not develop in isolation from the rest of American culture. Rather it is the very essence of the concept that Jefferson embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Architecture became the built embodiment of his “pursuit of happiness.” How did that come about? What propelled America to boldly conceive startling new structures for the built world? Which came first—architectural expression or society’s demand for new environments? Did architecture lead the way or did it inevitably follow the path that modern life was creating with its inventions and evolving technology that blossomed in America’s pursuit of happiness?

To understand how an emerging society struggling for its very existence began to find expression in its buildings, we must go back to America’s early development. We know that for about a century after the establishment of the Jamestown and Massachusetts colonies, America, out of practical necessity, built only that which was essential, with just an occasional church or other structure that broke the mold of elemental farmhouse construction. Then, as the colonies began to prosper, very slowly to be sure, America started to build more substantial buildings, and almost all of them took their cues from European models imported mostly from England.

As America progressed from an agrarian culture focused on essential necessities, more cosmopolitan environments evolved in its newly founded cities. Philadelphia, New York, and Boston expanded thanks to maritime trade. Charlestown, Annapolis, and Savannah were smaller Southern counterparts to those larger Northern urban centers.

The initial thrust of the development of architectural style in early America rested in residential buildings that began to mirror the growing affluence of those colonists who were able to parlay the moderate climate they found here into personal wealth. That climate fostered unprecedented agricultural development (in the south, cotton and tobacco; in the north, produce and livestock), which opened the door to the accumulation of real property. This spurred, particularly in the South but not exclusively, the plantation house or the great manor that graced the homestead. These manor houses emulated the showy houses of the nobility in England. In America, and in particular in Virginia, homes attempted to match the mansions of the moneyed class in England. In a more modest way, houses in our new urban centers emulated the gentrified residential architecture of London and its European counterparts.

The architecture of the Americas during the seventeenth century very slowly emerged from vernacular structures, which merely fulfilled the basic need for shelter, to an architecture of dignified imitation of prevalent European styles. But because ideas traveled very slowly, our buildings lagged behind prevailing trends in design by decades. An additional impediment to creativity in the colonies was the lack of craftsmen such as master carpenters and masons.

As travel and commerce improved, European influence increased, and along with it discourse about architecture. Ideas that were fomenting debate in Europe began to percolate through the Colonies. By the mid-eighteenth century America was catching up in its ability to erect buildings that began to rival the Europeans’ level of detail and grace. Along with the growth of skill in construction, coupled with an emerging sense of independence from Europe and its constricting social order, came a willingness to explore the possibilities of change. This outlook began to show itself in those colonies that were founded almost in defiance of the English order of things. Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Maryland were three such colonies, founded on the ideals of unrestrained religious freedom. Coincidentally, these three colonies were the ones that established thriving urban centers because they had seaports, which fostered the interchange of commerce and ideas, generating wealth and leading to a burgeoning of consumer goods and, and most importantly, knowledge.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) attempted to define American architecture by prescribing Roman Republican architecture as the model to be emulated. However, his classical ideal, in an ironic exercise in unintended consequences, resulted in a period devoid of architectural creativity. Jefferson’s lofty influence constrained the entire generation of architects responsible for the classical monuments that graced primarily Philadelphia and Washington in the emerging American republic of the early 1800s prior to the Civil War.

Shortly after Jefferson’s death, during the period of 1825 to 1860, there surfaced such Europeans as philosopher John Ruskin (1819–1900) and architect A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852) who were widely published in the United States. Similarly, the work of architect Eugène Voillet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was disseminated throughout the country. All three had an impact on a differing point of view about architectural style that espoused Gothic architecture, as the alternative to the Classical architectural design that was so prevalent during this period of America’s emergence. While architects in Europe debated these stylistic differences, those in America debated Jefferson’s fundamental belief in the future as rural in character, in tune with his rural Virginia. He saw the United States as a collection of gentleman farmers unfettered by government. He founded the then-Republican Party that shunned cities and favored ceding minimal power to the Federal government. Others later echoed this moral conviction that cities were the root of evil. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, founder of the American banking system and contributor to the Federalist Papers, sponsored the opposing view, advocating and fostering a larger federal role. He, more than any other, championed the virtue of cities, and the Industrial Revolution was financed by his banking institutions.

While America debated Jefferson’s vision versus Hamilton’s image of a strong Federal government, architects shortly thereafter paradoxically debated the merits of Classical architecture versus Gothic, with its disdain for the Industrial Revolution.

I say paradoxically because Jefferson so loved ancient Roman architecture as symbolic of the new republic and yet he found himself creating the ultimate romantic and idealistic rural setting at Monticello as his retreat against all things urban. So it was Hamilton and his Federalist Party that very possibly coined the phrase Federal Style, which became the symbol of American government through the work of the classicists in the nation’s capital, even though Hamilton was a strong proponent of industrial progress. Ruskin, Pugin, and Eugène Voillet-leDuc, along with William Morris, an advocate of the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe, created the dialogue about the Gothic and, for that matter, the Picturesque style of architectural design that emerged after the Civil War and certainly influenced Frank Furness and H. H. Richardson. Victorian architecture sprang from this fervor to return to the picturesque and the vernacular, moving ultimately to the exuberance of full Victorian eccentricity, which in turn ultimately resulted in the rise of a backlash promulgated by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Two books by Robert Venturi played a part in sparking the development of contemporary American architecture. A Gentle Manifesto, Complexit...