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AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

In a virgin land the art form that developed most rapidly was the one for which the need was most pressing--architecture. The earliest extant buildings are the dwellings, meetinghouses, and churches that made up the nuclei of the first colonial settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts. The dwellings, simple in plan and elevation, like the Adam Thoroughgood House, Princess Anne County, Va. (1936-40), resembled English houses of the late medieval or Tudor style. The most innovative in design were New England meetinghouses, because the separatists sought to avoid any associations with the established church in England. These handsome buildings, such as the Old Ship Meeting House, Hingham, Mass. (1681), were either square or rectangular in plan and served as the focal center for northern towns.

Colonial Buildings

As the colonies flourished, more and more elaborate structures were required. By the end of the 17th century, most American public buildings were derived from Sir Christopher Wren's designs for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in 1666. The best were the so-called Wren Building (1695-1702) of the College of William and Mary and the Governor's Palace (1706-20), both at Williamsburg, Va. To stay the random growth of cities, the concept of urban planning was introduced, beginning with Thomas Holme's grid plan of 1682 for Philadelphia, then second in population to London within the English-speaking world. By the middle of the 18th century, architects were designing churches, mansions, and public buildings in the current English Georgian style, named for King George I.

Post-Revolutionary Architecture

After the Revolutionary War, the first attempt to create a style expressive of the new republic was made by Thomas Jefferson. He based the design of the new capitol building at Richmond, Va., on that of a Roman temple, the Maison Carree at Nimes, France. In so doing he laid down an American precedent of modifying an ancient building style for modern use. The Virginia State Capitol (1785-96), both building and symbol, was meant to house the kind of government envisioned by Jefferson, and the Maison Carree became a paradigm for American public structures.
Jefferson was influential in setting forth the style of monumental neoclassicism that supplanted Georgian architecture with its taint of monarchy and colonialism. Monumental neoclassicism came to represent the new political and social entity that was the United States of America. Architects committed to neoclassicism designed not only the new Capitol of the United States in Washington, first designed (1792) by William Thornton and Stephen Hallet, and other government buildings, but also factories, schools, banks, railroad stations, and hospitals, modernized by the frequent use of materials such as iron, concrete, and glass. The English-born Benjamin Latrobe, who began his American employment working with Jefferson on the Richmond Capitol, brought American neoclassicism to maturity. Latrobe invented new formal configurations for buildings as varied in function as the Bank of Pennsylvania (1798-1800) and the Centre Square Pump House (1800; both in Philadelphia and both destroyed) and Baltimore's Roman Catholic Cathedral (1806-21). Chosen in 1815 to supervise the rebuilding of the Washington Capitol, gutted by fire during the War of 1812, Latrobe set about producing a truly monumental American architecture. In 1817 he procured the assistance of Charles Bulfinch, who had just completed Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Together the two men completed plans for the first major building phase of the Capitol.

Revival Styles

Latrobe and Bulfinch were the preeminent architects in the neoclassical mode. The generation following preferred Greek over Roman forms and produced the Greek Revival. A principal contribution of this style was a modification of the Greek prostyle temple (columns only across the front portico) for domestic and public buildings; the style's influence was rapidly extended north, south, and west. Major surviving examples are William Strickland's Philadelphia Merchants' Exchange (1832-34) and Alexander Jackson Davis's La Grange (Lafayette) Terrace (1832-36) in New York. Up to the 1850s classical revival styles led to a homogeneity in American architecture that was never to prevail again.
Yet even before 1810, American architects, following the lead of their English contemporaries, had begun to introduce a rival style on the American scene--the Gothic Revival. It is appropriate that this movement, which originated with the rise of romanticism in England, should have been taken over in a country where romanticism constituted the first intellectual flowering after the nation's founding. Not surprisingly, the style lent itself most naturally to church architecture. Richard Upjohn, a prolific ecclesiastical architect, made his Trinity Church (1839-46) in New York the prototype for Gothic Revival churches. The style was also widely applied to college buildings, thus identifying those institutions with the prestigious English universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Before the Civil War other revival styles such as the Romanesque, the Egyptian, and the Italian villa style were introduced, but with less applicability. More widespread was the cottage architecture for the middle class advocated by Andrew Jackson Downing. Moderate in price and well constructed, these Downing designs exploited the possibilities of wood both as construction material and as decoration.

Cast-Iron Architecture

An important development was the proliferation of industrial and commercial structures requiring extensive use of iron. At first engineers rather than architects were responsible for buildings that demanded advanced technical planning. Because cast- and wrought-iron columns replaced heavier masonry construction, it became possible to construct a lighter skeleton, use prefabricated modules, and introduce more glass into the facade. James Bogardus, an inventor and manufacturer of machinery, is generally credited with the development of cast-iron architecture, as demonstrated in his "Cast Iron Building" (Laing Stores; 1848) in New York. In his proposed plan for the Industrial Palace of the New York World's Fair (1853), also called the New York Crystal Palace, and his Wanamaker Department Store in New York (c.1859; destroyed), he pushed this type of engineered building to the limits then possible.
After the financial crash of 1857 and the Civil War, both of which had temporarily halted building construction, Americans gravitated to a style that demonstrably symbolized the nation's rapidly increasing wealth. Mansions and government and civic buildings were designed in the Second Empire style, promoted in France by Napoleon III to bolster his imperial ambitions and exemplified by John McArthur's massive Philadelphia City Hall (1874-1901). Also of great importance was the extension of the Gothic Revival into its Victorian phase. This movement, inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, emphasized craft and permitted the manipulation of architectural detail to create bold new effects. Two great architects, Frank Furness and Henry Hobson Richardson, emerged from Victorian Gothic; Furness created works of idiosyncratic originality, while Richardson created a new vision within a revival style.
Richardson, the most independent and imaginative architect since Latrobe, attained prominence when he gave a new Romanesque form to Boston's Trinity Church (1872-77). Besides churches, Richardson designed numerous residences, libraries, railroad stations, civic and commercial buildings, and even a prison, achieving models of their kind for each type. He favored the Romanesque because he believed it expressed the pervasive energy and dynamism of the American scene. But it was his Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885-87) in Chicago that was to prove seminal. Its rusticated masonry and multistoried arrangement of arches, reminiscent of Romanesque and expressive of Richardson's sense of ordering masses on a large scale, would be applied by his successors in Chicago to problems of skyscraper design.

Skyscraper Architecture

The skyscraper, defined here as a tall commercial structure, is America's original contribution to the history of architecture. Commercial buildings of several stories, constructed during the 1850s in Philadelphia, anticipated the skyscraper. But before it could become a reality, architects had to incorporate the elevator into the structure. This was done, beginning in the 1850s in New York. Chicago, however, was the city where skyscraper design soon attained a kind of canonical perfection.
Since many of the city's commercial buildings needed to be replaced after the great fire of 1871, Chicago served as an excellent testing ground for architects. Preeminent among them was Louis Sullivan. He and others working in teams evolved the glass cage that became the hallmark of the Chicago school of architecture. William Holabird and Martin Roche's Tacoma Building, Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root's Reliance Building, and Sullivan's Gage Building are outstanding examples of the progressive stages in the skyscraper's development.
Yet just at the time that an architecture of originality and daring was emerging in Chicago, the New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White successfully introduced a monumental Beaux-Arts style for impressive public buildings such as the Boston Public Library (1887-98). This preference for revival styles continued well into the 20th century, with interesting variations. When, for instance, New York began its campaign to raise the world's tallest buildings, their decorative systems were adapted to revival styles, culminating in the best-known Gothic skyscraper, Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building (1913) in New York.

Modern Architecture

Far more significant than revival styles to modern architecture was, on the one hand, the unfolding of the brilliant indigenous talent of Frank Lloyd Wright and, on the other, the infusion of European modernism through the work of the Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the independent work of Eric Mendelsohn and Eliel Saarinen. Wright, who early in his career worked for Sullivan in Chicago, believed that the West and Midwest embodied the "real American spirit." Acting on this belief, he designed the houses that were to win him international renown. His "prairie houses" were horizontal, often of one story, with rooms merging in a continuous open space. Wright was a man of fertile imagination; before his long career ended, he designed buildings as various as the Imperial Hotel (1916-22; destroyed) in Tokyo; the Johnson Wax Company Building (1936-39) in Racine, Wis.; and New York's Guggenheim Museum (1956-59).
Despite some native resistance--including Wright's objection that the International Style of architecture exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1932 was "un-American"--the presence of European modernism was felt in America's urban and industrial culture from the 1930s. After Gropius was appointed chairman of architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 1938, many young Americans were trained in the ideas of the German Bauhaus.


Postwar Architecture

The stark, boxy forms of European modernism by way of the Bauhaus dominated American cityscapes in the building boom following World War II. Of special importance was the use of glass curtain-wall construction for the design of large skyscrapers and other buildings, as in the United Nations complex, erected in 1947-53 under the supervision of Le Corbusier and Wallace K. Harrison, and the Seagram Building (1956-59) of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.
By the mid-1970s, however, the reaction against the plain, unadorned "glass box" of the International Style was well under way, carried forth by Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, and Robert Venturi, among many others, as well as by Philip Johnson, who had been the chief American proponent of the International Style. These architects returned once again to the use of color and decoration and revived such once-spurned architectural devices as the column. Postmodern architecture may have produced a few extreme statements, but the movement also brought American architecture a new vitality.