معرفی Architecture books

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D Other Nations

 

 

For the developing world, reliance on Western modern architecture was neither cost-effective nor responsive to the particular histories, building traditions, and living and working patterns of inhabitants. But modern architecture did provide convenient, inexpensive, and rapidly constructed images for multinational corporations as they spread outside the United States and Europe. American architectural firms such as Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill designed buildings in Saudi Arabia and Iran, generally of the same type as they would have built at home. In many cases, industrializing nations adopted Western modernism primarily because it was a symbol of modernity, and jettisoned local building traditions on its behalf.

A remarkable exception to this rule is the architecture of Luis Barrag?n in Mexico. After the turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Mexico struggled to find a new, modern identity. As was common elsewhere, modern architecture was both promoted and resisted for its internationalism. While some architects adopted the modern art deco style, others turned to International Style towers to provide much of the country's public housing. But by the mid-1930s a reaction against modernism began to set in. Barrag?n and others returned to local traditions, to the simple, strong colors and plain, unadorned walls seen in much of rural Mexico. With elementary geometric forms set off by still pools of water and lush vegetation, Barrag?n's designs were serenely detached from the machine-age sleekness of the International Style

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XI SCANDINAVIAN MODERNISM

 

 

A desire to enhance national traditions while embracing the tenets of modernism characterizes the architecture of early Scandinavian modernism. The leaders were Erik Gunnar Asplund of Sweden, Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto of Finland, and Arne Jacobsen of Denmark. Asplund, in his design for the Stockholm City Library (1928), set a rotunda (round building with a dome) within a rectangular cube. The design was neoclassical in inspiration, but the building's plain surfaces were characteristic of rationalist modernism. Asplund went on to create decidedly modernist buildings for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, with slender piers and extensive use of glass and steel. But his most influential building may have been the small, unadorned Woodland Chapel at the Stockholm Cemetery (1920). With its shingled roof and temple-like columned entry porch, the chapel seemed to transcend both local and classical architectural traditions.

Jacobsen worked within Danish tradition throughout his career, but was deeply influenced by the craft and rigor of Asplund's designs. In the Jespersen Office Building (1955) in Copenhagen, Jacobsen also incorporated the curtain wall and steel frame typical of high-rise buildings in the United States.

 

Eliel Saarinen was a member of a group of artists, musicians, and writers who celebrated Finnish nationalism, and with them he participated in a broad movement to revive Nordic vernacular traditions. His Helsinki Central Railway Station (1904-1914) utilized local masonry techniques to emphasize bold architectural forms and expressive sculptural decoration. But he allowed functional considerations to guide him in designing its sleek, streamlined appearance and rational organization of space. Saarinen moved to the United States in 1923, where he designed buildings for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Eliel's son, Eero Saarinen, secured his fame with two designs. The first was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, for which he won a competition in 1948 (though it was not built until 1963). Its soaring line has since become a world-recognized symbol of St. Louis. The second design was for the TWA Terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport (1962) in New York City, a building that expresses flight with its sweeping curves. Although visually pleasing, the terminal's curving shape proved maddeningly resistant to expansion. Alvar Aalto's early work reveals the influence of Asplund's designs, although Aalto was later influenced by Russian and Dutch constructivism, Finnish neoclassicism, and Frank Lloyd Wright's house designs. In collaboration with his first wife, Aino Marsio, Aalto designed houses, public buildings, and plywood furniture. After working with reinforced concrete, a standard material in modern European designs, he began to use more wood because of its association with native Finnish tradition and its greater warmth and expressiveness. For the Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku, Finland, Aalto layered sensuous strips of teak and other woods, even using teak for the venetian blinds on the exterior of the windows. The natural materials he used—wood-paneled interiors, a rough granite base for the house, and an exterior wall of stone rubble—stand in sharp contrast to the clean white walls of International Style modernism, although they display a sympathy with the natural materials of Wright's architecture. Aalto was less interested in arguing for a specific style than in finding solutions that would dignify places of human habitation.

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XI SCANDINAVIAN MODERNISM

 

 

A desire to enhance national traditions while embracing the tenets of modernism characterizes the architecture of early Scandinavian modernism. The leaders were Erik Gunnar Asplund of Sweden, Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto of Finland, and Arne Jacobsen of Denmark. Asplund, in his design for the Stockholm City Library (1928), set a rotunda (round building with a dome) within a rectangular cube. The design was neoclassical in inspiration, but the building's plain surfaces were characteristic of rationalist modernism. Asplund went on to create decidedly modernist buildings for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, with slender piers and extensive use of glass and steel. But his most influential building may have been the small, unadorned Woodland Chapel at the Stockholm Cemetery (1920). With its shingled roof and temple-like columned entry porch, the chapel seemed to transcend both local and classical architectural traditions.

 

Jacobsen worked within Danish tradition throughout his career, but was deeply influenced by the craft and rigor of Asplund's designs. In the Jespersen Office Building (1955) in Copenhagen, Jacobsen also incorporated the curtain wall and steel frame typical of high-rise buildings in the United States.

Eliel Saarinen was a member of a group of artists, musicians, and writers who celebrated Finnish nationalism, and with them he participated in a broad movement to revive Nordic vernacular traditions. His Helsinki Central Railway Station (1904-1914) utilized local masonry techniques to emphasize bold architectural forms and expressive sculptural decoration. But he allowed functional considerations to guide him in designing its sleek, streamlined appearance and rational organization of space. Saarinen moved to the United States in 1923, where he designed buildings for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Eliel's son, Eero Saarinen, secured his fame with two designs. The first was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, for which he won a competition in 1948 (though it was not built until 1963). Its soaring line has since become a world-recognized symbol of St. Louis. The second design was for the TWA Terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport (1962) in New York City, a building that expresses flight with its sweeping curves. Although visually pleasing, the terminal's curving shape proved maddeningly resistant to expansion. Alvar Aalto's early work reveals the influence of Asplund's designs, although Aalto was later influenced by Russian and Dutch constructivism, Finnish neoclassicism, and Frank Lloyd Wright's house designs. In collaboration with his first wife, Aino Marsio, Aalto designed houses, public buildings, and plywood furniture. After working with reinforced concrete, a standard material in modern European designs, he began to use more wood because of its association with native Finnish tradition and its greater warmth and expressiveness. For the Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku, Finland, Aalto layered sensuous strips of teak and other woods, even using teak for the venetian blinds on the exterior of the windows. The natural materials he used—wood-paneled interiors, a rough granite base for the house, and an exterior wall of stone rubble—stand in sharp contrast to the clean white walls of International Style modernism, although they display a sympathy with the natural materials of Wright's architecture. Aalto was less interested in arguing for a specific style than in finding solutions that would dignify places of human habitation.

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I INTRODUCTION

 

 

American Architecture, architecture that developed in the European colonies in America and subsequently in the United States. This development covers a period of almost five centuries, beginning with the establishment of Saint Augustine in Florida in 1565, English settlement along the Atlantic Coast in 1585, and Spanish settlement in New Mexico in 1598. Settlers from France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, and other countries arrived in the 1600s.

The full history of building in what became the United States reaches back 10,000 years, but European settlers almost universally ignored the many building traditions of Native American peoples. Over the five centuries after European arrival, transplanted European building traditions were gradually reshaped and redefined. They emerged as distinctly American building traditions by the early 19th century. Each of the European colonies in North America developed its own building tradition.

In the 1800s innovations in technology and the spread of railroads made possible the rapid growth of the Midwest and West. Mass-produced building parts, manufactured in the East, could be ordered from catalogs and shipped West by rail. A major fire in 1871 destroyed downtown Chicago, Illinois, and offered building opportunities for American architects, who over the next 25 years developed the first skyscrapers. This brand-new building type, devised in the United States, influenced architecture around the world from the late 1800s into the 2000s. During the 20th century architects and entrepreneurs vied to build the tallest skyscraper—a contest that continues today. Another unique building type developed in America was the single-family suburban house—a detached or stand-alone building, as opposed to the attached or semiattached suburban house popular elsewhere. It, too, influenced architecture outside the United States.

The emigration of European architects in the 1930s and 1940s brought European modernism to the United States, and in the second half of the 20th century America became a major architectural force. By the late 1900s and early 2000s American architects worked around the globe, while architects from Japan and Spain, to mention only two examples, received commissions for major public buildings in the United States

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II NATIVE AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

 

 

Conservative estimates suggest that at least 24 million indigenous people lived in North America, the Caribbean, and what is now Mexico when navigator Christopher Columbus stumbled into the New World in 1492. The native peoples can be classified in large cultural groups that together spoke as many as 600 languages. Over thousands of years they had developed unique methods of building adapted to the prevailing cultural and climatic conditions of their respective regions. In nearly all areas except the arid high plains and the Great Basin of the West and Southwest, individuals lived as part of family groups in extended communal houses. The arrival of Spanish explorers in the 1500s brought the horse to North America. The plains tribes adopted a nomadic way of life as a result, following on horseback enormous herds of bison (also called buffalo) and basing their culture on coexistence with the bison.

In the Northeast woodlands, Native Americans built dwellings with light wooden frames made of saplings and covered with large slabs of bark, or sometimes with hides. They could easily remove these coverings for better ventilation in the summer months. West of Lake Ontario, the indigenous peoples made similar although slightly smaller dwellings. On the plains they built portable cone-shaped dwellings called tipis (also spelled tepees), which they covered with tanned buffalo hides. In the Pacific Northwest, peoples who based their existence on salmon fishing fashioned large communal houses from broad split planks of cedar or redwood. In the arid Southwest, villages of clustered, stacked houses were built of stone in higher elevations and of sun-dried adobe brick along major rivers such as the Rio Grande.

Nearly all of these house forms, intimately connected with the pattern of life of indigenous groups, were rejected by the new European arrivals. Such forms were retained only in the American Southwest and in Mexico, where indigenous structures tended to resemble buildings of rural Spain. In those regions, Spanish arrivals used Native American labor to build presidios (military forts), haciendas (large estates), and mission churches on a scale larger than the natives used for their own buildings. But Europeans favored their own building forms and practices in virtually every other area they controlled in America. European settlers thus gradually forgot the ways in which native building traditions responded to the local environment. See also Native American Architecture

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III THE COLONIAL PERIOD: 1500 TO 1783

 

 

In the 16th century, many European nations claimed portions of the North American continent as colonial possessions. First to arrive were the Spanish, in the islands of the Caribbean Sea and in Mexico. Soon afterward Spanish exploration led to settlement of parts of Florida and then in what later became Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Other Spanish exploratory expeditions ventured north from Mexico into what became New Mexico and along the coastal area of what is now southern California.

In the 1600s French expeditions penetrated the interior of the North American continent, moving down the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. By the mid-17th century The Netherlands had established small colonies along the Hudson River (in what is now New York State), while the Swedes established a few settlements along the lower part of the Delaware River. The British founded several colonies along Chesapeake Bay in a region they named Virginia and farther north in an area they soon called New England. By the end of the 17th century the British had absorbed Dutch and Swedish colonies, so that a series of British colonial settlements extended from what was later South Carolina north to what became Maine.

 

Each group of colonists erected buildings reminiscent of those in their homeland, resulting in a highly regional architecture based on the vernacular building traditions (those of the common people) of Spain, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, and England. Moreover, two separate regional English colonial architectures resulted from the difference in social, economic, and religious objectives of English settlers of the northern coastal colonies and English settlers of the southern coastal colonies. During the colonial period, America lacked the kind of architecturally educated patrons who might sponsor the grand and formal styles of architecture then current in European countries. It also lacked the money to make that architecture possible.

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A The Spanish Colonies

 

Spanish priests carried with them the memory of elaborate churches in Spain and Mexico on their assignments to build mission churches in Texas, California, and New Mexico. Where possible, as around San Antonio, Texas, along the coastal road in California, and in southern Arizona, they built mission churches that attempted to emulate in their details and their arrangement of massive forms the churches of the 1600s and 1700s in Spain and Mexico. One of the most striking examples is the mission church of San Xavier del Bac (1783-1797) near Tucson, Arizona. This rather simple yet elegant church was under construction while along the Atlantic seaboard the newly independent United States invented its Constitution, created its new government, and tried to shape a distinctly American architecture. Mission Santa Barbara (1815-1820), on the southern Californian coast, was one of the last Spanish mission churches built in what became United States territory. The builders based its facade on a temple shown in a Spanish translation of an ancient Roman book on architecture by Vitruvius

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B The French, Swedish, and Dutch Colonies

 

 

Along the southern Mississippi River and near the town of St. Louis (in what is now Missouri), French settlers built wooden houses fronted or surrounded by porches called galeries. Southern landowners later transformed this idea of a large sheltering porch into the two-story Grecian colonnade (row of columns with a roof), resulting in the familiar image of the Southern plantation mansion.

In New Sweden on the Delaware River, Swedish settlers introduced log construction, based on familiar vernacular methods back home. With trees so abundant in America, German and Scots-Irish arrivals picked up this building type—the log cabin—and took it westward into the hinterlands. The Swedes also introduced a form of gambrel roof—a roof with two slopes, the lower slope steeper than the upper. The English, who assumed control of New Sweden in 1682, borrowed this roof shape for their buildings. In the Dutch colony that stretched up along the Hudson River, brick construction predominated in the towns. Narrow brick houses presented steep, stepped gables to the street. (The gable is a triangular end of a roof; Dutch gables were edged on the sides with steps). None of these houses survived. In the farmlands of northeastern New Jersey and on Long Island, a different house type predominated, apparently introduced by Flemish settlers. These broad houses had an entrance in the middle of the long side and sweeping roofs that extended out to shelter the entry door. An example of this type of house is the Dyckman house on the northern tip of Manhattan Island. This house was rebuilt about 1783 after the British army burned it during the American Revolution (1775-1783).

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C The English Colonies

 

 

English settlers, like settlers in the other European colonies in America, employed building techniques and forms familiar in their homeland. Their earliest colonial buildings were late medieval in form and detail. The Jonathan Fairbanks house in Dedham, Massachusetts, is likely the oldest surviving wooden frame house in the former English colonies; the central section of the house was built around 1636. Its slightly projecting upper story and its heavy wood frame construction provide a good example of this transplanted late medieval building tradition.

The New Englanders had immigrated to America to separate from the established Church of England and to create communities and a church organization more like those described in the New Testament of the Bible. Their early meetinghouses were plain and unassuming buildings that looked like warehouses for worship. Of these, only the so-called Old Ship meetinghouse (1681) in Hingham, Massachusetts, survives. Its nickname derives from the huge timbers that form its exposed roof trusses (supports), said to have been hewn by ship's carpenters.

In the southern English colonies around Chesapeake Bay and in the Carolinas, the first settlers built wooden houses with structural posts placed directly in the earth. These houses were highly susceptible to rot and attack by termites, and none remain. A few ostentatious brick houses meant to display wealth have survived from the early colonial period. They include the Adam Thoroughgood house (1636) near Norfolk, Virginia, and the Arthur Allen house (called Bacon's Castle; 1650-1655) in Surry County, Virginia. Also surviving is the brick church of Saint Luke, built around 1682 to 1685 in Isle of Wight County. The church is essentially late Gothic in style, with pointed-arch windows and buttresses, and as part of the Church of England it is wholly unlike the deliberately austere meetinghouses of New England. The Southern colonies, unlike the Northern colonies, did not break away from the Church of England.

By the start of the 18th century, all the colonies along the Atlantic seaboard had come under English control and a more uniform culture began to develop. Architecture in the English colonies also underwent a dramatic change, moving away from ethnic vernacular traditions toward a stylish emulation of the fashionable architectural details used for public buildings and country houses in Britain in the late 1700s. The wealthiest colonists hoped to demonstrate that they were every bit as cultivated as their countrymen and countrywomen in England. Because trained architects were extremely rare in the colonies, educated gentlemen acquired libraries of current books on architecture and trained themselves in matters of design.

 

Numerous books illustrated with engraved plates showed the proper use of classical details. They made possible the use of sophisticated classical ornament in England and the ornament that began to appear in the colonies. This classically based architecture of the 18th century is called Georgian, in reference to the successive British monarchs named George who reigned from 1714 to 1830. Hundreds of Georgian houses survive; a good example is the Benjamin Chew house called Cliveden (1763-1767), which stands in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the former estate of the colonial chief justice of Pennsylvania. The design, attributed to Chew's legal colleague William Peters, consists of elements shown in several books popular at the time. Cliveden's stone construction represents local building in Philadelphia's Germantown area (most Philadelphia houses of that time were built of wood or, less often, of brick), and its finely proportioned white classical details are typical of the Georgian period in America. These details include the dentil (toothlike) molding at the base of the roof, the projecting center section capped by a classical pediment (triangular form), and the finely proportioned entry door frame with its Roman Doric columns and smaller pediment. In New England, Puritan restraint still influenced Georgian architecture, as in the simpler Jonathan Trumbull house (1740) in Lebanon, Connecticut.

Businessmen, lawyers, and artists who educated themselves in architectural design also designed public buildings in the colonies. One good example is Faneuil Hall, a marketplace with a meeting room above, given to the city of Boston by merchant Peter Faneuil and designed in 1740 by painter John Smibert. (Architect Charles Bulfinch greatly enlarged it in the early 1800s according to Smibert's design). Lawyer Andrew Hamilton designed an even better-known example: the large colonial legislature building in Philadelphia, more often called Independence Hall (1732-1753).

Colonial churches were based on fashionable models just constructed in England, such as those of English architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Americans knew these designs from plates in recent books. One fine example is the First Baptist Meetinghouse (1774-1775) in Providence, Rhode Island, designed by merchant and self-trained architect Joseph Brown. While the main block of the meetinghouse retained something of the proportions and restraint of earlier meetinghouses, its tower and steeple derive directly from plate 30 of James Gibbs's Book of Architecture (1728). This plate represents some alternate designs for Gibbs's church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (1720-1726) in London, England.

Although not normally thought of as an architect, Founding Father George Washington was a highly knowledgeable, self-educated architectural designer. Washington's great wealth as a Virginia planter enabled him to acquire books and to add to Mount Vernon, the plantation house he inherited from his brother. First refurbished in 1757 and 1758 and then nearly doubled in size in a second phase of building from 1773 to 1776, the remodeled Mount Vernon incorporated details from several popular architectural books. In the last major change, made after the Revolutionary War, Washington added a broad portico (1784-1787) overlooking the lawn toward the Potomac River. Despite his political differences with Britain, Washington nonetheless based his striking portico on one published in English architect Batty Langley's work The City and Country Builder and Workman's Treasury of Designs (1740).

IV NATIONHOOD AND AFTER: 1783 TO 1815

 

The period following the American Revolution started with fractious squabbling among the 13 states. These disagreements continued until a federal union was established and the Constitution was ratified in 1788. The years from about 1780 to 1820 are often called the Federal period and the architecture of this time Federal or Federalist, signifying that a conscious search took place for new forms that would mark a break with English influences. Some architectural designers made a moderate break from England, whereas others argued for radical change.

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A Charles Bulfinch and New England

 

 

Bostonian Charles Bulfinch, who developed an interest in architectural design as a youth, ranks among the more conservative designers of this period. Bullfinch began his career as a businessman and self-trained amateur architect. He turned to architectural design as a full-time profession after his family lost its fortune. In time he designed scores of houses (in Boston and the surrounding countryside), public buildings, churches, and business buildings.

 

Bulfinch's first major design was for a new building type urgently needed by all the former colonies now become independent states—a state house or legislature building. Although some states adapted their former colonial governance buildings to this use, Massachusetts and other states opted for an entirely new building, free of the taint of colonial rule. Bulfinch developed his design for the Massachusetts State House in 1787, and the brick building went up from 1795 to 1798. Bulfinch created large rooms for the two houses of the legislature and for the governor and staff. He put the biggest room in the center, covered by a large wooden dome. He derived many of the details and elements from English buildings he had seen on a trip to Britain from 1785 to 1787, most notably the State House's colonnaded front porch and impressive dome. Although dependent on English design sources, Bulfinch's design established the dome as a feature indelibly linked to state capitols for more than 100 years. In the New England states, designers of residential architecture emphasized strong abstract geometries and the proportions and placement of windows but showed great restraint in their use of classical ornament. The Governor Goodwin house (1811) of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, illustrates these principles well

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B Thomas Jefferson and Virginia

 

 

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson of Virginia took a very different view, however; he detested Georgian architecture, which he associated with colonial rule. Jefferson heavily criticized the magisterial buildings of Williamsburg, Virginia, formerly the colonial capital. For his own plantation house (begun in 1770), Jefferson departed from the English colonial practice of putting plantation houses on the banks of major rivers and instead placed his atop a small mountain. He adopted an Italian name, Monticello, for the estate. Although contemporary English books inspired his earliest sketches for the new house, he gradually turned to the work of 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Palladian aspects of his completed initial design include the building's symmetry, with two wings extending from a dominant central structure; its single story; and its large front porch with a pediment and Roman Doric columns.

Over the years, Jefferson constantly modified the house as he learned more. Soon after the American Revolution, Jefferson was appointed American diplomatic representative to the French court, and he delighted in seeing the latest in French progressive architecture in and around Paris. The single-story Hôtel de Salm in Paris greatly impressed Jefferson, and he later remodeled Monticello to make it appear more emphatically of one story and to give it a low Roman dome like that of the hôtel.

While in Paris, Jefferson also took note of a recent French book that showed the restored Maison Carrée, an ancient Roman temple in the town of Nîmes in southern France. When friends in Virginia who knew of his passion for architecture asked Jefferson to design the new state capitol for Virginia in 1785, he was pleased to help. The Virginia capital had shifted from Williamsburg to Richmond, where a new building was to rise on a bluff overlooking the James River. Jefferson initially hoped to design three adjoining buildings to house the three branches of state government, but he was instructed to squeeze all operations into one building. He took as his model the Maison Carrée, which was considered one of the most beautiful ancient buildings. Jefferson selected it not only for its simplicity of form, however, but also because it symbolized for him the pure architecture of Republican Rome, before the excesses of the Roman Empire. The Roman Republic seemed to present the perfect architectural examples for a new republic learning how to govern itself.

 

Jefferson sent drawings and a model of the new capitol from France back to Virginia to guide construction. The Virginia State Capitol (1785-1788) became the first building since ancient times to be based directly on an ancient classical prototype, and it marked the beginning of a classical revival in the United States. This revival, known as neoclassicism, swept Europe and America until the early to mid-1800s and even today influences the design of public and governmental buildings (see Neoclassical Art and Architecture). The Roman architecture of Vitruvius possessed a clarity and mathematical precision in its proportions that appealed to Jefferson's logical and practical mind. Jefferson felt architecture exerted a powerful social and educational influence on its users, so when he began to design the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1817, he turned to Roman forms. For each of the university's ten instructional subject areas, he designed a separate pavilion, patterned after a Roman temple. Each pavilion used a different architectural style or order (the classical system that governed the shape of columns and other building parts). Jefferson wrote that these pavilions were to resemble an “architectural lecture,” silently educating university students about architecture. He grouped the ten large pavilions in two facing rows, five to a side, with a colonnade in the Roman Doric order linking the pavilions. Student rooms lay between pavilions, behind the colonnades. At the head of the group Jefferson placed a large cylindrical and domed library, inspired by the great Pantheon temple (ad 118-128) in Rome, which he knew from the plates in Palladio's Four Books of Architecture (1571

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V AMERICAN GROWTH AND EXPANSION: 1815 TO 1890

 

 

Thomas Jefferson's use of the Roman temple in Nîmes as a model for his Virginia State Capitol in 1785 marked the beginning of a series of historical revivals that swept both Europe and the United States in the 19th century. These revivals occurred in part because of increasing academic study of architectural history, study that produced books illustrated with engravings and woodcuts. Patrons and architects had more images of the past available to them, and increased travel to Europe additionally broadened their knowledge. A desire for symbolic meaning also encouraged the use of historic styles. A building was meant to make a statement about its use or the taste of the patron. Thus, Jefferson chose Roman architecture as a reference to the Roman model for the government of the new American republic.

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A The Greek Revival

 

 

The American Greek Revival began about 1818. As a result of a desire for allusions, such as Jefferson had made by modeling the Virginia State Capitol on a Roman temple, many government buildings, as well as banks and other commercial buildings, were based on classical models. The government of ancient Greece was felt to be a fitting symbol for the developing American democratic system. A Greek temple facade on 19th-century banks and commercial buildings was intended to convey the trustworthy principles and the stability of the business. Architects even based residences on Greek temples, and although builders most often constructed these dwellings of wood, they painted them white to resemble stone. These white wooden temple houses, built across the nation from Maine to Mississippi and from Virginia to Illinois and Oregon, carried an implied reference to democracies in ancient Greece and in America.

In the northern states, Grecian-inspired houses were often simple boxes with classical ornament around windows and doors, although most of them displayed a roof pediment and a classical cornice (molding at the base of the roof, sometimes with brackets or dentils). On large plantation houses in the South, colossal two-story classical columns created a colonnade over which the roof extended. This extended roof generally covered a gallery or balcony at the second floor and kept sun off the walls, helping keep the inside temperature down. Tall French doors (paired doors with glass panes) on both floors could be opened wide to promote the flow of air through the house. The irony was that enslaved Africans built these classical temples that carried grand references to ancient democracy, and slave labor also made landowners wealthy enough to afford these mansions

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B The Gothic Revival

 

The Greek Revival style soon received a challenge from the Gothic Revival, a romantic style of architecture that favored darkness and the suggested mystery of medieval times. Landscape architect and writer Andrew Jackson Downing promoted this approach to both building and landscape design in America, starting in the 1840s. Downing produced several highly influential books in which he presented model designs for houses based on picturesque medieval houses and early Renaissance Italian villas. Architect Richard Upjohn, who advocated medieval styles for churches, aided Downing's cause. Upjohn considered the Gothic Revival particularly appropriate for churches, which became his specialty.

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C New Building Types and New Materials

 

 

A problem was inherent with references to the past in architecture: Industrial development required new buildings for which no precedents existed. Architects had not been trained to systematically analyze new functional needs and create new building types arising from those functions. The railroad station clearly demonstrated this difficulty. What were railroad stations and what were they to look like? Mass transportation had never existed before the invention of the steam engine and the railroad in the early 1800s, so designing the first train stations presented a challenge to architects. Architects made all sorts of historic references in their designs, a few of which were highly fanciful.

Industrial development had two significant impacts on construction: mass production of new building materials such as iron, and railway shipment of those materials across the continent. The larger scale of buildings, the need for economy, and the desire for permanence led to the use of cast iron as a building material for urban buildings, especially warehouses and business blocks. Factories mass-produced a range of identical cast-iron parts that could be assembled into a finished building. By the 1850s, nearly identical buildings were going up in many large Eastern cities, their parts supplied by a handful of producers concentrated in New York, Baltimore, and other Eastern cities. Sections of precast iron were used even for the new dome of the U.S. Capitol (1851-1864) in Washington, D.C. What made this widespread use of iron possible was the ability to transport building parts anywhere the railway system reached.

With the rapid development of new towns and cities in the Midwest, the traditional method of constructing small structures—for example, houses, churches, and business buildings—had become impossibly slow. This method relied on the availability of highly skilled joiners and called for heavy, hewn-timber frames, with widely spaced principal timbers locked into place by complex mortise-and-tenon (dovetail) connections. As mechanized sawmills proliferated among the softwood forests of the Midwest, lumber became widely available in smaller dimensions (likewise shipped by rail), and carpenters in several places soon devised a much faster method of putting up buildings. They used closely spaced, narrow studs (vertical supports) for walls, which they fastened together not by complex joinery but by nailing the pieces to the studs. With the mechanized production of iron nails, this new method of wood-framed construction essentially replaced the traditional heavy timber frame. The new frames went up so fast that a house could be built in one day, and the frames appeared so light in weight that the term balloon-frame construction was soon coined. Historians associate Chicago, in particular, with the invention of the balloon frame. The small, wood-framed St. Mary's Church, built in Chicago in 1833 by Augustine D. Taylor, is an example of the technique's early use.

Compared with the architecture in many areas of Europe and in other parts of the world, the architecture of the United States developed with remarkable uniformity. This uniformity resulted from the hundreds of builders' manuals and pattern books published in the early 19th century. Pioneers trekking to Oregon in the 1840s and 1850s brought these manuals and pattern books with them, so that building in the Western territories duplicated in many ways construction 4,000 km (2,500 mi) to the east. These books, as their authors often noted, were produced specifically for an American audience, to address American building needs.

The printing and distribution of these illustrated books demonstrates how industry changed the process of building. Illustrated catalogs furthered the changes. These catalogs, published by iron manufacturers such as James Bogardus in New York City, enabled potential customers as far away as San Francisco to order building components. In some instances, entire sections of wood-framed buildings, fabricated in the East, were transported by ship around South America to destinations in Washington, Oregon, and central California via San Francisco. The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City perhaps best demonstrates the scale of building made possible by the rapid expansion of American industry and by American ambition. Designed by John Augustus Roebling in the 1850s and 1860s and built under the supervision of his son and daughter-in-law, the Brooklyn Bridge became the largest suspension bridge in the world upon its completion in 1883. Numerous techniques devised by Roebling made this bridge possible, including the use of caissons (watertight chambers) for building the bridge's stone towers and of steel wire for the cables. To allow tall-masted sailing ships to pass under the bridge, Roebling positioned the road deck 36.6 m (120 ft) above the water. Stone towers, which rose to a height of 84.3 m (276.5 ft), made this high roadway possible and made the bridge the tallest structure in New York at its completion. The span from tower to tower of just over 486 m (1,595 ft) and the span between cable anchors of 1,054 m (3,456 ft) constituted a remarkable achievement.

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D Second Empire and High Victorian Gothic

 

 

Industrial expansion underwent a dramatic shift after the American Civil War (1861-1865), when industrialists bought up thousands of small companies and enterprises and merged them into truly national companies and corporations. As a result, the profits of expanding industry became increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. It was a period labeled The Gilded Age by writer Mark Twain, and colorful and exuberant displays in architecture characterized it.

Two stylistic modes—Second Empire and High Victorian Gothic—dominated in the two decades following the Civil War. Architecture in the Second Empire style, patterned after work at that time in Paris, represented classical design. This ornate style featured layers of classical columns and abundant figural sculpture. Buildings were capped by multiple Mansard roofs (roofs with four sloping sides). Excellent examples in the United States include the Renwick Gallery (1859-1874, originally the Corcoran Museum) in Washington, D.C., designed by James Renwick, and the vast Philadelphia City Hall (1874-1901) by John MacArthur.

High Victorian Gothic architecture, inspired by contemporary work in England and by the critical writing of John Ruskin, appealed to an American desire for more picturesque variety in building styles. Twain himself was not immune to dramatic display, as seen in the High Victorian Gothic house built for him (1873-1874) in Hartford, Connecticut. Designed by Edward Potter, the Twain house is built of brightly painted brick and wrapped in broad porches. Memorial Hall (1865-1878), a multipurpose building at Harvard University, provides another excellent example of High Victorian Gothic. Designed by the firm of Ware and Van Brunt, Memorial Hall creates strong color contrasts through its materials—red brick, black brick, and cream-colored stone—and through roofs covered with bands of slate in red, black, and cream color.

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E Richardsonian Romanesque

 

American architecture before and after the Civil War remained heavily indebted to ancient and recent European sources, but one American architect managed to assimilate various European influences and create a highly personal and individual style. Henry Hobson Richardson rose to national and international prominence with his design for Trinity Church (1872-1877) in Boston. Although the use of multicolored stone in the church came from High Victorian Gothic, and the round arches were inspired by 12th-century French Romanesque architecture, the broad pyramidal mass is Richardson's own. In the years afterward, before his early death at age 48 in 1886, Richardson simplified his work and created an architecture of strong, broad masses and minimal but exquisite detail. His designs exerted great influence across the United States and began to influence European architecture, particularly in Scandinavia

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VI INNOVATION AND TRADITION: 1890 TO 1920

 

American architecture in the years between 1890 and 1920 was dominated by academically trained architects, many of whom had studied at the acclaimed Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Their knowledge of the history of architecture surpassed that of most architects before or since, but they tempered this interest in the past with an ability to design buildings that fully accommodated the needs of their time. They received commissions from industrialists who had amassed enormous fortunes before the institution of personal income tax in the United States in 1913. These clients built sumptuous residences, both in fashionable residential neighborhoods of industrial cities (such as Fifth Avenue in New York City and Prairie Avenue in Chicago) and in exclusive summer enclaves (such as Newport, Rhode Island, and Bar Harbor, Maine). These grand houses were objects to convey “conspicuous consumption,” as American economist Thorstein Veblen would soon call the ostentatious display of wealth at that time. Architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had trained in Paris, became the designer of choice for several of these grand houses, particularly for the Vanderbilt family. For Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Hunt designed an enormous Italian Renaissance summer palace called The Breakers (1892-1895) at Newport. For Cornelius's younger brother, George Washington Vanderbilt, Hunt designed a huge French Renaissance chateau called Biltmore (1888-1895), which is surrounded by formal gardens, at Asheville, North Carolina. Although such over-exuberant display disturbed some socialists, it also inspired many other Americans to strive to achieve this American dream.

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A Public Buildings

 

 

The spirit of grandeur in building prompted many cities to erect grand public buildings as well. The Boston Public Library (1887-1895), designed by the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, provided a model for this kind of public grandeur. Inspiration for the library's sumptuous entry staircase and voluminous upstairs reading room came from ancient Roman and Italian Renaissance sources. Although McKim, Mead, and White received many commissions for city townhouses and for summerhouses in the country, they specialized in major urban buildings. One of their best was the spacious Pennsylvania Station (1902-1910) in New York City. The train station's soaring public spaces provided a majestic gateway to the city; it was demolished in 1963, however, to make room for Madison Square Garden. Equally expansive is Union Station (1903-1907) in Washington, D.C., designed by Daniel H. Burnham. Both of these vast railway stations used classical Roman elements in their broad exteriors and barrel vaults (ceilings in the form of a half-cylinder) or groin vaults (intersecting barrel vaults, with ridges called groins at the intersections) for their huge interior spaces.

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B Office Towers

 

 

As American business grew, the need for urban office space expanded. In most cities, architects could create office space only by building upward. Typical office towers had self-supporting outer masonry (stone or brick) walls, with the interior structure formed by a skeleton of iron columns and wrought iron beams. By the 1880s these office towers rose to 15 stories or more, requiring the outer stone or brick walls to be 2 to 3 m (6 to 9 ft) thick. In Chicago, for example, the Monadnock Building (1884-1892), designed by Burnham and John Wellborn Root, had a solid brick outer wall that was 2 m (6 ft) thick at the insistence of the client. The architects wanted to use metal throughout, but the clients did not trust this new building method.

 

In 1883 Chicago architects began to build office blocks with a skeleton entirely of metal; all the outer cladding of brick or stone, as well as the windows, attached to this internal skeleton. After inexpensive steel for a building's skeleton became more widely available during the 1880s, office towers grew taller and taller. The first architects to accept, and visually accentuate, this vertical character were Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan of Chicago. Their 10-story Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St. Louis, Missouri, features strongly emphasized vertical piers on the outside that enclose the steel frame inside. Sullivan used the same approach in his even taller 12-story Guaranty Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York. For the Schlesinger & Mayer department store (1895-1904, now Carson Pirie Scott) in Chicago, Sullivan designed a corner public entrance accentuated with elaborate cast-iron ornament. To emphasize the large, open floors for displaying merchandise inside, Sullivan used broad windows and clad the building's steel frame with wide horizontal bands of terra-cotta.

By the end of the 19th century, architects across the country had switched to skeleton framing completely of steel, which was lighter and less susceptible to fire damage than iron. The framing was protected from weather by masonry insulation and an outer skin of stone and glazed terra-cotta. One of the most visually startling early skyscrapers is the Fuller Building (1902-1903) in New York City, popularly called the Flatiron Building, by D. H. Burnham & Company of Chicago. Because this building stands on a narrow triangular lot, it seems even taller than its 21 stories when viewed from its pointed end. The Flatiron Building was the tallest building in New York City for a short time, but it was soon surpassed by the soaring Woolworth Building (1910-1913) a few blocks away, designed by Cass Gilbert. With a steel skeleton heavily braced to resist sideways pressure from wind, this so-called Cathedral of Commerce rises 55 stories, to a height of just over 241 m (792 ft). The Woolworth Building retained the record for the world's tallest building for almost 20 years, until the construction of the Chrysler Building in 1930. To emphasize the enormous height of the Woolworth Building, Gilbert stressed its vertical lines, using Gothic detailing and capping the office tower with a series of setbacks and a pointed Gothic crown