Task Confronts Architect to Meet Modern Era

     What are we doing in architecture?—that is the question suggested by the exhibition of the Architectural club, which opened last Tuesday at the Institute; suggested also more powerfully and inevitably by any walk along our streets. 

     Architecture and poetry are the basic, the fundamental arts. Sculpture and painting are children of the one, music and the drama of the other. All the special pleaders in the world, all the lighter fashions of the age, cannot lessen the importance of these two in the expression of human needs and aspirations.

     Architecture in this country has encountered at least one new need and expressed it in colossal terms. This need is the insistent and enormous demand of modern commerce. As modern commerce dwarfs any earlier conception of the possibilities of trade, so our skyscrapers make puny and petty the commercial buildings which sufficed for earlier needs. 

     And as business in the modern sense is a development of the last half century, or practically the last quarter century, so our architects have been obliged to move with incredible speed, to force centuries into decades and years into months, that they might present the eager world with a forced growth, a plant overpowering and gigantic, an enormous and splendid and spectacular hybrid.

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     There have been advantages and disadvantages in the swiftness and inevitability of the process, the advantages being much the more important. Architecture has been forced to express our own age, has felt the push of the crowd behind it, while the other arts, lacking more or less this essential stimulus, have expressed the age only incidentally and, as it were, by accident. The poets especially, thrown back upon themselves by the dead wall of public apathy, have wandered mostly in by-paths or taken refuge in the past, since the most heroic muse can offer only fitful gleams of inspiration to a man whom that dead wall shadows. 

     So on the whole the architect’s importunate clients have been an immense help to his art, even if they have given him little time to think, even if they have expected a twenty story building to be designed, erected and finished in less than a year. 

     The stimulus has been excessive, perhaps, and far from delicate or sensitive, but it has forced the artistic temperament out into the vast new world of invention, of science, of world-wide trade and international neighborliness, of immeasurable and incalculable forces. 

     The American architect, in short, has had a bigger job on his hands than any other artist of our time. And, on the whole, he has met his opportunity that he has done a bigger job than any other artist.

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     “There has been nothing on earth like it since Egypt built the pyramids,” said an English painter recently in observing the aspect of our streets. It is a grandiose, a colossal art, expressive and important, in the development of which public taste should be more and more exacting. 

     In this development some architects have tried to adapt the various historic styles, others to think out new systems of design to meet the new conditions. In both cases the degree of success attained depends on the genius of the designer, his sense of structure, fitness, proportion, harmony, and his ability to express his instinct in architectural terms. 

     Whatever style he uses, his problem in all steel constructed buildings is the same—to overlay the structure with an envelope which shall enclose and protect it, and which shall express structure and purpose with the utmost regard to architectural laws and harmonies. For the visible façade is always an envelope, like the visible façade of the Roman Colosseum, which was overlaid on a concrete structure; it never helps to hold up the building, like the visible façade of the Parthenon or of the Gothic cathedrals.

     It seems incredible that this colossal art is so new; that when the old Montauk block was built about thirty years ago expert engineers questioned the architect’s use of steel in the foundations; that the Rookery was the first building to strengthen its walls with steel beams, and the northern half of the Monadnock the last to use walls of solid masonry.

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     The complete steel riveted structure became at once inevitable and since then our architects have searched all climes and ages for motives for their envelopes. They have been Greeks, Romans, Goths, Persians, almost everything but Chinese, and a few heroic souls have tried to be merely themselves—sons of the new age, exponents of the new conditions, originators of a new system of design. 

     It seems axiomatic that the envelope should hold as closely as possible to the structure, should accept and express it quite frankly, should use only such ornament as may emphasize its lines, and as it were overflow from them and play with them. 

     Such a rule would seem to exclude from consideration as architecture many of the quasi-classic envelopes now so much in vogue. The delicate volutes of Ionic capitals, which the fine Greek instinct used only for the smaller temples, have no significance and no true function, either as structure or ornament, under a twenty-story office building. Since the building’s weight must be carried on steel trusses, it would seem that any Greek order colonnade under it would necessarily violate every classic law of line and proportion and every modern law of truth and fitness, and be to the people a perpetual encouragement of false standards.

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     Still more when such a colonnade is elaborately applied to upper stories high in the air, where its enormous and meaningless proportions throw all its neighbors out of scale. 

     It would seem, therefore, that the utmost taste and discretion are necessary for any successful application of classic and renaissance design to modern commercial architecture. 

     New York has done better than Chicago in this direction. The West Street building and the Broadway chambers, both by Cass Gilbert; the Tiffany and Gorham buildings, by McKim; the Bankers’ Trust, by Trowbridge & Livingston, and the Flatiron, by Burnham, are all notable successes; while the best we can show here, perhaps, are Jarvis Hunt’s American Trust and its simple, massive neighbor, the First National.

     Gothic design, by its emphasis upon vertical lines, would seem to lend itself more readily to skyscraping architecture. In Chicago the University club—a tall building though rather social than commercial in purpose—and the new Monroe building, both by Holabird & Roche, are admirable examples of its successful and consistent use. And the imposing thirty story tower projected by Howard Shaw for the northeast corner of a widened Michigan avenue, at Randolph street, a water color of which is now in the Institute, promises to be another. This ninety-foot square tower is perhaps the most important project offered in the Architectural club show.

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     With Grant park at the south, it will have the finest site in Chicago and be a permanent and majestic monument, appropriate and beautiful. As there is no question here of congestion, it is to be hoped that the council will permit its erection, even though, being a tower, it must pass the recently imposed limit of height. It will still be much lower than New York’s forty story Woolworth building, Cass Gilbert’s brilliant essay in gothic design. 

     Of independent designers who reject the schools and orders, Chicago has a more interesting group than any other city. Back in the ‘80s John Root, though not quite a revolutionist, was a free thinker in architecture, as the Rookery and the Northern Monadnock testify. 

     Louis Sullivan has developed from the first his own ideas of design; the Gage and Carson, Pirie, Scott buildings show what beauty and symmetry may be achieved in a frank façade of iron, glass, and terra cotta, which borrows nothing from the old styles. These buildings are so brilliantly successful that the next age will undoubtedly reproach us for having so few of them.

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     Pond & Pond are also in this group. The new City club, outside and in, shows how cleverly they have developed original ideas of structural and beautiful design. The Henrotin and Michael Reese hospitals, by Schmidt & Garden, are beautiful expressions of original thought, though of late this firm seems to be yielding to other influences. George C. Nimmons’ design for the Franklin company’s building is another admirable example. 

     The public should be exacting in its demands and criticisms. The architects, more than any other artists of our age, are building its enduring monument. That it has imposing beauty, a certain magnificence and grandeur no one can deny who sees the Flatiron loom up over the crowded streets, or who walks down Michigan avenue while the lights come out and the great buildings lose any casual defects of design as they rise loftily against the sky. 

     We should be jealous for this new art. We should demand the utmost of our architects. For what the public demands it gets, and only when it demands great art is the most brilliant genius able to provide it.

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     The Ehrich galleries of New York are showing some interesting old masters at Anderson’s—about eleven pictures of almost as many schools. “The Family of the House of Orange,” by Jacob Uchterveldt, is a beautiful early Dutch group of three figures painted somewhat in Terburg’s manner, but free and fluent in spite of its exactness, and full of human tenderness and humor.

     A portrait of a man in red and blue by Joos van Cleve is an admirable example of this loyal follower of Holbein. A Gethsemane by Henri Met de Bles is still earlier, a truly delicious Flemish primitive in perfect condition; a landscape with figures of Christ and three disciples and distant soldiers entering with Judas. 

     Antonio Moro’s portrait of a man in black with a ruff is an extremely distinguished work. Greco and Ribera represent the Spanish school, the former with a head of a monk in his later manner, the finest and tenderest small picture by this great master which it was ever my good luck to see.