Decoration and Structure

...Irving Gill's villas in California, and no one can doubt the structural Tightness of our own simple and reticent designs...

...Gilbert Seldes's lively applause at the prospect that architecture has frankly become one of the "lively arts"—so I hasten to add that the exposition is much more than Coney Island...

...They are badly planned, and many of them are abominably designed, in styles that are "modern" only in the sense that a Fiji cannibal, with a loin-cloth and a pair of suspenders and a monocle, might be called modern...

...Even this statement requires qualifications, for there are individual good buildings, like the theatre, and one or two of the less pretentious exhibition halls which possess that quiet continence, that muscular repose, which marks the best architecture of our time...

...that is, an accurate insight into the problems, and a dexterous and economic solution...

...Varnum Poor, the stage designs of Geddes, Simonson, and Jones, and the geometrical decorations of Mr...

...Now, the weakness of the buildings in the exposition, a weakness which is shared by a great deal of the modern French architecture I have seen in Paris, in Neuilly, and in Geneva, is that it attempts to treat the building as a decorative whole, rather than as a structural unit—it uses a variety of materials...

...You see—just the opposite should be true...

...Contrast these buildings with the clean lines of a modern apartment house in New York, or with one of Mr...

...Claude Bragdon, we have no fresh decoration in America—our designers feed like silkworms on the mulberry leaves of the museum...

...The great paradox of the exposition is that the architecture is, on the whole, feeble, and that the decorative arts are good—copiously, exuberantly, violently, good...

...and curiously enough, what is right there is very much like what is right in the vernacular architecture of the middle-ages, before it succumbed to the pedantry, the syntactical flourishes, of the so-called cultivated architect...

...that is to say, not modern at all—but absurd...

...It is useless to expect a poor wretch who lives in a Bronx tenement, whose eyes know no more fascinating arabesque than the flash of posts in the subway, whose daily outlook opens on a frozen chorus of blank skyscraper windows—it is useless, I have held, to expect such people to create new designs in rugs, fabrics, or tiles...

...our decorative art is all imitative, a shameful union of the designer's impotence and the patron's timidity...

...532 THE COMMONWEAL October 7, 1925 DECORATION AND STRUCTURE By LEWIS MUMFORD ONE goes to the Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris with the expectation of finding modern decorations in modern buildings—sharp and vivacious planes of color tumbling into the geometrical unity of a complicated crystal...

...As one skirts around the vast field united by the Pont Alexander III, one's impression is that Coney Island has somehow invaded the tranquil greys of Paris: the buildings bark and yammer and trill and sing, and there is no harmony in them at all, except the utmost intention of being diversified...

...thus the need for lighting the stacks in a library gives the original architect an opportunity to achieve new rhythms and accents in window and wall...

...Changes of form in building should arise out of a necessity for solving new problems...

...but in the sober daylight one cannot forgive the architects for their meaningless idiosyncrasies...

...it makes balconies bulge, cornices writhe, and walls heave...

...for it contradicts all the banalities of our American experience...

...With the exception of the pottery of Mr...

...For a long time I have held that the best modern work must be structural, since as craftsmen and decorative artists we have largely lost that capacity for playing with complicated forms and patterns which marked older communities, more generously fed on the pied beauties of flowers and cloudforms and beasts...

...At night, when the barges on the river are spattered with color, one perhaps succumbs to the delicious folly of Coney Island...

...thus, too, our growing respect for sunlight unfiltered through glass must alter the forms...

...This state of things shocked and puzzled me...

...Good form in building is not something to be achieved by a municipal autocrat, or by a suburban realtor decreeing that all the buildings in his development must be in "Tudor" or "Spanish Renaissance"— harmonious building comes about when the great mass of builders learn to apply certain common methods to their problems, and to avoid cliches and tags handed over inertly from the past...

...But too much of what used to be called l'art nouveau remains in the outward aspects of the building...

...It depends far less upon any mere effort of the cultivated mind than it does upon certain common habits of thinking and working...

...Stylicism, the thing that makes a building "different," is the result of an unhealthy craving for idiosyncrasy which marks so much of leisure-class culture: what is really desirable is "style...

...and l'art nouveau is not new art, but the old art, contorted into new forms without any underlying reason or aim...

...In a little while one learns to distinguish between the buildings as a whole and the glorious array of goods that lies inside of them...

...At my mention of Coney Island, I hear Mr...

...and in this sense, in spite of all our snobbery and dilletantism, we are approaching a style in America...

...Hence, our absence from the Paris Exposition...

...it contrives to introduce new textures and colors...

...and at first one is a little disappointed...

...On the outside, the buildings are indeed a jumble...

...Guided by necessity, we have come to feel what is "right" in a modern building...