Architecture and the Environment

...Through Walter Gropius and Mies van dcr Rohe, Wright's architectural ideas—considerably emended—returned to the U.S...

...It details the impact that Sullivan's structured version of Art Nouveau and Richardson's massive Romanesque style (in both its commercial and domestic manifestations)—and upon architects in England and the Scandinavian countries...

...It is a part—the most valuable part, for me—of the Met's sprawling centennial exhibition, 19th Century America, already reviewed here ("Centennial Kitsch," NL, June 22...

...After the South's defeat in the Civil War, business and industrial interests were in the saddle, determining the fate of the cities...

...The observation, for instance, that "architecture is always based on power, and reflects it," provides the perfect contrast for his discussion of millionaire establishments like "Biltmore," the Vanderbilts' monumental North Carolina palace, which had all the appearances of power but produced no architectural "offspring," and the lowly 19th-century house, which came to fruition with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright...

...What his essay makes brilliantly clear is that American cultural influence abroad began with architecture and—earlier than had been supposed—was far advanced by the late 19th century...

...He supports that claim with a wealth of examples, from penitentiaries to skyscrapers...

...Surprisingly, all nine of the examples studied are still extant and operative...

...The Met obviously holds the 19th-century view that it is one of the cultural facilities of the park and, as such, entitled to Lebensraum...

...Critics of the expansion plans have already pointed out, however, that this 19th-century concept of the Met's role was based on a ratio of land-use to population that has been drastically changed...

...A few architectural fragments are placed throughout the exhibition to supplement the photographs and transparencies...

...Well-mounted and well-designed, in the form of modular light boxes that can be readily dismantled and reassembled, The Rise of an American Architecture will travel nationally following its October 3 closing at the Met...

...Handsome and provocative as the show is, however, it is the combination book-and-catalogue accompanying it that provides the fuller exposition of the subject, covering a much greater territory and offering a good many more illustrative examples than could be presented in the show...

...There are terracotta ornaments from Chicago architect Louis Sullivan's Meyer Building and Garrick Theater, and segments of cast-iron facades—a mail-order form of architecture that could be bought from manufacturers' catalogues—rescued from the store fronts of 35-37 Thomas Street in New York, a building now demolished...

...The promotion and publication of his work—principally in Holland and Germany—decisively influenced the architects of the Dutch-based tie Slijl movement and the programs of the Bauhaus...

...Of these, the most significant are Henry Russell Hitchcock's "American Influence Abroad" and Vincent Scully's "American Houses: Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright...

...They are anxious to save every inch of park property from encroachment, even by worthwhile institutions...

...There are subjects that do not yield up everything they have to offer in strictly pictorial terms, subjects that require discussion and analysis...

...It represents an attempt to oppose a naked display of power, the overriding power of propertied interests to change the character and quality of urban life—usually for short-term goals...

...We are given a look at 19th-century urban park systems, too—notably Olm-stead and Vaux' Central Park in New York and the Park Squares of Savannah, Georgia, originally designed by General James Oglethorpe in the 1730s and later modified in the 19th century...

...The attempt to deal with the 19th century's fast-growing urban blight, Fein indicates, was essentially an attempt by Northern Protestant forces to improve living conditions in the cities by planning large park systems complete with cultural institutions —museums, planetaria, botanical gardens—for the general public...

...It illuminates the nature of present urban conflicts, for every confrontation between the public and contemporary builders represents something more than the preservation of a landmark...

...As Fein points out, there was a broad ideological conflict in 19th-century America between agrarian ideals and urban realities, a conflict that polarized North and South and was one of the contributing factors of the Civil War...

...Albert Fein's "The American City: The Ideal and the Real," regards the religious and social background of the period as a means of defining reformist attempts to deal with emerging urban problems...

...But the show concludes with a multiple-image film showing other 19th-century buildings crumbling under the impact of the wrecking ball, with a cut to the image of a construction worker sweeping the pavement afterward...

...Hitchcock's wide-ranging survey goes considerably beyond the subject of Wright's influence...

...The conflict is still with us vcstigially in the form of "rural" legislative control over the cities...

...Hitchcock claims "the outside world has looked to the United States . . . for architectural ideas that were organizational and technical, truly functional in their relation to the modern civilization that was evolving already in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, though often by European standards aesthetically retardataire...

...in the form of the International Style of the '20s and '30s...

...Included are examples of commercial structures like New York City's Flatiron Building (a modest skyscraper) and an 1828 shopping arcade in Providence, Rhode Island (a surprisingly early instance of a shopping center), as well as examples of domestic architecture that range from an equally precocious suburban housing development, William Shinn's 1852 Evergreen Hamlet in Millvale, Pennsylvania, to Frank Lloyd Wright's Baker House in Winnetka, Illinois...

...The major architects of the show are Sullivan, Wright and Henry Hobson Richardson, all of whom figure prominently in Hitchcock's opening essay...

...But Scully's observation does more than that...

...He makes a convincing case for the argument that this optimistic movement lost most of its impetus during the Reconstruction period...

...In certain respects, he believes, Europeans are "by this time well up to, if not ahead of" the United States in the design of these building-types...

...He goes on to raise the question: "Should we not rather be studying the nineteenth century city as a whole, in all its urbanistic complication, its tenements, social mixtures, gas houses, trolley lines and colonial dependencies...

...He concludes that "the architectural research of this moment should especially strive toward the physical perception of the environment entire...

...Winston Weisman's "A New View of Skyscraper History" is a scholarly attempt to bring order to the history and classification of the building-type—a kind of architectural botanizing, really, but nevertheless valuable...

...Of single-family Victorian houses he remarks: "One cannot help but see them today as in some measure the products of a blindly complacent and unduly favored minority able to live out a suburban dream of permissive peace on the spoils of a ravaged continent and the subjugation of other peoples...

...The essay is a remarkable tour de force, not only as a stylistic exercise—the writing is marvelously suggestive—but for the quality of feeling it evokes about its subject and for its specific insights...

...One of the ironies of the Met's exhibition—in a sense, the park section of the show can be viewed as a built-in apologia—is that the museum itself is now encountering resistance in its plans to take over more of the Central Park property for necessary expansion...

...The latest evidence of America's continuing influence abroad he finds in the proliferation of supermarkets, shopping centers, parking garages, and motels (including one in East Germany), reflecting the motorized culture of the United States...

...t says a great deal, I think, for Vincent Scully—one of the scholars who first promoted the generally neglected study of 19th-century domestic architecture—that he should announce, almost at the beginning of his essay, the limitations of his earlier views on the subject...

...A good example of this is the Metropolitan Museum's current show, The Rise of an American Architecture, a visually stunning display supported by an informative text...

...Published by Praeger (The Rise of an American Architecture, $10.00 hardcover, $4.95 paperback), it contains four extremely good essays by eminent architectural historians and critics...

...The purpose of this show is to document the particular American contributions to the development of 19th-century architecture...

...It says a good deal, too, about the changes in our environmental situation, from 20 years ago to the present, that he should propose major changes in architectural studies...

...Directed by Edgar Kaufmann, a noted architecture and design critic and historian, the show is made up of large black-and-white photographs and color transparencies of 19th-century American building-types...

...The European impact of Wright's work in the early years of this century (the time span of the exhibit is 1815-1915) has already been well documented...