The Project Gutenberg eBook of Balbus; or, the future of architecture
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Title: Balbus; or, the future of architecture
Author: Christian Barman
Release date: January 25, 2025 [eBook #75202]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1926
Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BALBUS; OR, THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE ***
BALBUS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
_For the Contents of the Series see the end
of the Book_
BALBUS
OR
THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE
BY
CHRISTIAN BARMAN
London:
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Ltd.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
_The same Author has also written_:
_THE DANGER TO SAINT PAUL’S_
_THE BRIDGE: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF BUILDING_
_SIR JOHN VANBRUGH_
_THE ‘RULES’ OF JAMES GIBBS_
_Printed in Great Britain by_
MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM
BALBUS
It is often maintained that there is a similarity between architecture
and dress in that both are applied as a covering, the one to the
individual human body, the other to the body politic. But there is one
thing that those who point to this similarity are not always careful
to bear in mind, namely that it is precisely in their relation to this
human content that the arts of architecture and dress differ most
widely. The bodies of adult men and women are distinguished from one
another only by a few small variations of colour and proportion. Of
so little consequence are these departures from the universal norm
that fashion experts are freely permitted to disregard their effect,
and usually content themselves with saying that “trousers are worn
narrower” and that “gowns are of pastel shades of mousseline and
chiffon.” Having, in such observations as these, momentarily exhausted
the subject of sartorial growth, they can do nothing but await the next
measurement, the next material, that its guiding spirits may decree.
What would they say, however, if they were asked to discuss the toilet
of a greyhound, a turkey-cock or a hippopotamus, and compare it with
the vesture appropriate to human beings? Would not the historian of
clothes become deeply embarrassed at such an enlargement of his field
of vision, at the sudden appearance of such a multiplicity of forms?
Yet the scope and variety of his subject would still be as nothing
beside the scope of architectural history, and the variety of the
architectural forms that it is the task of this history to register,
and anatomize, and trace back severally to their origin. For while the
origin of sartorial form is to be discerned in the fixed and unchanging
outline of the human body, the origin of architectural form must be
looked for in the infinite diversity of the social organism and in the
sweeping and rapid changes into which this organism is for ever being
thrown. Of all architectural movements there is none, therefore, so
irresistible in its progress or so expansive in its effect as that
which owes its existence to a social movement. In the construction of
the first circular cathedral window on the one hand, and Sir William
Chambers’ experiments in Oriental design on the other, we have two
typical events in the history of architectural form whose influence
upon the course of this history has been far less profound than that,
let us say, of the publication of Rousseau’s _Emile_ or the repeal of
the laws forbidding the exportation of machinery. Had not the very
fact of Balbus building become an index to the social condition of the
commonwealth? Thus any change in the state of society may accelerate
building or retard it, and may likewise alter the whole subject or
content of a particular province of building; while events of a purely
architectural origin and significance most often leave a record that is
only skin-deep.
But whether the movement be deep or shallow, local or enlarged, the
historian has to consider it with just the same degree of care. While
we expect him to give no part of his subject more than its due, on
the other hand we insist that the ancillary and the fleeting shall be
recorded side by side with the chief and lasting things. We do not,
however, usually ask this of the prophet, and even were we to do so he
would not be able to satisfy us without incurring intolerable risks.
For the progress of an art is like the dual movement of the sea, which
is actuated by wind and tide in mysterious combination; and between
these two forces there is this great difference, that the one will,
after some little study, make itself known in advance, but none but
an ill-guided or a mendacious prophet would attempt to foretell the
other. Tide and current are important enough when we have to construct
a picture of past and present movement, but in our anticipation of
the future they are our only guides. In architecture as in dress the
position of the prophet is the same: he cannot safely predict any new
forms save those that are moulded by the human entity these forms
invest. The shrewdest observer of fashion would be at a loss to give
the precise length for the masculine waistcoat of five years hence.
Tell him, however, that about that time there will be a large demand
for reefer suits from the New Forest ponies, and he will describe the
design of these suits with considerable accuracy. And in architecture
no less we must content ourselves with seizing upon social movements
already at work, and may form our estimate of future growth only by
projecting these movements into the architectural plane, and there
working out their architectural equivalent.
There are some, unfortunately, among prophets and historians alike
who remain wholly or partly blind to this important truth, and who
claim that an occasional gust of wind is all that ever disturbs the
architectural waters upon which they keep observation. According to
them, there has been no movement of greater consequence than are
the ripples on a stagnant pool, nor do they encourage us to expect
any such movement in the future. Architecture and dress are treated
exactly alike by these imperfect observers, and the favourite topics of
sartorial conversation invariably reappear when architecture becomes
the subject of their talk. These topics are dimension and material,
and it may be worth while to consider for a moment in what manner they
are sometimes able to intrude into what would appear to be a serious
discussion of architectural form.
Everybody has heard it said at one time or another that the skyscraper
is the building of to-morrow, and will soon lord it over the streets of
every great city. Such a prophecy is about as likely to be fulfilled as
a prophecy concerning the length of a garment. The size of a building
is a matter by no means devoid of interest, but there is very little
to help us in making a forecast of that size, and very little point in
attempting it. Yet whole buildings have been erected on the strength
of such a forecast. It is not surprising that such buildings have
afterwards involved their owners in heavy pecuniary losses, losses
far heavier, indeed, than would ever be sustained by a racehorse
backer working on a similar method. Nor is there even the semblance
of a reason why size should be dignified with the name of style, and
a change of size be spoken of as though it were tantamount to the
creation of a new formal entity. A tall building might be continued
upwards until it reached the stars, and still we should be unable to
describe it as a new architectural expression, an innovation in the
domain of artistic form. The Edgware Road might, for that matter, have
its architectural configuration carried on as far as Newcastle in the
shape in which it runs into Oxford Street, but we should not thereby
be entitled to hold it up as the latest thing in street design. The
topless towers of Ilium were something new in the size of towers only,
and not in tower design properly speaking, just as the endless street
of Edgware would be a new thing in the size of streets only, and not in
street design. The same confusion lurks in the statement that certain
industrial structures put up to store large quantities of water, coal,
grain and similar commodities exhibit the modern spirit more strikingly
than any other kind of building. What, one may reasonably ask, is the
difference between a coal-scuttle and a coal store, between a bucket of
water and a tank of water, between a bottle of beer and a vat of beer?
No doubt it is a novel experience to come upon a coal-scuttle fifty
feet high, its bottom shaped like a cloud-burst, or a bin of barley
large enough to hold two thousand tons. But is not the difference the
same as the difference between the short street and the long street,
between the four-storey building and the forty-storey building? We once
more observe a difference of size merely; it is the shilling against
the pound, the seven horse-power car against the seventy horse-power
one. We have chosen to make these things larger than we have hitherto
deemed it convenient to have them, and who shall say what size we may
make them to-morrow?
Beside this deluded belief in the importance of dimension we may
often observe an equally fruitless concentration on material. The
architectural forms of the future, we are told, will be determined by
the new material of which it appears likely that this architecture
may be built. One could just as reasonably say that an orchestral
performance is determined by such sounds as a haphazard collection
of instruments is likely of its own accord to emit. Nothing could
be farther from the truth. In the present state of civilization the
notes played by the musicians upon their instruments are determined by
the composer’s score; the engine of a car is determined by the work
that will be required of it; the knowledge and skill of our doctors
are determined by the enactments of the General Medical Council; and
the materials used in building are determined by the kind of building
that the architect is asked to put up. In another age these things may
have been slightly otherwise, but here and now they usually conform
to this rule. In another age the materials with which you built, like
the horse you rode, the cheese you ate, the doctor who attended you in
sickness, were no doubt conditioned by your exact situation upon the
earth’s surface, but to-day they are not so conditioned. To-day the
industrial order of society has achieved all but the completest liberty
to manufacture such materials as it may think suitable, and to carry
these materials to whatever place may be chosen for their employment.
A modern building may draw its substance from the clayfields of
France, Spain and Belgium, the forests of Finland and Canada, the
tar-impregnated rocks of Switzerland, the granite-quarries of Ireland
and Sweden, and yet betray in not a single line that it is anything
but English in descent and urban in quality. At no time in history has
form been dependent upon material, though it may have been influenced
by it to a greater or lesser degree, and in our own age the autonomy
of form is more firmly established than it has been in any other age
of which we are aware. It is hardly necessary to add that to try and
foretell the future acceptance of a material would be even more futile
and more hazardous than the attempt to foretell the future acceptance
of a dimension. If we cannot determine the size that will be given to
the buildings of to-morrow, we know at any rate what is the range of
possible sizes from which a choice will have to be made. The range
of possible materials, however, may be fixed with no more accuracy
or finality than the range of possible propulsive strengths of our
future explosives, or the range of ether movements susceptible of being
perceived or recorded by man. The progress of modern invention shows no
sign of becoming retarded as yet, and only when its end draws within
sight is there a likelihood that we may be able to foretell its next
and ultimate stage, and lay down the limits of its achievement.
But if we are unable to discover what will be the size of the
buildings of to-morrow, and of what materials these buildings will be
constructed, we may console ourselves with the thought that the whole
field of architecture proper remains open for us to explore at will. We
have, for example, but to regard with some care those social movements
which are likely to suscitate a similar movement in architecture,
and the course of this architectural movement will gradually become
disclosed to us. Two such social movements will here be selected and
their immediate architectural consequences followed out. The first of
these is the emancipation of modern woman, which has produced a new
type of building in which the strongest architectural impulse of the
past and the highest architectural excellence of the past are both
conspicuously absent. The other is the determined fight that is to-day
being put up in order to prevent the complete paralysis of street
traffic in the great towns of Europe, and, more particularly, of the
United States of America. The effect of this struggle is to substitute
for the old impulse and the old excellence a new impulse and a new
excellence, both of an inferior order, but of considerable interest
nevertheless.
The question may arise whether architectural creation can be the
result of more than one kind of human impulse. Do not all buildings
erected by man, it may be asked, owe their origin to the same
unchanging desire, though the fruits of that desire may be many and
various? The answer is that there are, indeed, two distinct forces
at work, two separate impulses which, though most often acting in
combination, yet are neither similar in nature nor of equal importance.
We have only to look from Westminster Abbey to the Cenotaph in
Whitehall to realize that these two buildings are distinguished by
a profound difference of meaning and of intention. Let us take the
greatest possible difference and reduce it to its simplest aspect. It
is (we may say) the business of the architect to design buildings. But
he may set up round about his buildings a number of lesser objects such
as bridges, parapets, columns, fountains, and others suchlike. How do
these two kinds of structure compare? Are they different in size only,
and would the Cenotaph, if it were enlarged to the size of Westminster
Abbey, become a work of architecture commensurable with the Abbey?
Of course, it would not, for the simple reason that the Abbey has an
_inside_. Now, it is not by chance that the words _outer_ and _inner_
have become, in all languages, the recognized metaphorical equivalents
of _body_ and _soul_. The usage is one that has occasionally been
condemned by students of the logic of language, but it rests upon a
perfectly sound foundation in that it appeals to an experience of
universal validity, an experience which, let it be noted, is derived
from architecture, and from architecture alone. A building is the only
thing that you may both look into and look out of, both extraspect and
introspect, and having learnt from the art of building thus to regard
the human mind from two sides, as it were, we should at all times be
careful to distinguish this dual aspect in buildings also. Now, in
whatever manner we may describe these two views and the difference
between them, this much is certain: that the greatest and most enduring
qualities in architecture are those that reside in the design and
arrangement of the internal spaces of a building, of those enclosing
forms that are, in the last resort, the only justification of that
building.
The idea is familiar to the architect, if not perhaps in the very
words I have used, but he has not shown himself eager to let the
layman into the secret. How many of us have not been puzzled by the
mysterious significance attaching to the word _plan_, and the still
more mysterious aspect of the thing itself? What is there in a plan
(for something there must be) that gives it this supremacy among all
the possible representations of a building? A building worthy of the
name of great architecture, so a simple answer might run, is invariably
composed of a succession of spaces or cells. In this it resembles
the human body, which is made up of just such a series――the cranial,
thoracic and abdominal cavities, as we call them――with, in addition,
the mechanical attachments of the limbs. And in buildings, as in the
human body, the first essentials of beauty are to be found in the
shape, disposition, and junction of this sequence of cells. These are
the important facts about a building that are more fully revealed in a
plan than in any other kind of drawing. We now know why an architect
always hastens to record his ideas in the form of a plan――provided,
of course, that his subject is indeed an arrangement of inhabitable
cells. Sir Edwin Lutyens did not begin by sketching out the _plan_ of
his Cenotaph, but he cannot have found anything except a plan of much
use in recording his ideas for his great war memorials at Verdun and
Arras, a multicellular disposition, each of them, of great richness and
delicacy.
_A pair of internal casts, illustrating the development of the
architectural cell group. Above, a one-room dwelling-house.
Below, a typical small house of the Regency period. The first
floor has been removed, but the elliptical staircase-well with
its lantern-light is shown complete. The front is double-bayed
and the vestibule has a vaulted ceiling._
[Illustration]
Let us consider for a moment how this disposition has in the course
of time come about and how it has attained to its present complexity.
There follows, upon cave and tent, the one-roomed cottage, so distant
in spirit from the modern house, and yet persisting everywhere beside
it. Under its single roof the tenants sleep, cook, eat; the very
farmyard animals were once admitted to its shelter, as the camel and
donkey are to-day admitted to the Egyptian fellah’s hut. One by one,
however, this rudimentary dwelling puts forth cells as need sharpens
and opportunity comes: the cattle are expelled to one side, the kitchen
hearth to another, the beds to a third; cellar, larder, toolhouse
follow. New cells have fastened themselves to the older ones; the
house has become an organized collocation of parts; in it are found
the elements of a plan. But, though organized, it remains haphazard
in arrangement, what one of Jane Austen’s characters derisively calls
“a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as
windows.” Its growth is piecemeal and experimental, undirected, almost
blind. It does not, however, remain so for ever, for man is an animal
that learns by all that it does. In time these same elements, once
scattered, will be measured and composed together into a house by the
prescient mind of one who will henceforth be known as an architect.
A greater coherence, a greater orderliness, is gradually but surely
acquired, and from the growing power of large and orderly planning
there spring the ultimate achievements of architecture that are the
pride of our race. Town hall, palace, theatre, church, all these
proceed from this same skill in the fashioning of cells and in the
gathering of them into a reasoned whole, into a plan.
_A typical church of the Italian mid-Renaissance with one
large and four smaller domes. This diagram and those on p. 19
represent not the exterior of the building but the interior
space, its walls and ceilings removed, and regarded from
outside as a solid, on the same principle as that which governs
the design of the celestial globe._
[Illustration]
To fashion, to gather; but at whose command? It is not for the
architect to decide what cells there shall be; cells of what size,
dedicated to what purpose, combined in what numbers. The architect
is a servant only, and these things are the business of his master.
It is when the master fails to attend to them that we get a building
without a content, without a soul: a building that is admitted to
the realm of architecture only on sufferance, since there is nothing
to give its cells any particular shape, or to suggest or enforce any
particular disposition of these cells. This is the typical building
of to-day and to-morrow, and among the various agencies that have
helped to bring it forth the freedom of modern woman is certainly the
first, and is probably the most important also. There are, in addition,
several causes of social instability that affect architecture in one
way or another, and each of them helps to render modern building
more uncertain, more indeterminate, or, as a biologist might say,
more clearly lacking in morphological differentiation. On the formal
side also (as contrasted with the functional) two lesser influences
may be noted in passing. One is that astonishing manifestation of
anti-æsthetic enthusiasm which has continued in more than one guise
ever since the beginning of civilized society, but which to-day gains
an added strength in that it has its source in the very stronghold of
art itself. It is to be feared that Marinetti’s advice to use the altar
of art as a spittoon has not been altogether neglected by architects,
though their fellow artists may have taken it rather more deeply to
heart. The other external influence is more subtle but no less active.
It has been pointed out that only in a plan can the chief virtues of
great architecture be adequately represented. It is a significant fact
that the chief vehicle of architectural information to-day, the most
popular means of recording architectural excellence, is the photograph,
not the plan, of which it is the direct opposite. The photograph
expresses all that the plan leaves unsaid; it ignores all save a
small remnant of the major qualities registered in the plan, and this
remnant it twists and falsifies to a degree which renders its testimony
worse than valueless. We have still to be shown the photograph that,
representing the interior of a room, will convey a modicum of reliable
information concerning the shape of that room. For in looking at a room
through a photograph we are, be it remembered, looking at it through
a small hole in a box. These two factors then have, in so far as they
enter into contact with architectural form, been clearly disruptive in
their effect, but the influence which must next engage our attention is
an incomparably deeper one.
It is exactly half a century since the feminist movement began upon
the career whose triumphant finish coincided with the great Peace of
Versailles. There was in this country no feminist agitation worth
speaking of, until the signal was given by the Reform Bill of 1876.
In the very same year the late John Wanamaker, who had for some time
been in business in Philadelphia as a dealer in men’s and boys’
clothing, discovered that women seemed prepared to do a certain amount
of shopping on their own account. He opened a new department, which
became the foundation of his later successes. Where men had walked
rapidly in and out, mindful only of the tie or the pair of boots they
had come to buy, a long procession of women wound its way from counter
to counter, dismayed by the many omissions in their shopping list, and
grateful to find how easily these omissions were to be repaired. The
small band of women workers marching to victory was followed by an
army of shoppers a hundred times more numerous, and of such energy and
enterprise that men’s clothing departments were everywhere incorporated
into their already extensive domain. The allegiance of the whole
body of women must have been coveted for some time, for even in the
early years of the nineteenth century the big west-end drapers would
clothe an eligible debutante in their choicest productions, generously
relying upon her to find a husband who could afford to pay her bills.
But though the bait was ready, its opportunity had still to be found,
and when the feminist movement at last provided it the large drapers’
store leapt forward, and the two revolutions went on together in a
simultaneous advance. The first act of public violence was committed
by the adherents of feminism in 1909, and as the stones went crashing
through the windows of the Government offices in Whitehall, the newly
erected windows of Mr. Gordon Selfridge became the cynosure of the
more pacific among feminine eyes. It will be necessary later on to
consider the influence of modern woman from other angles of view, but
we may be sure that from none of these has it been more potent or more
remarkable, for as a consumer of wealth she is transforming the design
of our buildings more thoroughly than is clear even to-day.
Very few years elapse before the large new drapery store assumes the
characteristic form that will gradually impose itself upon many of
our other buildings. It is realized almost at once that no external
wall must cut off the ground floor of the building from the pavement
of the street, for the business can only succeed if the undreamt-of
collection of goods is amply and seductively displayed to the feminine
passer-by. For some time experiments were made (notably by the Leonhard
Tietz stores in Germany) with buildings clothed in glass from top
to bottom, but, though German architects are still toying with the
idea, the familiar stretches of undivided glass are nowadays applied
to the ground floor only. Inside the buildings, however, no walls
are wanted at any point, on any of the floors, and there we find
large open spaces offering no obstruction to the view, and allowing
counters and show-cases to be moved backwards and forwards with the
capricious tides of fashion. No longer is the building composed of an
expressive sequence of definitely formed cavities; there is only layer
upon layer of formless space, tier upon tier of vacant sites, along
which the hundred specialized departments may pitch their glittering
booths. It no more resembles a piece of major architecture than does
a market-place covered with awnings and sunshades. It has become, in
fact, a flight of hanging market-places piled one upon the other,
rising high into the air, and delving many yards into the ground.
The constituent parts of this type of building are fourfold. There are
the floors themselves; and there are the props necessary to support
these floors. There is the covering, opaque or transparent, in which
the top and sides are wrapped to protect the contents from the weather.
Lastly, there is the private road which runs through the building from
top to bottom. This road belongs to the modern composite type about
which a little more still requires to be said. Let us here but observe
that, reared on end and pointing upward, it allows visitors to ride
or walk from one level to another, while at the same time it contains
within itself the numerous pipes and conduits through which water,
heat and electrical energy are delivered to each floor, and the sewage
carried away from it and discharged into the public drain.
_Part of a modern commercial building, divested of its outer
wall curtain and with the supporting metal framework removed.
The U-shaped floor-platforms are, as it were, threaded on the
vertical road, in which are contained the lifts and stairways
and the various kinds of conduits. (Woolworth Building, New
York, by Cass Gilbert.)_
[Illustration]
The new eviscerated architecture, once invented by the builder of
the drapery store for his regiments of feminine customers, did not
take long to gain a very considerable following. Indeed, it could not
have had a more auspicious place of origin. As the bee carries the
pollen from flower to flower, so the no less indefatigable draper
carried the seeds of this architecture into the streets of every town
of importance. We need only remind ourselves of the manner in which
he is pressing forward to-day in the West End of London, transmuting
with golden wand the whole of Regent Street, large portions of Oxford
Street, and a great deal of Kensington and Bayswater, into something
very rich and, as I have tried to show, not a little strange. Richest
of all, perhaps, is the colonnade in Oxford Street whose relation to
the rest of London is the relation between the majestic bulk of a
transatlantic liner and the diminutive proportions of the fleet of
tugboats that surrounds her. The modern drapery store is as large as
it is ubiquitous, and its wealth and power are consonant with these
outward signs of importance. The Wanamaker store, of which I have
already spoken, provides an interesting example of the eminence to
which these establishments have to-day attained. Everybody is aware
of the interest displayed by publications such as the _Daily Mail_
in the building and equipment of the suburban home, an interest
which it would appear not unprofitable for them to indulge. The New
York Wanamaker store, however, opened in October, 1925, a great and
fascinating exhibition devoted exclusively to the future development
of the city of New York. The first, to my knowledge, of its kind to be
held anywhere, such an exhibition argues a sense of responsibility, a
foresight, courage and public spirit that would be hard to parallel
in any kind of business. Most of all, of course, it points to a very
considerable degree of affluence, for the exhibition itself was
accompanied by a wide and intensive publicity campaign in the New York
Press. A commercial house that can afford to take such pains towards
the popularizing of architectural and town-planning development schemes
may claim to be a fairly important institution and an opulent patron
of the arts. Both the importance and the opulence have been conferred
upon the drapery store by the emancipated women of to-day.
The possibilities of open-floor design for all kinds of building were,
then, abundantly exhibited and widely perceived. From shop and factory
the new device spread to the office block, whose claim to be in the
modern movement is not usually admitted unless it consists of the same
succession of shelf-like floors suspended round a central road. Schools
and universities have already subscribed to the principle of unformed
and undivided space. An appeal recently issued on behalf of the
University of Pittsburg opens with the statement that 14,460,000 cubic
feet of space are required for the University to discharge its normal
functions. I cannot forbear to mention that one of the objects of the
new buildings is (so the appeal goes on to tell us) to commemorate “the
achievers of Pittsburg” and to testify to their “records of tonnage
production.” The idea of perpetuating Pittsburg tonnage production in
14,460,000 cubic feet of University is not without a pleasing logic of
its own.
And what of the house and home? Are we to meet there, too, with the
same undefined vacuity, the same absence of internal form? Already a
Dutch architect has built a house with nothing inside its four outer
walls except an upper floor to which an open stairway gives access.
The upper and lower floors are subdivided by means of movable screens,
which enable the owner to arrange his rooms according to the fancy of
the moment, and, I suppose, to adjust his houseroom to the measure of
his hospitality. This is, of course, how houses are mostly constructed
in Japan, but it should be remembered that, though the Japanese house
is built entirely without walls, whether internal or external, it yet
exhibits the utmost complexity and formal refinement in the general
lines of its design. The plan is there, though only its skeleton is
permanent, and wall-divisions are made movable for another reason
than that which is causing them to vanish from our Western buildings.
Moreover, the Japanese house is of one storey only, and if the open
floor is likewise to establish itself for good in our own domestic
architecture, it will probably be restricted with us also to the
one-storey dwelling, to bungalow and town flat. But even in these the
outer walls and windows will, of course, remain――at any rate until we
acquire the hardy constitution of the Japanese, to whom a paper screen
is sufficient protection in all weathers.
The breakdown of the principal architectural impulse is complete the
moment the function of a building is expressed in an undifferentiated
mass of cubic feet. It is at this moment that the second great
movement, the movement which is to substitute a new external impulse
for the old internal one, first becomes manifest. This movement
springs, it will be recalled, from the threatened failure of our
communications, a failure which is due, however, to no deficiency
in these communications themselves, but to the vast and unequal
overcrowding of modern cities. And the great increase of our populations
that is the principal achievement of the nineteenth century presents
three aspects, each one of which requires at this point to be carefully
borne in mind.
First, the growth of population was not uniformly distributed, but went
on far more swiftly in the great towns of Europe and America than it
did throughout the countryside. Thus, while the population of England
and Wales increased by about 90 per cent. between 1861 and 1921,
the corresponding advance for London was about 133 per cent., while
Berlin and New York went up by 500 and 600 per cent. respectively.
The difference, however, is a diminishing one, having been far greater
throughout the second half of the nineteenth century than it is to-day.
Our English urban population, for example, grew during the decade
1870–1880 at a rate which was nearly 200 per cent. in excess of the
rate of growth of the rural population. The first decade of the present
century shows an excess in the urban rate over the rural of only 10 per
cent.
Our second observation is this: that during the time when it was at
its highest point, the rate of growth of the urban population rose
too rapidly for the concomitant growth of building to keep pace with
it. The result was that the growth of building fell into arrears, and
that such arrears still in part remain to be made good to-day. As the
inhabitants became more numerous so the shortage of houses became
more acute, until at last an ugly and even dangerous congestion of
human beings began everywhere to show itself. This congestion would
never have existed if the rate of building had been equal to the rate
of growth of the population; swift as it was, the rate of building
could never become swift enough. A similar condition, though due to a
different cause, prevailed after the great Fire of London, when Wren
himself was driven to denounce the ill effects that flowed from “the
mighty demand for the hasty works of thousands of houses at once.” Now,
it is a commonplace that the growth of building may proceed in two
directions, but it is not always realized that the two kinds of growth
must proceed together, that each has its appointed function which the
other is powerless to discharge. The growth of a town _outward_ at its
periphery is necessary, and the _upward_ growth of its central region
is also necessary. The first was the chief concern of the town-planning
of yesterday and to-day, which unfortunately failed to carry out its
appointed task. The second is likely to become the chief concern of the
town-planning of the immediate future. Let us hope that it may be more
fortunate.
These two growths are identical in one respect. Each of them remains,
like all forms of growth known to science, entirely normal and
beneficial so long as it is correctly regulated. We know that the growth
of different parts of our body is regulated by means of chemical
substances known as hormones, and that where certain hormones are
lacking, or present in excess, we get the dwarf and the giant, goitre
and cretinism. When it happens to the builders of a city that, in the
happy phraseology of a seventeenth-century pamphlet, “the Magistrate has
either no power or no care to make them build with any uniformity,” they
at once become the agents of a growth that is just as abnormal, just as
obnoxious, as these physiological ones. It would seem, as the nineteenth
century has taught us, that the power of regulating architectural growth
begins to fail when that growth exceeds a certain measure of speed and
urgency. Clearly, as the rate of growth increases, so the regulating
power must also increase if it is to retain an effective control over
building, for if it fails to increase in a similar ratio its influence
must come to an end. This is what has happened all too often. Nor,
haphazard and ungracious as the growth of building has been throughout
the whole of Western civilization, has it anywhere been more irregular
than at those points where it has moved most swiftly, and where the
demands of the expanding population have reached the utmost severity of
pressure. We are often told that New York is a city of high buildings.
It is nothing of the kind: it is a moderately low city disfigured by
_a few_ high buildings only. Not more than one building in every
thousand in the Manhattan Island district, famous for its skyscrapers,
exceeds twenty storeys in height. Nor should it be forgotten that the
_average_ height of buildings in New York is exactly the same as that
obtaining in London, and rather less than the height of buildings in
Paris. But while the upward growth of the two European cities has by no
means been uniform and harmonious, it has not attained to the
astonishing irregularity that receives such unmerited praise from
English visitors to New York. It is the irregularity that is of
consequence, and the source of this irregularity lies, on the one hand,
in the sharp and unequally resisted strain put upon building by its
effort to overtake the rate of increase of population, and, on the
other, in the complete or partial breakdown of proper civic control,
and the renunciation of the civic standard in building.
The third fact that has to be recorded in connection with the growth of
our populations is a curious one. While the growth of building merely
tended to become proportionate to the growth of the population, it was
necessary that the means of communication should increase at a much
faster rate. The more people there were, the more often and the more
rapidly these people were compelled to move about from one place to
another. Thus, while the inhabitants of Europe and America multiplied,
let us say, like the interest gathering upon a fixed capital sum, the
movement of these inhabitants, of their various belongings, their
food and drink, the materials and products of their labour, the waste
left over from their individual and corporate metabolism, all this
movement grew in scope, volume and swiftness in the manner of compound
interest, or like a snowball enlarging itself into an avalanche. It
is impossible in these pages to examine this mysterious law in any
detail, but an example of its working may perhaps be given. It was
stated just now that during the sixty years 1861–1921 the population
of England and Wales increased by about 90 per cent., or, roughly,
from twenty millions to thirty-eight. Many figures might be quoted to
illustrate the growth of communications during the same period, but
those yielded by the Post Office, at whose enterprising hands this
growth took origin, will be enough for our purpose. We find, then,
that the annual postal revenue of this country had, in the year 1921,
increased to forty-five millions from four millions in 1861, an advance
of 1025 per cent. If this is the rate at which our communications must
expand, no wonder the London traffic authorities complain that the
more facilities they are able to provide, the greater becomes the
demand made upon those facilities. Startling as the Post Office figures
may seem, if we could as readily estimate the growth of the total
movement along our roads, including not only pedestrian and vehicular
traffic, but the transmission of water, fuel, and sewage, and of
written and spoken messages as well, we should find the growth yet more
considerable. Nor should we be surprised at the long, heroic struggle
of nineteenth-century scientists and legislators to perfect this great
and complicated thing, the modern road, or marvel to see them extend
it hither and thither, and guard it from encroachments, and level and
straighten out its trajectory, and search out a firm foundation for
it, and render its surface hard and impervious, and dry it, clean it,
illuminate it, and at last equip it for the automatic distribution of
water and fuel, and for a continuous scavenging of all our towns.
It is this remarkable achievement of civilized man that to-day
threatens to become ineffective. No sooner had the growth begun than
it became clear that a keen rivalry between buildings and roads was
inevitable, and further that unless the balance between these two
were jealously maintained, the result to the road, so necessary to
the life of our civilization, would be disastrous. The first half of
the nineteenth century saw the passing of innumerable private Acts
connected with roadmaking, and in 1848 the famous Public Health Act
set up a considerable national machinery, since improved and extended
by many later measures. The Public Health Act has, in point of fact,
two objects. While the more important of these is to ensure the
quick, safe and efficient development of the roads, the Act was also
designed to ensure that the growth of new buildings should not, in its
headlong speed, fall below a decent standard of strength, comfort and
cleanliness. But all this time the road remains the special care of
the authorities, for, while in their capacity of building controllers
they merely inspect and sanction such work as is being done by private
enterprise, they themselves undertake the making and mending of roads
with increasing pertinacity. Nor would their work have shown the
smallest sign of failure were it not for the abnormal and unregulated
growth of our large cities, a growth which has now reached a stage at
which the roadmaker must assume a measure of control if the traffic in
our streets is to continue in motion.
The control of buildings is no new thing. In addition to the measures
enacted to safeguard the integrity of the road-space we have had, for
several centuries, the right to protest against a building being put
up for a purpose that may be considered noxious. Not only has this
right been enforced directly by means of legislation, but the State
has made itself responsible for seeing that such undertakings as are
entered into between landowner and tenant are carried out to the
letter. If anyone proposed to erect a poison-gas factory in Grosvenor
Square, his neighbours would have immediate power to restrain him,
while a fruiterer’s shop could only be expelled if its owner were
found to violate the conditions under which the land is granted. The
law, however, upholds such conditions, and by these two means manages
to exercise a considerable measure of _user control_, as it is now
commonly called. Now, zoning is, by its very name, a comprehensive
system of user control of this same kind. In so far, however, as
it merely forbids the erection of a certain class of building in a
stated zone, it can scarcely be said to influence architectural form.
The true architectural importance of zoning lies in the fact that,
the town-planner having failed adequately to control the _height_ of
buildings, it places in the hands of the roadmaker “emergency” powers
enabling him to control their _capacity_.
He cannot, however, hope to do this justly and usefully without
paying due regard to the use or function of each building at the same
time that he inquires into its capacity, and this dual control is in
fact the peculiar object of the roadmaker in his quality of zoning
controller. Let me give an example of how he goes to work. It has been
calculated by the committee which is preparing the development plan
for the New York region that one mile of theatres is the cause of a
daily traffic movement of 36,000 vehicles. The corresponding figure for
a street of suburban shops is only one-fourth as high, while a mile
of factories of ordinary size is responsible for a mere 600 vehicles.
On the other hand, the rapid development of labour-saving machinery
is daily increasing the output of modern factories, and has, during
the last seven years, more than doubled the amount per worker of
goods traffic going in and out of the average American workshop. In
addition to the moving vehicles, the stationary ones, too, require to
be considered, though a time is no doubt approaching when the parking
of cars on public ground will be forbidden in most large towns. The
worst aspect of this subsidiary problem is, of course, presented
by places of amusement, whose audiences are acquiring the motor-car
habit even more rapidly than the community as a whole. Not many years
will elapse before American theatre and concert audiences habituate
themselves to the motor-car to the exclusion of any other vehicle,
and when this condition has been reached the mile of theatres already
referred to will require a strip of land over a hundred feet wide along
its entire length, in order to make room for the lines of waiting cars.
Fortunately the motor-car has not yet attained such wide patronage in
our own country, but anyone who will stroll down the narrow streets on
the west side of Shaftesbury Avenue, say between the hours of eight
and ten, on a week-day night, must conclude that with us also the
difficulties are fast growing acute.
What is the solution to this knot of related problems? We can only
reach it if we calculate the capacity of each building, multiply this
figure by its traffic-producing coefficient, and then set this figure
against the capacity of the surrounding streets. Difficult as these
computations may appear, they yet are entirely feasible. Upon them is
founded the science of zoning, a science which is as yet so imperfectly
understood by the majority of us that it has been necessary to
describe its origin and purpose in some detail. We may now go on to ask
what is likely to be its effect on the architecture of the immediate
future. The answer is one which may appear to contradict itself.
Devised for the purpose of protecting the street from the undue growth
of its buildings, the zoning ordinance must tend before all else to
encourage the growth in size of the average individual building, and to
grant it a measure of formal autonomy which will rapidly destroy the
few remaining vestiges of coherent street design.
A height restriction, such as those in force in England, is founded
upon a conception of civic order, but it may in addition have one
of three practical objects. It may be designed to prevent unstable
construction, or to ensure that the surrounding area is not unduly
darkened, or to allow a jet of water to sweep over the roof in an
outbreak of fire. The zoning ordinance is concerned with none of these
things. Its object is to regulate capacity alone, and this it does by
drawing an inclined line upward from the centre of the street, thus
fixing an angle within which the outline of the building is forced to
remain. Now, it is in the first place to be observed that rapidly
sloping walls are as impracticable as they are unsightly in buildings
of great height. It follows that the ordinance may best be complied
with by breaking up the façade into receding vertical planes, each
separated from the next by a narrow terrace. And the larger is the
site occupied by a building thus falling back along a fixed angle, the
higher this building will be allowed to reach, for in a triangle of
which the angles remain constant the height will vary as the base. In
the second place, a building measuring more than, say, sixty or seventy
feet in depth will require an open area to provide it with an adequate
supply of light and air. In a skyscraper of the old-fashioned type it
was the custom to place this area at the centre of the building, which
became a quadrangular box, encircling the four sides of a deep central
void. But it is at its centre that a building erected under the zoning
ordinance is allowed to reach its maximum height. To give up this part,
more valuable than any other, for the necessary area would of course be
folly, and the area is, in consequence, placed where the sacrifice of
useful volume will be smallest, that is to say, at the periphery of the
building, in such a manner as to lie open to the street.
_A zoned building, consisting of an H-shaped arrangement of
parallelepipeds with two external areas. The influence of the
American zoning law is visible in the upper part only. It
accounts for the stepping-back of the central block and the
octagonal tower that surmounts each corner. (Fraternity Clubs
Building, New York, by Murgatroyd and Ogden.)_
[Illustration]
A building erected under the zoning ordinance will, therefore, occupy
as much ground as its promoter is able to buy with borrowed money,
and will, wherever possible, spread itself over the entire area of a
city block, so that it is bounded by a street on all four sides. Its
outline will, in addition, present two striking characteristics. It
will rise on all sides in a succession of receding stages gathered
at the summit in a central tower-like mass which, provided its area
does not exceed a prescribed limit, may itself escape the restraining
influence and rise unhindered. And while at each corner the street wall
itself is brought to the full height permissible under the ordinance,
the central part of each façade will be recessed so as to form one or
several open courts or areas. At the moment of writing, London is about
to witness the completion of its first building designed along these
lines. Why the American zoning regulations should have been made to
govern the design of the new Devonshire House building in London is not
excessively clear, but this interesting piece of work does at any rate
provide a valuable illustration of the laws of growth to which American
architecture will in future be subject. For this reason it is by far
the most interesting and the most characteristically modern of our
large new buildings. There is just now a curious tendency to describe
as modern a small number of structures whose windows are treated in
accordance with a short-lived æsthetic fashion of thirty years ago.
Devonshire House furnishes proof that architecture is able to be more
modern than that, for here the new zoning ordinance is, for the first
time in London, shown actively at work.
_A zoned building, more recent than the last, showing
the American zoning law in full operation. The central
parallelepiped here runs across the two others, thus forming
six external areas separated by six buttress-like projections.
Each of these projections is stepped back in obedience to the
zoning law. (Bell Telephone Building, St. Louis, by Russell and
Crowell.)_
[Illustration]
We may now see why it was remarked that zoning had substituted a new
architectural impulse for the governing impulse of internal form to
which we owe the major masterpieces of architecture. A zoned building
can never be a masterpiece in the same sense as these. You cannot
compare a zoned building to Chartres Cathedral, any more than you can
compare a suit of clothes to a paper-weight. The form of the one is
dictated by something working from inside outwards, while the form of
the other is the result of an agency working upon the surface from
without. The paper-weight may be as beautiful in its way, but its
beauty does not arise, as the beauty of clothing arises, from its
power to invest the human form with an apt, expressive and dignified
integument. In the same manner the zoned building may be beautiful, but
not with the beauty of the greatest architecture, which consists in
the fashioning of a dwelling-place, human or divine, in such a manner
as to guard and delight those who enter into it. The zoned building
is, I repeat, like the University of Pittsburg, a matter of cubic feet
piled up around a private road. Any new formal impulse that may control
its growth resides in the street without; any new formal excellence it
may exhibit has for its origin the directing authority of this street.
But in spite of the inferior quality of its products, it is easy to
see that the zoning ordinance holds out a considerable promise to the
architecture of the future, supplying a fresh and vigorous motive in
the place of an older that is rapidly failing, and setting up the
authority of reason where caprice alone now rules.
Before we leave this subject, a word may perhaps be added concerning
the limitations of this method of control. It clearly cannot be applied
everywhere with equally pleasing results. A town or a district in which
the streets run at right angles to one another will show it at its
best, for there, and there only, will it be possible for the defining
lines to meet with any degree of regularity. London buildings, too,
have sometimes to conform to a stipulated angle, though for another
reason than those of New York. But the irregularity of our streets, and
the narrowness of most of our building frontages, have caused these
controlling angles to become a source of grotesque heterogeneity and
ugliness instead of allowing them to establish a new kind of order.
Nor should our town be one containing sites excessively large, or have
some of its streets so narrowly spaced as to produce sites that are
sensibly smaller than the average. The larger area will permit of too
great a building height, the smaller of too little, and it would appear
necessary that the “street block” should, in addition to a regular
outline, observe an approximate equality of size also. Founded upon
these two equalities, the zoning ordinances proceed to build up an
equality of height, of content, which in its turn begets yet another
that is the guarantee of their ultimate success. For nothing will
prosper in America that does not pay, and fortunately zoning has been
found to pay, and to pay very handsomely. The “realtors” of the big
American towns did not take long to discover that, while the building
of a skyscraper must enhance the value of the surrounding land, this
enhancement is considerably greater where the growth is controlled than
where it is left free to congest, and stifle, and darken, as in the
licence of nineteenth-century New York. To the neighbouring landowner
an unregulated skyscraper, if it pointed to a new opportunity, was
at the same time an evil and a discouragement, for, if all buildings
simultaneously went up to those same heights, would they not mutually
destroy one another? The zoning ordinance has thus become a part of
the republican policy of the United States, under which a competitive
society is made to bring forth numbers rather than eminence, and
watches over these its children with democratic solicitude.
We have examined with some care the evolution of wheeled traffic and
the changes its multiplication must inevitably bring about in the
appearance of our streets. Is not flying, it may be asked, always
described as the locomotion of the future, and is not the shape of
our buildings likely to reflect so important a development? The first
part of this question would take us beyond the scope of the present
essay, but the answer to the second part may perhaps form the subject
of a digressive paragraph. One might reasonably say that the design
of a building is likely to respond to the needs of aerial traffic in
three ways only, but not in any way that is likely to be of great
consequence. The first possibility is that a building may be required
providing means whereby aeroplanes are enabled to make a safe landing
on its roof. A flat roof of ample dimensions thus becomes necessary,
and yet we have seen that one of the effects of the zoning ordinance
is to break up the roof surface of a building into a series of narrow
ledges. A building upon the top of which it is desired to bring an
aeroplane to land will, therefore, in those places where zoning
prevails, need to be conspicuously low. Possibly a roof may here and
there be projected outward beyond the walls of a building, an expedient
whose drawbacks are such that it is unlikely to be often adopted. In
any case it will be necessary to provide an entrance to the building
from this roof, but there is nothing very new about that. The second
possibility is that the aeroplane may have to be lowered from the
roof of the building to the street level. The easiest way of making
this descent is (to quote from a newspaper advertisement of the great
Wanamaker exhibition to which I have referred) by “corkscrewing down
the exterior of the building.” One of the great mural cartoons included
(side by side with a Ford “family aeroplane”) in this exhibition shows
an enormous cylindrical tower, encircled by a descending spiral,
very much like a corkscrew in appearance. This tower is not, however,
an ordinary city building, but, reaching high above the concourse of
these, a special structure surmounted by a mooring mast for dirigibles.
Happily the building has yet to be designed that will, while giving
shelter, however unworthy, to human beings, wrap itself in a broad
fire-escape for the convenience of corkscrewing aeroplanes. And there
is, on the whole, no ground for supposing that our urban architecture
will at any time pay so exorbitant a regard to the advance of the
aeroplane as to transform itself in this manner.
But it will be remarked that aerial travel is bound to call into being
a number of buildings of a special kind, devoted to this one purpose
alone. May we expect such buildings to be as novel and as eminently
characteristic as the Wanamaker cartoon would appear to suggest? It
is difficult to believe that among them there will be anything more
unusual than the dirigible hangar, which is already a familiar sight,
and which, to do it justice, has a peculiar interest in that it is the
only modern building whose purpose contains an unanswerable argument
for a roof vaulted throughout its entire breadth. The hangar built at
Orly by the French engineer Freyssinet is perhaps the example best
known in this country; if it is not, it certainly deserves to be. But
though the rounded shape of a balloon clearly demands a vaulted roof,
there is no reason why such roofs should not be used elsewhere, as
they have in fact been used for many centuries; and in his Utrecht
Post Office the Dutch architect Crouwel has given us a building that,
stripped of its great clock and its counters and other furnishings,
might easily be mistaken by a wandering dirigible for its accustomed
lair. Striking though the appearance of the Orly hangar may be found,
it would scarcely be fair to attribute its success to the peculiar
function it so efficiently discharges. And if this is all that the
dirigible balloon is likely to do for architecture, what shall we
say of the aeroplane? It would appear that only when practising the
movement described by our American friends as “corkscrewing” will
the aeroplane need the help of the architectural innovator. Till
then we must remain content to see it inhabit a structure hardly
distinguishable from the coach-house of our forbears.
The prospect opened to us by aerial locomotion is limited, for
no matter how high our winged vehicles may one moment soar, they
cannot approach the earth without losing much of their glamour and
strangeness. Let us turn instead to the far more considerable factor
which came before us at the beginning of this essay. The emancipation
of modern woman was there glanced at in only one of the three aspects
of which the two others have still to be regarded. We saw how, as a
consumer of wealth, she has been instrumental in withdrawing the art of
building from the light of its central inspiration, and depriving it of
the most highly treasured of its resources. As a producer of wealth,
her influence has perhaps been less momentous, but it is by no means
to be disregarded, for the modern dwelling-house exhibits the fruits
of it in almost every detail of planning and equipment. So profound
are the changes it has suffered that a medium-sized house, built, say,
three generations ago, and left in its original state, presents almost
insuperable difficulties to the housewife of to-day. Its cavernous
succession of kitchens and larders, its monumental boiling ranges, its
numberless stairs and endless dim passages, all of these things must
fall into desuetude, unless a regiment of muscular girls and women is
enlisted to maintain order among them. We all know how in the leisurely
age of our great-grandmothers a house was much more loosely, more
vaguely planned, with nothing resembling the meticulous precision that
is brought to bear upon it to-day. It was not necessary in those days
to measure the distance the housewife had to walk in order to put the
dinner on the table, for the walk was one which she was never called
upon to take. There was no need to place a roomy and well-ventilated
linen-cupboard close to the principal bedrooms, for the bedroom linen
might be kept anywhere and fetched from anywhere without inflicting
appreciable hardship upon the housewife. But wide though the gulf may
be that divides the modern house from that of the early nineteenth
century, the novelty of the former would not be nearly so apparent
were it not for the much broader gulf by which it is divided from
that of a generation later. During the second half of the century the
romantic revival was scattering over the country a number of houses
whose unpracticalness was so gigantic that they could only strike
the beholder completely dumb. The labyrinth at Knossos being at that
time still undiscovered, these structures are generally presumed to
derive from the cathedrals and dungeons of the Middle Ages. It is by
comparison with these preposterous inventions that the post-war house
stands out in a yet more appealing and more individual light. Instead
of losing purpose and definition, like the typical city building, it
has gained vastly in both these qualities, and it has gained because,
from being the scene of the housewife’s activities, it has become her
instrument and ally, and sometimes (it must be admitted) her accomplice
even.
The next step, indeed, has already been taken. It is possible even now
to watch the modern residence gradually assuming the properties of a
machine. At the beginning of the last century nine-tenths of the cost
of a house went into the structure, while the remaining tenth paid for
its fixtures and equipment. Nowadays we spend almost as much on drains
and plumbing, on baths and closets, on bedroom lavatory basins supplied
with hot water, on central heating, electric light, telephones and
suchlike, as we spend on the building of the house. So remarkable has
been this development that an American writer has prophesied a period
when houses will be given away free with the plumbing. It is doubtful
whether such munificence will ever become a commercial possibility, but
the prophecy contains more than a modicum of truth. We may reasonably
expect to see all but the most indispensable furniture done away
with in the small house of to-morrow, while its walls, ceilings, and
doors will assume a blankness and roundedness that has hitherto been
thought needful only in the operating chambers of our hospitals. In
order still to reduce the housewife’s labours, the apartments will
be brought together in those vast blocks that are meeting with such
strenuous opposition from private householders in the United States,
an opposition to which the zoning authorities have almost invariably
given every support. What is the reason for this opposition? It is
that a new apartment house will (in the words of a recent American
Court pronouncement) “increase the fire hazard” of the district upon
which it intrudes, and will be “creative of noises from autos, taxis,
milk wagons, drays, etc., in a locality where peace and quiet now
prevail; it will obstruct light and air, and sooner or later it will
bring with it the immoralities which always attend the building of
such structures.” The list of its potential misdeeds goes on, but I
have quoted at sufficient length to show what are the conditions to be
expected when the house is supplanted by large, noisy, and efficient
machines, which none but the richest and the poorest may altogether
elude.
Is it inevitable that they will be so supplanted? The displacement
is steadily going on, and the scope and rapidity of the process must
depend upon the eagerness with which modern woman sets herself to pluck
the fruits of liberty that are now so compliantly brought within her
reach. It should be borne in mind, however, that the mechanization
of the house is inspired by a purpose diametrically opposite to that
entertained by the pioneers of modern methods in industry. The triumph
of the powerloom over the handloom was conditioned by its ability to
produce so many more yards of material than the handloom could be made
to yield. But while the machine was introduced into the industrial
world in order to multiply the products of labour, the object of the
modern house is to diminish the necessity for labour. By exchanging the
handloom for the powerloom the weaver could, while still taking the
same amount of trouble, produce a greater result, but when the modern
housewife moves into a labour-saving flat her object is by taking
considerably less trouble to produce the same result as before. How
and where she spends the hours of leisure thus acquired is a question
which does not bear upon our present argument, except in so far as this
leisure has enabled her to raise the drapery store to the exalted
place it occupies to-day, and by this means to divert the trend of
modern architecture in the direction which we have just been following.
It is, then, largely by virtue of her new position as a producer that
the woman of to-day has become able to exercise such a signal influence
in her quality of consumer of wealth. But from both these points of
view we may perceive her acting immediately upon the main architectural
current, while, if we consider her from the conjugal point of view, her
influence will show itself only in the flow of the tributary stream
which is conveniently described as decoration. It is a regrettable
fact that the decorative arts in England had, until they suddenly came
within this influence, shown not the smallest sign of vitality since
Soane and Nash translated the Attic enthusiasm of Shelley, Landor and
Winckelmann into stone and stucco. Learned though he may have been,
there can be no doubt that John Soane was as genuinely moved by the
masterpieces of Greek decoration as Shelley by the large and authentic
voices of Plato and Æschylus. The modern decorator, however, who
ransacks the storehouse of history from Robert Adam to the caves of
prehistoric man, is never animated by better instincts than those
of the merchant adventurer, and often enough by worse. Of a creative
impulse he is completely innocent. And what are we to say of the
teaching of Ruskin, who followed upon the heels of these great men,
except that it was calculated to impart a knowledge not so much of
decoration as of botany, while its temper was wholly inimical to such
pleasure as might yet be taken here and there in decorative skill?
Stifled by the tedious pullulation of Ruskin’s “natural forms,” this
pleasure appears to be awakening once more, and it is to modern woman
that we must look for the cause of this awakening.
A convenient way of picturing the change of outlook that has led to
this revival is to compare two familiar works of nineteenth-century
fiction separated by a generation or two. Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_ contains long passages redolent of that nature-worship which
made Wordsworth a best-seller and which inspired our Ruskin to discard
the principles of decorative design in favour of those derived from
the study of plant growth. Innumerable landscapes are presented to us
in this book, many of them bathed in moonlight of the most impeccable
romantic quality. Country mansions, pleasure-pavilions, creeper-clad
cottages, all these are concealed beneath a dense mass of verdure,
their existence briefly hinted at, while the sinuous paths by which
they may be approached are made the subject of the closest description,
together with the trees, shrubs, creepers, herbs and mosses which
form their setting. Such power of attention as remains in the reader
is skilfully directed upon the subject of feminine apparel, to the
treatment of which the author brings a sympathy and animation almost
equal to those with which he approaches the vegetable kingdom. But the
apartments through which his characters move, the walls and furniture
against which their forms, so exquisitely clad, stand disclosed to the
reader, receive as little thought as the exterior of the buildings,
so that it is impossible for us to say what they are like. As soon as
the men and women cross the threshold of a house, an impenetrable mist
descends upon their surroundings. Alas, there was no one to take any
interest in even the most delightful of the houses or rooms, and we are
left to reconstruct them for ourselves, aided only by our knowledge of
a few authentic remains.
In Zola’s Nana we have a complete antithesis to this fatigue, this
chlorosis of the decorative faculty. The adornment of her immediate
setting has with this famous character become a consuming passion. Her
intuitive artistic knowledge, her manifold inventiveness, never cease
to astonish the architects and decorators who work at her bidding. Nor,
in her brief but triumphant career through the world of vice, does she
once tire of devising fresh schemes of decoration, schemes which Zola
himself appears to regard with an enthusiasm approaching that of his
heroine. As she pauses at last on the brink of financial ruin, this
passion for decoration flares up with an almost hysterical intensity.
It is then that she dreams of “un prodige, un éblouissement ... un lit
comme il n’en existait pas, un trône, un autel ... en or et en argent
repoussés, pareil à un grand bijou.” To the end her preoccupation
maintains its firm hold upon her, for through it alone it was that she
could gain her mysterious ascendancy over the minds and the senses of
men. “Jamais elle n’avait senti si profondément la force de son sexe,”
remarks Zola as he shows her to us happily contemplating the scenes of
prodigious elegance that she had established around her. Such is the
change of attitude which nineteenth-century society must somehow have
witnessed before it could be so brilliantly recorded in writing. It is
a similar change that has infused new life into modern decoration.
The question may present itself whether to connect this movement
with Zola’s unfortunate heroine is not to detract from its merit or
importance. That must remain entirely a matter for individual judgment.
I will here but remark that, in borrowing their light from the
constellation of unhappy spirits in which Nana shone so vividly, the
decorative arts are only imitating the example set throughout Europe
and America by the art of feminine dress, and that whatever is said
of one of these arts applies to the other also. But this superficial
resemblance is not the only thing that unites decoration with dress,
for the modern movement in decoration cannot be better described than
as an enlargement of the old and more immediate business of personal
adornment. Both currents spring from a common source, and if the
younger of them will always remain in some respects apart from its
sartorial companion, grown with the centuries into a venerable historic
stream, we yet have reason to be thankful that the arid waste of
decoration is being watered again, however fitfully.
What is it that has turned the decorator of to-day into a kind of
transcendent costumier? I here have room to hint at a couple of
reasons only. In the first place, it should be remembered that while
the avowed ideal of masculine clothing is to render its wearers
inconspicuous by causing them all to look alike, the ideal of feminine
clothing is to give an appearance of strangeness and singularity. Now,
nothing could accord more happily with our mechanical civilization than
the masculine ideal; nothing, on the other hand, could come into more
violent and more disappointing conflict with it than the feminine.
Modern industry does not discriminate; it holds out to both sexes
the same opportunities for acquisition, it heaps upon both the same
monotonous profusion of manufactured goods. A hat, a mantle, a gown,
is no sooner devised than a million others of the selfsame pattern
pour in steady streams into every corner of the world. A startling
colour cannot be affected by someone eager to achieve distinction of
appearance without multiplying more rapidly than the budding green
in Mr. Wells’ _Time Machine_. Provincial visitors to the West End of
London are astonished at the number of well-dressed women they see
about the streets, and profess themselves unable to distinguish between
a duchess and a shop-assistant, while Londoners who tread for the
first time the pavements of Paris or New York find themselves similarly
baffled. Thanks to the ceaseless activities of the large drapers’
store (supported by the admirable enterprise of artificial silk
manufacturers) no woman to-day, however penurious, need deny herself
any of those elegant accessories that were the crowning luxury of her
ancestors. But, pleasing as this facility may be to the multitude, is
it to be imagined that the more fortunate or ambitious can look upon it
with the same satisfaction? Assuredly not, for they have even invoked
the law of copyright in their attempt to resist it.
In drawing our conclusions from this spectacle of unwelcome equality
it is useful also to bear in mind the relation between the female and
the male populations of Western Europe. During the last half century
the excess of women in this country has, roughly speaking, doubled
in proportion to the total number of inhabitants of both sexes. The
effect of a fixed and constant inequality may be neutralized by a
series of adjustments in the social structure, but when the inequality
threatens to increase fourfold in the course of a century the pressure
it engenders is not so easily relieved. One of the most distressing
sights to be met with in Paris to-day is the large number of coloured
and mostly negroid males that is gradually being assimilated by the
white population. There are some even who predict that France will soon
have become a bi-coloured republic. Should this unpleasant prophecy
be realized, the present excess of white females will no doubt go a
long way to account for the change. Whether or not this excess has
done anything to stimulate the new movement in decoration it is, of
course, impossible to say with certainty, but our surmise receives
the strongest confirmation from the fact that in the United States
of America, alone among modern countries in this respect, the modern
decorative movement appears to be awakening no response at all. For in
that country alone the male population exceeds the female by a surplus
that is increasing at almost exactly the same rate as our own female
surplus is increasing.
The new movement has been described as an enlargement of the art of
dress, an affinity which those who visited the 1925 Paris Exhibition
of Decorative Art will be ready enough to acknowledge. Among the
most skilful of the exponents of the movement is M. Maurice Dufrène,
and no one could wish for a more complete expression of its main
characteristics than his _Chambre de Dame_, shown at the 1925
exhibition along with other apartments by the same artist. Wherever
one may turn in this room, one’s eye rests upon long sinuous curves
whose rise and fall is as the billowing of an exquisite garment. The
richness and amplitude of its lines recall nothing so much as the
famous liquefaction that the silk frock of Herrick’s Julia would
undergo, more particularly while the poet watched her in the act of
walking. The dressing-table undulates round its absent mistress with
a softness of movement that causes one to think of a fur or a cloak,
while in the distance, framed in a background of streaming silver,
the bed rolls lazily like a magic carpet suspended on the breeze. The
cushions and lampshades have the appearance of intimate garments too
pertly displayed. From an elongated hollow in the ceiling, fringed
with curling foam, a golden light descends with studied moderation
upon the skin of a giant polar bear, the canine adjunct enlarged and
architecturalized, its muzzle caught in the loops of a heavy rope
of silver. Everybody said the room was a distinguished success, and
this, in so far as it served to enhance a brilliant though imaginary
personality, it indubitably was.
The chief manifestation of the new movement, however, lies not so much
in its forms as in the teguments wherein those forms are clothed. They
are invariably of the greatest succulence. Soft, smooth, evenly or
sharply luminous, they answer one another like the modulated textures
of the dressmaker’s products. Even metallic surfaces are made to play
their dull or glittering part in the combination, for there is nothing,
as Baudelaire wrote in one of his poems, that provides so telling a
foil to the warmth of woven materials as “l’énivrante monotonie du
métal, du marbre et de l’eau.” It is only fit, therefore, that among
the most successful of all these designers should be the metalworker
Edgar Brandt, whose fame has securely established itself even on the
other shore of the Atlantic. To infuse with profound feminine charm
the design of a metal grille or an ornamental chandelier may appear
difficult, but this is what M. Edgar Brandt has succeeded in doing;
nor could we ask for a more striking testimony to the strength and
singleness of the impulse from which this modern movement in decoration
derives than we may find in his triumphant enlistment of such unlikely
aids as these. The proper place and function of his work, of which
I will not attempt a detailed description, is as unmistakable as the
work itself. Only the other day a candidate for an academic prize in
architecture introduced an imitation of it into a design for a bank
building. Of course, he had to be rebuked on behalf of the prize
committee, happily through the person of that witty and scholarly
critic, Mr. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel. The particular manner of design
he had chosen, the designer was told, should be confined to “the
surroundings of beautiful and expensive women.” Its nature could not
have been more succinctly defined.
Such, then, are, to the best of my belief, the most important forces
at work in architecture to-day. Without doubt these forces will drive
the architecture of to-morrow into a mould that is much like the one
I have here attempted to describe. Are any new currents likely to
manifest themselves, adding their influence to that of the currents
with which we are already familiar? Few men living to-day are so bold
that they would care to prophesy without some visible omen to justify
their words. Our ideas about progress and the future have themselves
shrunk somewhat; they have become more modest than they were. To the
nineteenth-century European, whose faith was so miraculously fortified
by the discovery of natural selection, these things had grown to be the
first and greatest realities of human existence. Progress was to him a
pleasing and uninterrupted enlargement of his worldly self, a direct
and positive increase of comfort, power, and general importance. As for
the future, the element of variability, of possible differentiation,
that was contained in it seemed about as great as the growth of a
crystal might show in a constantly replenished solution. Even to-day
there are some men living who (like that most eloquent of worshippers
at the favourite Victorian shrine, Mr. H. G. Wells) still look forward
to a continued expansion of the social organism, an unbroken if less
unvarying accession of prosperity and power. But it is becoming only
too clear that the band of orthodox believers is rapidly dwindling;
already in some places the object of their worship is openly blasphemed
against. We are told that the growth of an industrial society must
necessarily be limited in extent――nay, that it must even be of limited
duration. It is argued with depressing force that the opening-up of
markets is like everything else in this world, and can only continue
so long as there are markets to open up. Every day the future of our
urbanized civilization appears wrapped in a darker cloud. Every day
it becomes more uncertain how long Balbus will continue to build even
in fulfilment of needs that exist here and now. The modern amorphous
building, the “zoning” of volume and outline, the labour-saving
residence, the subservience of the new decoration to feminine dress:
all these spring from forces that exist to-day and that must continue
for some time longer provided civilization is able to maintain itself
in its present form. More than this it is impossible to foretell,
except one thing only, with an inadequate reference to which I must
bring this essay to an end.
It has been observed how the growth of population of our towns is
even now being followed by the architectural expansion which is the
somewhat retarded concomitant of such a growth. This growth, however,
is slowing down and, it may be, gradually subsiding. We continue to
build, but the tenants of the buildings we put up will before long
have ceased to multiply. We have rediscovered the first principles of
the forgotten art of town-planning, but only at a time when our towns
are becoming almost adequate to the needs of their populations. One
of the most momentous chapters in the history of humanity is thus
about to be closed, and it is surely permissible at such a moment to
speculate awhile on what will succeed it. What is to follow the great
age of city-building, whose ironic fate it was to discern the laws
that should have governed its activities when it was too late to obey
these laws except on a point of secondary importance, being then able
to obey only under penalty of death? Are we to meet, after failing
to grasp the illusive opportunities of town-planning, with new, and
real, and unexhausted opportunities of country-planning? I have not
in this essay attempted a detailed description of the growth of our
towns, which is a thing of the present and the past, but have confined
myself to certain things that must happen within the boundaries of
these towns before many more years have elapsed. And though it is
too early as yet to speak with any particularity of the repopulation
of the countryside, it is clear that no discussion of the future can
claim to be even approximately just if it does not bear witness to this
new phase in the history of building. Following unobtrusively upon
a lengthy procession of works on town-planning, the first treatise
on country-planning has recently made its appearance. Though only a
pamphlet of modest dimensions, it is fairly certain that the outward
growth it heralds will not be less important than the centripetal one
which is even now being arrested, for the exodus from the city has
hardly begun to-day, and the architecture of the countryside still
requires to pass beyond the experimental stage and assume some measure
of permanence. But when rural England has grown thus far, we may rest
assured that its permanence and stability will exceed all that the city
at any time possessed, and in this manner will come to pass what was
prophesied to the Roman philosopher Ædesius who, it will be recalled,
awoke one morning and saw that the back of his left hand was covered
with writing. “After reverently saluting his hand and the letters,” so
the story goes, “he found that the following oracle was written on his
hand: ‘On the warp of the two Fates’ spinning lie the threads of thy
life’s web. If thy choice is the cities and towns of men, thy renown
shall be deathless, shepherding the god-given impulse of youth. But
if thou shalt be the shepherd of sheep and bulls, then hope that thou
thyself shalt be the associate of the blessed immortals.’” Thus speaks
the divine portent of the future of architecture also, and to whom
except the architect skilled in country-planning, the architect of
to-morrow, could it be said (as it was said of Ædesius and his pupils)
that “when they spread their wings further than those of Icarus, though
they were even more fragile, he would lead them gently down, not into
the sea, but to the land and to human life”?
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
――The Publisher’s Catalog for the _To-day and To-morrow_ series,
referred to in the front matter above, was not contained in the
source material.
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