[Inaudible] If you don't know me, I'm Francis Marrone. I am an architectural historian and I've
been at this for a really long time. I'm going to be talking
about 20th century classicism together with all of the other
trends in 20th century architecture. I will be talking about some of those
things that another speaker might actually leave out, but I'm not going to
leave those things out. To me, 20th century architecture
is kind of a diverse, almost giddily diverse thing. And when you look at the
standard textbook on the subject, that aspect of -aspect of
it isn't highlighted at all. To the contrary, many architectural historians take the
view that there is a kind of narrative of 20th century architecture. There is a sort of progression towards
different forms and you'll find, if you don't know this about me already, you'll find that I don't accept that. I don't accept that there is a narrative. I think that there are many narratives
and it's sort of been my purpose as an architectural historian all of these
years to talk about the different narratives that exist
and not just the one. I'm sure that this isn't the first slide
you expected to see in a course on 20th century architecture in New York. But to me as I was thinking about
how I wanted to tell this story, this sets the mood because 20th century
architecture really begins in New York and elsewhere with a change in mood, not a change necessarily in
architectural styles or forms, but a change in mood. And
this I think captures it. Mrs. Vanderbilt moves to the slums. Mrs Vanderbilt was Anne Harriman
Sands Rutherfurd Vanderbilt. And this is the slum that she
moved to, One Sutton Place. Now I'm sure that any of you who know
Sutton Place and have looked at this house, don't think of
it as a slum property. After all, after Mrs
Vanderbilt lived there, J. Paul Getty lived there and
so on. It's not a slum property, but you know, when Mrs Vanderbilt moved there indeed
Sutton place was a slum or people called it that. We don't really
use that word much anymore. But back in the day people did. And what they meant by that word was
that the area was first of all poor. It was a working class neighborhood. There were tenements and the brownstones
that you see here were sub-divided. They were rooming houses
or boarding houses. There was a lot of industry
in the neighborhood. There were coal yards and brick yards
and breweries and a lot of noise, some waterfront enterprises. And it was a shocking thing
when Mrs Vanderbilt decided, Oh, that's where I want to live. Here you see a before
shot of Sutton Place. This was before its redevelopment, which began around 1920 and this is
that same block after renovation. Yeah, yeah. The brownstones were remodeled beyond
all recognition as the neighborhood was claimed by a much better off class
of people than had been living there. It went from being a working
class neighborhood to
being one of the most upper class neighborhoods in New York city. We have a word for this
process. That word is what? Gentrification. Right. A word that wasn't coined until 1964 but
that doesn't mean that the phenomenon didn't exist. Indeed
it did in 1920. Indeed, this may even be regarded as the golden
age of gentrification in New York City and it was this row house renovation
movement that for me really sort of shows the change in mood
that I'm talking about. The reason for gentrification is that
it was no longer possible for well to do New Yorkers to build themselves
new houses in new neighborhoods. There were no new neighborhoods. Manhattan was used up by about 1900. There was no new uptown pasture to move
to any longer and building new houses, which was what upper-class new Yorkers
had always done was prohibitively expensive. So most upper-class New
Yorkers bit the bullet, accepted the inevitable and
moved into apartment buildings. But others decided, you know what, we can kind of double back to our all
old neighborhoods and buy up these houses for very cheap and hire a clever young
architect and make it into something that is unique and kind of exciting. This is the house that Mrs Vanderbilt
lived in before she moved to Sutton place. We say, Mrs Vanderbilt leaving out Mr Vanderbilt
because he died and when he did, so he left his widow, this spectacular Richard
Morris Hunt house, and the view of many, the greatest of all, Richard Morris Hunt's
houses in New York city. This is the house about which Charles
Follen McKim said after it was built, "I sleep better at night knowing it's
there." And it set the whole Vogue for chateau style houses, not just
in New York, but in America. Anyway, Mrs Vanderbilt didn't want
to live in this house anymore. She really wanted to take her
whole lifestyle down a notch. The change in mood that I'm talking about, it's in part a rejection of the Gilded
Age of which Mrs Vanderbilt had been the product. After World War I, Mrs Vanderbilt and her friends, her women friends in New York society, all of them francophiles.
You know, in 1920, you could not be a society lady in New
York if you didn't speak fluent French. It was as important to speak French as
it was in the Russian court to speak French. And these ladies
had houses in France. They decided during the war that they
weren't going to abandon their houses, that they weren't going
to abandon the French. And many of them spent
the war years in France. Many of them worked in military hospitals. All of them certainly
gave money. The point is, is that a lot of these
New York society women, the ones who'd been among the founders
of the Colony Club, for instance they had seen the horrors
of the war up close. Some of them had witnessed
the carnage at first hand. You know, Edith Wharton carried
supplies to the front lines. And others worked in, as I said, in hospitals and after the war, many of these ladies felt they could
not go back to the way things were. That opulence that we see in
that Richard Morris Hunt house. Well, that was all fine in 1910, but in 1920, it would no longer do. And so a group of female friends, Anne Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan, the daughter of JP Morgan
and Elizabeth Marbury, all decided that they were going to
claim this sort of forlorn section of Manhattan. They hired a young, very young, he was like 24 years old, architect named Mark B. Schmidt, who was married to an interior
designer who worked for these ladies, great friend Elsie de Wolfe. And he created this compound
as it were for these very, very wealthy ladies, a compound that is called Sutton place, but which the press also dubbed
that sapphic enclave, to use a charming phrase. Anyway, there they lived and their
lifestyles became very, very different from what
they'd previously been. The new spirit in the air is
one which is distinctly modern. The houses are so much simpler, so much more relaxed, so
much smaller. To you and me, these might not be small houses,
but to a Vanderbilt or a Morgan, these houses were tiny. And this was a time in American
life when everything was changing. Manners and mores were changing. They were becoming much more relaxed. Women's clothing was changing, becoming so much more, so much less constraining
than it had been for, you know, about the last 500 years. And amid these changes, New York began to take
on a different look. There was a different
spirit in the air. As I say, it was the spirit of modernity, but not the spirit of what
we would call modernism. That is to say this was the architecture
that embodied the spirit of modernity and it didn't begin with World War I. This is an important point that
I think we should all remember. It actually begins with the century. It begins at the beginning
of the 20th century, or at least in the first decade of the
20th century when there was a new spirit in the air when people
felt the new century, a betoken, extraordinary things, and a kind of limitless freedom. And this is when a kind of new approach
to old city neighborhoods took root. I don't know how many
of you know this house. 139 East 19th street. It was an 1843 row house and a Denver
architect of very high standing; this was the architect of the Fisher
and Daniel's building in Denver of the Denver athletic club, of the antlers hotel in Colorado Springs. So this was a major architect, Frederick Junior Sterner was his name. He came to New York and he saw this sorta
dilapidated Greek revival row house on East 19th street. It
looked just like this. That is to say it looked just like a
proximately 1200 Greek revival row houses that are still standing in New York
City. We look at it and we think, Oh, that's a nice house. I'd like that house. But Sterner thought that the house was, was kind of dull. He thought
it was cookie cutter, that there were just too many like it
and what he wanted to do with his house and you know, there was no landmarks
preservation commission to get in the way. He decided he was going
to jazz it up a little. He didn't use that term, jazz it up. But he turned it into a kind
of Mediterranean fantasy
where the surface of the house, the front of the
house had been red brick. He stuccoed it over and
painted it a cream color, kind of eggy cream, by the
way. What do you see today? Because the house was restored a
couple of years ago with the very close supervision of the landmarks
preservation commission. What we see is very, very close to the way Sterner
made the house in 1908, anyway, that, that sort of cream,
he used the green shutters, he left the sills and lintels. But he removed the stoop. Frederick Sterner felt that the typical
New York city row house stoop was in his words up pompous thing. Now I happen to love row house stoops,
but you can sort of see his point. He felt that these stoops were far too
big for houses that were only 20 feet wide when the stoop sorta takes up half
of the front of the house and he thought it made a lot more sense, made the whole feeling of
the house less pompous, less heavy, lighter, airier or more carefree to remove the
stoop and put in what we call a basement entrance. Now you see row houses all
over the city that have been destooped and there are a lot of reasons that
houses have their stoops removed. There was a time when a lot of these
row houses were converted into multiple dwellings, whether modern
apartment houses or rooming houses. And it made it much simpler to remove that front stoop
and have a street entrance. But the, in fact, the original destooping of row houses
in New York was done for reasons of fashion and style, not for practical reasons. So Sterner removed the stoop
and didn't just remove it, but also gave the entrance, these beautiful accents of Mercer tile
which you can go there today and see. And then the other thing he did, although you can't really
see it in this picture, he put in a sloping red
tile roof on the house. And when he was done, the house, which was on a block that
was filled with red brick, Greek revival houses and slightly
later Brown stone fronted houses. This house by Sterner stood out like
a shaft of light on that street. Everything about this
house said modern. It said, we've entered into a new era. It said rich people in New York are choosing to
live differently from how they've ever lived in the past. Here
we see a, there's 139, and then you see that there's a tremendous
variety in the houses on this block as indeed there is because after Sterner
made over his own house together with a banker named Joseph B. Thomas he bought up many other
houses on this block. And by the way, this was not a fancy part of town at
the time. The houses were pretty cheap. He bought up a bunch of houses on the
block and renovated them all in different ways to create this kind of almost
willfully varied picturesqueness along the street. So for instance,
this house right here, which was Thomas's own house, Sterner, turned it into a kind of medieval fantasy, which he would also do in his
house for the art collector Steven C. Clark on East 70th
streets during our work in time, all over the city. But what he's doing in
renovating these houses is, as I said, kind of turning his back on the way
things had always been done in New York where a sort of style would take root, it would become very fashionable and it
would be replicated roughly a billion times over the next 15 years then
to be replaced by the next style. Well the vogue for row house renovation that Sterner set in motion really
had legs at least for a while. This was once a row of very
ordinary Greek revival houses. Then the architect Julius Frank working for Sailors' Snug Harbor decided
to do a little remodeling and ala Frederick Sterner in 1916, this row of very ordinary red brick houses
on eighth street was transformed into yes, another Mediterranean
fantasy and Julius Frank sorta continued that treatment round
the corner here on university place And then along the north
side of Washington Mews, a carriage mews that once held the
stables of the fine houses of Washington square North. But in 1916, those stables were converted into very
chic residences and artists studios with their outsides done over by Julius
Frank in the same style as the houses on eighth street with which these
stables were back to back. And here is another
view of Washington mews. So as we enter into the 20th century
we're not doing so arm and arm quite yet with Le Corbusier. We're entering into the 20th century
with a kind of new spirit in the air, which sees things happening, like all row houses being renovated and
all old stables being renovated into often elegant dwellings. This is my favorite of all these row
house renovation projects of the time. This was a very sorta tired row of
houses on 48th and 49th streets between second and third avenues. When the owner of one of the houses, a very wealthy woman named
Charlotte Hunnewell Sorchan decided that by buying up
the whole block of houses, that is to say a row of houses
on 48th street that was, and the houses with which they
were back to back on 49th street. Not only could the street fronts of these
houses be remodeled in such a way as to create something that
was fresh and appealing. But the inside the, in the back yards of these houses
could also receive a unified treatment. And a lot of you probably know of examples
in New York where the backyards of row houses have been transformed into
a sort of communal gardens or parks. There's McDougal Sullivan
gardens in the South village. There's the group of houses around
St John's church in the West village. And a couple of other examples, but the one that really stands
out is Turtle Bay gardens. What Mrs. Sorchan did
together with her architects, Edward Dean and William Lawrence Bottomley a name that
I'm sure a lot of you in this room know, was they created this sort of private
park for the people who lived in the houses and it was lushly planted. You see these pictures of it from
right around the time it was done. Lushly planted with fountains
and statuary and so on. All of which by the way, is still there. And this was sort of the rear terrace
of Mrs. Sorchan's one once upon a time, brownstone transformed into something
that looks at every inch of it as though it belongs, I don't know, in Tuscany. But this was again, something that had really never before
been done in New York city and it was beguiling. What Dean and Bottomley did with the
outsides of the houses was also very creative, again, to use
that word beguiling, if not quite as much as the gardens, which you as the casual
passer-by don't get to see. You've got to make friends with someone
who lives in one of these houses, you know, like Katherine
Hepburn. Well, she, she's dead, but you know that she lived
here for many, many years. Anyway, the outsides nonetheless
are also pretty terrific. Now that architect whom I mentioned and
said you're probably familiar with them, William Lawrence Bottomley; Bottomley was one of the great architects
of the 1920s and 1930s in America. He was, people are often
surprised to hear this, a native Manhattanite and all his early
works are right here in New York City, like Turtle Bay gardens. And then a few years later
he was the architect, well his firm was called
Bottomley, Wagner and White. But Bottomley himself was the designer
of the very famous River House, one of the most famous apartment buildings
in New York all the way East on 52nd street. But the place that Bottomley's name is
forever associated with is the state of Virginia and particularly
Richmond, Virginia. There's a street that's lined with the
statuary and then these magnificent houses, many of which
eight, I believe in total, on Monument Avenue were designed by
Bottomley. But if you look at this house, the Jeffress house at
1800 Monument Avenue, wonderful house, right? But really what Bottomley was doing was
transposing to this rather grand setting in the 1920s, that sort of mood of architecture
often expressed in a kinda, Neo-Georgian idiom that had already
taken root in places like Sutton place in Manhattan. Now, when you've heard
that you go to Monument Avenue, you can really see that it's kind of
almost like an enlarged version of Sutton Place and this sort of thing
continued through the 1930s. This is one of my favorite
things in New York city. I know that it's not all
that much to look at. So it's in part the idea of the
thing that appeals to me so much, but it's a group of old tenements in
which I mean, you know, tenements, I mean places where you know, immigrant Czechs and Hungarians who
worked at very low paid industrial jobs lived at the beginning of the
20th century. But in the 1930s, a woman named Carmel Snow who was the
editor-in-chief of Harper's bizarre. And as such, she was a mover and shaker in
the world of fashion in New York. It was incidentally she and not Diana
Vreeland who was the model for the character of Maggie Prescott, played by Kay Thompson
in the movie Funny Face. Does that register with anyone
in this room? Okay, good. The, anyway she undertook the renovation
of these tenements into upper class apartments. Note the date, it's 1938. And being rich just
wasn't what it once was. After World War II, there was federal income tax and then, you know the immigration
spigot was turned off in 1924, which made it much, much harder to find a cheap domestic help. And then the 1930s,
everybody was affected. And so by 1938, you know, you just couldn't live in a Richard
Morris mansion anymore. I mean, those days were as remote as you know, something out of the Old Testament. So what the rich ended up doing was living
in these very sort of chicly done up small apartments, walk ups they were in converted tenements
all the way East on 72nd street. Now, I'm just wondering if there's one thing
that you've noticed as we've gone along about that, that Sutton place and Turtle
Bay gardens and these houses, which we call the black and whites
because the colors scheme, well, it's not really black now, but when Mrs. Snow had them done over, she wanted everything to be
black. I mean, I was, yeah. That was like really
cool. Black and white. Like those black and white checked floors. It was very Dorothy Draper
ish sorta thing. Anyway, what have these three
things got in common. I'm gonna stay here until
you get it, huh? Women, they were all developed by women. Women were taking the lead in sort of
changing the face of Manhattan in the first three decades of the 20th century. And there were many
other examples as well. But we have a sorta the triumvirate
of Anne Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan , Elizabeth
Marbury at Sutton place. We have Charlotte Hunnewell
Sorchan at turtle Bay gardens. We have Carmel Snow at the black and
whites and clearly sort of the new tenor might be described...Let's just think about it as, as a little bit more feminine then had
prevailed in New York real estate up til that point. And if you look at this woman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in this
painting from 1916 by Robert Henri, you see somebody who looks like
she belongs in any of those places. The architecture, the
spirit of Sutton place, of Turtle Bay gardens seems to go along
with her languid pose and with her clothing, which if you're a woman of today
and you're looking at this painting, you're thinking, well, what's
the big deal? But you know, in 1916 it was actually pretty
radical for a woman to dress the way. Gertrude is depicted in this painting by, by Henri, the kind of loose fitting, very unconstraining clothing. There are no corsets or shirt wastes or
any of the standard items of feminine clothing of the era. So she's being radical and she carried; by the way, that painting is
the same year as these houses. So think of it in that,
those terms, think of the, how those, putting those things together may help
you sorta capture the spirit of the time. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was one
of the richest women in the world. She grew up in a house on Fifth Avenue
and 58th street where Bergdorf Goodman now is. Her parents' house on
that site had 137 rooms. If any of you have been to
the Breakers in Newport, that was their summer house. That's where they went to relax. And, and so what did Gertrude decide
to do when she came of age, well, you know, she wanted to be
an artist. She was an artist. She was a very fine sculptor,
very underrated in my own opinion. She got herself a studio in MacDougal
Alley in a converted stable. And she eventually had her studio
designed by the artist Robert Chandler. This is, it is amazingly still intact. And the building is now the New York
Studio School of drawing, painting, and sculpture. And they'll actually
take you to look at her studio. If you go in there, it's well worth it. But it's a pretty wild space. And she being, you know, rich, was able to buy up several adjoining
buildings over the years and she did so, not because she needed
the space for herself, but because she was a great sorta builder
of institutions to aid the artists community of Greenwich
village. She created sorta clubs and studios and galleries for
painters until eventually she had acquired several contiguous properties and hired
an architect whom she knew named Auguste Noel to combine these houses, give at least most of them, a unified facade and to open them in 1931
as the place where she would show off her extraordinary collection
of modern American painting. And thus was the Whitney
museum of American art born. And this is what it looked like. Noel's design was really highly unusual. Even in 1931, even after Sterner and
Bottomley and so on, had been doing their
things for several years. Still what Noel did in kind of making a, if you will, the classical language of architecture
into his very own play thing was even to this day when you walk past this building, very striking and singular, this is the entrance
to the Whitney museum. This is it today and you see that that the materials, the colors, the handling of the columns, that big spread wing eagle over
the name on the building and so on, there is to all of this, not just a casual quality such as we see
in the Georgian Revival architecture of Sutton place, but downright playful quality that is
entering into New York architecture in a way that had maybe never before
been seen in quite the same way. This is the inside. It's very
traditional, yet at the same time, very light and all throughout the
building there is always to this day, a playful quality that I find tremendously appealing. Now, Noel is an architect who had been
brought up in the Beaux Arts tradition. He'd worked for Carrère and Hastings, the architects of the
New York Public Library. And so to at one time had William Lamb, the architect of the
empire state building. And once when I was preparing a lecture
on the old Whitney museum building, which I delivered last year
at the New York Studio School, I was lying in bed the night before
my lecture and a thought came to me. It was like a bolt of lightning hit me. And I was forced to decide whether to
get up and record my thought or to hope that I remembered it when I woke up and
I decided to hope to remember it when I woke up. Anyway, the thought was this, I knew that this facade
reminded me of something, but I couldn't think what I,
I kept thinking to myself, there's another building in New York. I just know there's another building
in New York that looks just like this. And then I hit, it's the
Empire State Building. And then I realized that they
were built in the same year, Lamb and Noel knew each other. I
mean, there's no smoking gun here. I mean I don't know if Lamb showed Noel
his designs or if Noel showed Lamb his designs. But when, when you
look at them, you see that what, I'm trying to get the pointer, you see
that these fluted piers are the same. You see that these aluminum frames around
the windows are the same. You see that both buildings, sport stylized eagles and it's
clear that one or the other, they, they one borrowed from the other, or maybe they both
borrowed back and forth. But in any event this is the miniature
empire state building. Some of you may remember last year when
they were doing restoration work on the front of the building. The New York Studio School sign came
down for a very brief time and there it said Whitney museum of
American art. It was very, very cool to walk by
there and see that. Now the other strand of this new spirit
is to be found in a different kind of development. Thus far, we've been talking about urban
row houses almost exclusively, but there was a persistent
dream throughout the 19th
century of creating these planned suburbs that would be
very elaborately landscaped
and allow people to, as it were live in a
central park of their own, a place where the landscape was designed
in that romantic manner with curving paths and irregularly shaped
lawns and bodies of water, a place that would get you and your
soul off the infernal city grid. And indeed developments took shape
in the 19th century in the 1850s. Llewellyn Park, the first planned picturesque
in America in West Orange, New Jersey and Riverside in Illinois, which was laid out by no
less than Frederick Law
Olmsted and Calvert Vaux with the idea that this was a sorta
central park for people to live in. And over time, Riverside was embellished with houses
by architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, the Tomek house, and the very
famous Avery Coonley house. When Riverside was first created, long before the Frank Lloyd
Wright buildings were there, but when Olmsted and Vaux had laid it
out and construction of its streets and earliest houses had begun, a young English man lived in Chicago. This was sort of a weird bit of
fate. This young English men, Ebenezer Howard was his name, had come to America with the dream of
establishing a kind of utopian farm in Nebraska. And that's, that's a tough, tough thing to pull off as he
realized after about six months. And he wound up in Chicago where
he worked as a stenographer, but he was always interested in a sort
of utopian schemes and plans of better meant and what we would
later call urban planning. And he saw Riverside take shape
and it impressed him very, very deeply. And when he ultimately moved back to
England he wrote a book called tomorrow, a peaceful path to real
reform published in 1898, but the book is much better known under
the title it was given for its second edition, which is Garden
Cities of Tomorrow. One of the most famous tracts
on city planning ever written. Howard then began a movement to
create a new kind of community, these self sufficient towns
that were within the sort of, orbit of the big cities of Britain, but that would be, as
I say, self sufficient, a way of sorta decentralizing
the metropolis. And they would be based
on certain political and
economic principles including communal ownership of land. But they would also be designed in
a certain way where the houses were integrated with the natural setting and
where landscaping and the design of the public realm was given very, very close attention. And the first of the so-called garden
cities that Howard spearheaded was in Hartfordshire called Letchworth Garden
City where Howard himself went to live. His architect was a man
named Raymond Unwin. And we see the seeds of the destruction
of the Garden City ideal in what Unwin wrought because garden cities
were meant to be for every man. Unfortunately, they were too nice and because
they were so beautiful, they were, I mean, they were
just drop dead gorgeous. They began to attract, you know,
money. And before you knew it, garden city had sorta become just a style. It had begun as a great political ideal, but now it was an architectural
and landscape style. That was the case also with
Hampstead garden suburb, which was laid out by Unwin
and his partner Barry Parker, captured in this beautiful
painting by William Radcliffe, Hampstead garden suburb. Now the garden city as a style, not again, not as a political ideal, but as a style comes to America
in part through this man. Everybody knows the name
Frederick Law Olmsted, right, but this is not he, this is Frederick Law Olmsted Jr the
son of the cocreator of Central Oark and truth be known Jr was a much more
skilled designer than was his father. And he was one of the
most important figures, not just in landscape architecture, but in urban planning in the 20th century. One of his great early works was a
commission that he received from the Russell's Sage Holmes foundation as it was called
to create a planned suburb on Long Island, specifically in Queens County to
be called Forest Hills gardens. And what he did at Forest
Hills was simply miraculous. Here was the garden city aesthetic, beautifully transposed from England
to America in a community that was a carefully designed down to the smallest
details by Olmsted Jr and by the architect Grosvenor Atterbury. So Atterbury for instance designed the
station of the Long Island railroad in Forest Hills gardens. And by the way, the LIRR has very few stations as
nice as this one and Station square, which is sorta the great entry way to
Forest Hills gardens where Atterbury designed picturesque buildings in a kind
of Germanic medieval style surrounding a very generous, open Plaza. Meet with those sorta
aerial bridges and high conically top towers and all
of the plantings among them. He created what is in fact, one of the loveliest public
places in all of New York City. Another view of station square in
here. We see one of his inspirations, the now rather too touristy Rothenberg
in Bavaria and in station square A tterbury design, Forest
Hills gardens's, his hotel, the Forest Hills in a necessary thing to
have there because Forest Hills gardens had a very famous tennis club, private tennis club that
played host to the U S open, meaning that lots of people came to
visit Forest Hills back in the day. And you see that in Forest Hills which
is built throughout the 1910s and 1920s. There is this, again like in
the English garden cities, a very close relationship between
architecture and landscape architecture. But you also find that just as you
proceed inward from station square, you find that the housing is in fact
at first quite dense that the buildings just beyond station square are
apartment buildings that house many, many families. And then as you move along the apartment
buildings thin out and they become row houses, attached houses fronting big green
spaces such as you see here or here. And then as you proceed farther in the
houses become more and more spaced out. The idea was to create a community where
all of these forms of housing led sort of very naturally one from the other and
provided places within this community for people of varied incomes in
different stages of life and so on. And it is for this reason that forest
Hills gardens has been such a huge influence on the contemporary
movement called new urbanism. Anyway, another thing that Atterbury did at Forest
Hills gardens was to experiment very widely with the use of inexpensive building materials that nonetheless
yielded great visual delight. Many of the walls that you see in
Forest Hills gardens are just these, you know, cement and pebbles nothing fancy
at all and yet they look great, Forest Hills gardens. Now here's the thing, you
all know from the city, beautiful movement, right? You hear city
beautiful. And what do you think of, you think of the New York public library,
you think of grand central terminal, you think of monumental buildings of
circa 1900 or 1910 and yet if you go back and you read the great
city beautiful treatise, the one that more than any other really
inspired that whole movement in American architecture. It was a book called Modern
Civic art by Charles Mulford Robinson published in 1903. And if you read his section
on neighborhood design, the design of residential neighborhoods, do you know what he
describes in that book almost to a t is Forest Hills gardens, which had not yet been built. And so I think it's important to realize
that this is very much in the city beautiful tradition. And when I say designed
down to the smallest detail, you can look at things like the street
lamps for confirmation of this or the waste baskets, just about everything in this
place was very carefully designed, usually by Atterbury. But even later, architects like William Gompert who
designed a public school in Forest Hills gardens hewed to the original style. And the same sort of
thing was done elsewhere. A development in Philadelphia, the Mount Airy section of
Philadelphia called French Village, developed by a sort of
visionary named George Woodward, and designed by some very talented
architects like Robert Rhodes McGoodwin. It was called French village. Because Woodward wanted to start
using local materials by the way, the local schist wanted nonetheless to
revoke the spirit of a Norman village. At the time, there were many Italian artisans living
in Philadelphia and they were put to work creating this and other developments
in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, which are in fact very, very much kin to forest Hills gardens
and to Hampstead garden suburb in London. So in order to sort of work
our way up to art deco, and you all want to know about art
deco because who doesn't love art deco, right? Nobody can define art
deco, but everybody loves it. We're going to have to
take a circuitous path. The reason for that is that
it's a complicated story. It's very circuitous. And we're going to first of all set
aside the whole issue of architectural style. As we look at something
that's a little bit more prosaic- zoning. This building, 120 Broadway was built, well completed in 1915 and it
was by the standards of its day, a monstrously big building. There are much bigger buildings today, but there was nothing in the world
bigger than this building in 1915. We began to build tall buildings. Okay. And as we did so at first the law and municipal regulations
were not quite keeping up with the new developments in building technology
and the new building heights. There were in short, very few laws, for all intents and purposes, let us say no laws that regulated
the design of tall buildings with the consequence that developers
built buildings in such
a way that they maximized the use of the site by simply piling one
story at top of another story without any sorta modulation. The buildings rose straight up from the
lot line to the crown of the building. Sure they might have a light court
because after all you need to give your tenants some light. But the fact is is that as these
buildings began to be built, one after the other, the streets of lower Manhattan were
being turned into dark canyons, and the canyons of wall street.
That's a familiar phrase. You also know if you spend time downtown
that there are these Canyon like streets. Those are the streets that were developed
before 1916 because buildings like 120 Broadway and this was the straw that broke
the camel's back because this was the biggest of all these buildings.
And the, the people began to think, Oh my God, what happens when we start
building more and more buildings? Just like this one? Life in
New York will become simply unbearable. Anyway, in 1916, the city of New York enacted the very
first municipal zoning code in America, 1916. And one provision of this code was that
tall buildings as they rose had to step back at various prescribed intervals
based on a formula that took into account the height of the building and the width
of the street and some other things, so that the buildings did not block the sun
from penetrating to the street below. That was the whole point. Thus you did away with the Canyon effect. Now the first buildings that
were built under this zoning were classical skyscrapers. The beaux arts skyscraper in the works
of architects like Bruce Price and Cass Gilbert and Louis Sullivan sorta was
perfected in the 1890s and thereafter, all the major firms such as Carrère and
Hastings designed tall buildings and they were often very beautiful. We have a tendency to think that tall
buildings that classical skyscrapers largely belong to the pre zoning era. And that's not actually true. If you look at some of the early buildings
that were done under the new zoning, they are classical buildings.
You'll get 26 Broadway. And you see the way that this
building steps back so many times. Well, this building was built to
conform to the new zoning code. But the truth of the matter is that
the new zoning code was difficult, let us say for a lot of architects to
try to sort of get their heads round as they were designing tall
buildings. You know, when we first started designing
buildings that were 15 or 20 stories high architects were to a large extent
defeated artistically by the new building type. And it would be a good 20
years of building skyscrapers
before we reliably built good looking skyscrapers. And so with the new zoning architects, many of them felt they
were back at square one. How do we make the new kind of skyscraper, which is mandated by the zoning law? How do we make it look good? Sometimes a building like 26 Broadway
would be built, which looked great, but not everyone was able to do that. One architect who was giving a lot of
thought was a New York architect who was really so very interesting, slightly crazy man named Harvey Wiley Corbett who employed
a draftsman named Hugh Ferris. And together Corbett and Ferris, Ferris being the artist came up with
a series of studies in 1922 of what buildings could look like
under the new zoning. And in their inspired vision, these buildings were
dramatically sculptural, often dramatically tapered towers that
really embodied the concept of tower. Corbett believed very strongly that the
future of cities was in tall buildings and that rather than continue to regard
tall buildings as a necessary evil, we should embrace the tall building. We should learn to love the tall but
tall buildings with a difference- tall buildings that were designed by him. But these tall buildings would be
dramatic and they would create a whole new skyline for cities like New York
and they would be Corbett firmly believed that next great age in Western
architecture there had been the Gothic and the Renaissance, and now it was time for the
era of the American skyscraper. And it was on this idea that he and Ferris sought to influence the future
development of New York City. Now Corbett, as I say, was
a very talented architect, always a little quirky, but in that sense, he truly fit in, in this era with a building like the
New York school of applied design for women. Very interesting school by the way, where many New York young women
learned the arts of design. And he did things like this, this sort of very eccentric single
column facing Lexington Avenue. I mean, this is the sort of thing people
were doing in the 1980s in calling postmodernism. But Corbett
was doing it in 1908-09. And as I say, this quirkiness of his fit in with
the spirit of the times very well. But it was Ferris and
those drawings by Ferris, they would have such an influence. You'll look at something
like this. I mean, these were drawings that Ferris did before
there were any buildings that looked like this. In 1929 Ferris's drawings were collected
into a book called the Metropolis of Tomorrow. And it included
things like this, which looks like very much like, well, Rockefeller center before
Rockefeller center was built. Okay. The next big thing that happens,
first big thing was the zoning code. Second big thing was Hugh
Ferris. Third big thing, 1922 the Chicago Tribune, the great newspaper of middle America
decided that it needed to build a new headquarters building and I'm
sure a lot of you know this story, they decided what a great bit of
publicity it would be for us to hold a competition for the design
of this new headquarters. We'll make it a really big competition. We'll invite entries all over the
world and they did so and yes, it was a publicity bonanza. Every architect in the world, it seemed entered the Chicago Tribune
competition and it is without question the most famous architectural
competition of the 20th century. And the building that won was widely
regarded by architecture people as not being the best design. Although I have trouble
thinking, I think it's a great, great building, Raymond hood's Chicago Tribune tower is
actually one of my favorite skyscrapers in the world, but maybe that's just me. There were other entries to
the competition, however, that would prove to be much more directly
influential than the winning building. For instance on the left is the entry
to the competition by a great New York architect. Bertram Goodhue was his name and on the
right designed by a Finnish architect named Eliel Saarinen, whose son Euro would become
a very famous architect. But Eliel Saarinen, the father's design which
looks an awful lot like what? It's an awful lot like a Hugh
Ferris drawing, doesn't it? It is done with that setback massing, which was almost as
though Saarinen and was, was aiming not to win
the Tribune competition, but aiming to, to influence the way tall buildings
were designed in New York city. When many architects, especially New York skyscraper architects, laboring under the new zoning law, saw Saarinen's entry to
the Tribune competition, they were bowled over. And that unsuccessful entry in the
competition would be one of the most influential buildings
of the entire century. [Inaudible].
