The War on Architectural Ornament and the Emperor’s New Clothes

I have harbored subliminal, and usually negative, feelings about the great changes in architecture that were wrought between the mid-19^th and mid-20^th centuries – changes that have given us the field today.  I could sum up this period by calling it a vast war on ornament fought with special fervor in Germany and France after the beginning of the 20^th century.  This change was especially abrupt considering the length of time our species has ornamented the built environment.  And not superfluously but organically – ornament growing from vast subterranean reservoirs of experience living in nature.  We have all seen photos or have perhaps even visited the awesome frescos at Lascaux and Altamira; and the compelling Mother Goddess sculptures from Lespugue and Willendorf etc.  This ornament derived from the senses as we dwelled in nature – internalized over millennia of shared experiences.  Gradually these natural forms grew more abstract and only suggested the actual natural features, once captured in greater accuracy: a nautilus or a rams horn suggested the Ionic volute, wild herbs/vines growing in clusters became the acanthus motif and etc.  Human sculptures were also incorporated illustrating our dominance over the world of form and our interplay with the Gods.  For many centuries human ornament derived from the matrix in which we have been embedded: Nature, or this particular life raft we call Earth.[i]

I have always appreciated the natural sources of molding profiles and other architectural decoration – even as they are altered through time and different cultures, Persian, Greek, Roman, Norman etc.  But all clearly derive from nature like the rinceau, guilloche, waterleaf, acanthus, anthemion (or honeysuckle) many others too numerous to list – and not just western culture.  Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian and Indian decoration also derive from nature – just as directly (or in some cases more so).  Witness the magnificence of Angkor Watt or the incredibly exuberant sculpture of a Viking long ship.

Historians trace the roots of the modern movement to Rationalist thought as interpreted at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris at the end of the 18^th century, when a simplification of detail and ornament was promoted – suggesting or expressing the structure.[ii]  Later in the 19^th century Viollet le Duc formalized Structural Rationalism where the structure replaced or became the ornament.[iii]  By the 1880’s this “style” had become quite widespread and attracted influential adherents in the US including the Supervising Architect of the Treasury who designed and built large government buildings in every state.[iv]  This formula to “express” the structure influenced rapid changes in design and architecture including the curricula of the Bauhaus where buildings would now be stripped of all ornament to only expose the concrete, glass sheer surfaces and/or the steel structure.  By 1936 Gropius exults in his total victory over centuries of more human design with: “The morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling”.

The hubris of the modernists (Ozymandius seemed demure by comparison) helped effect the immense destruction and loss of cultural icons like Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan – now replaced with the uber mundane glass box of Madison Square Garden.  Influential designers like Frank Lloyd Wright, Gropius and Corbusier had only disdain and ridicule for historic architecture.  These feelings were passed on to their students as they became the next generation of designers, architects and planners who without qualms began in earnest the destruction of our historic urban centers.

I failed to understand the broad sweep of this disdain for the past until I became the historic preservation representative and fine arts officer for the recent (2004-2013) renovations/restorations to the Old Executive Office Building – now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB).  Originally built as the State, War and Navy Building it was configured so that the administrative office suites for each department, where the Secretaries and staff sat, were located on the 2^nd floor, the piano nobile.  The highly decorated granite exterior expressed the importance of the second floor.  The interior decoration of these executive suites was especially noteworthy.  The Secretary of War’s Suite – the last to be completed in 1877 was a particularly grandiose architectural vision and is well recorded at the National Archives in College Park, MD where all the extant records of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury, including plans, photographs, letters, invoices and all correspondence are available for serious researchers or dilettantes like myself. 

A Venetian architect, Richard von Ezdorf, employed by the SAT under Mullet became the prime government designer.  Ezdorf had received his architectural training in Vienna and Prague when the most influential school of architecture in Europe (and hence America at that time) was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.[v]  Ezdorf supervised a team of decorators and craftsmen from a well-known New York decorating firm, Moeller and Sons.  Most of the decorators and artists in this firm were recent immigrants to America and had also trained in Europe.  Some had worked with Brumidi and Meigs to complete the Thomas U. Walter additions and dome at the US Capitol and were imminently qualified to install the original decorative program in the SOW suite.[vi]  What remained of this original decoration: classical ceiling murals, gold and silver leaf, trompe l’oeil painted friezes, Santo Domingo mahogany woodwork (originally French-polished), had all been painted white many times, probably beginning in 1949 or shortly thereafter.  Clearly the triumph of the modern movement (as stated by Gropius) rendered this virtuoso performance of the decorative arts an embarrassing extravagance without value, so that now instead of repairing and maintaining, it was painted over and disguised while much of the bas-relief hand cast plaster textured wall decoration was removed and discarded entirely – only black and white photos remain to record its existence.  The brutality of this treatment was repeated across the US (in the historic buildings that remained standing).  Oddly where the roots of the modern movement first appeared in France, Germany people never lost their admiration for cultural heritage.  It would be hard to imagine the exuberant interior decoration and murals at Versailles or Caserta[vii] painted white?   But American architects intoxicated with the stark vision of a Bauhaus future erasing a vainglorious past, government bureaucrats and related fields (all making decisions exceeding their expertise) scourged our historic built environment like barbarian hordes slashing and burning their way through irreplaceable works of art and architecture during the decades following WW2.  As these losses accumulated an outcry rose up among those who recognized the waste for what it was and Congress was persuaded to effect the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 which protects all historic buildings owned by the US government or anywhere federal tax dollars may be used to renovate.  This legislation continues to protect our most important buildings, artwork, burial sites etc from well-meaning but ignorant decision makers, property managers and contractors.[viii]

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[i] Architectural Ornament, Banishment and Return by Brent C. Bolin, W. W. Norton and Company:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Architectural_Ornament.html?id=y7t9lDZASDoC

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Altamira ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Lespugue

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_nationale_sup%C3%A9rieure_des_Beaux-Arts

[iii] The Foundations of Architecture, selections from the Dictionaire raisonne, Viollet-Le-Duc, George Braziller, Inc. http://www.amazon.com/The-Foundations-Architecture-Selections-Dictionnaire/dp/0807612448

[iv] Architects to the Nation, The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect’s Office, Toni Lee http://www.amazon.com/Architects-Nation-Decline-Supervising-Office/dp/0195128222

[v] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_nationale_sup%C3%A9rieure_des_Beaux-Arts

[vi] http://www.amazon.com/Architects-Nation-Decline-Supervising-Office/dp/0195128222

[vii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caserta

[viii] http://www.achp.gov/106summary.html

Urban Renewal or Urban Holocaust an Homage to Vince Scully and Jane Jacobs

Seeing the wealth of film coming from Hollywood over the last decade or so recording various aspects of WW2 like Saving Private Ryan and now the Monuments Men, depicting the horrific destruction of great cities in Europe and Asia, I am reminded of the incredible destruction wrought on our cities during the three or four decades following that most destructive international conflict.  Vast historic urban tracts were cleared away to accommodate what “enlightened” planners and architects deemed improvements.  This modern movement gained inspiration from a small group of essentially socialist designers in pre-Nazi Germany and France.  Their goal was to develop and build the structures, organized in patterns that would encourage the emergence of a new man – socialist man.  And here “they helped to lay part of the groundwork for the general destruction of American cities which some of their students would undertake in the following generation”.[1]  Enormous sections of ancient cities like Paris, Rome, Berlin were also to be demolished to accommodate the new built environment that would produce the new man.  Although most of these plans were, fortunately, never fully realized they have left not only their physical imprint but falsely informed a generation of planners and bureaucrats.  The hoped for evolution of socialist man did not magically take place as the utopian designers claimed would surely follow the construction of the massive new housing projects or “radiant cities” that were to be clad in gleaming new materials and known as “social condensers”[2]. 

In America where post war politics during the McCarthy terror forbade anything that might be deemed the slightest shade of “pink” only the exterior form of the bold new architecture was adopted – free from any possible socialist taint – now only a fashionable garment covering a new office building or department store.  Buildings were to be clothed in glass and/or concrete soaring many stories into the ether – standing on stilts with a fashionable abstract sculpture and fountain near the entry.  Not unlike the behavior of Australian aborigines during the era of the cargo cult religion, American architects believed that by imitating the exterior form of the new architecture as promoted by Corbusier and the Bauhaus they would gain the cache or “magic” the new forms possessed and in that way bring about social change - but instead of being incorporated into designs for factories and working class dormitories the new “style” would be used to “decorate” the towers of commerce and government for the wealthy and powerful.[3]  Our cities were to be sparkling crystals rising from what was the ferment of the now discarded and soon to be demolished historic urban centers. 

As historic urban centers began to decay a great exodus of white middle and upper class families began - to the bourgeois bliss of the horse car, streetcar and now automobile suburbs.  Financial institutions began “redlining” the now moldering and abandoned urban neighborhoods shortly after WW2 making it impossible to improve or maintain the housing stock in these decaying areas.  The FHA would not write mortgages for existing housing downtown so that thousands of soldiers returning from Europe or the Pacific could not begin families where they had grown up and where their families still lived.  The impotent and politically unrepresented population of the inner cities were now displaced as their housing became targets for massive demolition in order to support the rapid movement of commuters to and from their offices and to accommodate the largest construction project ever to have been devised: the Interstate Highway System - those Giedion-Corbusier thruways[4] envisioned by the wizards of the new reality.  Pharaohnic scale clearance programs begin to clear away the debris and prepare a clean palette for the designers of both the interstate highway system and the gleaming glass temples of Commerce.  Now that only the dispossessed and powerless lived downtown, destructive transportation and development schemes were much easier to realize than if other more powerful populations still resided in historic inner city neighborhoods.  Enter the Urban Apocalypse - an era of vast destruction to American cities, causing an instant devaluation of those already degraded properties under the roaring Giedion-Corbusier throughways and known by the euphemism: Urban Renewal.

Also see:   http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/FreewaysTear.html

“Traffic engineers and Corps officials haven't learned these lessons in isolation. Across the country and across many disciplines, people are re-evaluating post-World War II federal urban policies that had destructive effects on cities, despite their good intentions. This destructive legacy has five major ingredients:

•Federal welfare policy, which undermined city labor markets by paying people not to work and penalizing them if they did.

•Promulgation of model zoning codes that criminalized the mixed-use development patterns that were the norm in traditional American neighborhoods and main streets, replacing them with the now familiar pattern of sprawl: city housing, office, and retail separated into pods and sprawled across the land.

•The Federal Housing Authority created in 1934 helped popularize the low equity mortgage. FHA subsidized home ownership to millions of Americans - which was great, except that for many years FHA only subsidized newly constructed homes, meaning you couldn't use FHA to buy a house in your old neighborhood. FHA also required race segregation covenants until 1949 and allowed them until 1962.

•The urban renewal program subsidized wholesale demolition and clearance of urban neighborhoods. In 1945, many European cities were wastelands. Berlin, for example, was 80 percent destroyed at the end of the war. Thirty years later, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, and Hamburg were all rebuilt cities while U.S. cities looked as though World War II had happened in the United States.

•Welfare, zoning, FHA, and urban renewal all did their damage, but the most destructive program was the federal government's gross over-subsidy of high-speed roads that cut through the fabric of U.S. cities. The federal government paid 90 percent, states 10 percent, and locals 0 percent. This funding mix was so compelling that few cities opposed freeway construction in the early years of the program.”

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[1] American Architecture and Urbanism, V. Scully, pg. 180

[2] “Central to the idea of the social condenser is the premise that architecture has the ability to influence social behavior.  The intention of the social condenser was to influence the design of public spaces, with a goal of breaking down perceived social hierarchies in an effort to create socially equitable spaces”. Wikipedia

[3] Wikipedia, Cargo cult – see metaphorical uses of the term

[4] Scully, pg 180 – the full quote expresses the righteous fury of all who understood the extent and permanence of the losses from both Urban Renewal and the Interstate Highway System:  “The destruction of Pennsylvania Station, Gropius’ own coup de grace to Park Avenue in the Pan American Building, the abortive attempt on the New Haven Post Office (to move once again to the provinces), were a few among many grotesque results of that iconoclastic fury, and to them hecatombs of unnecessary victims of the Corbusier-Giedion throughways must also be joined”.