How to Study Architecture by Charles H. Caffin (free reads .txt) 📕

title="{469}"> desired to embody its sense of beauty in the home. Such people have co-operated with the architects who are no longer designing merely for them but also with them. The result has been an increased attention to the question of fitness; fitness of design to the character of the locality; to the conditions of climate and to the various needs and necessities arising out of the modern circumstances of living. To cite but one example: the problem of domestic help in America is so urgent that labour-saving considerations have affected the planning of the homes, tending to concentration rather than diffusion in the arrangement of rooms, service offices, staircases, and so-forth; and out of this organic lay-out of the interior a suitable exterior treatment has developed.

Thus, while the architect may still be adapting motives derived from old styles, he is no longer doing so for the main purpose of reproducing a given style; he has ceased to be a stylistic pedant. He adapts with flexibility and freedom; using a style in so far as it conforms to the character of his plan. The plan is his own creation and, if in the development of his design he feels the fitness of adapting, he adapts creatively. The result is that, since the domestic architecture of the past has been made to contribute to the needs of the present, a new kind of domestic architecture has been evolved in America, characterised by variety of design, originality of treatment, and, more and more, by a regard for that fitness to the special requirements of each problem, which is the foundation of every true advance in architectural design.

Office Buildings.—Side by side with this progress toward originality in domestic architecture has been a similar tendency in that of public buildings, especially the office building. The office building is distinctively a feature of American cities, because it grew out of conditions in certain cities which imperatively demanded some such expedient; and, having in these cases proved its fitness to business situations, has been adopted elsewhere. Though the earliest of these tall buildings, characteristically known as “sky-scrapers,” were erected in Chicago, the spot which now contains the greatest aggregation of them is Manhattan Island, the section of New York City bounded by the North, East, and Harlem Rivers, in which the business of the city is concentrated.

In the situation thus existing was an area, limited in size and incapable of being enlarged, while the business demands upon it were continually expanding, in the way both of increased accommodation and adequate financial return upon the value and cost of the land. It was impossible to meet these conditions by spreading out laterally; the only alternative was to build skyward. By the time the necessity of this was realised, two inventions made it practicable—an improved method of rolling steel and the development of elevator connection. The problem of accessibility was solved by the latter; that of economical and efficient construction by the former. Accordingly, once again, as so often in the history of architecture, practical expediency, methods of building, and the material employed were operative in evolving a new kind of form.

“Steel-Cage” Construction.—The method of building is that of the so-called “steel-cage” construction: a new application of the principle of “post and beam” construction, in which the vertical and horizontal members are composed of steel and riveted together. The foundation posts are anchored to the ground, which in the case of Manhattan Island mostly consists of a very hard species of rock. The posts are connected at the top by cross beams, thus forming the skeleton frame of a complete story, upon which other similar skeleton stories are erected, their number varying up to the present extreme in the Woolworth Building, of fifty-one stories. This mode of construction does away with the necessity of external buttressing; the strain is one of tension on the ground, the problem of wind pressure being met by the introduction of interior cross-braces. By this system also the downward pressure is distributed throughout the several stories, each carrying its own weight of exterior and interior walls; so that, in the process of construction it is not unusual to see some of the upper stories apparently completed, while lower ones are still in a skeleton state, awaiting the arrival of the material that is to sheathe them.

The character of the sheathing, representing the design of the building from the outside, will be considered presently, for of primary and essential importance is the character of the interior. Here is manifested at its highest the creative originality of the American architect in constructive adaptability to the needs and necessities of the problem. These office buildings and their counterparts in domestic life—the tall apartment-houses—represent the economic tendency of this age in its progress through combination to possible co-operation. They also embody the latest achievements of science and invention, applicable to the requirements of convenience and health. They are thus in a distinctively modern way, as well as with remarkable completeness, organic architectural structures. In a singular degree, they are self-efficient. Their cellular arrangement comprises an elaborate aggregation of members, each having its special function; while the whole is provided with its own system of power plants for the supply of heat, air, light, and locomotion. They are in a way the equivalent of the Roman basilica and insula, developed to that higher degree of complexity that the modern age demands and modern progress in science and invention has made possible. In their organic completeness one discovers conspicuous evidence that architecture, after a long period of revivals, has recovered its creativeness.

Exterior Design of Office Buildings.—It is in studying the exterior design of these sky-scrapers that one finds the progress toward originality has been more halting and uncertain. The explanation of this cuts deep down to the fundamentals of all progress in art and life. It is out of man’s needs and necessities, physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, that he is impelled to advance, and the advance is most sure according as it most closely fits the circumstances. In so far as the architects were dealing with the practical problems of the interior of these buildings they conformed consistently to the demands of fitness, and their advance was sure. But when they approached the problem of the exterior, the necessities of which are few and comparatively unexacting, the logic of fitness was apt to be superseded by mere caprice of choice. They experimented, for the most part rather aimlessly, with various historic styles of treatment; clapping on to the façade embellishments derived from Roman, Italian, Renaissance, Venetian Gothic, and so forth; treating the design mainly as a matter of added ornamentation instead of something to be evolved out of the special character of the structure.

We must remind ourselves that the façades of these buildings, whether the material be stone or marble, brick, terra-cotta, or reinforced concrete, are virtually only a sheathing to the actual organic structure inside of them. They correspond to the clothes on a human body. There are certain necessities to be served in the case of the building: on the one hand, financial; on the other constructive. The investors demand a certain return on the cost or value of the site, which determines the aggregate of rentable floor space, and hence the height of the building and the amount to be expended on the façades. Again, the lay-out of the floors calls for a certain quantity of window-spaces and there is the further constructive necessity that, while parts of the building may under certain restrictions overhang the sidewalks, nothing may project over adjoining property. Within these limitations the architect is usually free to adopt such design for the exterior as he chooses.

In the early days of the sky-scraper, which coincided with the period of more or less imitative reproduction of old models, the architect found himself confronted with an entirely new problem in design. His classical studies had familiarised him with buildings comparatively low and characteristically horizontal in design. His experience of Italian Renaissance had involved buildings, still inconsiderable in height though they included several stories, and had led him to be pre-occupied with details of design, especially with the effectiveness of a cornice. On the other hand, the characteristic of the new problem was vertical instead of horizontal, and on a scale that gave predominance to mass over detail; while the specific detail of the crowning cornice could only be fully adopted in the case of structures that did not abut on adjoining property.

Height—the Principle of the Design.—But, for a time, the architect failed to grasp the newness of his problem. He was confronted with height, but did not start with it as a principle of design. Instead, he tried to accommodate the old principles to the new conditions; experimenting with various methods of embellishment near the ground and at the top, and treating the main, intermediate part as merely a repetition of floors.

Gradually, however, he realised the fact that the new buildings actually presented a new problem which could only be solved by taking the vertical principle as the basis of the design. So he bethought himself of a precedent in the column. It is the vertical member in the Classic design, and comprises three subdivisions: base, shaft and capital. The base might be emulated in the treatment of the lower part of the façade, which generally encloses a bank or some feature of special importance, surmounted by a mezzanine floor. The counterpart of the column’s shaft was the repetition of stories, while the effect of the capital could be reproduced in some emphatic crowning treatment. And those architects who most logically adopted the precedent of the column, recognising that the beauty of a tall building must be evolved from its special characteristic of height and that the beauty would be enhanced by a suggestion of height growing up in its own strength, abandoned the mere repetition of stories for a vertical treatment that would emphasise the suggestion of upward growth.

In some cases they applied to the masonry between the windows continuous bands of vertical ornament, projecting in the nature of shafting or piers, which by their effect of light and shade carry the eye upward, giving to the whole structure a suggestion of soaring. Or, in other cases, they so proportioned the width of the windows to the width of the masonry that the latter, especially at the angles of the building, gave the suggestion of soaring piers. Meanwhile there still continued to be architects who ignored these devices, treating the windows and masonry solely as recurring horizontal features, with the result that their repetition contradicts both the vertical feeling and that of upward growth.

By degrees, however, as the principles of verticality and growth came to be generally accepted, it was recognised that the analogy of a tall building to a Classic column was fallacious, since the building should involve a complete design, while the column is only a constituent member of a structure and one, too, that is designed to support a horizontal member. Possibly the realisation of this was assisted by the difficulty of treating the top of the building. For the most frequent conditions permitted the projection of a cornice only on one side, that of the front side of the building, where it sticks out like a prodigious mantelshelf. That architects should have persisted so long in reproducing this futile expedient seems only to be explained by a habit of seeing a design on the drawing board as an elevation to be viewed from one fixed point, instead of as a structural composition, occupying space and to be seen from a variety of directions. Moreover, it is a fact that, as one walks along a street, it is the side of a building that is chiefly and longest visible, while, by the time one is opposite the front, the narrowness of