Chapter 24: Notes

Footnote 511:

‘Historicism’ is a clumsy term matched by no viable adjective. It
does, however, express more accurately than ‘traditionalism’,
‘revivalism’, or ‘eclecticism’ a certain aspect of architecture which
was common throughout the last five hundred years, and not unknown in
early ages. Quite simply, it means the re-use of forms borrowed from
the architectural styles of the past, usually in more or less new
combinations. It is late in this book to introduce a definition; but
historicism is always so much taken for granted in discussing the
architecture of the nineteenth century that it is only after the
appearance as an alternative of exclusive modernism, rejecting all
borrowed forms, that the older attitude needs to be isolated in order
to discuss its continuance in this century. Characteristically, the
architecture of two-thirds of the period covered by this book balanced
a moderate sort of modernism with more or less of historicism. This is
as true of most of the novel projects of Ledoux in the 1780s as it is
of a considerable part of the work of the first generation of modern
architects. However, only the traditional architects remained firmly
attached to the concept of historicism in the twentieth century; men
like Behrens and Perret were, through much of their careers at least,
in highly significant revolt against it, quite as Ledoux had been in
his day.

Footnote 512:

See Östberg, R., _The Stockholm Town Hall_, Stockholm, 1929.

Footnote 513:

The decline is perhaps to be related at its start to the death of
their associate Joseph M. Wells in 1890. Never a member of the firm,
he had nevertheless been personally responsible for the design of the
Villard houses (Plate 109B) that had opened the academic phase of the
firm’s career. Later, the death of White and the retirement of McKim
in the early years of the new century removed the two controlling
personalities from the firm. Henceforth the office was a
‘plan-factory’, with high professional standards undoubtedly, but
without direction other than that already established in the late
eighties and nineties by the founders. In 1961 the firm finally came
to an end with the death of J. K. Smith, the only surviving partner
who had known the founders.

Footnote 514:

J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920), a pupil of Gilbert who had worked with
Garnier on the Opéra and succeeded Labrouste at the Bibliothèque
Nationale, had at least as high a reputation, and was the teacher of
several prominent English and American architects. His severe academic
style, emulated later by his Anglo-Saxon pupils, was well established
by the time he designed the Faculty of Medicine at Bordeaux in the
early nineties. Nénot was one of Pascal’s French pupils.

Footnote 515:

William Adams Delano (b. 1874) was a pupil of Laloux; Chester Holmes
Aldrich (b. 1878) was also trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. For an
attempt to reassess the ‘traditional’ houses of this period, see Lane,
J., ‘The Period House in the Nineteen-Twenties’, _Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians_, XX (1961), 185-90.

Footnote 516:

The controversy as to which firm should receive credit for the design
of the Grand Central Station once waxed hot. The organization of the
tremendous complex was probably the work of Charles A. Reed (?-1911)
and Allen H. Stem (1856-1931), who had already built other big
stations in Troy, N.Y., in 1901-4 and in Tacoma in 1909-11—as,
moreover, their successors, Felheimer & Wagner, have done also:
Buffalo and North Station, Boston, both begun in 1927, and Cincinnati
in 1929-33. Whitney Warren (1864-1943) and Charles D. Wetmore
(1866-1941), who also worked with Reed & Stem on the Detroit station
completed in 1913, were doubtless more responsible for the dignified
and well-scaled detailing. See Marshall, D., _Grand Central_, New
York, 1946.

Footnote 517:

Books of the period, such as _American Architecture_ of 1928 by the
distinguished architectural historian Fiske Kimball, or _American
Architecture of Today_, also of 1928, by the then Dean of the Harvard
University School of Architecture, G. H. Edgell, offer the later
writer very little assistance. Kimball in the twenties was too ready
to consider the continuance of the academic tradition assured—his
chapter on Sullivan and Wright was entitled ‘The Lost Cause’—while
Edgell offers such a miscellany of buildings that no clear picture
emerges. Several attempts within the period to select its major
monuments fixed on much the same lot as are given prominence here; but
such selections hardly help to organize the work of the day in
historical terms.

Footnote 518:

See Weisman, W., ‘Towards a New Environment: the Way of the Price
Mechanism; the Rockefeller Centre’, _Architectural Review_, CVIII
(1950), 399-405; ‘Who Designed Rockefeller Center?’, _Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians_, X (1951), 11-17; and ‘The First
“Mature” Skyscraper’, _Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians_, XVIII (1959), 54-9.

Footnote 519:

This firm were the successors of Richardson, and Henry Richardson
Shepley, now its head, is Richardson’s grandson. See Forbes, J. D.,
‘Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, Architects—An
Introduction’, _Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_,
XVII (1958), 19-31.

Footnote 520:

‘Compositionalism’ has been suggested by Colin Rowe as a name for the
style-phase with which this section deals. Composition was then
conceived by many architects and theorists as an absolute to which the
re-use of any sort of stylistic forms could be accommodated. It is at
least open to suspicion, for example, that Rogers’s Pierson College at
Yale was designed originally with Gothic forms and then re-cast as
Neo-Georgian. Later eyes than our own will doubtless find it possible
to identify the period characteristics of traditional work of the
twenties in the way many critics already feel able to do with the
nineteenth-century revivals. The period-designation ‘President
Harding’ may some day perhaps be as meaningful as ‘General Grant’, if
hardly comparable to ‘Victorian’!

Footnote 521:

Harvey Wiley Corbett (b. 1873), a pupil of Pascal at the École des
Beaux-Arts, was probably the designer.

Footnote 522:

Carrère was dead by this time, but the firm name remained unchanged;
as has been mentioned earlier, Professor Sir Charles Reilly was
consultant, and he probably made some real contribution to the design.

Footnote 523:

C.-F. Mewès (1858-1947) and Arthur Joseph Davis (1878-1951), both
pupils of Pascal, like Corbett.

Footnote 524:

Gropius is very insistent on the desirability of anonymous team-work
in architecture. His TAC, the one-time Tecton group in London, and
other firms with similar names are examples of this ideal which aims,
of course, at something rather different from the anonymity of the
large commercial firms. Theirs is fact rather than ideal.

Footnote 525:

See Weisman, W., ‘Group Practice’, _Architectural Review_, CXIV
(1953), 145-51.

Footnote 526:

Sir John J. Burnet (1857-1938), another pupil of Pascal at the École;
Thomas S. Tait (1882-1954).

Footnote 527:

See Pevsner, N., ‘Building with Wit; the Architecture of Sir E.
Lutyens’, _Architectural Review_, CX (1951), 217-25.

Footnote 528:

See Purdom, C. B., _The Garden City_, London, 1913; and Culpin, E. G.,
_The Garden City Movement Up-to-Date_, London, 1913.

Footnote 529:

See Macfadyen, D., _Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning
Movement_, London, 1933.

Footnote 530:

See Unwin, R., _Town Planning and Modern Architecture at the Hampstead
Garden Suburb_, London, 1909.

Footnote 531:

Some of the other large buildings were the work of Sir Herbert Baker,
who was also responsible for another dominion capital at Pretoria in
South Africa. Of his rival’s intervention at New Delhi Lutyens
remarked characteristically, ‘It was my Bakerloo’.

Footnote 532:

See Drysdale, G., ‘The Work of Leonard Stokes’, _Journal of the Royal
Institute of British Architects_, XXXIV (1927), 163-77, and Roberts,
H. V. M., ‘Leonard Aloysius Stokes’, _Architectural Review_, C (1946),
173-7.

Footnote 533:

The New-Zealand-born Connell’s High-and-Over in Bucks of 1927 is very
superior, however, to Tait’s Le Chateau at Silverend in Essex, and a
year earlier.

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