The 1902 plan to revamp and expand the National Mall in Washington, DC, was the product of a commission of prominent Americans. Three of them worked closely together to produce the hugely successful 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—architect Charles McKim, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architect-planner Daniel H. Burnham. The fourth member was landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., whose father designed the fair.
Veterans of the Chicago exposition were also deeply involved in the creation of the Lincoln Memorial, the highlight of the expanded mall. Henry Bacon designed the exterior and Daniel Chester French created the bas reliefs on the upper frieze. Two 60-foot-long murals were the work of Chicagoan Jules Guerin, who, a few years later, created the watercolors for the Plan of Chicago.
Today, the memorial is an iconic American structure, but, initially, its design was strongly opposed, particularly by prominent Chicago voices, notes Witold Rybczynski in The Story of Architecture.
“ ‘Architecture, be it known, is dead,’ fulminated Louis Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright called the idea of commemorating Lincoln by a Greek temple a ‘depravity.’ The Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects passed a resolution condemning Bacon’s design as ‘purely Greek and entirely un-American.’ ”
Despite such contemporary complaints, Rybczynski, the Canadian author of such popular social histories as Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986) and City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World (1995), includes the Lincoln Memorial among the hundred or so buildings he spotlights in his lively, deeply researched and sensitive book on architecture’s history.
With the Lincoln Memorial, Bacon created “something remarkable: an enduring national icon that spoke to succeeding generations of his fellow citizens.” Rybczynski writes that, although named for the president, the memorial doesn’t commemorate Lincoln’s life, work or tragic death. It is, instead, an unusual sort of war memorial.
“Bacon created an architectural metaphor for a nation reunited after a harrowing civil war. That required presenting Lincoln both as a man—the tired leader—and as a national symbol, not deifying or canonizing him, but raising him to an almost mythic level. That is where classical architecture proved invaluable.”
A Story Rather Than a History
Books that tackle the history of architecture tend to be large and long, and cram as many facts, dates, elevation views and images as possible between the covers. They seem to be aimed at experts and at those who want to become experts.
Rybczynski has written what is essentially a collection of linked essays in which he elegantly discusses one, two or a handful of structures that relate to each other.
By contrast, Rybczynski has written what is essentially a collection of linked essays in which he elegantly discusses one, two or a handful of structures that relate to each other. His audience is the general public, and that may be why he calls his book a “story” about architecture as opposed to a “history.”
Also, by calling his book a story, Rybczynski isn’t tied to the past. Indeed, the final section of his book, called After Modernism, covers the past half century and deals with myriad architects, buildings and styles, taking about one-sixth of a book spanning nearly 7,000 years.
The Story of Architecture is made up of 39 chapters, distributed in six sections. The other five sections are titled The Ancients, Middle Ages, A Reimagined World, The First Moderns and New Building. The first chapter deals with a very old tomb site, and here is how Rybczynski begins his account:
“One of the oldest surviving buildings in the world stands on a windswept Brittany headland overlooking the English Channel. Construction began around 4800 BC during the Neolithic period, the end of the Stone Age. Known as the Cairn of Barnenez, it is a cumulus—that is, a burial mound.”
The cairn is a human-made stone pile, 240 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 30 feet high, containing 11 tombs built over a period of 600 years. Although simple in its engineering, the cairn required a great amount of work from a great many people, proving, Rybczynski notes, the old truism that architecture is a social art.
“Like many monumental works of architecture, it is first the size that impresses. The cairn makes us feel small, but at the same time proud — humans like us built this. The cairn shares another quality with many works of architecture: it takes its place in the landscape, both standing out and fitting in.”
Any reader knowing a modicum of world history is likely to be familiar with a good number of the hundred or so buildings that Rybczynski discusses in The Story of Architecture, such as the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, Hagia Sophia, Notre Dame in Paris, the Crystal Palace and, in Chicago, the Mies van der Rohe-designed 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments.
That structure, marketed as the Glass House and completed in 1951, was utterly unlike anything else on the lakefront or anywhere else at the time. Instead of brick or stone, “twenty-seven-story steel frame was wrapped in glass.” It had no patterned spandrels, no art, no evocative spire.
“It was—a box,” says Rybczynski with a flat starkness that matches the building which became the model for hundreds of American skyscrapers over the next half century.
“Like Bramante’s Tempietto, the stripped-down glass towers on Lake Shore Drive changed the course of architecture,” Rybczynski writes. Even so, it seems that he isn’t sold on its value. While not directly criticizing the Mies approach, he asks pointed questions, such as: “But is a building clad entirely in glass really logical in the American Midwest, with its brutally hot summers and cold, windy winters?”
Cobalt Windows and Huge Owls
One of the many pleasures of The Story of Architecture is the rich and vibrant way that Rybczynski describes beautiful buildings, particularly those he loves, such as the Royal Abbey Church of St. Denis. Completed in 1144, the church features ribbed vaults that enabled the builders to fill the walls with windows:
“This simple change had the far-reaching consequence of flooding the church interior with light. And not just any light, colored light… Sugar imported craftsmen from Italy and Bohemia who created stained-glass windows illustrating Old and New Testament themes and in the process developed a new cobalt glass that became known as ‘Saint-Denis blue.’ To those used to murky church interiors the effect must have seemed magical.”
“Huge cast-aluminum barn owls, traditional symbols of wisdom, are perched on the eaves of the library, and a large horned owl hovers at the top of the main façade.”
Another example is Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Center at 400 S. State St., designed by Thomas H. Beeby and completed in 1991. “Beeby’s concept for the library,” writes Rybczynski, “was simple: six levels of book stacks and reading areas were organized like an old-fashioned department store, with escalators serving each floor.”
In contrast to the Miesian approach, the architect filled the structure with ornament, such as cast-stone festoons between windows, medallions “with puff-cheeked cherubs drolly personifying the Windy City,” and window spandrels of Midwestern sheaves or cornstalks. The most dramatic decorations were the work of sculptor Raymond Kaskey: “Huge cast-aluminum barn owls, traditional symbols of wisdom, are perched on the eaves of the library, and a large horned owl hovers at the top of the main façade.” The great horned owl, he notes, has a wingspan of twenty feet.
Anyone in or around Chicago can easily visit the Washington Library and Mies’s Lake Shore Drive buildings to see for themselves. However, most of the structures that Rybczynski mentions are far away and scattered across the globe.
For the armchair architectural buff or art fan or history aficionado, The Story of Architecture is a great way to visit them—and Rybczynski is a great companion to have on the trip.
The Story of Architecture is available at bookstores and through the Yale University Press website.