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    Masterpieces of American Architecture
    Masterpieces of American Architecture
    Masterpieces of American Architecture
    Ebook323 pages1 hour

    Masterpieces of American Architecture

    By Edward Warren Hoak and Willis Humphrey Church

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    About this ebook

    From the golden age of American architecture comes this splendid survey, documenting scores of masterpieces built between 1900 and 1930. More than 260 illustrations include plans, sections, exterior and interior details, and photographs. A sampling of featured buildings include Lincoln Memorial, Boston Public Library, Tribune Tower, and Woolworth Building.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateFeb 20, 2013
    ISBN9780486147277
    Masterpieces of American Architecture

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      Masterpieces of American Architecture - Edward Warren Hoak

      1913

      PREFACE

      IN THE LIBRARY of an architect a book is essentially a tool, and, as such, its value depends upon its utility—upon the worth and interest of its subject-matter, and the clarity with which its material is presented. In preparing this collection of executed work, the authors of this book, Messrs. Hoak and Church, have shown a very clear understanding of its requirements, and both in the selection of their material and in their exposition of it have displayed a discrimination and intelligence that is worthy of very high praise. Thus, although forewords and prefaces belong more or less to the class of literary superfluities, it may not be out of place to describe briefly what their methods were, and what purposes governed the application of them.

      The collection offers a summary of architectural work representing the highest achievement of contemporary American architecture in certain divisions of the architectural field, such as Libraries, Churches, Memorials, etc. At the request of the authors, each member of a group of architects acting as jury supplied the names of the various buildings which seemed to him to exemplify the best work in these departments, and the buildings illustrated in this book were selected by comparison from the lists thus provided. This jury was composed of the following men: Chester H. Aldrich, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Ralph Adams Cram, Paul P. Cret, Raymond M. Hood, William Mitchell Kendall, H. Van Buren Magonigle, the late William Rutherford Mead, the late Milton B. Medary, Harry Sternfeld. Having been a member of the jury myself, I can hardly dwell upon the competence of the judges, but I can at least vouch for their impartiality.

      In designating only such work as typifies the best in contemporary American architecture, all considerations other than that of the absolute architectural value of a building were set aside. Works significant chiefly for their historical interest, as marking the beginning of some movement or school, or as containing germs developed in later building, though rightly included in a history of architecture, were discarded here as unsuitable in a book which had been planned as an anthology of matured artistic achievement. For the same reason, although this collection represents contemporary work, those buildings have likewise been disregarded whose interest lies merely in their expression of the modern dogma, in its narrowest sense. There have been many architectural books among those recently published that have based the selection of their material solely upon its exemplification of the canons of the new art. These books have their use and their public, and I am far from wishing to disparage them; but the fact remains that, being compiled without a judgment ripened by time, they soon show the defects of their origin; the work that they illustrate quickly loses much of its fortuitous interest, and in ten years time the majority of them will be lying forgotten on the upper library shelves, collecting the dust of oblivion. Such is the inevitable fate of books written in the heat of enthusiasm for novelty, whose authors, in their zealous partisanship of some whim of fashion, are blind to what is really significant in the new, and accept the mediocre indiscriminately with the good. The process of selection is always slow, even for those whose judgment is guided by deep knowledge, and there are few people who are capable of penetrating below the mere surface decoration of a building. A large number of editors of architectural books have little idea of where to look for the really significant formal changes that make a building typical of a particular period. Such fundamental features as its conception, its adaptation of plan to purpose, the translation of this plan into sections and elevations, and the rhythm of the whole as an expression of its inherent purpose, are beyond the reach of their critical understanding; so they content themselves with the enunciation of some arbitrary canon of beauty, not troubling to qualify it with the warning that they might very judiciously borrow from the railroad companies: Good for one month only from date of issue. It is admissible for us to draw up our little formulæ if it pleases us to do so, but we cannot claim yet to have invented one large enough to embrace all the conditions out of which an artistic work of the first rank has been evoked. Possibly it was with the consciousness of this in mind that Socrates observed, Architecture and the other sciences analogous to it are all forms of knowledge accessible to the human intelligence. But what is greatest in them the gods have reserved for themselves.

      The examples illustrated in this book were selected, therefore, without any consideration of the fashionable dogmas of yesterday, to-day or to-morrow. In these pages one will find the reflections of many tendencies, for in the past thirty years there have been many and varied influences at work, and no artist entirely escapes the influences of his environment; but one will find too, we hope, that the work represented here has a value independent of—I might say, in spite of—these birthmarks. Some of these buildings have been standing for more than a quarter of a century; some were built but yesterday. The fact that the older ones still hold an appeal for an enlightened public seems to prove in them that soundness of artistic fibre which always meets age with grace.

      The authors of the book have displayed the same good judgment in the presentation of their material as in the selection of it. In supplementing their photographic illustrations with plans and detailed drawings, they have shown a thorough appreciation of what is not only most interesting to an architect, but also most necessary for his intelligent appreciation of other men’s work. For all its literal accuracy, the camera can only partially describe—as we often realize when for the first time we see in the flesh a person known hitherto only from photographs—and it is impossible to form a clear conception of an architectural composition and study it as a whole unless one sees the drawings of plans and sections. The value of measured drawings has been sufficiently proven by the Letarouilly—a book which was the architect’s livre de chevet during the period when harmonious proportions and rhythms of composition first began to be understood in this country as elements of beauty, and American architecture came of age. In these geometrical drawings details are presented at a scale large enough to allow a full appreciation of the refinements of study by which a motive, perhaps commonplace in itself, may be molded to the subtle expressiveness attained by the great artists of the Italian Renaissance. The careful presentation of the handling of detail enables one to follow an architectural design as he would follow the development of a simple musical theme into the rich yet ordered variation of a classic symphony.

      I am aware that the detailed presentation of a subject has been objected to on the ground that it tends to weaken originality by offering too much opportunity for copying. But I must confess that to me this argument is not very convincing. Carried to its logical conclusion, indeed, it advocates the destruction of all our libraries!—a severity which hardly the sternest of us would support to-day, whatever the habits and sentiments of our ancestors. In point of fact, the so-called menace to originality in the copy is not a very serious one. To begin with, the men who, for lack of natural ability, really try to imitate, have on the face of it very little originality to be endangered. Moreover, these imitators cannot produce an exact copy, however hard they may try; but, omitting this detail or that whose importance they are quite unable to estimate, they produce in the end nothing more than a rather inept caricature of their model. On the other hand, the men who have originality will always disdain literal imitation, and there is little danger of vitiating genuine creative ability by overabundance of architectural data. These men make use of their documents to find a point of departure, not a resting place. They treat the forms perfected by their predecessors as so much gain, using them as a traveller setting out to explore some virgin country might take a train to its borders, finding little advantage in walking, when he can save time and strength for heavier labors by riding

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