FROM Indian lodge to skyscraper, the buildings of New York State have recorded and symbolized its dramatic history. Fire, the elements, and men have destroyed most of the early structures, but today those remaining are increasingly cherished and preserved, not in a spirit of romantic sentimentalizing, but rather with the realization that the essential character of New York culture is most clearly materialized in its architecture.
York State building begins with the forest-dwelling Iroquois, who, with stone knife and ax, framed their rude huts with pairs of light poles sunk in the ground, bent across and lashed in a series of light arches; horizontal pieces braced the structure longitudinally; overlapping bark slabs formed walls and roof. In size these dwellings ranged from single-family units to great 200-foot ‘long houses’ accommodating whole clans. After 1700, Indians often adopted the white man’s system of log construction, witness the Seneca Council House in Letchworth State Park.
The first shelters of the Dutch consisted of large square pits dug in banks, roofed with timbers and green sod, floored with planks, and lined with bark. When other tasks permitted, these temporary dugouts were replaced by tiny one-story-and-garret cabins of logs or boards, with central hearths and smoke holes at the ridge of the thatched roofs. Mud and masonry chimneys were added later.
As soon as possible the Dutch erected permanent dwellings, several of which survive. Although bricks were sometimes imported from Holland, kilns were established in New Amsterdam by 1628 and in Beverwyck (Albany) soon after. Conforming to Dutch standards, these brick came to be called ‘Holland’ brick to distinguish them from the larger ‘English’ variety. The name has led to the usually erroneous belief that all so-called Holland brick were brought from the old country.
In form as in material, the early brick structures of Manhattan and Beverwyck preserved the medieval flavor of their Netherlandish prototypes. The typical two-story-and-loft town house faced its entrance stoop and stepped gable toward the street. The farmhouses of Rensselaerswyck, such as the Jan Breese House, built just south of Rensselaer in 1723, employ the one-and-a-half-story form common in all the Colonies, but borrow their steeply pitched gable roofs and wrought-iron beam anchors from urban cousins. Bricks of contrasting color were often introduced to record a date or create a decorative pattern.
Dutch dwellings in Ulster and Dutchess Counties were commonly of stone and had low-pitched gable roofs. John Brinckerhoff’s house (1738), east of Fishkill, and William Stoutenburgh’s home (1750), in East Park, are typical. Rockland County farmhouses, like those of northern New Jersey, reproduce the form and arrangement and the projecting ‘flying-gutter’ of the European peasant cottages of the Flemish farmers who settled this region. The rich rose-brown sandstone used in these buildings adds an attractive color note. Major John Smith’s house (1735?), at Germonds, south of New City, is typical.
Under English rule, Dutch habits and traditions suffered little change, but increasing prosperity brought a demand for larger and more fashionable homes. Deeper plans produced single-pitched roofs of excessive height, as in the Hasbrouck House at New Paltz, but that difficulty was overcome after 1725 by the adoption of the New England two-pitched gambrel. The handsome brick house built in Beacon about 1750 by Abraham De Peyster, wealthy New York merchant, illustrates this aggrandizing and refining process. The main story with its central stair hall flanked by pairs of spacious, high-ceilinged parlors rests upon a high stone basement with service and servants’ quarters. Beneath the broad gambrel an amazing number of large bedrooms are found. Cornice, doorway, staircase, and interior trim followed the new Renaissance fashion.
Several venerable Dutch barns are hidden in out-of-the-way corners of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. Their capacious square interiors are reached by a large wagon door in the center of the gable wall, while two small doors at the corners lead to cattle stalls under the low eaves. The Wemple Barn (1734), at Fort Hunter, and the Van Wyck Barn, south of Fishkill, exemplify the characteristic heavy timber construction.
The curious octagonal churches of the early Dutch period have all disappeared. Even the Sleepy Hollow Dutch Reformed Church, in North Tarrytown, whose rectangular stone walls date from 1699, has undergone such extensive alterations that its original form is almost unrecognizable. Later churches, such as that at Fishkill, built in 1784, adopt Georgian forms. Governmental buildings, known only from old prints, were but slight modifications of large town houses.
During the eighteenth century, English culture and architecture was largely confined to New York City and a few great manor houses along the Hudson and the Mohawk. In them was reflected the gracious, formal manner developed in England under the Restoration, Queen Anne, and the first three Georges. Fort Johnson (1749) not only followed the new fashion in its two-story rectangular stone mass, its symmetrically disposed windows, and its hipped roof with level eaves-line, but actually imported from London paneling, hardware, and other fittings. Albany’s Schuyler Mansion, built of brick in 1762, with its square plan, its hipped gambrel roof with Chippendale railing, its spacious halls and rooms, and its richly carved stairrail, demands a prominent place on any list of great Colonial homes. Georgian additions or refittings, as at the Philipse Manor House, Yonkers, or the Glen-Sanders House, Scotia, often brought earlier dwellings stylistically up to date.
All in all, conservative half-Dutch New York spurned the elaborate academicisms so popular in New England and Virginia. An exception is the graceful Robert Morris (Jumel) House (1765), in New York City, which has the only pre-Revolutionary two-story ‘colossal’ portico in the Colonies.
In the smaller houses of farm and village, the English introduced the wood-frame-and-clapboard system of construction so prevalent in their New England colonies. From the simple salt-boxes of Long Island, related directly to Yankee prototypes, to the larger homesteads, such as Johnson Hall (1762), at Johnstown, carpenter and joiner everywhere adapted Georgian masonry details to wood with the light, gracious touch characteristic of Georgian Colonial.
The English, by direct subsidy, encouraged the establishment of Episcopal churches in the province, but architecturally the new congregations matured slowly. The first structure of Trinity Church, New York City, was built in 1696, but not until 1764 did Thomas McBean give the city its first authentic Georgian church, St. Paul’s Chapel, directly inspired by Gibbs’s St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, London. St. Paul’s, Eastchester, 1761, and St. George’s, Schenectady, partly 1766, are smaller and simpler, but still unmistakably Georgian Colonial. Several eighteenth-century Anglican chapels are extant. Christ Church, Duanesburg, though built in 1793, has a typical nonliturgical meetinghouse plan, and retains all the original furnishings. St. Peter’s (1767), Van Cortlandtville, Trinity Church in Fishkill, begun about 1769, and the often altered Caroline Church (1729), Setauket, Long Island, are modest and charming examples.
Other ethnic groups made important architectural contributions to eighteenth-century New York. At Fort Niagara, the fortress built about 1725 by the military architect, Gaspard de Lery, simulates a French provincial manor house. The Huguenot-Dutch houses clustered together at New Paltz form an ensemble which in its humbler way is as informative and precious as Virginia’s Williamsburg. The Palatine buildings along the Schoharie and Mohawk give no such cumulative effect, yet the same forthright character is apparent in ‘Fort’ Frey (1739), the Palatine Church (1770), and Schoharie’s Old Stone Fort (1772).
The successful termination of the War for Independence not only created a new Nation but by the defeat of the Iroquois also gave New York a new frontier. For 40 years a stream of New Englanders poured westward and northward, intent on carving out of the wilderness a new Yankee domain. Symbolic of this struggle was that product of the woodsman’s ax and jackknife, the ubiquitous log house, exemplified by Mary Jemison’s cabin in Letchworth State Park. Some foresighted settlers took along prefabricated timber-framed houses, as did Neil McMullin, who in 1796 transported a house frame from Kingston to Oswego and erected it on the shore of Lake Ontario six years before the first sawmill was established in that region. Even earlier, Colden’s report of 1723 mentions exportation of house frames ready to set up.
Although the Colonies had won political independence, England continued to be their architectural mentor for almost a century. During the Federal period, 1781–1830, marked by the boom of westward migration and the commercial expansion of New York City, the Georgian tradition remained strong, preserved by provincial craftsmen. Many of them were New Englanders, who, guided by Asher Benjamin’s Country Builder’s Assistant and other domestic or imported handbooks, followed the succeeding modes of delicate ornament popularized by Robert Adam, the bare stucco surfaces of Soane, and the idealized classicism of Palladio.
In such a dwelling as the massive Ludlow House, in Claverack, built about 1790, can be seen a fusion of Dutch solidity, Georgian symmetry, and Early Republican spaciousness, while at near-by Hudson the homes and warehouses of the Yankee proprietors preserve the flavor of pre-Revolutionary Nantucket. The village homes built by Ephraim Russ in Rensselaerville, from the Stevens House of 1809 to the Rider House of 1823, with its delicate blind arcade and gable window in the manner of Robert Adam, show the typical stylistic sequence and prove that by resourcefulness and taste a local builder could achieve remarkable civic unity.
Conservative post-Colonial architecture is best illustrated in the work of Philip Hooker (1766–1837), who singlehanded produced a worthy architectural setting for the capital city of the State. Arriving in Albany in 1790, he watched the Dutch village of 3,500 grow into a thriving town of more than 35,000. As architect, assessor, alderman, city superintendent, and surveyor, he built 16 public buildings—State Capitol, city hall, seven churches, two markets, two banks, two schools, and a theater—besides laying out new real estate subdivisions. His finest remaining works are the old Albany Academy (now the Joseph Henry Memorial), completed in 1817, and the Hamilton College Chapel (1828), both conceived in pure Georgian spirit. Even as late as 1827, Hooker’s elegant marble façade for the house of Richard Hart, rich Quaker merchant of Troy, preserves the gracious warmth of the late eighteenth century.
Paralleling this conservatism, however, there is evidence that as early as 1792 the social and political aristocracy of New York State were cognizant of more fundamental developments. In that year Staats Morris Dyckman erected handsome Boscobel House just south of Peekskill. Here the wide central hall with its superb divided stair leading to the large upper parlor, the projecting rooms, and the two superposed porches with slender columns and lambricated architrave indicate a new and freer solution of old elements. Even more remarkable is The Hill, south of Hudson, begun by Henry Walter Livingston in 1796, just after his marriage to Mary Penn Allen. Certainly Mrs. Livingston had visited Woodlands in her native Philadelphia, and, admiring the two elliptical salons there, ordered for her new home two similar rooms placed side by side, masked in front by a two-story portico. The stucco walls, massive columns, curved bays, and secondary projecting wings declare an architectural liberation from Colonial forms and indicate a growing interest in authentic Roman classical details.
If the post-Colonial manner symbolized the Anglophilia of the Federalists, the Roman Revival found its patrons in Jefferson and his Republicans, who, in romantically identifying the new Republic with the ancient prototype, decreed Republican architectural togas for the governmental buildings in Washington, D.C. In New York State, an unexpected and unique example of the Roman Revival appeared in the grand plan for Union College in Schenectady, drawn in 1813 by Joseph Jacques Ramée, trained architect and refugee from Revolutionary France, brought to America to build along the St. Lawrence the vast frontier estate of David Parish. Ramée’s noble disposition of college buildings surrounding a wide mall, dominated by a classical rotunda, and flanked by fine formal gardens has been unjustly overshadowed by Jefferson’s later University of Virginia. Romanized Palladianism is further apparent, first, in the Holland Land Office in Batavia, built in 1801 by Joseph Ellicott, then in Joseph’s own house (now the Goodrich House) in Buffalo, built in 1823, and in several Geneva homes built in the 1820’s by settlers from Virginia.
Between 1800 and 1830, knowledge of classical Greek architecture disseminated by such works as Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens came to be increasingly applied to new buildings in Philadelphia and Washington. Completed in 1826, both Latrobe’s Bank of the United States at Philadelphia and the Lee Mansion at Arlington by George Hadfield immediately captured popular imagination. Aroused by the Jacksonian revolution, fired by democratic dreams of another Periclean Golden Age, stimulated by sympathy for the contemporary Greek struggle for independence against the Turk, excited by the rapid commercial and industrial expansion following the opening of the Erie Canal, and fortified with Minard Lafever’s Modern Builder’s Guide, New York State went Grecian with a vengeance, literally lining the water level route with rustic Parthenons. Troy, appropriately enough, led off in 1827 with the Rensselaer County Courthouse, a Sing Sing marble Theseum now unfortunately demolished. Well-preserved, however, are the grave Doric First Presbyterian Church (1836), the graceful Ionic First Baptist Church (1846), numerous houses, large and small, and several business blocks. In the truly monumental four-story Doric portico of the Utica State Hospital (1839–42), New York possesses probably the grandest single work of the period, rivaled only by Robert Mills’s Patent Office in Washington. An Ionic work of similar scale is Newburgh’s American Reformed Church (1835). In the old State Office Building (now the Court of Appeals Building), built in 1839 in Albany by Henry Rector, a fashionable Sing Sing marble exterior encloses an interior noteworthy for its fire-resisting vaulted floors.
Typical large residences are General Aaron Ward’s marble house (1835) in Ossining, and Rose Hill, southeast of Geneva, built of wood about the same time. Every hamlet had its temple-fronted cottage, but the General Spinner House (1840), in Mohawk, proves that the style could achieve flexibility both in plan and mass. Especially amusing are vernacular examples that sing the ancient modes off key, such as Child’s Folly in Rochester (1837), with its extraordinary portico of five buxom Lysicratean columns. Possibly the finest residence of the period was Beverwyck, the manor house of William Paterson Van Rensselaer, built in 1839–43 in what is now Rensselaer. Its well-organized plan, refined detail, and dignified brown stucco exterior signalize the professional competence of its English trained architect, Frederic Diaper.
A third romantic revival was Gothic. Since the late eighteenth century, pointed arches, wiry pinnacles, and crude tracery had been applied superficially to Anglican buildings which were fundamentally Georgian. An example of this ‘Georgian Gothic’ was the second Trinity Church, built in 1788 in New York City. St. Luke’s (1824), Rochester, and St. Paul’s (1827), Troy, represent more successful attempts to approximate medieval forms. In secular building, the ‘castellated’ style derived from English Tudor castles was preferred. Typical are Colonel James McKay’s Castle (1837), Buffalo, the fine West Point Library (1841), and Lyndhurst, the Philip R. Paulding mansion, built in 1840 in Tarrytown by Alexander Jackson Davis, that prodigious peer of eclectic architects. Hyde Park’s St. James Episcopal Church (1844), designed by the amateur, Augustus Thomas Cowman, shows further improvements.
It remained for the Englishman, Richard Upjohn, to introduce America to authentically designed and executed Gothic. In the third Trinity Church (1839–46) he achieved an effect of such dignity that Gothic soon replaced Greek as the popular style. New York State is particularly rich in Upjohn’s work, outstanding examples being St. Paul’s Cathedral (1850), Buffalo, and Albany’s St. Peter’s (1859). Especially worthy of note are Upjohn’s charity jobs, the board-and-batten chapels sprinkled throughout the State; St. Paul’s (1851), Kinderhook, is one of the most charming.
Since England was the fountainhead of New York State Gothic, it is not strange that John Ruskin’s Victorian Gothic, based on the medieval buildings of northern Italy, quickly made its appearance here. Half Gothic, half Romanesque, the Nott Memorial Library of Union College, Schenectady, built in 1858–76 by Edward Tuckerman Potter, displays the salient features of the style in its polychrome masonry and polygonal, domed mass, inspired by the Baptistry at Pisa. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Withers, English architects who came to America to assist Andrew Jackson Downing, celebrated landscape architect of Newburgh, built in 1866–72 one of the most pretentious and costly Victorian Gothic monuments in New York, the Hudson River State Hospital, north of Poughkeepsie.
The pattern books of Downing and Vaux, which guided American house design in the forties and fifties, peddled every variant of the historic architectural styles. Taking their cue from George Harvey’s romantification of Irving’s Sunnyside in 1835, these volumes portrayed Tudor cottages, Italianate villas, Swiss chalets, and other homes in the ‘American Bracketted Style.’ Of all the buildings constructed under this influence, perhaps the most exotic examples are Renwick Castle, Syracuse, an unbelievable Norman hodgepodge built in 1851 by James Renwick, and the Persian villa which Frederick E. Church, leader of the Hudson River school of landscape painters, built overlooking the river opposite Catskill.
In the 1850’s New York witnessed an interesting structural innovation in the development of commercial and industrial buildings whose walls, columns, and floor beams were entirely of cast iron. The new system aimed to secure greater fire resistance than the prevailing masonry-wall, timber-floor construction. The ease with which the prefabricated sections were cast encouraged an unusually profuse application of ornament.
In New York State as in the Nation, the close of the Civil War inaugurated an unprecedented expansion in population and industry; but despite a tremendous building boom, America remained an architectural province of Europe. The restless, picturesque Victorian Gothic continued in use for schools and churches. In commercial and governmental buildings, however, the English Renaissance gave way to the ostentatious bombast of Napoleon III’s Second Empire style, the prestige of which was established by the reconstruction and expansion of the Louvre, 1852–68, and the building of the Opera, 1861–74, in Paris.
New York enthusiastically developed this new mode into an exuberant expression of its economic prosperity. One of the earliest Second Empire buildings in the State was James Renwick’s Main Hall (1861–5), at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, a somewhat ungainly and reduced brick version of the Louvre, complete with mansard roofs, superposed orders, and pavilion accents. A surer application of the same elements was begun in 1867 by Thomas Fuller and Augustus Laver in the incredibly expensive New York State Capitol in Albany, but the building was completed with unfortunate stylistic admixtures. In Rochester, the Powers Building (1870), by Andrew Jackson Warner, not only displays the latest in cast-iron construction but also the ultimate in mansarded commercial elegance. The old Buffalo City Hall (now the Erie County Building), built in 1872, also by Warner, is typical of numerous pretentious municipal buildings in this style. The summit of this superlatively parvenu period, however, was reached in the super-gorgeous Grand Union Hotel (1872) and United States Hotel (1875), which still preside over Saratoga Springs. Even factories aspired to modish grandeur: witness the 1200-foot long Building #3 (1866) of the Harmony Cotton Mills in Cohoes.
Upon this florid adolescent scene, four men appeared to establish that formal order that the architecture of any nation must possess to attain maturity. The first, Richard Morris Hunt, received a thorough theoretical and practical training in Paris as the first American student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and as an assistant of his master, Lefeul, on the Louvre. Upon his return in 1855, his first independent commissions were rather tentative experiments: witness the Howland Library in Beacon. Although alert to the functional problems of his day—he built one of the first elevator office buildings in New York and the city’s first apartment house—Hunt’s greatest contribution came in the huge Fifth Avenue and Newport mansions in which he introduced the discipline of fine craftsmanship and accurately rendered historical details. To a select few of Ward McAllister’s four hundred, his lavish architectural backgrounds provided a conspicuous and reassuring guarantee of social security. His masterpiece, the William K. Vanderbilt house, Fifth Avenue at 52nd St., begun in 1878 and unfortunately demolished in 1925, was a superb design in early French Renaissance. Levi P. Morton’s half-timbered home, Ellerslie, built about 1886 on the Hudson near Rhinebeck, is a less elaborate example of his style.
The second great figure was Henry Hobson Richardson. While, like Hunt, he was trained in Paris, unlike Hunt he developed out of the French Romanesque a personal expression of masonry construction which attained great power, dignity, and beauty. The Buffalo State Hospital (1872–81) is a fine early example of his vigorous massing. Collaborating with Leopold Eidlitz on the State Capitol (1875–86), he designed that brownstone fantasy of vegetative ornament, the famous ‘million-dollar’ staircase, Romanesque counterpart of Garnier’s baroque stairhall in the Paris Opera. The Senate Chamber, his most sumptuous work, forms an interesting contrast to the restrained Victorian-Gothic Assembly Chamber by Eidlitz. The Capitol exterior suffers from composite authorship. Richardson’s genius is most happily seen in the richly paneled Appellate Court Room (now removed to the Court of Appeals Building opposite the Capitol) and in the adjoining Albany City Hall (1882). This last great artist in masonry demonstrated that American architects could draw inspiration from the past without stooping to servile imitation.
Richardson never had to face the problems raised by the newly developed system of fire-resistant, steel-framed construction. The cast-iron structures of the fifties and sixties had failed to withstand the Chicago and Boston conflagrations of 1871–2, and in the reconstruction that followed the metal skeletons were for the first time consciously enclosed in protective sheaths of masonry. In subsequent Chicago and New York City building booms, the new system was extended to ever higher structures. In the early nineties, Adler and Sullivan of Chicago achieved the first rational expression of the new skyscraper form. Buffalo’s Prudential Building (1894) is one of Louis Sullivan’s finest designs. In its wide windows and slender piers, unashamed, unconventional verticality is frankly unveiled. If something of Richardson’s round arches and rich foliage remains, Sullivan was able to transmute these into his own lyric style, and, at least symbolically, to reveal the slender steel supports beneath the superlatively ornamental terra-cotta sheath.
One step further remained to clear the way for a new American architectural synthesis. Sullivan’s mantle passed to his pupil, Frank Lloyd Wright, who for almost 50 years has been producing building after building freshly approached in plan, imaginatively conceived in structure, and dynamically synthesized in a whole series of personal styles. The magnificent Administration Building (1904) of the Larkin Company in Buffalo is a mountain peak in modern architecture and a symbol of the growing importance of industrial structures. His Dana Martin House in the same city displays the imaginative magic with which he invests the prosaic problem of a middle class house.
It was the tragedy of American architecture that the way pointed out by Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright was long obscured by the disciples of that other master, Richard Hunt. Hunt’s success sent American student architects flocking to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. A few assimilated its basic teaching of sound structure and rational planning, but many returned with only a sketchbook of historical paraphernalia with which to mystify their unsuspecting clients. Even in a work of such manifest merit as the majestically planned Chicago Fair of 1893, dominated by Hunt’s Administration Building and Atwood’s Palace of Fine Arts, the public usually considered superficial stylistic detail to be the secret of success rather than the fundamental virtues of order, breadth, and competent finish.
It is only fair to acknowledge that the ‘conservators of traditional values’ have given us many fine if not progressive buildings. Stanford White’s remodeling of Staatsburg (the Ogden Mills) House (1895) and his eloquent design for Hyde Park (1895), the Vanderbilt home, recapture much of the restrained elegance of eighteenth-century French chateaux. Cram and Goodhue’s West Point, from 1903 on, forms one of the most romantic ensembles in all architecture. Claude F. Bragdon’s New York Central Station (1914) in Rochester is a masterpiece of adaptation of classicism. Nor can the powerful magnificence of Palmer and Hornbostel’s much maligned State Education Building (1912), in Albany, be denied. Marcus T. Reynold’s Delaware & Hudson Building (1918), Albany, irrespective of its Flemish Gothic details, fulfills its splendid site with a charming vivacity. The Rundel Memorial Building (1936), in Rochester, by Gordon, Kaelber, and Waasdorp, is a successful free interpretation of the Italian Renaissance stripped of traditional ornamental details.
The appearance of most medium-sized New York towns records the progress of these nineteenth-century stylistic fashions. The central zone of brick business blocks with corbelled or bracketted cornices dates chiefly from post-Civil War expansion, but here and there a Greek Revival structure remains or a ‘neon modernistic’ creation replaces one destroyed by fire. Surrounding this core, a band of mid-Victorian arks, once fashionable residences but now sheltering boarders and tourists, is interrupted along the chief arteries by blatant filling stations. Beyond, Eastlake jigsaw cottages of the seventies and eighties give way to ‘Arts-and-Crafts’ bungalows of 1900 and more recent homes of Colonial or English aspirations, with perhaps a few self-conscious moderns here and there. Outside the city limits, the radiating highways are lined with houses, shacks, and fruit stands that forego city services to escape city taxes. What architectural character such a typical community displays is usually the work of some local practitioner who year in and year out has supplied the necessary services and sooner or later adopts the current fad. Troy’s Mark F. Cummings and Rochester’s Andrew Jackson Warner are typical of almost forgotten personalities responsible for much of the civic scenery of their respective communities.
Although American architects sometimes seem preoccupied with stylistic matters, many of their most significant contributions have been made in the fields of construction and planning: for example, the steel-frame and reinforced concrete structural systems and the mechanical equipment that makes possible a remarkable degree of comfort and convenience. Developed and refined in the skyscraper, these technical improvements today enrich every type of building.
The skyscraper has revolutionized the process of construction. Where once a decade seemed too short a time to complete a large structure, today a 70-story office building materializes in less than 12 months. The steel framework of the Empire State Building grew four-and-a-half stories per week. Steel members were riveted in place within 80 hours after their departure from the fabricating plant in Pittsburgh. The methodical bolting into place of its 6,400 windows exemplifies the increasing trend toward standardization of parts. Surely such technical organization is a valuable addition to modern building. Furthermore, the experience gained in planning and operating industrial and commercial structures has established strict economic standards by which to judge the feasibility of building projects.
Tremendous economic energy brought New York tremendous building activity, and this, in turn, has made the State a leader in all architectural fields, especially apparent in the many examples of new, highly specialized building types, such as Buffalo’s New York Central Railroad Station, the Central Islip State Hospital, the great pavilions at Jones Beach, the Attica State Prison, and an ever-expanding array of educational institutions. Not only did new building types appear, but older forms underwent progressive change. Mangin’s graceful City Hall in old New York and modern Buffalo’s gigantic municipal skyscraper symbolize a whole history of urban development. Between the stinking, windowless, ‘railroad’ tenements of 1850 and the sunlit low-rental housing at Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Buffalo’s Kenfield lies almost a century of crusading against speculator and jerry-builder. New York has always led in the development of the single-family, middle-class suburban house, that integration of city and country which is one of America’s most important and most typical contributions to modern architecture. In Forest Hills, Long Island, and Sunnyside, Astoria, New York architects made notable advances toward the creation of a homogeneous, protected, traffic-free ‘neighborhood unit,’ a concept used increasingly in the design of modern residential communities.
New structural systems, new building types, and new planning methods led inevitably to a new aesthetic approach. In contrast to the conservators of traditional values, a school of architects has appeared that seeks to use these new resources and standards as the very bases of a new architectural synthesis. In the formation of a new manner, the first step has always been to renounce the prevailing mode and state the problem in starkly realistic terms. Such efforts have been seen in New York before. The asceticism of the Shaker buildings in Mount Lebanon and the Crum Elbow Friend’s Meeting House near East Park, the forthright utilitarianism of the superb Schoharie Aqueduct at Fort Hunter, and the self-conscious craftsmanship which the Roycrofters of East Aurora inherited from William Morris, all have a close kinship to the majestic geometry of the great Port of Albany grain elevator, the ‘International Style’ exhibited in Howe and Lescaze’s Hessian Hills School at Croton, and the lithe, soaring harmony of the Bronx-Whitestone bridge.
Whether the motive for negation of the past be religious, economic, or intellectual in origin, it often results in clean, bold forms of startling ‘constructivistic’ beauty. Despite their long pronouncements, the extreme abstractionists have not so much abandoned their inheritance of baroque grammar as they have substituted a ‘constructivist’ vocabulary of glass, steel beam, and concrete for traditional masonry forms. The World of Tomorrow, and the day after, will no doubt eschew extreme asceticism. Wright long ago demonstrated that a designer of soundly logical mind and vivid imagination can create new and stimulating buildings of genuine beauty that are neither reminiscent nor negative. Today a discerning eye can discover among the younger generation of architects many signs of better days ahead. Employing the new vocabulary of forms and materials, the better contemporary work, such as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (1939), by Philip Goodwin and Edward D. Stone, and the WGY Broadcasting Studio (1938), Schenectady, by Harrison and Fouilhoux, aims to achieve the qualities of all great architecture—order, breadth, and competent finish. No doubt the layman will be content to leave such aesthetic problems to practitioners and critics, and will find in the future his greatest satisfaction in the slow but steady growth of modern architecture, which promises him, in the words of Sir Henry Wotton, seventeenth-century architect-philosopher, buildings of greater ‘commoditie, firmeness, and delight.’
