Between 1776 and 1812, following the firm establishments of national, State and municipal governments, there was an immediate need for public buildings. This demand was affected by the Classical Revival of Europe and was par ticularly influenced by the intimate relations which had grown up between the New Republic and France. When Washington was selected as the seat of government, it was a Frenchman, Major Pierre Charles l'Enfant, who laid out the city. The Treasury building was the first office i building. It was undertaken in 1781. The Treas ury, designed by Robert Mills, a pupil of Lat robe, then United States Architect, was built in 1836-39. The same architect also designed the Washington monuments in Baltimore (1815) and Washington (1836). The White House was started in 1792 by James Hoban and a year later the Capitol. The central portion was de signed by William Thornton in collaboration with B. H. Latrobe and Charles Bulfinch. It was not until 1851 to 1865 that the dome and wings were added. Other well-known buildings of the Classical Period are the State House and Custom House, Boston, the City Hall, sub Treasury and Old Custom House, New York City, and the Mint, Philadelphia, the State House, Albany, N. Y. So popular did the monumental style become that buildings sprang up on every side, which, if not completely in the classic mode, were at least adorned with Greek and Roman orders which when applied to small houses served only to make them ridiculous. In large private houses and in public buildings, however, it was possible to do justice to those newly adopted architectural forms and we have many admirably dignified and graceful structures, in the cities of the country. The wave of Roman and Hellenic enthusiasm dominated the archi tecture of the United States until 1860 when its strength gradually subsided. The style did not live, for architecture to be com pletely successful must reflect the condition of the civilization whose activities it is planned to house. The impossibility of instilling into modern life the conditioning causes of a dead civilization made it impossible for the struc tural and decorative elements that were bat rowed for the production of Academicism and Classicism to reflect the functioning of the civilization of the 19th century. The Gothic revival of the 19th century while confined chiefly to England made itself manifest in the United States as early as 1839, when Richard M. Upjohn undertook the design and comple tion (1846) of Trinity Church, New York. Of the same time was the church of Holy Trinity, Brooklyn, N. Y., designed by Lefevre. Grace Church, New York (1840), by James Renwick and, by the same architect, Saint Patrick's Cathedral, New York (1850), are among the most successful efforts of the period. The Gothic style was for the most part restricted to churches, although a few projects as in the Harvard Library and the Yale College Alumni Hall evidence the influence of the collegiate Tudor style of England.
These very creditable pointed works were produced during an era that was otherwise represented by a host of edifices marked by careless and undiscriminating design. The super-excited political conditions that obtained throughout the United States reached their climax in the debacle of the Civil War and production and art were reciprocally inhibited. Honesty, sobriety of task and logic in construc tion were in a state of stagnation. The Mu nicipal Building, Philadelphia, and the Capitol, Albany, still unfinished, are monumental ex pressions of design and construction subordi nated to the demands of grasping and voracious political patronage. Their errors of plan and the wholesale disregard of engineering efficiency and sanitary provisions render these costly, WI finishable piles expletives of architectural warn ing. Perverted taste likewise characterizes the New York Post Office, the Army and Navy Building, Washington, both by A. B. Mullett. In the latter half of the 19th century, the United States experienced unusual activity in building due to a variety of causes, the opening up of the West, the great fires in Boston and New York and the stabilizing of business and finance after the chaotic conditions surrounding the war and reconstruction periods. This new period discovered two architects, Richard M. Hunt and Henry H. Richardson, men thor oughly trained by European study and practical experience and possessed of a personal force that commanded attention, who established in the public mind that architecture was one of the Fine Arts, and set the profession on a sound basis, for Hunt took a leading part in organiz ing the American Institute of Architects and was its first president. Among his important works are the Lenox Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art and residence of W. K. Van derbilt, New York, the .Breakers and Marble House, Newport, and George W. Vanderbilt's country house at Biltmore. His genius for or ganized plan, standardization of style and thorough grounding in the principles of the Renaissance finally established that style in the United States.
Henry H. Richardson, a graduate of the Beaux-Arts, and a classicist by training, be came dissatisfied with the finical elaborateness of the Gothic revival and turned to the simpler and more massive Romanesque of southern France. His first important work, Trinity Church, Boston, 1877, met with a great and immediate success. So freely did Richardson use the provencal forms, that he may be said to have established a style of his own which is seen to the best advantage in the county build ings, Pittsburgh, the city halls of Albany and Springfield, the public libraries of Woburn, Quincy, Malden and Burlington and the Cham ber of Commerce, Cincinnati. His seriousness and refined taste left a lasting impression upon the nation's art, but his selection of the Ro manesque style, while it had some following, was abandoned for the Classic and Renaissance due to the influence of the later students of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The most important work of this period was the Columbian Exposi tion at Chicago in 1892. Here the architects were given a free hand in the planning of the grounds and buildings. The result was on a larger scale than had ever been attempted be fore and showed what could be accomplished by the co-ordination of landscape, architecture, sculpture and painting. Its effect was national, stimulating the imagination of a people long in different to claims of beauty and impressing itself upon Federal, State, municipal and com mercial buildings for over 25 years. It has also played its part in the development of parks and boulevards and more recently in the recon struction and artistic planning of cities. It is
but natural that apeople thus roused to better things in public affairs should display an equal concern in their immediate surroundings and that a similar uplift should be felt in the build ings of domestic character. For the time being it was confined to an adaptation of the old styles to new conditions, the architect seeming more intent in reproducing the old styles than in meeting the needs of the present. In the houses erected in the last 10 years, however, there are evidences of a new creative art that is gradually being established upon the fitness of design, to the locality, climate, materials and the various needs and necessities of modern living. If in the development of his design the architect feels the need of adapting, he is forced to adapt creatively. Thus from the needs of the people, the source of all true art in all time, is gradually being evolved a functional domestic architecture in America to which the experience imagery of the past is being made to contribute. uIn this onward movement the Federal buildings, post offices, custom houses, courthouses and other government edifices have not held the first rank. Although solidly and carefully constructed those built during the past 20 years are inferior to the best work pro duced by private enterprise, or by State and municipal governments. This is explained by the fact that all participation in their design ing by the leading architects of the country at large has been excluded by enactments devolv ing upon the Supervising Architect at Wash ington the planning of all Federal buildings, as well as a burden of Supervision and clerical duties incompatible with the highest artistic results.° During the early part of the 20th century great attention has been given to the problem of the adequate protection of our municipalities and the training of citizen soldiery. The newer principles of military science have been formu lated by Major-General O'Ryan and translated into structural form and exemplified in the Eighth Coast Artillery Armory, New York; the First Cavalry Armory, Brooklyn, N. Y.; the Infantry Armory, Troy; Squadron A, Armory, New York; Drill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. In these typical examples of mili tary architecture the masses and parts of the fabric are so disposed that the attacking force may be seen while the defenders are hidden from sight and at all vulnerable portions of the struc ture a possiblity provided of obtaining a cross and defile fire. The congestion of population, high cost of land, the perfection of the elevator and the invention of the skeleton or steel frame were the active forces which found their expres sion in the skyscraper, a product of American ingenuity without a prototype in the whole realm of architecture. In the early periods of its development the same system of adaptation was applied by the architects who failed to recognize the unlimited opportunity afforded by this new problem for the application of the true princi ples of constructive art. Condemned as a monstrosity and outlawed by the classicists every subterfuge was resorted to in order to conceal the construction and to reduce the ap parent height. The World Building and the Manhattan Life Building exemplify the appli cation of this system which may be said to have reached its culmination in the Saint Paul Build ing where sill and band courses were introduced in the greatest profusion in an effort to ac centuate the horizontal and distract the eye from the vertical. The failure of accomplish ment along these lines led to a reaction in favor of the frank acknowledgment of height, but limited still in its expression by the tradi tions of the classic for the accepted principle of composition. The column was taken as the motif of the design of the façade as exempli fied in the Broadway Chambers where the capital shaft and base of the column were symbolized in the highly decorated cornice, the repetition of windows and the basement. In the American Surety Building is seen the ex treme of this conception in that Bruce Price, the architect, aimed to create the impression of an entasis by varying the depth of the window reveals through the many stories of the plain shaft. Louis Sullivan was one of the first architects who seems to have recognized the elementary principles involved in the treatment of this new form, that of expressing upon the exterior the structural members it clothed and protected. Fundamentally, however, classic forms, admittedly changed and modified to meet the new conditions, were the controlling characteristics of the structures of this period. It was not until very recently that the logic of the problem of the tall building was fully grasped and it was realized that the fitting precedent to be followed in a problem in the vertical was to be found in the historical verti cal style only. The West Street Building is an exemplification of the Gothic influence which has crystallized in its highest creative state in the Woolworth Building. In passing it is in teresting to speculate on the course of this development if the tall building had made its appearance in the days of Upjohn and Renwick. In spite of the great advances that have been made in the development of a creative and scientific architecture, no style has been pro duced that can as yet be recognized as new or distinctively American. From these advances it may be that we are progessing to the long looked for American style if such be a possi bility within the limits of a national dominion whose climate ranges from the heat of the tropics to the almost arctic conditions of the north temperate zone. Notwithstanding the eclecticism and unprejudiced point of view when the average American comes to judge artistic achievements, no style has been evolved in the United States that is either new or national. Commercial requirements, the demand for speed in design and construction, and the experi mental conditionings that restrict the modern designer have discouraged the evolution of a typical national style. In works of a public and commercial character, the necessity for a co-operative understanding between the archi tect and the engineer is increasingly felt. It is only when a unified resultant combining the efforts of the architect and the engineer has been achieved — a resultant in which plan and detail shall adequately and truly function with the discoveries of modern science, that a new American style will appear.