Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

PAN AMERICA IN THE MAGAZINES.

463

Another potent influence in the architectural history of the country is that of the increase in educational facilities, a feature which Mr. Hamlin treats as follows:

The growing influence of the French school, which had contributed powerfully to the architectural awakening of the eighties, reached its highest mark during the last decade of the last century. The number of Americans in the Ecole at Paris rapidly increased, and the leading offices depended upon their return for the recruiting of their draftsmen. With each year some among the older Paris-trained draftsmen emerged from these offices to practice independently. In 1894 the Society of BeauxArts Architects began its remarkable campaign of education by the establishment of “ateliers” and “concours" of "projets," which have since been extended into all parts of the United States. Their success has been prodigious; and despite their tendency to dwell unduly upon clever draftsmanship and "paper architecture," they have done a great service in training competent draftsmen, in instilling sound ideas of planning, and in fostering the artistic spirit. The general quality of American design and of American draftsmanship has certainly been greatly raised.

But the credit for improved design and draftsmanship does not by any means all belong to the labors of the Beaux-Arts Society. Since 1891 important architectural schools have been founded or developed in the universities of Harvard, Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Tulane, George Washington at Washington, D. C., Washington at St. Louis, Michigan, and Minnesota; in the Carnegie Technical Schools at Pittsburgh, the Armour Institute at Chicago, Rose Polytechnic at Terre Haute, Ohio State University, Alabama Technical Institute, and many others; while the older schools have been greatly strengthened and developed. Many traveling fellowships have been founded, and the American Academy at Rome has been built up into a strong institution. Countless night classes and "extension" classes have been established, and Princeton and Yale have built up departments of architecture which are excellent feeders for the more advanced professional courses in other universities. The influence of all these schools, conservative and academic in the main, but by no means narrow or superficial, has served to raise the standards of our architecture, and to bring it more and more into its proper place as a learned profession as well as an art; a profession in which science and general culture unite with imagination and trained taste to make it a worthy pursuit for men and women of high aspiration.

Mr. Hamlin gives quite a long, although by no means a complete, list of examples of representative American architecture of the last quarter century. Of the exhibitions, after enumerating the most important, he writes:

They were all scenic displays of "staff" architecture, decorations rather than durable buildings, but they all stimulated the imagination and developed the decorative resource of our architects, and for the first time in our history exerted a reflex influence on European exhibition architecture.

Among other prominent examples of modern American architecture he cites the following:

The Boston Public Library was completed in 1895; the Library of Congress at Washington in 1897; the Public Library of New York in 1912. With the accession of William Martin Aikin to the office of Supervising Architect of the Treasury in 1893 there began a remarkable reform in our Federal architecture, which continued under his successor, J. Knox Taylor. The customhouses, courthouses, and post offices of this régime at New York, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Cleveland, and other cities, the Senate and House offices at Washington, and a host of lesser Federal buildings,

[graphic]

Courtesy of the Architectural Record.
THE WOOLWORTH BUILDING, NEW YORK CITY.

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

have lifted our national official architecture from pretentious inferiority to a level of high artistic merit. The great railway terminals at Washington and New York and the Northwestern at Chicago, and others of less magnitude at Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and other cities have redeemed us from the former disgrace of the old-time shabby and disreputable makeshifts. University and collegiate groups have been created that are the envy of foreign professors and scholars; Palo Alto and Berkeley in California, the University of Pennsylvania, Chicago, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Washington at St. Louis, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Sweetbrier Colleges, the College of the City of New York, and others, represent a branch of architecture which hardly had any existence before 1891. At the same time a new architecture of public-school buildings has been developed, based on scientific principles and the logical expression of plan and structure; witness the modern schools of New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and a dozen other cities. Certain types of buildings have been subjected to a process of standardization, within well-defined limits, as the result of prolonged and systematic study of their requirements; for instance, public libraries, hospitals, Y. M. C. A. buildings, office buildings, public schools. That is to say, a general consensus has been reached as to certain of their requirements and the best arrangements, proportions, and dimensions of their fundamental elements, so that all architects have profited by the combined wisdom of those who have worked out these standards. The librarians were the first to attempt such a formulation of requirements, and American library architecture now leads the world, both in the larger buildings like those already mentioned and such other important examples as the libraries of Milwaukee, Detroit, Newark, Springfield, Providence, and Manchester (N. H.), and in the smaller libraries and branches. In any American city the library is likely to be one of the handsomest buildings in town, and a creditable work intrinsically; and in any college or university the same is often true, as at Columbia, Harvard, Vassar, and many others.

The Cathedrals of the New World, the third installment of the series which appeared in the French edition of the BULLETIN, deals with those ecclesiastical structures to be found in Peru. The following abbreviated English version embodies the main features, and will serve to explain the accompanying illustrations.

The traveler in South America who studies the various features of the history of that continent, the life of colonial times and that which followed it as the national life of the separate countries, soon discovers that there is a well-defined line of demarcation between that time when the people borrowed their artistic inspiration from the traditional sources in Europe and that later time when local influences began to be felt and when the continent developed its own artistic sense that demanded some original expression. This statement applies to the industries that were first brought over from Europe across the Atlantic; it is true of the social life and of education in all the Republics of the southern continent manifesting characteristics which are peculiarly their own; it is likewise true of municipal and governmental affairs, and finally in regard to the construction of their buildings, especially of the architecture of the ecclesiastical edifices of the diocesan capitals.

As an example of the colonial epoch in church architecture the cathedral of Lima offers a good illustration. That country has one

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »