Beaux-Arts movement and Washington, D.C. -- a cat-fight
There's an interesting debate going on in the pages of the Washington Post about the nature of architecture in Washington, D.C. It's being prompted by Frank Gehry's design for the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, and the furious debates going on about that design.
For decades, the Post ran an architectural review column on the front page of the "Style" section every Saturday. The reviewers tended to be rah-rah cheerleaders for anything in the city, which wasn't very good for architecture here. The newspaper's legendary architectural critic, Wolf von Eckardt, said L'Enfant Plaza was D.C.'s version of Rockefeller Center or the Place Ville-Marie, and predicted people would throng the plaza. He thought it was the "city's major urban attraction", called it "exceptionally attractive" and "modern America's most beautiful 'outdoor salon'". Even after five years, when it was clear that L'Enfant Plaza had turned out to be a sterile waste of urban space, he called it a "superb work of urban design" on par with Lincoln Center in New York City. (I'm laughing out loud, and you should be, too.)
On May 18, University of Maryland professor emeritus of architecture Roger K. Lewis wrote a column for the Washington Post in which he defended modern architecture. Although Lewis did not defend (or attack) Gehry's design, he did have this to say:
Classicism in America was an 18th- and 19th-century European import, embraced here because, before and after independence from Britain, Americans admired and emulated European culture and architecture. After all, colonial America lacked indigenous architectural traditions. Does this reasoning still hold?
Greek and Roman classical form and ornament evolved as manifestations of how buildings were constructed, a reflection of limited structural options, building materials and standardized decoration. This design language endured because, until the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, construction technology remained relatively unchanged.
Lewis singled out the National Civic Art Society (NCAS), a tiny group of very vocal activists who are wedded to the "City Beautiful" Neoclassical architectural movement, as a reactionary and Luddite group. The NCAS has been very vocal in opposing Gehry's design, and has sponsored a national design competition of its own to replace Gehry's proposal with a Neoclassical monument.
Today comes Justin Shubow, chairman of the National Civic Art Society. In a polemic rebuttal to Prof. Lewis in today's Washington Post, Shubow attacks anti-humanistic architecture; declares modern art to be incompatible with "harmony, civility, and indigenous tradition"; says modern art only seeks to "capture our disenchanted times"; accuses modern art of a lack of historical memory; declares that modern art undermines the Republic; says modern art represents "fundamental cleavage with - a sundering of the foundations of - our tradition[s]"; blasts away at deconstructionism; equates modern art with deconstructionism, and says both are nihilistic; and concludes that modern art is an attempt "to garble our historic memory, to sow confusion into our national identity".
Whew!
Here's an example:
Professor Lewis noted that today “almost all practicing architects in the United States are, in the broadest sense, modernists.” Yes, and in the Middle Ages all astronomers were astrologers.
...
Gehry’s signature works represent the reductio ad absurdum of modernism: deconstructionism. Deconstructionists are to architecture as anarchists are to the state. They reject and seek to tear down the values constitutive of architecture itself - beauty, order, functionality, solidity. Indeed, the leading deconstructionist architect Bernard Tschumi, the former dean of Columbia University’s School of Architecture, has explicitly called himself a nihilist.
Shubow's article is polemical, filled with assumptions and loaded words. It's clear that he loathes, hates, despises, reviles, and [insert additional verbiage here] modern art.
Ignored in this debate is why D.C. looks the way it does. Lewis sort of gets close to this in his article, but let's be more explicit about it here. George Washington, Pierre L'Enfant, Thomas Jefferson, and other early leaders and planners of the nation's capital believed that American democracy was very fragile. To help create the sense that democracy was not something new, they decided to use Neoclassical art and architecture as a means of not-so-subtly inculcating the idea that democracy was not a new idea. Furthermore, these buildings were to be imposing and massive to imply that American democracy was not going anywhere.
As the 1800s wore on, there were attempts to create an indigenous architectural style within Washington, D.C. The "Federalist" style (which you can see on many townhomes in Georgetown and Capitol Hill) was one such attempt. But it was a domestic (e.g., your own home and family) style, and not one suited for public buildings -- especially the massive public buildings still going up. (Take, for example, the U.S. Treasury Building, constructed in 1836.) American architects borrowed heavily from French and Baroque architecture to create the "American Empire" style -- the "massed wedding cake" look of innumerable pillars and broken pediments that constitute the very, very, verrrrry busy exterior of the Old Executive Office Building (west of the White House). But this was rejected as too ornate, and not very "American." Elsewhere in the nation, advances in construction materials and techniques were forcing architects to create new styles. The rise of the skycraper, first seen in Chicago in the 1880s, led to the creation of the "Chicago School" or "Commercial Style" -- that indefinable, but typically Midwestern, look to tall office buildings that isn't Modernism but isn't Beaux-Arts or Arts-and-Crafts or Prairie School. Domestic architecture fragmented into a hundred different directions: Victorian, Italiante, Cottage, Arts-and-Crafts, Craftsman, Beaux-Arts. In New York City, the Beaux-Arts movement -- with its emphasis on Neoclassical structures accompanied by ornamentation derived from Neoclassical sculpture as well as nature (plants, rocks, stars, etc.) -- became the standard for a time.
Huge debates over the direction public art and architecture should take occurred in D.C. from 1890 to 1920. The Senate Park Commission seemed to resolve the debate in 1901 when it issued the "McMillan Plan" (named for the commission's chairman, Senator James McMillan). The McMillan Plan called for Neoclassical architecture to be used for public art and architecture in the city. There were several reasons for this. First, the city remained largely incomplete, but what had been built was Neoclassical in style. Completing the L'Enfant Plan for the city meant sticking with the Neoclassical style employed shortly after the L'Enfant Plan was adopted. Second, the Neoclassical style was amorphous enough to permit a wide range of other styles to be used -- such as Beaux-Arts, Baroque, Gothic, Italianate, Renaissance, Greek Revival, Roman Revival, etc. Third, the Neoclassical style was well-accepted, and part of the McMillan Commission's goal was to come to a commonly-accepted plan for the city that would bring to a halt the ceaseless debate over style.
The McMillan Plan called for the wholesale leveling of the area bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue NW, 15th Street NW, and Constitution Avenue NW -- then known as "Murder Bay." Murder Bay was to be replaced by a vast complex of large federal office buildings.
The McMillan Plan was not acted on until 1928. By the time the design of the new "Federal Triangle" was under way, the Great Depression had taken hold. Democracy once more seemed fragile and insubstantial -- likely to be swept away in a tide of anarchism, communism, and fascism. Demagogues like Senator Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin were taking to the airwaves, demanding fascism as the only way to save the American way of life. As many as one-third of all Americans listened weekly as Coughlin talked openly about implementing the policies of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in the United States. (He also began making virulently anti-semitic comments.) The Public Buildings Commission, a federal agency created to ensure that the buildings suggested by the McMillan Plan were indeed constructed, was deeply worried that American democracy would be swept away. So was Congress. So was the President.
Federal Triangle was built to be impressive. It was built to be Neoclassical, so that the American people would be "impressed" with the permanency and power of the federal government.
But, frankly, that is what the Beaux-Arts movement is all about. The Beaux-Arts movement (which is advocated strongly by the NCAS) essentially argues that the "public" cannot be trusted. Buildings must be massive, must be Neoclassical, and must be ponderous -- because that keeps mobs from forming, that keeps the public from sweeping away government, that keeps people tame and under the thumb of their rulers.
The Beaux-Arts movements is not necessarily anti-democratic, nor fascist, nor dictatorial, nor communist. It is, however, an architectural movement whose fundamental value is that "the people" cannot be trusted too far, or with too much power. It is designed to impress, over-awe, wow -- to create a cultural "shock-and-awe" that makes you cower before your betters.
There may be good reasons to continue with a Neoclassical form in Washington, D.C. There may be good reasons why a representational, classical, even architecturally conservative approach to buildings and memorials in Washington, D.C., is a good idea.
There may also be serious reasons to not want any more shock-and-awe Beaux-Arts memorials in the city.
NCAS and Roger Lewis are not helping matters by ignoring this history.