BEAUX ARTS CONFESSIONAL

MY DEAR SISTER, Dr. Dr. Judy (she has a DDS and a PhD in education, which makes us all proud and hopeful that she'll avoid the penitentiary) responded to a note in which I mentioned that I'd "pulled a charette."

Another friend commented that this sounded like a painful muscle strain. But Judy, who signs herself "Princess Anne," after her childhood nom de guerre, sensibly asked "What is a charette?" I replied:

A “charette” is an overnight design push to the deadline, an all-out overnighter to finish, taking its name from the cart (“charette,” in Froglaise) that appeared in the draughting room of the Ecole des Beaux Arts architecture studio in France to collect the completed projects. Because the Ecole was considered the heart of architectural design, some of its terms are still used by architecture students and architects today.

The Ecole dominated “public” architecture during the Greek and Roman revival period between our Civil War and the First World War, roughly the time of Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age.” It was a style that reached back to architecture widely supposed to be insuperable in form and beauty and balance. Greek and Roman examples were closely studied, visited, redrawn and dissected geometrically. The forms were structurally appraised and modeled with new mathematical tools in place of the sculptural sense of weight and the rules of thumb used by the ancients. Many libraries and courthouses and churches were based on the designs of reconstructed Roman baths or gladiatorial arenas or temples.

This sounds silly to our ears but it was persuasive to American corporate and municipal clients. Through this era, Europe and even our own traveled gentry regarded the United States as a nation of apple-knockers, clod-hoppers and rubes, plus a few red Indians. Remember that this was the time a well-bred young person’s character and education wasn’t complete until he or she took The Grand Tour of Europe, Greece, and the Holy Land. The object was to understand just how naïve and uncivilized most Americans were. Our national obsession with “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” may or may not have stunted our national spirit but it surely didn’t nourish our pride.

So when a European-trained architect responded to a county seat’s aldermen with a design for the new courthouse, pointing out that it was an adaptation of the Baths of Titus in Rome, the local burghers were delighted to have a transplanted divot of cultural respectability flourishing in the county. They felt that classic proportions and plenty of columns would ennoble the institution of the court and improve the cultural climate of the town. It was a bargain: legitimacy, heritage, cultural improvement, nobility of purpose … oh, geez, a lot of stuff came with a Beaux Arts building.

Take the courthouse in the little burg where my sister and I grew up, St. Clairsville, Ohio. It beggars every other structure in town. It is a gallumphing great expression of civic pride and can’t be overlooked. Next to any other structure in town, it is enormous. The city fathers and the swells must have been proud. It is a “Second Empire” design, built between 1885-1888. The architect was Joseph W. Yost from Columbus, Ohio, who later practiced in New York. He also designed the remarkable geology building, Orton Hall, on the Oval at Ohio State University. I remember it well.

The basis of this rant is that a big chunk of America’s design history came from Paris and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This influence reached its apotheosis in the Great White City of the 1891 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was organized by Beaux Arts architects “Uncle Dan” Burnham and John Root. The Roman and Greek revival buildings in the White City (lit by hundreds of thousands of electric bulbs powered by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse AC generators) marked a turning point in American identity, an announcement that the United States was a formidable power in every way. Except architecture. The impressive columned, porticoed, galleried, decorated buildings (built of plaster-soaked jute fabric on wood lath) were so popular that, in the words of Frank Lloyd Wright, “It set American architecture back a hundred years.” The buildings and their styles were so successful that roughly the same group of architects (minus Louis Sullivan, who had designed the only “contemporary” structure at the Exposition) designed most of the public buildings around the Smithsonian Mall. The Exposition fixed our expectations of dignity and official design. For better and for worse.

As an expatriate architect, it’s taken me a long time to reach this conclusion and I state it over the objections of my younger selves, but I predict that we will look at this era of revival architecture with sad longing. In many ways those Old Guys, like Uncle Dan Burnham, were right. There was a balance and rhythm inherent in the style, and a sensible human scale, and a rhythm of repeated parts that we don’t have. The vertical columns, the arches, the three dimensional geometry of many revival designs is appealing. It speaks to our collective unconscious, perhaps, or perhaps we simply enjoy variations on known themes. Whatever the reason, I look at work by H. H. Richardson and Edward Janney and Joseph Yost with interest and admiration.

One damnable tenet of the revival design dogma was that architecture reached its apogee during the late Roman empire and nothing offered could rise above it. Yet this quaint, pre-narcissistic notion granted a kind of freedom of movement within the forms. Okay, we’ll never do better than the Coliseum, so let’s do our best and arrange what forms we have in a pleasing way, using what worked well before us, creating new form out of handsome components. What came out of this was both new and familiar. It was steady and reassuring. Anyone could see the way forces were transmitted from cornices down to foundation. I think we’ll miss that.

Contemporary architecture seems to be largely a personality cult. Frank Gehry wraps his structures in stainless steel cocoons of fantastic shapes that have no relation to the flow or function within them. I. M. Pei violates the Smithsonian Mall with a self-indulgent and inefficient fantasy born from his whim rather than any interior, functional argument. Philip Johnson’s “Chippendale Building” is a perfect example of New York society star-worship. Frank Lloyd Wright, who was one of our greatest architects and a force for functionalims, was more concerned with his ideology than with the actual workability of his structures. (They all leaked. All of them.)

Architecture is called the First Art. A good conceit but what IS art? I maintain that art is communication: the artist uses his or her medium to express a verity, something living and interesting to the rest of us. The state of art in our culture is artificial and distant. It no longer represents us. We’ve been drilled to accept art that expresses only the artist’s emotions. So it no longer communicates shared ideas, ideals, fears, joys, wit, need.

If we could be honest with ourselves we might shrug off art dictated by ten galleries in New York City and point out that the art emperor is not wearing clothes. How much contemporary art addresses our feelings? We’re irrelevant to art. A Jackson Pollack painting may have meant something to Jackson Pollack (which I doubt) but I’ve never received his message clearly, not enough to say, “Ah, he’s got it there.” We take some odd delight in not understanding contemporary art. We’ve become so indulgent of our own whims that we license the whims of our designers, encouraging them to “express themselves” like the funded sculptors who have dropped “municipal sculpture” in public places all over the United States – sculptures that don’t reflect the indigenous citizens, who would much rather have them dismantled and taken away.

Architecture should speak to us, about us, for us. When we see a building we should have some notion of its function. We should see the entrance welcoming us. We should have an inherent sense of flow within the building. In a well-designed building we should never be lost but feel the current of design taking us to the right place.

We could understanding the revival buildings. We somehow knew them. Their proportions struck sympathetic chords in us. I’m sorry now I didn’t crawl all over that courthouse in St. Clairsville and learn something about architecture.

Well, Princess Anne, this is a confession and a correction: I have been at war with the Ecole des Beaux Arts too long. I pulled off a charette last week as Ecole students did long ago, and I was unexpectedly happy with the result. I thought about the origins of that word, and you’ve asked about them. It’s driven me to reexamine habitual attitudes. I’ve bad-mouthed The Ecole des Beaux Arts, denied it, damned it, and underestimated its students. I’m not certain that it was the best way to teach architecture but it beat hell out of contemporary architecture.

Consider this one, clear fact: our American Culture is so bankrupt that there is no possibility of ever building the Belmont County Courthouse again. We can’t design in that demanding stye, we no longer have the courage of expression, we have no qualified craftsmen to reproduce the astonishingly careful stone and woodwork, and we simply can’t afford it. Any courthouse built today will have a service life of, perhaps, fifty years, probably half that. Our St. Clairsville courthouse is coming onto 125 years and should last another 200. Any new courthouse will be built of the cheapest materials and assembled from mass-produced components. Just as we no longer have the technology or the will to return to the moon, we can’t afford, design or construct the buildings of which our great-grandfathers were justifiably proud. Perhaps their pride was tinged with Gilded Age desire to be more European but I can forgive them that mistake.

If I had a time machine, being at the dedication of that courthouse would be exciting. Plenty of red, white and blue bunting, Civil War veterans, long speeches, and an imposing, overwhelming structure towering over the one and two story buildings of a sleepy little town. What a luxury: genuine municipal pride, unquestioned national pride, excitement at the American culture flowering. We’ll miss all that.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself would have made a bad architect in his youth. If we could return to our youth with experienced, mellowed, wiser attitudes, he might have made a very fine architect. It's probably just as well we don't have that option. Youth is given too much praise; it's a frightening experience, humiliating, and scarring. Himself is a much nicer fellah than he was, more understanding and less judgmental. Age is given too little praise.