Internationale Revue i 10 1927-1929

Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr
America-Europe

Lönberg-Holm's ‘Reflections on America’ published in the October number of i 10 are of great interest to Americans. Even to one who fears that he is both to some extent an ‘art writer’ (since he has published in American magazines photographs of German Expressionistic brickwork) and ‘a native bragging about the glorious discovery that a modern man should live in a modern house’ they must appear if not altogether valid at least more suggestive than most of what is written on American architecture. But without bragging a native may desire to contest certain details of the amount of the Danish visitor.

It appears that in the common delusion that America represents a quite new civilization separate from that of Western Europe, Lönberg-Holm carries much too far his opposition between the European sense of space and the American sense of time. In the first place it is perfectly clear to any one who has studied the matter that Amecan architecture in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although in a general way provincial perhaps, was no less appreciative of form than the coëval architecture of Europe. Indeed it may be remarked that in the period of Romanticism the only church in the world which has serious merit in terms of space and does not depend primarily on the time sense of reminiscence of the past is Latrobe's Baltimore Cathedral. And while in Europe the latter half of the nineteenth century was illustrated by much more splendid engineering constructions than in America, constructions developed by the time sense, in America the same period saw the appearance of H.H. Richardson who reacted against the historical reminiscence of the Romanesque Revival, which he first began, toward experimentation with space and form according to a more modern ideal with results not parallelled in Europe for nearly a generation.

Yet as regards contemporary production it is none the less true that the time sense interferes in America with the appreciation of form and space and substitutes quite other ideals in the public criticism of architecture than those, - alas, far from universal in Europe, - to which Lönberg-Holm and myself subscribe. In this connection his photographs, although not altogether typical, perhaps have more to say than the text.

It is quite clear from them that the raw material of modern architecture exists in America - indeed more plentifully and more acceptably than in Europe. But it is not alone in America that a building whose rear represents this raw material of modern architecture is decorated on the façade by architects who consider themselves ‘modern’. Between the Tudor façade at the University of Michigan which Lönberg-Holm illustrates and the façade of de Bijenkorf in the Hague there is not much to choose according to the aesthetic of a ‘fine architecture’ once one has seen the rear of either.

It must further be remembered that in his generation no European architect showed a greater mastery of space and form than Frank Lloyd Wright; and despite his eclectic ornamentation none came nearer to anticipating the principles of post-war architecture.

While all that Lönberg-Holm has to say of the effects of the Paris Exposition of 1925 in America is but too true, he forgets that he has seen its effects only in the works of a generation already confirmed in the prac-

[p. 150]

tice of borrowing decoration wherever convenient to make the raw materials of architecture, as he expresses it, ‘look nice’.

But there is in America a younger generation, just about to begin to build if given the chance; and among this younger generation are certain men whose theoretical command of modern architecture, whose critical appreciation of it, is no less than that of Lönberg-Holm. Among these one, Peter Smith, who showed perhaps the greatest promise, died this winter. One of this projects was published by J.J.P. Oud in the previous number of this magazine.

With the raw material of modern construction at hand, with a few men among the younger generation able to profit by the European experiments of the last decade, the situation for the further development of ‘International Architecture’ in America is perhaps as bright as anywhere in Europe - for the new movement will not be hampered by a tradition of compromised ‘modernism’, as particularly in Holland and Scandinavia, nor as in Germany by the wholesale conversion of architects who have no real understanding of, or sympathy with the aesthetic of a ‘pure architecture’.

Very few architects, European or American, have realized in the last century and a half ‘that a building exists as form’. Moreover since there is architecture at least of the two centuries before that in America of general excellence equal to that of Europe; and as Americans feel, and I must believe rightly, that they share the general heritage of Western civilization, there is for the intelligent American quite as much of the profounder sort of tradition to help in solving the problem of form as for the European. Even in many respects as regards ‘time achievement’, the American has much to learn from Europe - as regards travelling particularly - and no danger of losing that which has perhaps become inherent in him.

All modern architecture is, in Lönberg-Holm's terms, ‘time-space architecture’. The architect incapable of creating in space and form who turns to borrowing the ‘space-architecture’ of others, either of the past or the present, is by no means a purely American phenomenon. Indeed most of Lönberg-Holm's strictures apply perhaps with greater force in Hamburg and Frankfort than in New York or Detroit. In Germany many architects admit that they sacrifice the study of ‘form and space’ to a ‘time-achievement’ which is if anything superior to that of America.

The American is probably far more safely placed as regards the architecture of the future than the European on amount of what Gertrude Stein calls his ‘disembodiment’.

When upon the flood of the raw material of architecture poured forth for economic reasons an aesthetic conscience comes in America to set form, that aesthetic conscience, more ‘disembodied’, more ‘pure’ than that of Europe, is far less likely to forget architecture the art for architecture as a part of sociology. Finally in this connection it should be remarked that while the constructions of Le Corbusier at the garden-city of Pessac near Bordeaux were in general a sad failure, his two latest and most successful houses were built for American patrons. It may be hoped therefore that when, as in the next few years there should be, there are American architects ready to build, there will be - and this is a point quite overlooked by Lönberg-Holm - work for them to do and an intelligent body of the public to work for.

Paris, 29-XII-'28