6. Point Taken: Gothic Modernism and the Modern Middle Ages
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146.06
The true Romanticist welcomes steel or concrete construction as his brother of the twelfth century must have welcomed the counterthrusting arch or flying buttress. To this extent, he may be called a ‘Gothicist,’ even though his “ave” to the steel frame and reinforced girder is, to a certain extent, a “vale” to the pointed arch and pinnacle.
—Bertram G. Goodhue,
“The Romanticist Point of View”
The Origins of Gothic Skyscrapers: Top That
The Gothic style was the crowning achievement of Christian architecture during the Middle Ages. Characterized by the pointed arch and an elaborate structural system of ribbed vaults and buttresses, it is a brilliant and impassioned style in which complex volumes of space are enclosed within a cage of stone and glass, all of it held aloft by the delicate opposition of thrust and counterthrust.
—William H. Pierson Jr.,
American Buildings and Their Architects
Towers in collegiate Gothic style were tours de force in multiple senses. In a time of no-hold-barred zeal, they put a spire into the heart of American aspiration. They shot heavenward at the same time as skyscrapers rebalanced the skylines of cities across the country. For most of the twentieth century, the United States outbuilt the world in these soaring buildings. No less an authority than Montgomery Schuyler (see Fig. 6.1), cultural critic par excellence of the Gilded Age, commented on the trend that propelled millionaire moguls to make menhirs of steel and glass. To his mind, the modern-day megaliths harked back not to prehistory or pyramids but to the Middle Ages. The new steeples had “no parallel, but a striking prototype” in the cathedrals built in northern France in the early thirteenth century.
The reason for relating many-storied buildings to Gothic great churches on a purely structural level is as transparent as glass set into stone or steelwork can be. Tall structures, such as the greatest Egyptian monumental piles and obelisks, existed in antiquity, yet were laid out differently. Most ancient constructions extended horizontally. In contradistinction to the classical low-rise, the Gothic cathedral constitutes the antecedent of the upwardly striving high-rise. Thus, the architects who thought of erecting skyscrapers could not help but look closely at the techniques of great churches in the late Middle Ages. Like the constructors of cathedrals, they sought to develop techniques for achieving the most ambitious structural height. Like them, they endeavored simultaneously to maintain stability without sacrificing fenestration and space to the size and extent of the support system.
The words “arch” and “architecture” are etymologically unrelated, but in the early development of skyscrapers they had more in common than they have had ever since. The men who raised the modern tall buildings studied Gothic for guidance as they sought clear solutions to a primal challenge: how to gird the maximum of space within the minimum of materials. In medieval Gothic, the chief ingredients are hewn stone and glass. In modern architecture, the equivalents are steel and glass. Gothic was the design and construction style of choice for verticality until the twentieth century, and for this and other reasons, a recurrent strand in modernism views Gothic as harbingering the quintessence of the modern.
Consciously or not, New World architects acceded to the same impulse as had been on show in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which was begun in 1855 and opened in 1860 (see Fig. 6.2). Sir Richard Owen, founder of the institution, intended it in its Gothicity as a “cathedral to nature.” Under the sway of John Ruskin and his The Stones of Venice, the principal designers of the English structure chose a polychromatic Gothic with Italianate and Venetian coloring. When one of the two lead participants in the planning fell ill, the edifice was brought to completion with the great man’s direct involvement. The exterior of the museum is Ruskinian from top to bottom. Yet it stands as anything but a monument to a conservative, historicizing Gothic. On the contrary, the design team innovated by erecting a Gothic framework of iron and glass, materials most familiar at the time from railroads and conservatories. Inside a large square court, they planted a glass roof atop cast iron pillars.
The same building blocks had been applied to impressive effect in the Crystal Palace. This establishment, erected in 1851 in London, constituted the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, with which world’s fairs originated. The resultant style of the institution has been labeled “techno-Gothic.” Architects of New York City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other cities in the United States noticed—and took aspects of the Oxford experiment to the next level, both really and figuratively.
Assembled of cast iron and plate glass, Crystal Palace was erected for the first few years of its life in London’s Hyde Park (see Fig. 6.3). Despite being profoundly new in its materials, the Palace managed to be at once lightly evocative of High Victorian Gothic, and ultimately prejudicial to it. It anticipated horizontally many features that would become fixtures of skyscrapers vertically. Although essentially an extravagantly oversized hothouse or a huge greenhouse, Crystal Palace also had ecclesiastical aspects in its basic layout. Hence, it has been called a cathedral of both human progress and commerce. As one chapel in this great church, it featured a “Mediaeval Court” (see Figs. 6.4 and 6.5), which presented an extraordinarily influential display of Gothic, overseen by none other than Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin himself. In consolidating iron and glass (even if not to achieve uprightness), it offered inspiration for modern architecture to come. Yet in what it contained, a much earlier era took precedence.
The indefatigable designer of the Palace of Westminster managed to make the Middle Ages subjugate modernity by demonstrating that pseudomedieval art and artisanry could be applied to all the needs of the present day. The medieval formed a counterpoint, not a contradiction, to other arrays of the latest machinery. It also complemented the exoticism of exhibits that flaunted the wares and ways of life from unfamiliar cultures from the world over. The making of the Middle Ages into a chic commodity within this context of protoglobalization can be inferred from the names of the vendors from whom objects on show or ones like them could be purchased (see Fig. 6.6). A roll call of hot or would-be hot brand names leaps out at the highest register, just below the glass-and-iron ceiling. One and a half centuries would pass before the catchword “cathedrals of consumption” would become entrenched for describing large indoor shopping spaces such as malls, but the consumptive process was initiated already in 1851.
More than sixty years after the construction of Crystal Palace and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the prismatic dome structure of the Glass Pavilion was fitted together from concrete and glass in Cologne (see Fig. 6.7). The occasion was the 1914 exhibition of the German Association of Craftsmen, who could be called the inheritors in that nation of the British Arts and Crafts movement. With its unusual geometry and variegated coloring, the design manifested a concern with light and aesthetic effect. It bears remembering that the Gothic and neo-Gothic cathedral in Cologne was a point of national pride—and that it had been completed considerably less than a half century earlier. From a perspective of German nationalism, Gothic was indeed the precursor to modernism.
Owing to the outbreak of World War I, the Glass Pavilion was dismantled after being open to the public for view and visitation for less than three months. The skyscrapers that changed the face of transoceanic cities became the exclusive province of the United States. Even so, they shared with the sadly impermanent structure a knowing and unhidden debt to Gothic. The pavilion was a first toe dunked into the puddle of the modernism in architecture that would soon be under design and development in Germany. An art school and movement named Bauhaus had the upper hand from 1919 to 1933. If Gothic had its polar opposite, this style might seem to have been it. Whereas the medieval form was old and historicizing, this school of design was self-knowingly modern and seemingly ahistorical. Yet the two manners were not altogether opposed. Notably, both exploited the extraordinary qualities of glass as a construction material. An early theorist of Bauhaus, Arthur Korn, waxed ecstatic in extolling medieval stained-glass windows for their beauty. As he saw matters, the new fashion paired glass with other materials to fulfill new functions: “A new glass age has begun, which is equal in beauty to the old one of Gothic windows.”
The distinctively US iteration of the earlier medieval Gothic was sufficiently widespread as an architectural idiom that traces of it, and sometimes much more, can be detected dozens of stories aloft in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. For a time, Gothic became as American as apple pie: people ate it up—and here that means emphatically up. Collegiate Gothic sought to infix the architecture in its historical, social, and spiritual context. The soaring physical height enabled an expectancy of moral uplift. In contrast, Gothic skyscrapers brought to a logical fruition the analysis of the medieval style sheerly for its design principles. Wherever steel stretched skyward, architects and viewers turned their talents to the upward mobility and spirituality of Gothic cathedrals. The way skyward had been paved, perhaps unforeseen, by earlier public works. For example, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the North American continent became thickly freckled with municipalities that were the proud possessors of standpipes, water towers, and pumping stations in, however improbably, the renascent Gothic. These structures, designed with lancets, quatrefoils, and other pointed and lobed staples of revival architecture, towered over the landscape (see Figs. 6.8, 6.9 and 6.10). Sometimes they stood in towns with other buildings in the same style, but in others they were specimens of what could be called Gothic tokenism. They could have been eyesores, like the smokestacks and slag heaps that came as the inevitable concomitants of industrialization. Instead, rather than being masked as industrial intrusions, they were exhibited as objects of civic pride. Beyond looking like hydraulic monuments of bygone civilizations, they at least aspired to be picturesque. At the same time, by being built in Gothic they may have been intended to have rub off on them some of the soulfulness associated with the style. Buildings were on the verge of being made machines. Gothic skyscrapers fought the mechanization: they embodied architecture as real or at least pseudo-anti-machine.
Churches and other religious institutions sought to copy medieval cathedrals, but in so doing both to Americanize and Gothicize the features of these buildings. Not infrequently, the houses of worship in the United States included replicas of European pilgrimage sites, most notably ones in the modern boomtown of Lourdes. The Gothic cladding of municipal waterwork facilities fulfilled similar functions within laical life. Decades would elapse before the creation of Disneyland or Walt Disney World, and public works cannot be compared closely with theme parks. Even so, it may be said that these much earlier edifices served similarly as at least local destinations for recreation. As happened so often in the revival, they were set in built landscapes that were designed to appear sylvan. What is more, the aquatic associations only enhanced their picturesqueness. However great a contradiction in terms the phrase may be, they acted in their sometimes moated majesty as industrial ivory towers (see Figs. 6.11 and 6.12). Gothic architecture and idyllic landscapes have often been wedded.
In the United States, the most magnificent example of an engineering triumph presented in Gothic revival style is the Brooklyn Bridge. Erected from 1869 to 1883 in New York, the construction was radically innovative in its mechanics. A supreme feat of the gigantism that expressed the vitality of America at the time, it is held aloft by a suspension system that relies for its lightness upon the paradox of heavy steel cables. Yet in its architecture, the same structure turned back to earlier history in a characteristically nineteenth-century way. The thick metal ropes that suspend the road across the river rest upon two massive pylons of granite block, pierced by lancets in a style well known to us: Gothic.
In height, the steeples of the Brooklyn Bridge were overtopped in New York City at the time only by the spire of Trinity Church, which was built under the influence of Pugin (see Fig. 6.13). At this juncture, Trinity and its Puginian Gothic revival style would have been stunningly new, but within a few decades the skyline of the city would be altered irrevocably (see Fig. 6.14). The historicizing aspect of the towers on the span came from their design, since each incorporated two lofty lancets (see Fig. 6.15). Beneath these medievalesque points of more than a hundred feet proceed convoys of vehicles and troops of pedestrians alike. Like medieval churchgoers, they pass through the portals of their places of worship—and light penetrates the same spaces, as if through arches in ruined choirs where the stained glass is no more.
Despite the sharp tips of the archways, no one could have misconstrued the bridge by itself for an authentic structure from the Middle Ages. Confusion was even less likely in its urban context. In fact, even the Gothicizing touches could be overlooked as the metallurgical modernity of steel catches the viewer’s eye. Contrast the Tower Bridge over the River Thames in London, which was raised up slightly later. It holds fast to a Victorian Gothic style that can seem completely unsuited to the technology it houses (see Fig. 6.16). Yet early postcards situate it in juxtaposition to such genuinely medieval landmarks as the Tower of London. Today, the faux medievalness may delude tourists (tower-ists) into thinking that the span has a real connection with the Middle Ages (see Fig. 6.17). Whether European or not, we forget at our peril how what appears medieval at first glance may contain much that is modern—and vice versa.
By physics and nature, the Gothic arch points heavenward. By its directionality, this kind of erection is therefore associated almost lackadaisically with spiritual transcendence. Nothing should be puzzling in the association that many have drawn between the story of the jongleur and the architecture of Gothic. A soulful connection with the style existed from the very beginning of the skyscraper, that great American innovation. The Frenchman Viollet-le-Duc, whose Lectures were published in an English translation in 1881, had not gone so far as to propose the construction of office buildings with iron frames encased in stone, let alone of Gothic skyscrapers. Still, he had laid out the basis for such an extension of his ideas. In Chicago, his influence, for his focus on cathedrals as technical miracles among other things, had been recognized by 1880.
What was the first skyscraper? One very early candidate for the prize of being the prototype is the Jayne Building in Philadelphia (see Fig. 6.18), which was finished in 1851. For the record, that was the same year as the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace in London. The ur-skyscraper stood ten stories high, with granite piers that ran from the first floor to the top. The Gothic character of the edifice evidenced itself near the top, where the supports joined in lancets topped by quatrefoils. Despite potentially being compatible with the design of tall structures, the style in fact featured little in them until a few decades later.
The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, constructed between 1883 and 1885, is sometimes held to deserve credit more properly as the first skyscraper in the world. Originally nine stories, supplemented by an additional two in 1890, it was composed mainly of iron but included steel in its framework. It showed the architectural promise, hollow literally but not metaphorically, in the strategy of employing walls as screens rather than as supports. The designer was William Le Baron Jenney. In some circles he was called consequently by the stiffly contested title “Father of the American skyscraper.” After beginning his education in the United States, he rounded off his studies in Paris, where he was a classmate of Gustave Eiffel and fell under the spell of Viollet-le-Duc. Back in America during the Civil War, he served as an engineer under Union General Sherman, uncle of the Elizabeth Cameron with whom Henry Adams was entwisted for half his life. While in service, Jenney rose to the rank of major. He collaborated with an architect on a volume entitled Principles and Practice of Architecture, of which an investigation of the Gothic cathedral forms the backbone. The motivation of the coauthors for finding relevance in this architecture is readily discernible, since architects and builders had within their grasp the attainment of unprecedented height—if only they could first master the basics of medieval skeleton construction and then express them through the media of iron and steel.
To Ralph Adams Cram and others like him, the amalgamation of metal and stone crossed wholly over the line. To such dyed-in-the-wool or even stone-cold Goths, skyscraper and Gothic were antonyms. These architects were not the equivalents in their profession of plastic surgeons, out to achieve cosmetic effects by performing bizarre face-lifts that would make modern buildings look older from the neck up. Nor were practicing designers the only ones to venture their opinions. Henry Adams’s youngest brother did not keep close to his vest that he found the juxtaposition of materials and styles from such different eras repugnant. In The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896), Brooks Adams explicated the course of history, such as the downfall of Rome, on the basis of the latest theories about thermodynamics. On a less high-flown level, he now and again opined upon architecture. One of his ideas restated the ancient commonplace about historical inevitability in which golden ages yielded to silver, silver to iron. He suggested a paradox involving precious and base metals. His premise was that the adoption of the gold standard in 1873 opened a door to monopolization and manipulation of capital by an elite. (Some things never change, do they?) In short order, this development led to the application of iron and steel to skyscrapers, embodying the new Iron Age that compared ever so poorly with the Golden Age of medieval art.
Such somber thoughts of decline were one aspect, though only one, of the fin de siècle. Among others were escalating optimism and confidence of a sort that would soon powerfully mark the skylines of major American cities. The insignia included Gothic.
The Cathedral of Commerce
The cathedrals were the skyscrapers
of their day.
—Donald L. Miller, City of the Century
The foremost example of an early Gothic skyscraper may be the sixty-story Woolworth Building in Manhattan (see Fig. 6.19). For close on twenty years, from when polished off in 1913 at 792 feet until outdone by the Empire State Building in 1931, it ranked as the tallest inhabited edifice in the world. It was occupied by 12,000 people and 3,000 offices, and outfitted with more than 5,000 windows. “Its summit piercing the heavens,” it was exceeded in height only by the Eiffel Tower—and the Parisian icon was unoccupied. The pinnacle stood alone, recognizable from all four sides as a new sort of construction in the rapidly evolving urban landscape. To this day it remains among the twenty loftiest structures in New York City, among the fifty tallest in the entire United States. It followed on the much lower but equally impressive West Street Building in a similar Gothic idiom by the same architect (see Fig. 6.20).
The Woolworth Building was soon nicknamed “the Cathedral of Commerce.” The edifice is strongly and to our eyes perhaps strangely Gothic, with gargoyles galore. Its qualities as a cathedral and as a skyscraper are juxtaposed as a mixture rather than as a compound. The Gothicism takes a few different forms. Most readily visible from afar is the top: in the middle of turrets at all four corners, a spire juts upward. To a viewer who draws nearer, the next feature of the style to greet the eye is the decoration overlaid in a sheath of white. Gleaming terracotta clothes the steel frame that handles all the work of structural support. The observation gallery atop the building shows a profusion of chimeras that puts to shame Viollet-le-Duc’s recasting of Notre-Dame of Paris (see Fig. 6.21). Another photograph emphasizes the same sort of Gothic exuberance at the street-level entrance (see Fig. 6.22). In short, the exterior of the building features a riot of arches, buttresses, lancets, and pinnacles worthy of the liveliest late Gothic construction of the Middle Ages. It recreated the architectural marvels that parts of Europe had allowed to slip into ruin, monuments of ancient Greece and medieval France, pockmarked as much by the bellicosity of man as by the mere passage of erosive time. Nor do the medievalizing and Gothicism end at the portal. Visitors enter a lobby in the shape of a Latin cross, where they find Byzantinizing mosaics and stained glass, along with murals that depict allegorical scenes of business life (see Fig. 6.23). What more could a money-leeching modern-day monk desire?
The byname of the Woolworth Building goes directly to the contradiction inherent within the Gothic skyscraper. While modern and commercial, it strives concurrently to be medieval and spiritual. A clergyman, not condemnatory but encomiastic, set up precisely this juxtaposition in his foreword to a guidebook to the edifice. Yet in the concluding sentence of this passage, the good cleric suggests that the structure has little about it to warrant calling it a great church. In fact, earlier medievalizers, such as both John Ruskin and William Morris, would have been aghast at the Americanness of juxtaposing the concepts of cathedral and commerce in the first place.
Woolworth heaped up a fortune from his vast chain of emporia. The brick-and-mortar outlets were known in those days as five-and-ten-cent stores. His ambition for the skyscraper may have been inspired by his admiration for Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament in London as well as for the place of worship and pilgrimage in Cologne. Of the threesome, only the first is late medieval more than modern and medievalesque. Yet irrespective of the architectural inspirations for its patron, was the Cathedral of Commerce so much ecclesiastic as feudal or baronial? Unless we make room for an un-Christian tendency we could call “altar ego,” it has a stronger right to be regarded as a castle than as a house of God. Better yet, the Woolworth Building is a tower, a symbol of seigneurial power and wealth such as thrusts skyward in walled Tuscan hill towns of medieval Italy, like San Gimignano. If it is high, the height takes the form of “high risk, high return.”
At the same time, such buildings attempt to elide, by sheathing steel in stone, the disconnect Henry Adams felt keenly between the Virgin and the dynamo. Their exteriors are radically modernized equivalents to Chartres. At the same time, they are shells that camouflage machinery, such as the vertical transportation without which these buildings would have been beyond the bounds of possibility: having stairwells but no elevator shafts works only in structures with a handful of stories, which clarifies why higher walk-ups were made illegal in the first half of the twentieth century. For that matter, even from outside, the brilliant effects of these edifices required what was then the latest technology. A 1918 book guaranteeing that the Woolworth Building would be known even unto eternity as “The Cathedral of Commerce” commemorated in its opening sentence the formal inauguration of the skyscraper by using—ta-da!—electrical illumination. A later plate that shows the tourist attraction by night bears the caption (see Fig. 6.24): “At dusk, its gigantic Tower, bathed in electric light of many gorgeous hues, rises high into the heavens like a shaft of fire heralding the approach of night.” Not an ordinary nickel-and-dime cathedral!
The Tribune Tower
One swallow does not a summer make.
Another relevant case among Gothic skyscrapers is the thirty-six-floor Tribune Tower in Chicago, completed in 1925 (see Fig. 6.25). Its design was selected in an international competition run by the major city newspaper, for which the edifice is named. The goal was to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the year in which the paper had been instituted. In the end, John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood took the victory lap. In their partnership, these two New York architects were associated mostly with Art Deco business centers, but for this tall building they favored neo-Gothic. The second place went to an entry by Eliel Saarinen, destined for fame from his art nouveau constructions. The Finn’s submission for the design of the Trib building also featured pronounced Gothic aspects (see Fig. 6.26). The hoped-for outcome was a design for “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world.” The contest for the $100,000 prize was open, but an article in the Chicago Sunday Tribune nudged readers none too subtly toward the Middle Ages. The headline posed to the broadsheet’s readers a supposedly open-ended question: “What do you think The Tribune’s new building will be like?” On the right side, most of the page was taken up by a large image made from an etching of the resplendently and unrelentingly Gothic west façade of Antwerp Cathedral (see Fig. 6.27). The soft-sell prose about the church presented it innocently as a provocation to imagination. Yet on the left side, the short text was flanked by a fanciful office block. The structure was surmounted, rather unorganically, by an adaptation of the cathedral’s largest spire. If the sponsors were fishing for Gothic, they used dynamite to do so.
Both the origins and aspirations of the neo-Gothic style ultimately chosen for the Tribune Tower were proclaimed in the Hall of Inscriptions in the lobby. A quotation from John Ruskin’s “Lamp of Memory” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, with all the flourishes of a blackletter font, is inset in the floor (see Fig. 6.28). The same spirit drove the contractors to embed upon the surface of the construction what now amounts to 149 rocks from man-made structures and natural sites all around the world—and from across time. The chronological and geographical reach of the pieces is very deliberate. To the makers of the skyscraper, building techniques were positioning modern America to outgun the achievements of the past—to eclipse with steel in the New World what the Old had accomplished with stone.
A ferrous baton had been passed from one continent to another with the Statue of Liberty. As we saw, the copper-clad image had an iron-framed interior designed by Viollet-le-Duc, the architect who more than any other in France rejuvenated Gothic. The steel groundwork (and skywork) had been raised with the Eiffel Tower, itself a rival or foil of the first magnitude to the renovated Notre-Dame of Paris. Now the United States had jointed the two together, steel and stone, modern and medieval, in the Gothic skyscraper. Those wide awake to what might be called the riveting successes of architectural history judged the move to a fresh expression of the style from the Middle Ages as not backward and downward but forward and upward, as not old but new.
The distinctive architectural features of the Tribune Building extend to ornate buttresses at the very peak. As a whole, the misplaced steeple is modeled after the medieval Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral in France—and after Harkness Tower at Yale University, which was singled out for its beauty in a promotion of the competition for the architectural design of the Chicago edifice (see Fig. 6.29). The indebtedness to the towers of great churches in Rouen, Amiens (see Fig. 6.30), and Mechlin (see Fig. 6.31) in France and Flanders, and its likeness to Harkness in Connecticut, may have carried a special emotional and cultural charge for the first cousins who were the driving forces behind the Chicago daily newspaper and its contest. Both men were graduates of Yale and were exposed in their military service during World War I to the damage done to medieval towns that were shelled during the combat. Their boola boola strain of American Gothic could save the day architecturally by preserving the Middle Ages for posterity, much as the doughboys had done in the war.
Beyond absorbing rafts of contemporary sculpture in newly sculpted chimeras and gargoyles, the Tribune Tower repurposes, in a very American expression of the “melting pot,” stones, bricks, and other pieces from different architectural and natural sites throughout the world. But the Chicago skyscraper was believed to embody much more than a magpie-like gathering of choice morsels from previous or foreign cultures. The design elements were selected with care to be the best and most beautiful, and the carvings and stonework reflected this process of selection. The scope of ambition was greater too: the structure is studded with bits and pieces not just from around the planet but even from beyond it. It includes, among later additions to the original souvenirs, a nugget of moon rock, as does also a pane of stained glass in the National Cathedral. The lunar lumps go to show that Gothic revival can be both forward- and outward-looking.
The chair of the jury that chose the Howells and Hood design as the winner felt that the entry stood out because its distinctive appearance countered the most atrocious imperfection in the general state of culture in America—and more narrowly in Chicago: the Gothic design embodied medieval spirituality as an antidote to modern materialism. In effect, those who favored the style viewed it as a cure-all for the soullessness that in their judgment had arrived with industrialization, factories, and all the rest. Now well into the twentieth century, historicists trusted Gothic to rebalance and redress the frailties of modernity.
The Tribune Building predominated in its neighborhood and beyond for years to come. One decade later, a radio station completed its new studios just north of the skyscraper in 1935. The transmitter’s call sign WGN abbreviated the slogan by which the daily styled itself: the “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” Since radios with cathedral-like cabinets (see Fig. 6.32) were all the vogue too, good logic and symmetry supported construction of a “Gothic radio structure” for housing the up-to-the-minute broadcast technology.
The spiritual objective of the Gothic skyscraper is still more evident in the even higher Chicago Temple Building (see Fig. 6.33). Called a skyscraper church, it was the tallest building in the Windy City (and in the United States outside New York City) from 1924 to 1930. As the First United Methodist Church of the metropolis, it houses no fewer than three sanctuaries. Unless we stipulate that such a place of worship must be devoted entirely to religious purposes, it is the tallest church in the world from street level to spire top. If the stricter definition applies, it loses out to the Ulm Minster in Germany. As we will see, the German cathedral was taken as an inspiration by modernists of that country at precisely this time.
Gothic combined the somewhat opposed qualities of being instantly age-old and yet promising timelessness or at least durability. To the jury chair, Howells and Hood belonged to a fresh peer group of young men with “New Spirit.” These new Goths sought inspiration by developing architecture from much earlier, pre-Columbian history, and by accommodating it to the new possibilities that steel-frame construction and elevators had enabled. They were truly a rising generation with a rising style.
Giving Gothic: John D. Rockefeller Jr.
The Rockefeller family name is associated most tangibly with an aggregation of buildings and other major architectural components, originally fourteen but now twenty-one, in Midtown Manhattan. Known as Rockefeller Center, the complex is emphatically unmedieval in its Art Deco-ness, even though John D. Rockefeller Jr. (see Fig. 6.34) himself made a pitch for planning it in Gothic revival, and even though one of the two architects who designed it had worked in the office of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson. Unsurprisingly, Ralph Adams Cram vivisected the style of the center as it was built. All the same, the entire assemblage has been labeled “the mid-century cathedral” (the century in question being, of course, the twentieth) and even “our secular cathedral.” The cathedralic analogy is meant to bring home how this constellation of impressively high office buildings occupies the same central space in the landscape, real and imaginary, of modern city dwellers and visitors as great churches and their precincts did in bygone times. This claim has been undergirded by a quotation from a memoir by an Irish playwright that conveys how modern-day pilgrims (that is to say, day-trippers) to the metropolis seek out as their first stopping point not New York cathedrals such as St. John’s or St. Patrick’s but instead this compound.
Gothic was effectively precluded for the Rockefeller Center by a zoning resolution. To regulate the size of structures, a setback was prescribed. The zoners wanted, more or less, a ziggurat. Although stepped gables are feasible within the style, pseudocathedrals formed into steps are impossible to design: they are a contradiction in terms. All the same, the whole complex can be called—straight up—a cathedral. 30 Rock, as one address within the grouping has been dubbed for short, has been termed the shrine. The support for its cathedralesque features came from the highest level. Rockefeller had as his own space an executive suite at the southwest corner of the fifty-sixth floor, more than a dozen stories short of what would be the penthouse, but still very far up (see Fig. 6.35). In accord with his favorite manner, the public benefactor installed at the top of the building a fence with somewhat incongruously stylized Gothic arches and slats to surround the Observation Deck. The metalwork was cast in aluminum, to harmonize with the spandrels. The color is a pale ashen, to simulate the lead that Rockefeller would have preferred instead of the cheaper and lighter substance. Other edifices in the original compound have similar constructions that culminated in slightly angular pointed leaves, as a final and finial gesture toward the Gothic that Rockefeller favored.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a financier, son of an American oil magnate who was the richest man in America. John Senior’s business practices led the Supreme Court to order the untwisting of his chief company for violation of antitrust laws. Both father and son were lifelong philanthropists. The liberality of the younger Rockefeller enabled the construction and renovation of edifices across the United States in a multitude of architectural styles. Although amenable to a stylistic range that encompassed Egyptian and classical, he had a noteworthy association with collegiate Gothic architecture. Through the funding he provided, he was responsible for many acres of halls, dormitories, and libraries in the medieval mode from coast to coast. Alongside Rockefeller’s personal generosity should be placed that of Edward Harkness. This Yale alumnus drilled into his oil millions so that he could foot the bill for the erection of residential colleges of his alma mater in collegiate Gothic. The family fortune welled up out of the silent partnership of Edward’s father with John Senior, in the early years of Standard Oil, which had been the 800-pound gorilla in the fossil-fuel industry.
Rockefeller’s Gothicizing philanthropy was not limited to funding construction in twentieth-century Gothic. He also spent free-handedly on the transformation of the authentically medieval elements of George Barnard’s Cloisters, a museum housing art from the Middle Ages. In the fullness of time, the original initiative metamorphosed into what is now The Cloisters, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. To this end, Rockefeller underwrote the acquisition of many new components. By so doing, he enabled what had been an exciting but still inchoate architectural ensemble to be integrated into a full-fledged museum. Its contents matched the quality of the setting. In the overall architecture, Rockefeller’s love of Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth initially inspired him to woolgathering about building a castle-like structure. Traces of this original conception linger in the rampart, entry gate, and portcullis of what was eventually erected. To this day, The Cloisters remains the only institution of its kind in the United States dedicated solely and exclusively to medieval art. Finally, to look beyond constructions of collegiate Gothic or re-creations of medieval Gothic in the United States, Rockefeller supported the reconstruction and maintenance of original structures in the style in Europe itself. On Memorial Day of 1924, for instance, he pledged a million dollars of financial assistance to the French government. A third of this sum was targeted to the reroofing of Reims cathedral, which had been open to the elements since World War I.
The patronage of John D. Rockefeller Sr. hammered an enduring imprint of collegiate Gothic upon the campuses of Bryn Mawr, Princeton, and Chicago. His support began early, and it has been maintained through succeeding generations of his family, rocking on into the twenty-first century in the United States. To take an early example, Rockefeller Hall, the last residence hall designed by Cope and Stewardson at Bryn Mawr College, came in 1904 (see Fig. 6.36). Beyond the troika just mentioned, various other universities, colleges, and seminaries have benefited from Rockefeller generosity. For instance, Buttrick Hall at Vanderbilt University was raised in 1928 thanks in large part to the resources of the General Education Board, funded initially through John Senior (see Fig. 6.37). By no accident, the thoroughly Gothic crypt of the equally thoroughly Gothic National Cathedral in the nation’s capital contains a stone plaque that has incised the gratitude of various southern colleges to John Junior for his repeated benefactions to them.
In the profusion of collegiate Gothic, the style was sometimes put to bizarrely anachronistic uses. The erstwhile Bartlett Gymnasium at the University of Chicago is only one among many cases in point (see Fig. 6.38). Even before such medievalesque features as stained glass and a mural had been put in place, John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself posed a supremely down-to-earth question: “Is it wise to use the cathedral architecture in a gymnasium?”
The support of John D. Rockefeller Jr. for Gothic and specifically collegiate Gothic construction work extended beyond commercial and academic institutions. Since the style received its definitive expression in ecclesiastical architecture, Gothic was a good choice for churches. In this vein, he commissioned the Riverside Church (see Figs. 6.39 and 6.40), built between the end of 1927 and 1930 in a collegiate Gothic heavily influenced by French Gothic. The house of prayer is presented from a perspective that makes its Gothic tower loom high above both a major historical monument, Grant’s Tomb, and a triumph of modern technology, the George Washington Bridge. The architecture was even modeled to some extent after Chartres Cathedral, down to an adaptation of the floor maze or labyrinth found there (see Fig. 6.41). Rockefeller sought to bookend at least part of Manhattan with the imported Gothic of The Cloisters and the revived Gothic of Riverside Church. The philanthropist also financed the Central Presbyterian Church in Manhattan (see Fig. 6.42), which was built in the Gothic manner between 1920 and 1922.
Rockefeller’s dedication to Gothic ecclesiastical architecture was by no means restricted to Manhattan or even New York City. At Colgate Rochester Divinity School, he funded the erection of a campus that was completed in 1932 in collegiate Gothic (see Fig. 6.43). At Bryn Mawr, the M. Carey Thomas Library followed Rockefeller Hall in 1906. Also funded largely thanks to Rockefeller’s benefactions, its cloistered courtyard looked as if it had been built hundreds of years previously (see Fig. 6.44). The chief inspirations of Cope and Stewardson included the English colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The designers acculturated so effectively to early twentieth-century America the architecture of Oxbridge that the new style they midwifed came to symbolize the academic life.
“Not a Cathedral-Building Age” and
Thorstein Veblen
The evidence, such as it may be, indicates that the Gilded Age may be seen more distinctly if viewed, at least occasionally, without the aid of Thorstein Veblen’s spectacles.
The pronouncement “ours is not a cathedral-building age” can be found repeatedly in newspapers through out the US in 1879 and 1880, enough to make it seem hackneyed. In part, the preoccupation with great churches may have been prompted by the completion in 1880 of the Cologne Dom, in Gothic. American citizens on the grand tour would have noticed how Europeans, in the flush of nationalism, were completing the backlog of unfinished Gothic constructions or erecting entirely new ones. The average visitor today may have no idea that the cathedral façades of Florence and Naples were added in 1867–1887 and 1877–1905 respectively, but the work in progress would have been unmissable at the time.
In any case, the truism was broadcast most widely through its inclusion in an essay entitled “An American Cathedral” that Montgomery Schuyler published in 1892. The year of publication was most definitely not irrelevant. In marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival, the United States engaged in searching self-analysis. The architectural commentator opened his magisterial piece with a sentence that quotes the shibboleth, and refers to it as “so obviously true, and so familiar.” Yet would he have found “ours is not a cathedral-building age” still so readily applicable had he written the article fifteen or thirty years later? He may have made his avowal about cathedral-building just as the most Gothomaniacal architects settled down at their drafting tables and the most medievalizing masons took their chisels in hand. Furthermore, by asserting that the late nineteenth century was not a time of cathedrals, Schuyler did not necessarily profess that Gothic was unsuited to modernity.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two of the twentieth, American institutions—ecclesiastical, educational, military, commercial, and governmental—committed boundless resources to raising ritzy buildings in assorted flavors of Gothic revival. Implicitly, in some cases even wittingly, this determination to build related to the rise of the United States of America as a global political and economic power. Suddenly the country possessed monetary means with which to experiment. It could make itself look as it liked and own what it wished. Faced with this golden (and greenbacked) opportunity, it engaged in a national game of dress-up by trying on different pasts, mostly European ones, to see if it liked their look and fit. On an individual level, privileged revelers could pitch costumed balls; collectively, the historicism necessitated the building that architecture required as much as it did the buying of art and cultural realia.
The commitment of wealth to the construction of an Americanized Middle Ages did not come without controversy. One prominent opponent, the American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, vilified the original, medieval, Gothic cathedral as empty ostentation and imprudent expenditure, on the order of the pyramids (see Fig. 6.45). He found fault even more captiously with the re-creation of the same architecture centuries later and an ocean away in collegiate Gothic. To him, Chicago, Yale, Trinity College in Hartford, and other campuses were frittering resources on inefficiency: the style was a throwback, an atavistic reversion to a past not quite as out of the way as the cavemen but as little relevant to the modern world as the Pleistocene. Yet he discerned in Gothic even worse elements of American society in play.
In Veblen’s reading of the architectural and socioeconomic landscape, both the originals and the re-creations gave voice to the gusto for “conspicuous consumption” by leisure classes. The archetypal barons of the Middle Ages anticipated the robber ones of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The vulgarian spendthrifts of his age squandered bucketloads of money on vain ostentation. Class exploitation entered the picture as the rich wastrels pressed poor laborers into serf-like service to put together their castles in the sky, or cathedrals on the manicured lawns.
Oddly, the economist sounded some tones reminiscent of Cram and the most impassioned of Gothic proponents. Like them, he railed against meaningless manifestations of caste, wealth, and culture. Of course, the hollowness he censured first and foremost was the gaping space within Rockefeller-funded Gothic edifices on his own campus, the University of Chicago. These had been erected for the classrooms, studies, offices, libraries, and laboratories that he and his colleagues used. The great professor thundered against the extravagance and impracticality. To his hypercritical eye, the buildings of the Gothic revival were poorly matched to the purposes they needed to serve. What did the dead hand (and heads) of gargoyles have to do with the living reality of modernity? What functions were served by steep gables, towers, dormers, oriels, crockets, spiky finials, spandrels, and tracery? The steeples may appear to soar, but cost-benefit analysis proves that appearance to be illusory: they are sinkholes—money pits.
By contrast, Gothicizers chose to see in operation a more high-minded process. President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago (see Fig. 6.46) appraised the labor of the masons who raised collegiate Gothic buildings throughout the United States, reaching, like others, a sunny assessment of their work that is redolent of the protosocialism preached by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The outlook of Harper and cohort contradicted the argument that classicism stands in the same relationship to democracy as Gothic to elitism. Instead, the Goths of the Gilded Age preferred to accentuate the romantic, moralistic, and monastic worth of the architectural style they promoted.
Matter-of-factly, Veblen took Gothic to task for requiring high-priced building materials, for being ill suited to the construction practices of his day, and for producing nonfunctional results. From a practical standpoint, he was scathing about the poor acoustics and even worse lighting that he associated with the style. He ridiculed the anachronism of performing modern scientific research within buildings that conjured up a medieval dream-world. He hooted at having modern-day instructors and students conduct their activities in lobbies that “might once have served as a mustering place for a body of unruly men-at-arms.” Aesthetically, the social scientist bridled at the grey limestone exteriors of the campus that John D. Rockefeller Jr. founded and funded on the south side of Chicago. He found the façades stonily somber rather than stone-cold sober. To him, they signaled secession from the beauty and vitality of the world rather than a reprieve from its materialism. In sum, the professor regarded the fashion as resulting in “wasteful, ornate, and meretricious edifices” that the barons of his day were gulled into believing would be “a competent expression of their cultural hopes and ambitions.” He conjectured that in the next shift of stylistic taste “the disjointed grotesqueries of an eclectic and modified Gothic” would pass into “the same category of apologetic neglect” to which in his times mid-Victorianism had been relegated. How much should we be won over by Veblen’s dire denunciations? Economists have seldom done very well at predicting the future—except retrospectively, when their eyesight tends to be nearly invariably twenty-twenty.
In the expressions Veblen made famous, collegiate Gothic was conspicuous consumption directed toward the end of status emulation. Yet for all its vim and verve, his vituperation did not stanch the spread of the fashion on American campuses, not even on his own at Chicago. The turrets, buttresses, and gargoyles stand to this day. What alternative did he offer? His druthers might have been the efficient modernism and digital anonymity of MIT, where university buildings have numbers rather than names. Who is to criticize those decisions regarding style and nomenclature—but at the same time, who would argue that they should have been applied at all institutions of higher learning? For that matter, have we fared better since the demise of collegiate Gothic, which at least paid close attention to the interaction of edifices and landscape—not that it is easier, even for professional metrologists, to measure the profit that comes of aesthetic harmony and environmental responsibility? To the eye of at least this one laic, many campuses have forsaken an attempt to impose a presiding spirit. Instead, they have embraced what could be considered a mix-and-match eclecticism. In the process they become theme parks, with single buildings designed by this or that brand-name architect. As a consequence, the constructions lack coherence or integration into the greater physical space. Such was not always the case.
In the days of collegiate Gothic, spats over architecture were fought openly and hard. Culture wars, like most others, often end in wins and losses. In my opinion, we are lucky that Veblen was overruled. Only time will tell, but over the long haul the Gothic splurge of the nouveaux riches in the Gilded Age may turn out to have been (especially those towers) a tip-top investment—capital and spiritual—for the nation.
Seeing Chicago in Gray and White
To celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of when the Italian explorer and his crew sailed the ocean blue, sighted land, and set their feet upon sand untouched by European feet, Chicago played host to the World’s Columbian Exposition, which opened in 1893. At the same time, the booming urban center experienced a famous showdown between two architectural styles and cultural significances. The crossfire pitted against each other a pair of districts, freshly built or under construction. The two areas were designated by opposing appellations, the White City and the Gray City (see Figs. 6.47 and 6.48). The pair of so-called cities contrasted starkly with the tenements that made up much of the rest of the metropolis. Both arrived two decades or so after the Great Chicago Fire.
The conflagration of 1871 devastated much of the business district. The destruction left key swaths of the urban area an erased sheet of blueprint paper on which to fill in the blanks and diagram the future. In steel and iron, brick and stone, the Windy City erected its self-image as a distinctively American municipality (and perhaps in its own immodest eyes as the most distinctive one), at a point when the whole country was taking on new roles for itself in the world.
The White City was official. The architectural array was constructed temporarily for the World’s Fair. Its centerpiece was the Court of Honor, with its buildings clad in gleaming white-painted stucco (see Fig. 6.49). The prevailing fashion was conditioned heavily by French neoclassicism that held to Beaux Arts principles. Did the commitment to this architecture succeed? Henry Adams was less satisfied by the incandescent neoclassical dome of the great Administration Building than he was by the dynamos he encountered first at the Chicago Exposition. In subsequent years he would fumble and flounder his way toward an idiosyncratic equipoise between modernism of technology and medievalism of spirit. That very contrast was graven already upon the face of the Windy City itself.
In chiaroscuro opposition to its whitened twin, the Gray City encompassed the neo-Gothic edifices of the establishment for higher learning that were taking shape across the midway (see Fig. 6.50). Looming quadrangles of gray Indiana limestone were fitted together in the style to allow for orderly growth as the “University on the Midway” expanded. The adoption of a thoroughly collegiate Gothic roadmap for the development of the new educational institution in Chicago was somewhat paradoxical, since it was a research facility very much on the German model rather than a college modeled after what Americans imagined Oxford and Cambridge to be.
Should the university have committed itself to the luminous transience of the White City, most of which disappeared precipitately? Or should it have built more practical structures, along the lines of those familiar to Veblen from his youth? He failed to recognize that for variety’s sake even the grounds of the World’s Fair eventually acquired their own traces of Gothicism, detectable in the entrance to the roller coaster known as Devil’s Gorge, which opened around 1907 in the amusement park associated with the original Exposition. The portal leading up to the ride bears more than a faint family resemblance to the medieval-but-not-medieval gargoyles of Notre-Dame in Paris (see Fig. 6.51). In any event, the scrap in the United States over collegiate Gothic was still in its early days.
The anti-Goths would not win for a couple of decades—and the change in the balance of power had more to do with the downward vortex of the economy during the Great Depression than with the articulacy of modernists who never warmed to neo-Gothic.
Hooting at Yale Gothic
Collegiate Gothic architecture had what might be called its archenemies. Not quite four decades later, the skirmish between collegiate Gothic and modernism flared up again, perhaps even more overpoweringly. This time the field of contention lay within Yale University. William Harlan Hale was an undergraduate (Yale class of 1931) who went on to distinction later as a professional journalist. While a student, he cofounded a short-lived but extraordinary magazine, The Harkness Hoot (see Fig. 6.52). In 1930, he published in it a remarkable deconstruction of Sterling Memorial Library, conceived very deliberately as a Gothic cathedral, with a tower that would loom over the Cross Campus. When announcing the design, the Yale librarian proclaimed that the building would consolidate factory-like functionality and cathedral-like beauty.
With all the intensity of youth (see Fig. 6.53), Hale had the courage of his convictions. Among various contentions, he argued that “in living architecture there is no such thing as ‘style’; the term appears only when architecture is considered as a phenomenon of the past.” Despite this straightforward disavowal that a contemporary manner could even exist, Hale made clear his preference for a modernist design in place of what had been built. He described Sterling Memorial in the first paragraph of his tract as “designed in the Gothic-skyscraper style.” In an unforgettably impassioned cannonade against this manifestation of collegiate Gothic in New Haven, he posed a rhetorical question to which he provided an instantaneous answer:
How can students be educated to artistic appreciation under the eaves of an architecture that puts water tanks into church towers, and lavatories into oriels? It runs counter to every creative conception: it demands that the modern young man nurture himself on a diet of frozen mediaevalism.
In the last sentence, Hale made the common mistake of slipping from a persuasive point based on his own perspectives into prescription for all others. He wrote in the singular of “the modern young man,” as if all tastes could be scaled back to one—his own, as the supreme exemplar of this species that he was. Talk with any nutritionist and you will hear that a balanced diet requires nutritional values that come from a full basket of nutrients. Some good things, not merely comfort food, may be pulled occasionally out of the freezer and unwrapped.
In any time and place, reductionism, whether it is driven by conservatives or by progressives, carries dangers. The imposition of a single viewpoint upon everyone is totalitarianism. Healthy cultures need to consider and take in moderation, many inspirations, a rainbow of extremes. Across the Atlantic in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union, “the modern young men” of different countries would be equipped soon enough with single national flavors of modern architecture to suit the single parties of their modern world. In those cases, what Harlan dragged through the mud as “frozen medievalism” might have been a better alternative, as one ingredient in an eclectic mix. There have been far worse things.
In this exceptional manifesto against what Hale regarded as retrograde architecture, he published a photograph of the library’s book tower while under construction, swathed in scaffolding. Beneath he supplied an “if only”: “It might have been made into a monumental modern building—with the structural and decorative ideas evolved by the American skyscraper designers newly adapted to a splendid and living institutional structure.” On the facing page, he contrasted the final product. The collocation of the two images is a touch of genius, but not without both intended and unintended irony. The first is that the college student faults the architects of Sterling Memorial Library for humbuggery in blanking out its structural elements. The arch-Goth among architects, Pugin, was celebrated in an obituary letter printed after his death for having decried this very deficiency in the then-modern architecture of his day, and for having remedied it in his own brand of Gothic revival. Knowingly or not, Hale delivered his withering criticism of collegiate Gothic by using the same contrastive method that Pugin had employed to great satiric effect—the Englishman’s Contrasts from 1836 contained its series of plates to bring out “A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day.” In the content of his assault, Hale sounded a note similar to Eric Gill, who opined: “Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building—like Tower Bridge.”
A second irony is that Sterling Memorial Library has been fairly called “a functionalist tour de force; books and paper movements are sorted out, rationalized, and mechanized.” Yet at least some modern designers have been infuriated by two traits of the structure. One is that the functionality has been hidden behind a stone skin designed to conjure up a medieval past of cathedrals and castles. The result is classic tactic of bait and switch: viewers who are being sold the architecture are led to believe that they are buying an apparent bargain, when instead substandard goods are being substituted. The other irksome characteristic of the building is that the whole has been embellished with ornaments, especially carvings, that both entertain and edify. For instance, the practicality of book stacks within the information center was both counterbalanced and complemented by Gothicizing ornamentation outside it. An author wrote in 1906 of the cathedral of Amiens: “The façade is set up against the sky like a great frontispiece of images to a printed book, the book which Ruskin has called the Bible of Amiens” (see Figs. 6.54 and 6.55). The exterior of Sterling expresses in twentieth-century terms this sharp-eyed perception of medieval iconography. Cleverly, the false front incorporates images relating to writing and printing that play upon old associations drawn between cathedrals and books.
For his bluster, Hale raked in his share of plaudits. The unexampled Frank Lloyd Wright requested ten complimentary copies of the article. More to the point, the great man even held a hootenanny and had his second-in-command make a drafting table into a soapbox. From that vantage point, the aide read the whole text aloud to the assembled team. The piece was reworked and won further notice when reprinted as “Yale’s Cathedral Orgy” in The Nation. As might have been foreseen, Ralph Adams Cram responded with a decided dearth of enthusiasm. By the younger set who inclined toward modernism, he would have been regarded as the arch villain or limestone blockhead—the ideal target for a volley of anti-lancet archery.
Perhaps more importantly, the visceral reaction of this one modernophile undergraduate was unrepresentative of the Yale community members who lived and labored in the buildings upon whose architecture he decanted his scorn. He may have been an archenemy of the collegiate style, but he stood almost alone in his distaste. The general fondness of administrators and Hale’s classmates for the faux Middle Ages, despite his own high-handed condemnation, may be gauged from the frontispiece to the yearbook in the year in which he graduated. It suggests that the lancet and Gothic had snared the hearts of his fellow members of the college and that for their part they did not give a hoot about any of his criticisms (see Fig. 6.56). Many Yalies and faculty within the residential colleges liked being walled off from the city that engulfed the university, liked the unplanned encounters encouraged by the courtyards within, and liked the stone carvings, stained glass, organs, and other frills of the medieval architecture. Consistently, they loved Sterling Memorial Library. As has been the case with many collegiate Gothic buildings and campuses, the place has entranced a large public, even as it has disgruntled professional architects. Cherished or not, it is an abiding icon that is used as shorthand to signify the very Yaleness of Yale.
In eerie ways, Hale’s faulting of the spirit (or lack thereof) instantiated in collegiate Gothic foresaw denunciations of American students and the college environment that Le Corbusier would advance a few years later. The Swiss-born but Paris-based comet of French modernism developed his gross generalizations and crass contempt largely thanks to visits to Princeton and Vassar in the fall of 1935. Not biting his tongue for a nanosecond, he censured the college boys of those days in the United States for living cloistered lives that made them pampered, fainthearted, and even castrated in comparison with their French counterparts. He all but accused Gothic of lowering sperm count and testosterone levels.
In the introduction to the English translation that appeared more than a decade later in 1946, Le Corbusier leveled pitiless potshots at the GIs who participated in the liberation of France. There would be no risk in wagering that in the same year as he carped, the American soldiers, both living and dead, on and in French soil included a share of the college graduates he had earlier deemed unmanly. For his part, the big-name architect had taught rather than fought in World War I. To make matters worse, in its encore he sought sponsorship from the collaborationist Vichy government. It seems fair to wonder how qualified he was to assess virility and courage or their opposites. He was not overjoyed with his country’s performance during the hostilities, but even less that the United States rode to the rescue. And so he took out his frustrations upon the universities of the nation he resented.
Despite many flaws, collegiate Gothic provided, very literally, an overarching wholeness. The stylistic organicity has helped to sustain an illusion of integrity at least in architecture. Such unity is by no means a constant in universities, despite the oneness with which their very name begins. In fact, at the time when the style took hold, many universities, especially private ones, were undergoing a marriage of convenience between undergraduate liberal arts colleges modeled on the British system and specialized graduate schools patterned after German models. In any case, the Gothic of American campuses was too pertinacious to yield in the face of harangues by Veblen, Hale, or anyone else. Yet other and greater forces would change the motivations for the revival, as well as the responses to it.
Eventually, collegiate Gothic would largely run its course. No fashion holds or should wield power forever. Dreams always end, even dreamlike manners of art and architecture. Still, the style would be hard to expunge because of its inherent ambition to transcend the millennia. By design, it was anchored with its weighty slabs of stone in a longue durée. Its chronological ambit started from a remote past that burst into being in the twelfth century and stretched at least through the fifteenth, through a present in the twentieth, and into an unfixed but distant future. The rich stylistic pedigree laid claim to hallowed antecedents far back in time, while the rock-solid stability of its construction looked to endure far ahead. Woodrow Wilson, president then of a university dedicated at his exhortation to the nation’s service, regarded the appropriation of Tudor Gothic as a device that elongated the authority behind the institution by nearly a thousand years.
This way of thinking was not universally accepted. Opinions have never been unanimous on whether age looks good or not. On the one hand, admirers of patina and verdigris hug the principle that old things should look old—and even that new ones should camouflage their newness. On the other, proponents of youth and novelty reject the wear and tear of decay. In 1910, a Chicago PhD-holder whimpered and whined about the “artificial aging process” that had eventuated in a faux old institution. His bon mot ran, “The University of Chicago does not look its age. It looks much older.” More than one century later, the counterargument could be made that the choice of style explains why the same structures seem ageless. At Yale in 1930, Hale took issue with reasoning that favored an architectural style from the Middle Ages for institutions of higher learning all because they originated in the medieval period, riding this train of thought to its terminus in the logical absurdity of a sophism: “Modern scholarship had its birth and spent its youth in Gothic buildings; therefore modern scholars should continue to work in mediaeval buildings.”
New Haven saw one of the last and loveliest broad-scale manifestations of the collegiate style. The city also possesses one of the earliest major expressions of Gothic revival that survives in North America in the Episcopalian Trinity Church, built on the Green in 1813 and 1814 (see Fig. 6.57). Yale University committed heavily to older forms of the architecture long before the collegiate kind became the prevailing flavor of the revival. Of these earlier buildings the eldest is Dwight Chapel, designed as a library in the mid-1840s (see Fig. 6.58). Four decades later came Victorian dormitories, from 1885 to 1886 (see Figs. 6.59, 6.60 and 6.61).
Here and there, the institution of the new fashion in what was once the Elm City meant the displacement not just of Gothic by Gothic, but even of one form of medieval fantasy by an altogether different sort. From 1888 to 1926, the castle-like lecture building known as Osborn Hall occupied the corner of Chapel Street and College Street. It was a Victorian extravaganza built predominantly of pink Stony Creek granite (see Fig. 6.62). Intended to evoke the relationship between Byzantine and Romanesque, it was riddled with arches. Its portico comprised five large ones supported by multiple columns. This behemoth was dismantled to make way for the eclectic collegiate Gothic of Bingham Hall, which still stands (see Fig. 6.63).
The most telling expression of the revival at Yale came in the residential colleges. Of eight constructed in the 1930s, fully six were Gothic. Another had a Gothic exterior but a Georgian interior façade. Only one was entirely Georgian revival. Among the many expressions of Gothicism not in dormitories, the most massive is the abovementioned Sterling Memorial Library (see Fig. 6.64). Although planned originally by the architect Bertram Goodhue, its design, to be built of granite with limestone trim, was the work of James Gamble Rogers, the architect whose vision defined the university in New Haven in the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas most of the landscaping by Beatrix Farrand has sadly perished, the architecture remains with its combination of soaring lightness and medievalesque gravitas.
If the library is a collegiate Gothic church for the reverence of books, its nave terminates at the circulation desk. That accouterment is modeled upon an altar in a house of worship. In lieu of an altarpiece dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a female who hypostatized Yale’s nurturing spirit occupied the center of a mural at the western end of the counter (see Fig. 6.65). The fresco was entitled The Imagination That Directs the University’s Spiritual and Intellectual Efforts by its professor-painter Eugene Savage. The painting is commonly called by the catchier or at least more pronounceable name of “The Alma Mater Mural.” It depicts the personified university, dressed in a blue like a Madonna—but the color is a Yale blue, like a gown worn at commencement. Standing beneath the ramifying foliage of the tree of knowledge, she is surrounded in turn by personifications of arts and sciences as they present their gifts, like Magi.
When a Yale senior, Hale juxtaposed the ideas “cathedral” and “orgy” to describe Sterling Memorial Library. By doing so, he cut to the heart of a debate that has not yet been resolved. In cyclical culture wars, contention has long raged over the nature of universities. Two hot-button topics have regarded the places that religion and the past should occupy within them. A book repository with cutting-edge facilities that was built to look like a medieval church was the perfect catalyst for polemics.
World War I and Modernism
Even more than the Spanish-American conflict had done, World War I brought home to Americans how the honor of empire entails the onus of imperialism. Henry Adams wrote his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres around the turn of the century and printed it privately in 1904, but he made it publicly available only on the eve of combat. In the changed world that took shape after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, his book may have seemed predictive or even prophetic. The Gothic revival was often intended to solemnize faith and spirituality. The author pinpointed forces that were attenuating these very values. Look at the lucidity with which at the end of chapter ten he says a melancholy but still tranquil goodbye to both the cathedral and the Virgin:
We have done with Chartres. For seven hundred years Chartres has seen pilgrims, coming and going more or less like us; and will perhaps see them for another seven hundred years, but we shall see it no more, and can safely leave the Virgin in her Majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their own strength and in God’s providence as they were when Saint Louis was born, but looking down from a deserted Heaven, into an empty church, on a dead faith.
Less than two decades later, these valedictory remarks had taken on an added charge of poignancy. By the time Adams died in 1918, the war had shown the potential of new technologies for inflicting death and destruction. The dynamos may not have violated the Virgin herself, but they left some of her shrines to lie in smoking ruins. For millions, the wake of the prolonged armed confrontation resulted in an immeasurably different Europe. Gone were the culture and climate that had existed when Our Lady’s Tumbler was brought to light, the short story Le jongleur de Notre Dame written, and Massenet’s opera by the same title first sung. For men dazed by battle fatigue who resorted to the Mother of God for succor, the slaughterhouse of the trench warfare at the front stood irreversibly far from the now-gone glitter of belle époque opera houses. A postcard made from a 1914 painting offers a case in point (see Fig. 6.66). The canvas depicts Mary in her role as “the consoling Virgin.” Embodying mercy and sheltering those faithful to her, she holds out promise of miraculous intervention in times of deepening crisis.
The Middle Ages had played a supporting role in the war effort. Chivalry and Crusades had been mustered to the objective of pumping up hawkish values in young men. If France had Saint Joan, Britain had George: the saintly dragon-slayer held sway until the bloodshed began in deadly earnest. For that matter, the work of the young women in the Red Cross first to nurse wounded soldiers and later to cope with the sequelae of the influenza in 1919 were retailed, like the war itself, as holy campaigns (see Fig. 6.67). As the years wore on, the context must have seemed at least sometimes less sacred.
As mass death turned into a reality in the gory war zones, pugilistic sanctity lost much of the appeal that it had exercised earlier during playacting. Pacifism recaptured some of its lost luster. Kenneth Grahame had sounded a precociously pacific note in “The Reluctant Dragon” from 1898. Now the war-weary voices of conscientious objection and peacemaking became belatedly more audible and appreciated. At this juncture, the tales of the tumbler and jongleur could have exercised a charm by being very different from Saints Joan and George. These characters stood outside the militarism of the Crusades far more even than lone knights did—far more than knights errant, knights in shining armor, and white knights. The juggler offered access to other, more peaceful and conflict-free Middle Ages.
Despite idiosyncrasies, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres fell inside the special province that medieval literature and culture staked out for itself within a larger dominion of anti-modernism. Resistance to modernism was one cultural option in the closing decades of the nineteenth and opening decades of the twentieth centuries. Then again, it may be simplistic and erroneous to stereotype the place of the Middle Ages in America during this transitional period as having been anti-modernist. Medievalism need not have been opposed to modernism. Instead, it could have been nonmodernist, premodernist, or even, more neutrally, paramodernist.
The explanation for the ambiguous position of medievalism is not too elusive. By having no truck with established values, modernism sought and brought splintering and ruptures that included a break with classicism. Medieval revivals had something in common with classicizing movements, in that they sought or at least laid claim to revive the past. At the same time, they were themselves anticlassical. Thus, elements of them could be appropriated, at least in stylized forms, within modernism, even if in aggregate the renewals were rejected. Hence, the openness of Art Deco to stylized Gothic ogees. In its basic contours, Art Deco (especially in the subcategory of Gothic Deco) relies heavily upon stylization of such elements that were arrogated from Gothic revivalism. The new fashion did not displace its predecessor, though it may have seemed to do so. In many features, the typically modern American style evolved naturally from the consummately medievalizing one.
The architects who designed Gothic revival buildings, especially during the first three decades of the twentieth century, generated a wide range of constructions in other fashions, while their peers who are now hallowed as archetypal modernists were not at every breathing moment fundamentally ill-disposed to the medievalesque style. The question was not a simple one of old and new, or of mossbacks against avant-gardists, since Gothic as developed in this expanse of more than a quarter century was itself perceived to be innovative.
Ralph Adams Cram capped a rousing oration to English architects, published in 1912, with an affirmation: the collegiate Gothic that he advocated was meant not to put the new into a holding pattern but instead to pave the way for it. His conceit that the style transplanted Oxford to the vigorous midst of America is found also in Schuyler. Along similar lines, Norman Bel Geddes’s proposal for a staging of Dante’s Divine Comedy makes for fascinating reading. The introduction by Max Reinhardt describes the author as being characteristically American—childlike but coolheaded, clairvoyant but clocklike, a builder of castles in the sky but with solidly grounded foundations (see Fig. 6.68). Bel Geddes was a theatrical and industrial designer associated with futuristic and Art Deco plans for automobiles, buildings, computers, and highways, as well as dramatic stages. In this introduction, he is understood as being, not that Reinhardt resorts to this Latin phrase, a homo mediaevalis redivivus, a medieval man brought back to life, commanding the youthful freshness and fast metabolism of that earlier era. He constructs castles and cathedrals, while making all the necessary changes—aerodynamically, aesthetically, and otherwise—for a modern world.
Modernism and medievalism were not at all mutually exclusive in architectural planning. To take a bookish approach, consider, for instance, the cover to a 1931 New York publication of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris in English translation (see Fig. 6.69). The style of the lettering is Art Deco. Even more so is the design, which presents what could be the stylized top of a skyscraper against an equally stylized sky, with gold lines of varying thickness stamped beautifully upon an indigo blue background. The Gothic might seem to have vanished altogether, if the viewer fails to observe the two lancets that lend the tower its basic definition. The gilt imprint on the front of the volume bears a startling resemblance to the façade of the Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen, which has step gables that look as if they are in motion: any more movement and we would be justified in calling them an escalator. The exterior of the place of worship, constructed mostly between 1921 and 1926, fuses so-called brick expressionism and Gothic architecture (see Fig. 6.70). Both the American book and the Danish church could be related profitably to the helm of the Chrysler Building in New York City, with its stylized gargoyles and arches (see Fig. 6.71).
Further evidence that medievalism was not automatically antimodernist, nor modernism antimedievalist, comes from none other than Frank Lloyd Wright. Yes, it must be owned up at the outset that the architect made pronouncements that could be taken as blanket denunciations of historicizing architecture in any form. All the same, his position was not nearly as simple as some of his prose could be understood to suggest, and he may not have stopped to think that the most radical and numerous isms have emerged from conscious efforts to sweep away their predecessors.
Wright’s best-known work of exterior construction and interior design would surely be the cantilevered modernity of Fallingwater, also known as the Kaufmann Residence. The site, completed in 1935, gives the supreme expression to Wright’s creed of organic architecture. This defining trait of his related to the holism that has appealed to many in Gothic. For instance, in 1939 he acknowledged in writing the organic unity of the Gothic cathedral. The architect’s acquaintance with great churches rested on foundations that included extensive readings of Victor Hugo, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc. Even before Wright was born, the path was being readied to familiarize him with Gothic: his mother hung ten full-page wood engravings of medieval English cathedrals on the walls of his bedroom. In the 1910 portfolio of his work for Berlin, he issued an appeal for a spiritual mobilization, calling the “feeling for the organic character of form and treatment the Gothic spirit, for it was more completely realized in the forms of that architecture, perhaps, than any other.”
In his later years, the designer still believed firmly that “Gothic architecture approached the organic in character.” He pictured skyscrapers as fulfilling for the landscape of his contemporary America one of the same functions that cathedrals had served in medieval Europe—as lighthouses within small cities. The first tall office tower designed by Wright was the Larkin Company Administration Building, devised in 1903 and built between 1904 and 1906 for the soap company by the same name in Buffalo, New York. Demolished in 1950, its five stories in red brick centered upon a nave-like skylit court that prompted a prominent architectural historian to describe the construction as “an industrial cathedral that should have delighted Viollet-le-Duc.” This result was in keeping with the American architect’s conception of urban planning, which only flirted with skyscraper metropolises. Only one skyscraper by Wright was realized, the nineteen-story Price Tower. This multi-use edifice, conceived as a tree-like trunk from which the floors jut out like branches, was built in 1956 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Between 1936 and 1939, a structure with a vertical orientation was constructed by him in Racine, Wisconsin. Known as the S.C. Johnson Administrative Complex, the portion intended as the headquarters features dendriform columns. A later addition was the fourteen-story Research Tower, in which laboratories are grouped around a central core that Wright conceived as a taproot. Did the arboreal aspects of these two tall buildings owe anything to Gothic?
In domestic architecture Wright created, after his own fashion, a Tudor revival home for Nathan Moore in Oak Park. Elsewhere, the architect incorporated homage to Carpenter Gothic into the design of brackets beneath the eaves and even more into that of the flattened ogival mullions in windows at the Auldbrass Plantation in Yemassee, South Carolina (see Fig. 6.72). In ecclesiastical architecture too, the designer evidenced Goth proclivities. In the Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, California, he echoed ogees even more ostentatiously than he had in the domestic architecture of the Southern mansion (see Fig. 6.73). The last church Wright designed was Pilgrim Congregational Church in Redding, California. He referred to its style as “Pole and Boulder Gothic.” By that phrase he intended to evoke both the shape of a tent, and a Gothic church (see Fig. 6.74). In sum, he appreciated the versatility and fluidity of Gothic. In fact, he supposedly went so far as to coin the term “Cherokee Gothic” to describe the architecture of the University of Oklahoma at Norman. This manner fuses conventional Gothic with elements influenced by native Americans. It merges two styles that share primitivism and polish.
Funded by oligarchs, collegiate Gothic was built to house the young of the elite as they acquired the additional gloss of college after the earlier sheen of finishing school or prep school. The structures were also erected as a counterbalance to the specialization of a German educational model that emphasized advanced research and graduate study. The very purposes and arrangements of their construction put the accent upon undergraduates and upon the value of cohabitation and proximity to professors for their charisma as role models. In some cases, the campuses that resulted may have expressed an ambition for fame and immortality by perpetuating their donors’ names across time; in other instances, they may have been attempts to expiate guilt, a desire to repent and achieve redemption for ill-gotten gains. But altruism need not always be subverted by belated or mixed motivations. Many people, both haves and have-nots, experience yearning to do good and joy in sharing.
The raising of the collegiate Gothic campuses did not coincide in every instance with the academic high tide of their institutions. In most cases, the best intellectual times had not yet arrived. The betterment to come before, during, and after the entry of the United States into World War II owed partly to the influx of emigrants from the self-inflicted dismantlement of Europe’s establishments of higher learning during the “hot” war itself and to a slower brain drain in the long cold war that followed it. Another reason for the buoyancy of American universities was the broadened access of previously disadvantaged groups that the GI Bill of 1944 inaugurated and that continued as further legislation and policies were put in place. For a spell of a few decades, meritocracy was not merely theory but (with notable and dishonorable exceptions) common practice. At the same time, the architectural style was not a relic of a worse past that was superseded. Rather, it helped to make the precincts of colleges treasured havens of stability in which to conduct those experiments.
Among the various anachronistic revivals, collegiate Gothic may have been the most successful. But all the renewals have evolved into the eclecticism that characterizes the choice of contemporary architecture on campuses nationwide. The diversity can be compelling, but it can also lapse into the stochastic staleness of a strip mall, in which one brand name is juxtaposed to another. Their practicality is not assured without exception even now, and the true test within the chronology of universities will require a century to judge.
The now hoary contention that structure must reveal functionality has been mostly discarded. Those who live in the buildings that emerge these days are justified in wondering how the styles fit together, and how the forms are justified for the functions to which they are to be put. These same questions led to the downfall of Gothic. By the same token, they could cause it and other historicizing fashions to be resurrected and reshaped and to displace what now reigns supreme. The world has ridden a stylistic merry-go-round going back centuries, and in some cases millennia. Some manners are likelier than others to be resuscitated. Gothic may be ready for defibrillation. Skyscraper Gothic may not be aberrant, some sort of cul-de-sac within the Darwinism of American urbanism. On the contrary, the manner is iconic (and often iconographic too).
Tall Gothic is found elsewhere. In India, the Rajabai Clock Tower has embellished the Fort campus of the University of Mumbai since its completion in 1878: the look of this architecture has been designated as Bombay Gothic (see Figs. 6.75 and 6.76). While incorporating features of early Indo-Islamic, the edifice is modeled freely upon Big Ben in London. The structure weds two types of cultural imperialism or cultural hegemony, the one stylistic and the other chronometric, both implanting the values and technology of Europe upon the Indian subcontinent. Gothic was global or at least globe-trotting in the way best known to the imperialism and colonialism of the nineteenth century. The sun never set on the British Empire—or on its Gothic.
For the moment, the ultramodern high-rises and campuses of Dubai and Shanghai make no gestures toward the Westernizing aesthetics of colonial-era Gothic revival or of any conceivable later iteration of it, but the day may come. We may yet see collegiate quadrangles replicated in deserts halfway across the world, because new nations have stridden onto the world stage with the ambition to acquire instant pasts—but it seems likelier that the pasts they will seek will differ than that newfangled medieval will suddenly become chic.
Whatever verdict we reach upon collegiate Gothic as architecture or as a manifestation of the zeitgeist pandemic in its glory days, the style will be with us for a long time to come as a concomitant of education at many highly-regarded and –rated universities. Consequently, many future leaders in business, government, learning, and culture will associate college, where at least in the happiest cases they will have spent one of the freest and most creative phases in their lives, with the collegiate Gothic environs in which they studied, ate, and slept. The campus style of Gothicism is hardly the only architectural means of demarcating college life to partition it from the hustle and bustle, and materialism, of existence afterward. Still, it has been a good one among many or even primus inter pares. It has become an essential component within the cultural patrimony that makes the United States what it has been and what it remains.
The campus stands not a full world apart—but at least a part of one apart—from the realities outside it. If not helped to stay a little aloof, it could melt into the world. That would be a loss for both the world and it. There is no shame in a measure of apartness. As many believe, Eden once had it, and paradise still does. Solitary confinement is spiteful, but even the best teamwork usually requires single members to isolate themselves sometimes for the sake of completing tasks and to create. We need the single names of poets and novelists every jot as much as we need the interminable credit lines that unscroll when the action of the main film has concluded.
The jongleur thought that becoming a monk would earn him his ticket to redemption, but the conventions of monasticism turned out not to save him. In the end, he demarcated himself from both his past and his present by doffing his habit. Still, it was inside the oblong confines of a monastery that he did his best outside the box. By creating his own intersection between very separate subcultures, he won heaven. Worse ways exist of reaching worse outcomes than juggling or tumbling beneath a pointed arch in hope of attaining salvation. Let us now see how in the early twentieth century the tale of the jongleur gained new hardiness, thanks first to a composer and second to a diva.