Skyward

Folk whom an age of exaggeration has not robbed of their capacity to marvel at superlatives, or to criticize them, last week visited an extraordinary exhibition in a Manhattan building modestly called "Corona Mundi" (crown of the world) on Riverside Drive. It was an exhibition of skyscrapers*-- models, photographs and designs --assembled by an architect whose livelihood and reputation are in the building of skyscrapers, Alfred C. Bossom. When Manhattan should have gazed its fill, the exhibition was to go on tour.

It was just the moment for such an exhibition. Of recent weeks the Manhattan press had been full of controversy over the desirability, from the standpoints of health, traffic, economics and art, of steepling and peopling further that rock-bottomed little island upon which whole new cities have been superimposed annually for a decade. The Chicago press, after months of extravagant paeans about Chicago's towering new hotels, newspaper cathedrals and dizzy spires for housing jewelers, oil men, furniture merchants, athletes, chicle-venders, and to support a Methodist cross, had not yet quieted down sufficiently to overhear the murmurs of reaction. But such murmurs there were, even in Chicago. Three universities had in the past year embarked upon skyscrapers of learning--at Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Chicago. Detroit was contemplating the advent of an 85-story prodigy, complete with barbershops, drug stores, restaurants and a car-checking system, the Book Building, 873 feet high, planned by a young real estate heir/- to top all of man's monuments save the Eiffel Tower.

So vigorous had Manhattan's skyscraper controversy become that it had a loud echo even in Paris, where citizens wrote indignant public letters protesting against a proposal to ring the old city with monster apartment and office buildings, "skyscratchers" as the French say. London held her peace but listened with interest.

Architect Bossom said ingenuously: "The American people build skyscrapers because they are unsophisticated." Architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, in a written debate held by the New York Times, suggested what monuments skyscrapers would be to humanity if anything should ever happen to the race: "The explorer of a thousand years hence might piece together the fragments of our life gathered in one skyscraper and know the whole as though he had lived among us, from the cafeteria and nickel-in-the-slot telephones on the first floor, to the final office on the ultimate last floor."

Traffic clogging was the major grievance of the anti-skyscraperites. It might be all very true that working "far aloft, away from distracting noise, breathing the pure ozone of the firmament" was desirable, but after all most working people liked to go home at night and it was not only no fun, but definitely dangerous, to have your ribs caved in during the morning and evening subway stampede. The New York World, in a series of editorials discouraging further skyscrapers, discovered perhaps the most formidable charge of all against them. It found experienced Realtor W. Bourke Harmon stating that only the first two stories of buildings, however tall, produced revenue; the stories above, however many, do well to pay taxes and interest on the investment. Early Manhattan skyscrapers--the first Equitable Building (seven stories, 1869, with its "vertical railroad"), the gold-domed Park Row Building, the 21-story Flatiron Building, the 41-story Singer Building (1907) and finally that 60-story marvel that dwarfed everything save the imagination of the man who thought of selling things for five and ten cents--all these paid for themselves in advertising value. For later imitations in prairie cities like Chicago and Detroit there was no equivalent economic excuse. In proving themselves to be cities these places were borrowing traffic evils headlong. Transportation experts, and Editor Charles Harris Whitaker of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, predicted that to cope with the present madness, new madness would be required, such as double-deck streets.*

Inventor Thomas Alva Edison entered the lists against further skyscrapers. Health officers, mayors' advisers and Henry Ford all cried halt, for obvious practical reasons. And there was a more vociferous though less effective chorus of sociologists, artists and philosophers crying out upon the "Babylonish jumble" of modern city-building. Of this faction, the logical leader was silent. Being a church-builder he was not one to whom newsgatherers would soon run for comments on a dispute in commercial architecture. Yet it was he who years ago wrote: "A walk up Fifth Avenue in New York, from Madison Square to the Park, with one's eyes open . . . leaves an indelible impression of chaos that is certainly without form, if it is not wholly void. Here one may see in a scant two miles (scant, but how replete with experiences!) treasure-trove of all peoples and all generations: Roman temples and Parisian shops; Gothic of sorts (and out of sorts) from the 'carpenter-Gothic' of 1845 through Victorian of that ilk, to the most modern and competent recasting of ancient forms and restored ideals . . . delicate little Georgian ghosts, shrinking in their unpremeditated contact with Babylonian skyscrapers that poise their towering masses of plausible masonry on an unconvincing substructure of plate glass. And it is all contemporary . . . while it is all wildly and improbably different."

This writer was Architect Ralph Adams Cram of Boston, scholiast, mediaevalist, deeply religious "minister of art," apostle of the Gothic restoration in the New World. The above stricture, written before the War, before woe-begone forebodings and prophecies as fearsome as they were mystical settled upon his sensitive soul, is mild compared to other preachments by Mr. Cram without reference to which no discussion of a major issue in U. S. architecture can be complete.

Gothic has been Mr. Cram's misision and passion ever since he came out of rural New Hampshire, a parson's son, to practice architecture, 37 years ago. As senior member of the soon-famed firm of Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, he seconded the introduction of collegiate Gothic, judiciously diluted and sentimentalized, at Princeton University, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr Colleges. The fashion caught on, running through West Point, Yale, the University of Chicago and scores of other institutions. Into St. Alban's Cathedral in Toronto, St. Paul's in Detroit, St. Thomas's in New York, Calvary Church in Pittsburgh and at last the huge cathedrals of St. John the Divine in New York and SS. Peter and Paul in Washington, he has breathed, strongly and yet more strongly, the spirit of centuries long dead.

To persons asking him why a young nation, separated by thousands of miles of ocean as well as by 500 years from the source of this form, should adopt Gothic as its national architecture, he replied that unless one went back to 1820 or so there was nothing but egotistical, barbaric experiment on the U. S. architectural scene. From there back the transitions occurred "without a shock." He was an anachronism on the defensive and critics suggested that his sensitive feelings were swaddled by distance, his brain lost in a dream, when he explained how our own Colonial merged "lawfully" with Georgian, from which, via Inigo Jones, it was but a step to Continental Renaissance and thus back to Flamboyant Gothic and ultimately real Gothic. But people who considered that this country could develop its own art form without any such jaunt around Robin Hood's barn little understood the deeper implications of Mr. Cram's Gothic revival.

Anti-Protestant, anti-Renaissance, antiscientific, Mr. Cram is so steeped in mediaevalism that he resents even Catholicism in its standardized latter-day form. Luther, Calvin and Wesley are as upstarts to him, whose phrases adumbrate the flowery staff of St. Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. Philosopher Bergson, visionary, intuitive, seems to him "the greatest figure, perhaps, since St. Thomas Aquinas." His imagination remains cold to the world-wide phenomena of Socialism, but leaps up in flame over an almost contemporary revival of the monastic ideal.

"The Gothic restoration is neither a fad nor a case of stylistic predilections," he has written. It is ordered by "the great rhythm of human life that is the underlying force of history." Then he diverges to show history moving in 500-year cycles, one of which is to end, and with it the so-called "modern" era (from 1450 on), in 1950. Gothic alone embodies the spirituality, the truth "as absolute as the difference between right and wrong," that can survive. He predicts a "cataclysm." He cries in the night, with the language of Thomas Carlyle and the tone of Ecclesiastes, for a "master man," a hero to worship and to lead. "Religion lacks its Pentecostal tongue; art lacks the Pentecostal flames of divine inspiration." Woe to the artist--one can see Mr. Cram as a boy, looking into his devout father's big illustrated family Bible--woe to the artist that fails to "serve God through the serving of them that He made in His image and redeemed in the darkness and the thunderings of Calvary." The ministry of art is God's ministry, for the redemption of human character. But it is not quite all mediaevalism with mystical Mr. Cram, for he is personally attracted farther in that direction than he would think it necessary or possible for others to go. He describes Gothic as a form of the leaven now working for "a new and wonderful order."

So that if newsgatherers had approached him last week for his esthetic views on skyscraper construction, the Gothic master-builder of the U. S. might have stunned them by replying, as he has said before, that "bird cage" or steel-frame construction, the enfant terrible of architecture, will probably grow up safely into a dignified adult. And he might have stunned them further--he the disciple of William Morris and deplorer of the vanishing of skilled craftsmen in wood, stone, embroidery, leather, stained glass--by telling them that he hopes some day to write a history of U. S. architecture which in great part would be the biography of his friend, Ernest Robert Graham, mightiest builder of all time in the U. S., commander of regiments of shovelers, armies of masons, riveters, roofers, glaziers, painters and plumbers.

Builder-Architect Graham, under Designing Architect Daniel H. Burnham, built the Chicago World's Fair, when he was 20. He built that early century wonder, the Flatiron Building, and the new $31,000,000 Equitable Building in Manhattan; the Union Station on Capitol Hill at Washington, the Union Trust Building of Cleveland. He built all of Marshall Field's stores in Chicago, the Field Museum, the Railway Exchange, the Continental & Commercial Bank. He built the Selfridge stores in London. He put up the first Chicago skyscraper, for Gumman Wrigley, and the Straus skyscraper. During the War he was given an army of 70,000 men and, accountable only to President Wilson, built powder plants in West Virginia and ran them up to production of three and a half million pounds per day. At present he is occupied only with a $100,000,000 railway terminal in Philadelphia, one nearly as costly in Cleveland, the world's hugest aquarium (Shedd), a $15,000,000 opera house and a super-power plant for Samuel Insull in Chicago. A book about such a son of Progress by the dean of Gothic America would be, in itself, an architectural portent.

* Original meaning: a triangular skysail, of small utility and perhaps mythical existence, hoisted by U. S. skippers to make good their boast of the world's tallest chips.

/- James Burgess Book Jr., 37, son of a foresighted Canadian physician who amassed Detroit real estate and a fortune. He has built up whole streets at a time, including the tallest hotel in the world, the Book-Cadillac. The world's tallest structures include : Stories Feet Eiffel Tower 1000 Woolworth Bldg., N. Y. C 50 792 Metropolitan Life, N. Y. C 50 700 Singer Bldg., N. Y. C 41 612 Municipal Bldg., N. Y. C 24 580 Bankers Trust, (tallest bank) N. Y. C 39 539 Pure Oil Bldg., (formely "Jewelers Chicago Bldg.") Chicago 40 523 Straus Bldg., 32 475 Chicago Tribune Bldg 36 462 Wrigley Bldg., Chicago 36 400

*Already installed in Chicago, where the commodious, ingenious and handsome Wacker Drive carries traffic on two levels along the once shabby banks of the Chicago River in the city's heart.