Architects in Washington

(See front cover)

Gentlemen variously beribboned in orange, green, red, white and blue crowded last week into the lobby of Washington's Mayflower hotel--delegates from all over the U. S. to the sixty-third Convention of the American Institute of Architects, an exclusive body devoted to the preservation of professional standards, the solution of problems. For three days they were engaged in discussion.

Public interest was aroused by a debate on style between George Howe (Howe & Lescaze) of Philadelphia, upholding Modernism, and C. Howard Walker of Boston, defending Conservatism.

Said fiery Modernist Howe: "In America with its vast resources of natural and human energy in constant volcanic eruption, cities, factories, warehouses and elevators have been thrown up in towering accidental masses, as exciting as the Rocky Mountains and also as crude and little subject to esthetic control. In Europe, less disorderly but with no more discretion, most of the new districts can evoke no emotion but blank despair, and even Paris has been partially saved only by the pride of its dead tyrants. . . . The modern movement is a conscious effort to direct and canalize the stupendous energy of modern civilization between its proper architectural embankments. . . . Seizing the opportunity offered by the elimination of the requirement of gravitational stability with imagination and courage [the Modernist] has suspended about his skeleton framework a gossamer veil of glass and light building materials, and created a new style based on the old common law of architecture reformulated to meet modern needs in the light of modern economic and engineering genius."

Parried Conservative Walker: "It has been reserved for the so-called Modernists to be irritated at any resemblance to anything that has calm, and to adore excess in every direction, to be shapeless, crude, eliminated in detail to nothingness, explosive in detail to chaos . . . creating sensation with the slapstick and the bludgeon. Modernism may change the methods of architecture, but when it does it will necessarily have in it traditions of sound previous methods, with which at present it is in conflict ... at times infantile and often callow. . . . Occasionally it reaches a serious adult stage. Therefore Hope is struggling at the bottom of the open Pandora's box."

Five honorary members were elected, including John Davison Rockefeller Jr. The citation: ". . . His active interest in architecture is incarnated in the restoration of the cathedral of Rheims, the chapel of the University of Chicago . . . the American building in Luxor and the restoration of the city of Williamsburg, Va.. a project unprecedented in its scope and cost and unlimited in its possibilities as an inspiration in good architecture, patriotism and citizenship. . . ." Honorary membership was also conferred on Professor William Archer Rutherford Goodwin (William & Mary), historian & archeologist who supervised the Williamsburg restoration. The Institute's Fine Arts Medal was bestowed on Architectural Sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman of Manhattan.

On the last day was announced the election of a new president--Robert David Kohn of Manhattan, also president of the New York Building Congress and the Society for Ethical Culture (whose meeting house he designed). With his partner, Charles Butler, he planned Manhattan's great new Byzantine Temple Emanuel. By himself, he designed the newest building of R. H. Macy & Co. ("It's Smart to be Thrifty"), and is Macy's regular consultant. As president he succeeds big, genial Charles Herrick Hammond of Chicago, active municipal architect, tireless worker in behalf of the profession's public relations, who usually flies to out-of-town conferences with skill acquired in the War.

Architects have one thing in common--they are the least advertised professional men in the world. They do not sign their work. Advertising copy writers never get a McKim, Mead & White or a Warren & Wetmore account. Even in the pages of architectural journals you will look in vain for architects' advertisements. Everyone has heard of the Woolworth Building, the Lincoln Memorial and the palatial Pocantico Hills residence of John Davison Rockefeller, yet few laymen can name the designers (Cass Gilbert, Henry Bacon, Delano & Aldrich, respectively). The feats of great lawyers and even doctors are popularly associated with their names. But if you want an architect you have to go and get him, and the information you have as to his worth is usually conveyed by word of mouth.

The fact that William Van Alen does not boast in national advertising that he is responsible for Manhattan's Chrysler Building may be attributed to the innate dignity of a profession, which prefers to let its works stand for themselves, considers it cheap to ballyhoo a matter of merit. Other considerations make it difficult for the layman to comprehend the architectural world. In the '80s and '90s most publicly admired architecture was a refined adaptation of traditional forms--Classic, Medieval or Romanesque. Such great personalities as McKim, Mead & White, Carrere & Hastings, and H. H. Richardson emerged as leaders of this tendency. Today, however, the tendencies are much more multiple and diverse.

There are extreme reactionaries, like Boston's Ralph Adams Cram, who meticulously follow one archaic style (in Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine and his other works, Mr. Cram is bent on literal, scholarly transcription of the Gothic). There are innumerable firms which practice the modern adaptation of old forms. The delicate permutations of Manhattan's Delano & Aldrich on the basis of the Georgian style may be cited in example, as may the Classical adaptations of Philadelphia's Paul Philippe Cret, the modernized "collegiate" Gothic of Manhattan's James Gamble Rogers, the translations of Mediterranean styles by Myron Hunt for the sunny expanses of California.

A third school is developing an architecture based on modern structural necessities--steel and concrete. There are skyscraper specialists, of whom Holabird & Root of Chicago and Ralph Thomas Walker of Manhattan are examples. A still more advanced group follows the lead of Le Corbusier of France who once declared that a house should be "a machine in which to live." George Howe and William Lescaze of Manhattan and Philadelphia employ glass, metals and stone in a severely utilitarian architecture, an arrangement of rectangular and curvilinear masses, devoid of superimposed ornament, which suggests a sort of plastic geometry.

With such various schools, the architecture of the future might be any man's guess. It is safe to say, however, that the typical architecture of the present emanates from the median school, that which adapts traditional decorative forms to a modern structural foundation. In this practice no office ranks higher in the estimation of the profession, none has attracted a more distinguished clientele or done more noteworthy work, than Delano & Aldrich of New York.

Architecture is practiced in little offices and big ones, which are satirically referred to as "factories" by draftsmen who work in them. Rarely does an office remain little when the demand for its services warrants its becoming big. But holding the belief that architecture, like all fine art, is an individual, intimate, scrupulous affair which suffers from large scale, mass methods. Delano & Aldrich have kept their office small enough so that at frequent intervals they can personally inspect the work of each & every draftsman. Today, at the height of their careers, Mr. Delano and Mr. Aldrich maintain a force of only 67 people, including their clerical staff. Both of them are constantly to be seen watching the progress of $35-a-week assistants.

Their office consists of a rehabilitated stable in the Murray Hill residential district. Out of it, after the most deliberate processes of craftsmanship, has come an impressive array of plans. Besides the Rockefeller mansion, they designed Otto Hermann Kahn's great French chateau at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I., and James Abercrombie Burden's Georgian home in Syosset, which won the Architectural League Gold Medal for 1920 and housed Edward of Wales in 1924. Other Long Islanders who live in D. & A. residences are Vincent Astor, Editor Julian Starkweather Mason of the New York Evening Post (a bungalow), Harold Irving Pratt, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Harrison Williams (public utilities). Editor Conde Nast (Vogue, Vanity Fair) inhabits a Park Avenue penthouse by D. & A. The entire Labrador missionary plant of the International Grenfell Association was designed by them, as was Dwight Whitney Morrow's home in Englewood, N. J. Railroad-man Leonor Fresnel Loree occupies a D. & A. house in West Orange, N. J. William Hallam Tuck, of the Solvay Company, will soon occupy another on the battlefield of Waterloo.

New York work of the firm includes the Colony, Brook and Knickerbocker Clubs, the slightly Gothicized Wall Street 'scraper of Brown Bros. D. & A. altered India House and are planning a new Union Club. They have done numerous buildings for Yale and for Lawrenceville School. They are designing the new Yale Divinity School group entire. Socialite daughters are educated amidst D. & A. architecture at Miss Chapin's and Miss Nightingale's schools in Manhattan. D. & A.'s ecclesiastical treatment of the Georgian style is exemplified in Manhattan's Third Church of Christ Scientist. U. S. architecture will soon be represented on the Place de la Concorde, Parisian trove of French Renaissance, by a new U. S. Embassy building done by D. & A. They are also architects for the new Japanese Embassy in Washington.

D. & A. designs are never spectacular. Praised by other architects for their finesse, their nicety in detail, their discreet erudition, they may be truly said to constitute an architectural aristocracy.

Mr. Delano and Mr. Aldrich both worked for the late great Carrere & Hastings, whose architectural fidelity they have inherited. They met originally at the Paris Beaux Arts, whither Mr. Delano had gone from Yale. Mr. Aldrich from a long apprenticeship. No profession does more for its students, and both these gentlemen are constantly busy on the juries and committees of the Beaux Arts Institute. Mr. Delano is president of the New York chapter of the A. I. A., a member of Secretary Mellon's architectural board and the National Capital Park & Planning Committee.

At the Versailles Conference it was Architect Delano who, by special appointment, opened the mail. He paints watercolors for diversion, jots down architectural sketches during his morning train ride from his home in the D. & A.-dotted Long Island countryside. In a London speech he recently voiced his disapproval of the indiscriminate use of skyscrapers, an unusual sentiment for a U. S. architect, a sentiment which illuminates the philosophy of his firm. Regarding architecture as valuable not for bulk or mass or grand scale, but for exquisite workmanship, Mr. Delano and Mr. Aldrich particularly enjoy residence work. Whatever may be the state of their clients' souls, they will continue to build them more stately mansions for their bodies.

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