Economic Downturns and the Architectural Profession

What happens when ACCORDINGTOTHEFISCAL POLICYINSTITUTE, unemploy- the building stops? ment among City white-collar workers outside the financial industry went up 40 percent in November 2008. Many of these white-collar workers must be architects, for economic slowdowns always hit the profession hard. Functioning buildings always require management and maintenance, but dur- ing low points in the business cycle, the design and construction of new build- ings—which is what architects do— simply stops. Plans are put on indefinite hold, building expansions are postponed, development projects are cancelled. That WITOLDRYBCZYNSKI is where we are today.

REVIEW 8 5 The prevailing sentiment among archi- indications are that it will last longer, per- tects is summed up by Kazys Varnelis of haps four years, perhaps five or six. What Columbia University, who wrote on the happens then? Historical parallels are web site Archinect: “Don’t expect to build always imperfect, but the Great anything in the foreseeable future. Count Depression, which lasted ten years by your lucky stars if you do.” The latest sta- some counts, offers some instructive tistics are bleak. In November 2008, the answers to that question. Architectural Billings Index, which meas- ures firms’ commercial building activity, dropped a massive 30 percent compared to THEPROFESSIONALCOST a year earlier, registering the lowest score in its thirteen-year history. The effect on Job shrinkage in the 1930s had many employment was felt immediately: the consequences for the architectural profes- Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that sion, some obvious, some less so. There during that same month, 10,000 architects are no firm statistics on architectural and engineers lost their jobs. Architectural unemployment during the Depression, firms are said to be laying off 10 percent to but it is estimated that of the five million 20 percent of their staffs. The American unemployed in 1935, more than 11 per- Institute of Architects expects nonresiden- cent—about 600,000—were white-collar tial construction activity to decline by 11 workers, among whom architects surely percent in 2009. were well represented. Some architects The construction industry is famously entered government service. Many of cyclical, and architectural firms regularly those who found related work did so in deal with slowdowns by downsizing, the short-lived Civil Works reducing operating costs, tightening their Administration, or the Federal Art belts, and holding their collective breaths Project. Others made do with New Deal until the inevitable recovery. This is what programs such as the Federal Emergency happened during the last three construc- Relief Administration and the Work tion recessions (defined by the declining Progress Administration (WPA), or with value of nonresidential construction whatever work—of whatever sort—was starts). The recessions of 1980-1982 and available. Some architects left the profes- 2000-2004 lasted three years, and the sion altogether and took up other occu- recession of 1989-1993, three and three- pations. Albert Butts of Poughkeepsie, quarter years. The current recession is N.Y., who was laid off in 1931, achieved barely one and a half years old, but all everlasting fame by inventing Scrabble.

8 6 ZELL/LURIEREALESTATECENTER Figure 1: , New York. Figure 2: Municipal Building, New York. Warren & Wetmore, architects. 1904-14. McKim, Mead & White, architects. 1908.

Even well-established firms faltered as Union Club on as well as the many owners, seeing commissions dry Brown Brothers building on Wall Street, up, simply closed up shop. The large New retired in 1935 to head the American York firm Warren & Wetmore, for exam- Academy in Rome. Even McKim, Mead ple, which was responsible for such land- & White, the most prominent firm in the marks as the and country, was affected. Although the two Grand Central Terminal (Figure 1), as chief founders, Stanford White and well as a string of hotels including the Charles McKim, had died in 1906 and Mayflower in Washington, D.C. and the 1909, respectively, the practice had con- Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu, effectively tinued unabated, producing such out- ceased operation in 1931 when Whitney standing buildings as the Municipal Warren, who was the designer (Wetmore Building in Lower (Figure 2, was a lawyer), retired. Chester Aldrich, of the U.S. Post Office on Eighth Avenue, the leading New York firm, Delano & and the Racquet and Tennis Club on Park Aldrich, which was responsible for the Avenue. This output was severely cur-

REVIEW 8 7 tailed by the economic slowdown, and sional skills quickly wither and practical although the firm survived until the lore tends to disappear. The networks of 1960s, it lost its premier position during manufacturers, contractors, and crafts- the Great Depression. men on which architects depended like- When firms downsized, it was younger wise unravel. Thus, the effects on the pro- architects who tended to be laid off—or fession of a prolonged construction slow- not hired. This was hard on recent gradu- down are widespread and severe. ates, but it also had a long-lasting effect on the profession. Architecture—then as now—depended to a great extent on a sys- CHANGINGCOMMISSIONS tem of apprenticeship. Delano and Aldrich both apprenticed with Carrère What about the architects who continued and Hastings, who in turn apprenticed to practice—what did they do? With the with McKim, Mead & White; and both notable exception of in McKim and White apprenticed with the New York (Figure 3), which was funded by great master, H. H. Richardson. It was a stunning family fortune and went up assumed that the neophyte would acquire during 1932-1940, most commercial con- most of the necessary professional skills on Figure 3: Rockefeller Center, New York. the job, and in the early 1900s the larger Raymond Hood et al., architects. 1932-40. offices—McKim, Mead & White and Carrère & Hastings in New York, Peabody & Stearns in Boston, Daniel H. Burnham & Co. in Chicago—served as de facto architectural finishing schools, and provided a crucial generational trans- fer of design and building skills, as the economy boomed. Architecture is not created through theories and formulas, but in the imagi- nation. And the institutional memory of the architectural profession exists not in textbooks and educational institutions, but in the collective expertise of practic- ing architects and the firms they lead. But without the opportunity to build, profes-

8 8 ZELL/LURIEREALESTATECENTER Figure 4: New York Municipal Airport, LaGuardia Field. Delano & Aldrich, architects. 1937-42.

struction stopped during the Depression. in the 1930s was privately endowed edu- But other construction continued. The cational institutions, including schools programs of the federal WPA built a vari- and universities, which took advantage of ety of buildings, including post offices and lower construction costs to expand their other government offices. In Washington, campuses. The project list of Delano & D.C., the 1930s saw the construction of Aldrich from 1930 until 1935 (when the National Archives, the Justice Aldrich retired) contains few of the coun- Department, and the Federal Triangle, as try houses that had been the bread and well as the Jefferson Memorial and the butter of the firm in the previous two National Gallery. Two freshly minted decades. Instead, there are academic young architects, Louis Skidmore and buildings (for Yale, Princeton, the Nathaniel Owings (who would soon Hotchkiss School, and Lawrenceville found one of the most successful firms in School), a U.S. post office, the Japanese the country), found themselves in charge embassy in Washington, D.C., and a ter- of the design of the Century of Progress, minal for Pan American Airways in Chicago’s world’s fair. Miami. The last building led to a major Institutional facilities continued to be WPA-funded commission for New York’s built during economic slowdowns. A first airport at what would become known major source of work for some architects as LaGuardia Field (Figure 4).

REVIEW 8 9 Delano and Aldrich were able to adapt refuge in drink and dying of cirrhosis of to the changed conditions of work because the liver in 1938. of their excellent educations (both had Some architects sought new markets studied at Columbia University and the for their skills. Robert L. Stevenson pub- Ecole des Beaux-Arts), their creative tal- lished a compilation of modest house ents, and their wide networks of social plans titled Homes of Character. The contacts (both were from well-established American Institute of Architects organized East Coast families). They also had taken the non-profit Small House Service the trouble to develop a diverse practice Bureau, which employed out-of-work that included not only residences but also architects to prepare designs of small, college buildings, private clubs, schools, affordable houses. The collection of plans and churches. So, when the market was published as Small Homes of changed, they shifted their practice from Architectural Distinction in 1929. A set of opulent Norman chateaus, such as Oheka, construction blueprints for a typical three- the 500-acre estate they had built for the bedroom house cost as little as thirty dol- industrialist Otto H. Kahn, to practical lars. Royal Barry Wills, who opened his school dormitories. office in 1925, specialized in designing The period between 1900 and 1929 small houses and popularized the Cape had been the heyday of the American Cod cottage. Wills went on to a successful country estate, but few people built career as a residential architect, not of sprawling mansions during the mansions but of houses for the middle Depression, and the rare private house class. In 1932 he received a gold medal that was built was much more modest. from President Hoover for the best small Architects who adapted to the new budg- home of the year. Wills’s designs, practical etary reality designed houses that were and resolutely traditional, were featured in not only smaller, but also simpler, with his book, Houses for Good Living (1940). cheaper materials, less demanding crafts- manship, and more straightforward details. But some architects were unwill- CHANGINGDESIGN ing—or unable—to change. For exam- ple, the great Philadelphia architect The Great Depression not only changed Horace Trumbauer, who had built dozens what architects did, it also changed how of magnificent mansions in Philadelphia, they did it. This was the direct result of New York, and Newport, had trouble reduced construction budgets that mandat- finding clients after the Crash, taking ed simpler and less elaborate buildings.

9 0 ZELL/LURIEREALESTATECENTER Figure 5: Federal Reserve Board Building, Washington, D.C. Paul Cret, architect. 1935.

That meant less expensive materials and and shows up in several skyscrapers begun less hand-crafted ornamental work such as just before the Depression—the Chrysler carved stone, wrought iron, and complicat- Building and the Empire State Building— ed cabinetwork. The country houses that was ideally suited to the new economic Delano & Aldrich built during the 1930s, conditions. So was streamlining, which for example, continue to look traditional originated in industrial design, and substi- but they are considerably less decorated tuted machine-made ornament for tradi- than what the firm had built in the 1920s. tional craftsmanship. Classicist architects such as Paul Cret and Stripped Classicism, Art Deco, and Bertram Goodhue developed a stripped streamlining were motivated more by Classical style, which used traditional com- pragmatism than any profound ideology, position but dispensed with traditional but there was an ideological thrust to ornament. Many Depression-era buildings, another, more lasting stylistic change. such as Cret’s Federal Reserve Board After the Gilded Age, the Roaring Building in Washington, D.C., incorporat- Twenties—which were, to some extent, ed this approach (Figure 5). Art Deco, blamed for the Crash—and the harrowing another geometrical but lightly ornament- Great Depression, the public was ready for ed style that appeared during the late 1920s something different. Extravagant architec-

REVIEW 9 1 ture was not just too expensive, it also CONCLUSION appeared tasteless; something simpler seemed more appropriate. That something It is, of course, as yet unclear whether the turned out to be the so-called downturn that began in 2008 portends International Style, an architectural move- two or three years of economic recession, ment that originated in Europe in the or a full-blown depression. In the former 1920s. Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies case, one could expect downsizing of van der Rohe in Germany, Gerrit Rietveld firms, early retirements, some closures, and in Holland, and Le Corbusier in France architects extending their services into new called for a revolutionary new architec- fields. If the downturn is longer, it might ture—functionalistic, plain, severe—that have an effect on architecture itself. The would suit the new post-Depression age. kind of immoderate, iconic architecture After 1949, when the economy revived that characterized the most recent Age of and construction restarted on a large scale, Excess will likely lose favor, in part for eco- Modernism entered the mainstream. This nomic reasons, in part because the public architectural sea-change was greatly facili- will demand buildings that are calmer and tated by the destruction of generational simpler. Sober steel-and-glass shoeboxes continuity that had occurred during the replaced the Art Deco skyscrapers of the Depression. The old established firms were Jazz Age; will there be a similar change in either closed down or no longer dominant. 2012? Is there another architecture waiting The old ways of doing things were soon in the wings, as there was in 1949? Perhaps dead and gone—or at least forgotten— green building will enter the mainstream; leaving the way clear for the young perhaps traditional styles will grow in pop- Modernist firebrands. These new up-and- ularity; perhaps a more frugal Bauhaus coming architects, such as Philip Johnson, Modernism will make a comeback. A lot Paul Rudolph, and I. M. Pei, who had all will depend on the length—and depth— studied architecture at Harvard under of the economic downturn. Walter Gropius (who proscribed the teach- ing of history), had no ties to the prewar profession. When the system of architec- tural apprenticeship reappeared, it was Modernist firms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Harrison & Abramovitz, and Eero Saarinen that dom- inated the scene.

9 2 ZELL/LURIEREALESTATECENTER