1

David Van Zanten Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History Northwestern University Evanston, IL, 60208-2208

WHAT AMERICAN ARCHITECTS LEARNED IN , 1845-1914

I.

What did American architects learn in Paris?1 We think we know: the system of architectural reasoning of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts which drew there these young

Americans between the Second Empire (when Hunt and Richardson arrived) to between the World Wars.

Richard Morris Hunt brought the system back to the US with the atelier he ran in his Tenth Street Studio building (1858-1859) and passed it on to his student William

Robert Ware who established his own atelier in Boston with another Hunt student and his professional partner, Henry Van Brunt (1863). In 1868 Ware formalized this as the architectural program at M. I. T. with a Beaux-Arts trained instructor, Eugène Létang hired 1871, the first in the US.2 A first generation of Boston students went on from MIT to Paris themselves in the late 1860’s and 1870’s, many entering Létang’s old atelier, that of Vaudremer.3 A decade later Ware was named to found the architecture program at

Columbia (1881), coinciding with a wave of New York candidates starting with John

Mervin Carrère and his future partner Thomas Hastings. In the mid-nineties a promising

California wave followed, led by Bernard Maybeck, funded by Phoebe Hearst, and including Arthur Brown, Edward Bennett, and Julia Morgan.4 By the turn of the century it was a general phenomenon, brought home by the brilliant pedagogue Paul Philippe

Cret (arriving at Penn in 1904) and later by Jean Labatut (arriving at Princeton in 1928), 2

Cret’s teaching shaping the careful thinking of his student and employee Louis I. Kahn;

Labatut’s that of his student Robert Venturi.5

The Beaux-Arts system was carefully theorized and embodied, by 1900, in a series of texts – in French, Julien Guadet’s Eléments et théorie de l’architecture (1902-

1904), Georges Gromort’s Essai sur la théorie de l’architecture (1942) and finally Albert

Ferran’s Philosophie de la composition architecturale (1954), clarified on a more practical level by Edouard Arnaud’s Cours d’architecture et de constructions civiles

(1928); in English, John Vredenburgh Van Pelt’s Discussion of Composition, especially as applied to architecture (New York, 1902), Nathaniel Courtland Curtis’ Architectural

Composition (Cleveland, 1923, 1934), Howard Robertson’s Principles of Architectural

Compsoition (London, 1924) and most systematically in John Harbeson’s massive 1926

Study of Architectural Design for the Institute of Beaux-Arts Architects and published initially in Pencil Points in 1921-1924.

What was this famous “Beaux-Arts” doctrine?6 In the abstract, a technique of progressive design elaboration starting with an idea and ending with a delineated spatial form. This pivoted on certain selections among choices of shape and relationship obliging the designer to take a general philosophical stand and thus which generated a graphic resultant. In final elaboration, this would be adjusted to emerge in three dimensions as a pictorial/spatial manifestation of the originating idea.

Instructional texts specify how the student was to proceed: from the “elements” of architecture (doors, windows, stairways, courtyards) to their arrangement – their

“composition” – into a building. This was a test of ordering and logic. The student was to start with a quick reading of the program to grasp its spirit, then a slower and attentive 3 reading to grasp the details. (The school programs were carefully-written to aid such analysis.) Then he quickly threw off a mass of sketch plans testing as many arrangements – “partis” -- as possible (in the Grand Prix competition this was specifically to be done in twelve hours), followed by the famously detailed final carpet plans (in the Grand Prix competition rendered, with help, in four months).7 Guadet put it very simply: the student divides the problem into its constituent parts, selects one as the characterizing dominant, then “marchant de l’ensemble aux sous-ensembles, du corps de bâtiment à ses détails, vous avancez facilement (I, p. 101),” but he warns, “ si votre grand point de départ est judicieux” – it is a process which must not be hastily entered upon.

Edouard Arnaud, writing a generation after, was more down-to-earth:

“Après un repos, on expose tous les ‘partis’ entre lesquels il s’agit de choisir et, avant tout, on relit attentivement le programme en se pénétrant une dernière fois de son esprit.

Puis, on fait une critique sévère des différrentes solutions. Si en dernière analyse on hésite entre deux ‘partis’, répondant bien aux besoins matériels du programme et aux besoins moraux, c’est-à-dire ayant tous les deux le caractère voulu et tous les deux susceptibles de beaux développements, c’est le plus simple et le plus clair qu’il faut choisir.” (Arnaud’s emphasis, p. 61)

This progressive elaboration was, of course, of the plan. Only after that was fixed was the building projected into three dimensions, first by the study of the cross-section showing the upward expansion of volumes suggested, then by adjustment of the façade this step obliged the student to accept. This privileging of the plan had the significant result that the viewer should sense the outside when inside, that the building was not only conceptually transparent, but also (in the mind’s eye) physically so. Georges Gromort 4 put it very simply: “Jamais, dans un bon plan, le pubic ne doit avoir à demander son chemin.” (p. 159, Guadet’s emphasis)

The outside, thus, reflected the inside; the inside was transparent to the parti.

This parti was the most minimal sketch idea settled upon at once after the most intense analysis – and what that determined whether the building was a good or bad design. As one of the last French Beaux-Arts teachers in America, Jean-Paul Carlhien, liked to remark: it was clear thinking and clear exposition, as one was taught in lycée. Arnaud compares it to the game of chess. Ferran insists, less cerebrally, that it is the expression of all that one is capable of: “Composer, c’est faire emploi de tout de que l’on sait avec le désir et la volonté d’exprimer tout ce que l’on est; c’est avant tout OSER ETRE SOI.”

(p. 8, Ferran’s emphasis)

But, by this very emphasis on the simplest commitment to a personal solution, the

Beaux-Arts system claimed to be the most open and liberal possible. Guadet put it in his

Eléments, “L’originalité de notre Ecole peut se définer d’un mot: elle est la plus libérale qu’il y ait au monde.” (I, p. 80) The student chose his professor; with that professor’s help, he settled on his parti. This was its answer to criticism, from Viollet-le-Duc to Le

Corbusier.8 Guadet explained:

“je ne dirais pas: ‘Voilà comment vous devez faire un théâtre.’ Ce n’est pas mon rôle, ceci, car ce sera ma théorie à moi; mais je vous dirais: ‘Voilà quelle est l’état de la question, voilà où on est l’état d’avancement de cette recherche que dure depuis si longtemps et qui n’est pas encore terminée. Cherchez à votre tour….” (I, p. 89)

Examples might be two much-discussed New York library designs of the mid-

1890’s – that submitted in 1892 for what became the 42nd St. Central Library by Ernest 5

Flagg and that planned in 1894 and built at by McKim (figures 1 and 2).9 Here we see the first privileging the stack blocks in three wings extending from a domed central link, with the reading space divided into four octagonal volumes projecting on the diagonals at the crossing, while in the latter the linkage and reading room spaces coincide, with the book storage space drawn close into a more compact mass, the whole under an embracing dome which, however, provides only a vertical light to the readers. The lay-out is similar, but the ultimate shape it assumes when set parallel forms and reforms like a jelly fish.

In the American context, it is important not to stop here, with the individual building: the great strength of Beaux-Arts planning at its height at the turn of the twentieth century was its adaptation to working out competition problems, large building complexes like university campuses and world’s fairs (two new building enterprises of the turn-of-the-century) or hospital complexes or city plans.10 Since it pivoted on the parti, an idea, Beaux-Arts planning worked most effectively where there was a clear message to express, for example that of a research university like McKim’s new campus for Columbia centering on Low Memorial Library, or a capital city centering like

Burnham’s McMillan Plan for Washington, D. C. (1901-1902) focusing on national monuments. In more complex situations, one might see the architect struggling to nuance relationships – like Burnham again in his Chicago Plan (1909). Perhaps the most brilliant solution of this last and greatest problem was Chicagoan Walter Burley Griffin’s 1911 plan for the capital of Australia, Canberra, dividing the city into a garden-city-like field of octagonal nodes forming its functional parts – Government complex, municipal center, business center, residential districts -- then binding them together with monumental axes 6 and cross-axes, these anchored on natural features left dominate by the restriction of built-up areas to valley bottoms (figure 3). The result is immediately decipherable if too generously spread out.11

A Beaux-Arts project was less a building that worked efficiently than one immediately comprehensible to a mind knowing the requirements and wishing to see them neatly displayed to judge their relationship.

II.

But there are complications. Around 1900, at the height of the American migration to

Paris, American Beaux-Arts design was regarded as quite distinct from French. The pioneering British architectural educator Charles Reilly, shaping the Liverpool University program in 1904-1914, followed the American model he perceived in McKim, Mead and

White in distinction to the Parisian.12 He explained that the Americans’

Roman/Renaissance vocabulary returned to what he called, “The central position in architectural thought”; that their huge cadre of employees and imitators constituted a homogenizing force in modern architecture, even if at the expense of architectural individuality. “Is it then, as things are today in our great modern world, any the worse for it? I would be willing to maintain the contrary…. These noble, reticent buildings of

McKim, Mead and White’s express a universal spirit such as our present-day civilization should do, even if it does not.”13 Here Reilly was paraphrasing the analysis of the

American progressive journalist Herbert Croly, founder of the New Republic, in 1906 presenting the work of the firm (with Harry Desmond) in the Architectural Record. “Can it be proclaimed at the outset that McKim, Mead & White have been the leaders in the contemporary American architectural movement, because their aesthetic point of view 7 has been so representative? … They have established a tradition; the others have not done much more than make a name.”14 Croly and Desmond go on to explain that its success lies in what they call its “supple and communicative” nature. From here they move to the idea that would be the center of Croly’s immensely influential progressive tract of 1909, The Promise of American Life, insisting that individuality must be balanced with community. 15 “It should be clearly understood and loudly proclaimed,” they wrote of the McKim firm, “that the less American architects worship at the altar of

Individuality, the better it will be for American architecture. Architecture is essentially a social art, in which the best results can only be attained by co-operation, and in order to make effective co-operation possible, the individual architect must not indulge too much in arbitrary personal preferences.”16 John Russell Pope is supposed to have said this more simply: the student should go to Paris to learn composition, then on to Rome to learn the universal vocabulary.17

Running beside this analysis contemporaneously – and specifically in the pages of

Architectural Record – was a noisy debate about the virtues and vices of Beaux-Arts training, starting with J. Stewart Barney in November, 1907, damning it thoroughly in its details and peculiarities, answered calmly by the newly-arrived Paul Cret in 1908.18 As in earlier French controversies, like Viollet-le-Duc’s effort to reshape the Ecole in 1863, the objections were to the fixity of the Beaux-Arts doctrine with all its accompanying habits – especially its baroque graphicism – and the response emphasized its liberalism in its open field of self-constituted ateliers and its emphasis on arguing a point through form. 8

But not all Americans studying in Paris actually attended the Ecole. William Le

Baron Jenney, one of the first of the Second Empire generation arriving between Hunt and Richardson and a founder of modern office organization, attended the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, and later criticized Beaux-Arts graphicism in favor of more technical procedures.19 McKim fifteen years later thought first of the Ecole Centrale himself, influenced by his family friend William Rotch.20 Millet started as a student at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in 1873; McKim, Robert Peabody, Alfred Greenough,

Alfred Thorp and Francis Chandler had enrolled there in 1867-1868; Sullivan left drawings after the lessons of Ruprich-Robert teaching ornament there (in succession to

Viollet-le-Duc).21

The thing always most fascinating in Paris was work of the renegades. Among the first American francophiles like Henry Van Brunt and Charles Follen McKim, it was the radical work of Henri Labrouste and Viollet-le-Duc that initially attracted them, not less for the fact that the first French Beaux-Arts students to arrive in the US, both in

1848, were from Labrouste’s atelier -- Detlef Lienau and Léon Marcotte -- then of

Labrouste’s admirer Vaudremer, Létang.22 It was only around 1850 that the American intellectual monthly emerged, too late for any discussion of Quatremère de Quincy’s neoclassicism, but just in time for the exploration of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc.23

Labrouste was noticed earliest, in a passionate two-part essay by the young Hunt-student

(and employee of Lienau) Henry Van Brunt in 1861 Atlantic Monthly, “Greek Lines”.

After analyzing the gestural speech of ancient Greek building, he goes on to present the work of Labrouste and what the author imagines to be the whole younger generation of

Paris architects as developing these rediscovered principles. “Thus was formed the new 9

Renaissance in France. … For the youth of the nation soon learned that in these newly- opened paths, their invention and sentiment, so long straitened and confined within the severe limits of the old system, could move with utmost freedom and at the same time be preserved from licentiousness even by the delicate spirit of the new lines.”24 Van Brunt makes no mention of composition. Labrouste today is remembered for his structural rationalism, but this essay reminds us that he also encouraged decorative innovation.

One might ask (as contemporaries did) whether Labrouste was teaching the Beaux-Arts method at all.25

Van Brunt himself quickly moved from Labrouste to Viollet-le-Duc, starting with a review of the Entretiens in The Nation in 1866, entitled “Architectural Reform”, and culminating in his translation of that whole pair of volumes appearing in 1875 and 1881.

He presents the French radical as moving parallel to Ruskin as an architectural moralist and functional truth-teller, broadening the moralizing tradition dominating the first

American art journals, The Crayon and The New Path.26

The books of Viollet-le-Duc went on to become – in multiple British and

American translations -- the mainstay of late-nineteenth-century Anglophone architectural reading. Yet we read not a word of Quatremère de Quincy and of the technical volumes provided for the teaching at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussés (Mandar), the Ecole Centrale (Mary) or the Ecole Polytechnique (Durand, Reynaud – this last in several splendid editions, 1851/1858, 1860/1863 1867/1870, 1875/1878). Here we must note the fundamental question: just when and in what form was the actual Ecole des

Beaux-Arts doctrine decisively formulated? Paul Cret declares that Guadet’s Eléments et théorie de l’architecture of 1901-1904 was its first such enunciation in fifty years.27 10

Guadet himself, in 1882, in a sketch of his later opinions, speaks of controversies around

1835 and again in 1863, that is, with the emergence of Labrouste (his own teacher) and the impetus of Viollet-le-Duc.28

In 1863 Viollet-le-Duc’s opponents speak of their avoidance of doctrine in contrast to that systematic rationalist’s imposition of it. Perhaps this is the point: Beaux-

Arts doctrine was less a matter of a technical procedure than of something more general, clear thinking in form, diagramed for debate. And in this sense, it has left a residue, although on more visual than intellectual: the chromolithographed plates of the textless student publication started in 1867, Croquis d’archtitecture or Intime club, presenting the mass of school and Grand Prix solutions abstracted and set parallel for analysis.29

Beyond this, if we seek succinct characterization of the Beaux-Arts method, we must go to foreign observers like Lawrence Harvey and Hubert Stier who, at just this time in the late Second Empire, stated outright things taken for granted in Paris.30

Yet even the seemingly-liberal self-constitution of the ateliers, pivoted on the programs dictated by the central authorities – the Professor of Theory for the monthly projects, the Académie des Beaux-Arts for the Grand Prix. These programs, for most of the life of the Ecole, required the solution of broad but typical spatial problems. It is illuminating to see what happened when in 1846-1853 a liberal, Abel Blouet, was

Professor of Theory and set problems of expression (for example a monument to

Napoleon on the Island of St Helena) instead, inspiring some striking projects.31 Within the ateliers further programs might be set as we hear of Labrouste. But there is also an anecdote that Viollet-le-Duc, establishing a short-lived atelier in 1856, gave the program of a new city in Algeria with all its institutions and was sorely disappointed when the 11 students simply responded with solutions dressed up in Gothic style.32 In 1846

Labrouste’s Armenian student Melick had exhibited a project for a mosque to be built in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.33

Finally, we must remember that there was a great difference of life style between the entitled young men who formed the vast majority of the American students in Paris and poorer, artisanal adventurers who could come because of family and craft connections, for example, Bernard Maybeck who arrived in 1881 to apprentice to a furniture maker linked to his father and only later took the bold step of entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.34 Sullivan was the son of a dancing master and must have paid for his year in Paris from his earnings in Jenney’s office in 1873-1874; Louis Millet his future collaborator was son of a New York music teacher and lived in Paris with his uncle, the sculptor Aimé Millet (1873-1879). Importantly, where that uncle lived, 21 boulevard des

Batignoles, was an artist’s ruche of considerable importance, frequented perhaps by both

Viollet-le-Duc and Sullivan. It is interesting to compare this to Jenney’s reminiscences and McKim’s letters home (published in the Auburn, NY, Morning News) which are almost ritualistic in depicting parties, atelier escapades, strolls in the Bois de Boulogne –

McKim pursued tennis, baseball and sometimes ice skating there – and vacations in the country.35 These blend with the diary pages of well-off ex-patriots like the senior

Rotches, 1851-1855 (friends of the McKims), and little-troubled novels like de Murier’s

Trilby (1891). 36

There was more than one Paris for Americans. In 1875 William Le Baron Jenney established the architecture program at the University of Michigan, deliberately modeled on that at the Ecole Centrale.37 It is interesting to glance at the book list the sent forward 12 for University purchase which of 11 volumes includes only two are French and neither

“Beaux-Arts”, Ruprich-Robert and Viollet-le-Duc.38 There was a good deal more than the strict Beaux-Arts doctrine to be learned Paris.

III.

From this, further considerations arise. First: the experience of Van Brunt indicates an

American discovered French design, first through Labrouste, then more broadly through

Viollet-le-Duc, both on analogy with Ruskin. Why, then, did they go to Paris for training, with its economic and language difficulties, rather than London? Second, perhaps answering this: Might it have been because Paris fit in a larger network of emerging professional consciousness in America? – one seen through the lens of the professionalization of engineering. For example, the remarkable Rotch brothers of New

Bedford and Boston, subsequently sending one cousin, William, to the Ecole Centrale as an engineer, the other, Arthur, to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, to become an architect. (One can cite a number of brothers, one an engineer like Albert Sullivan or Albert Millet, the other an architect, like Louis Sullivan and Louis Millet.)

So the question is less why American architects sought “formation” at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, than what was the idea of professionalism in the minds of their families

(paying the considerable sums enabling this education) and why did it pivot on Paris rather than elsewhere?39 (There was no organized architectural education then in Britain, still holding to pupilage.40) If we understand design as economic, functional and conceptual strategy, Dean Warren Laird (who hired Cret at Penn in 1904) explains things neatly, “In 1885 [studying at Cornell] what I most craved, and most certainly needed, was training in design…I got none until later in Paris.”41 It is surprising that the sons of 13 lawyers (McKim and Hunt), doctors (Richardson) and clergyman (Flagg), now brothers and cousins of engineers (Rotch, Millet, Sullivan), should understand architecture’s essence as arguing a point not repeating a stock craft solution?

But then the question is: just what was this transformation of architecture from craft to conceptual profession to enable? The first battle fought by Hunt was for larger fees – 5 percent of the total cost of construction42 – and his near contemporary Jenney famously declared that an architect who did not save his client twice his fee was incompetent. Conceptual competence was money and this became especially important with the layout of large buildings and complexes of modulated message like Richardson’s

Trinity Church and McKim’s Boston Public Library and on to educational campuses like those of Berkeley and Columbia – and even to cities like Washington, D. C., Chicago and

Canberra.

The US government at the turn of the twentieth century had been demanding demonstrations of qualification in civil service reform, architectural licensing (first instituted in Illinois in 1897 and including a design problem), and the award of commissions by competition with the Tarnsey Act (1893).43 Here the Beaux-Arts-trained mind might shine. The architect now was to argue – graphically -- a solution like his lawyer relatives in court. As Lloyd Warren observed in 1913: “The method of architectural criticism in France has long been … dependent on the assumption … that an architect skillful enough to analyze and properly lay out the mass of a plan can be trusted to look out for its details. In this country, until recent years, plan indication, in the general run of competitions, warranted no such assumption,… [T]he jury’s work used to be more of detail than it now need be. This [new] method of judging from parti consists, 14 broadly speaking, of deciding entirely on the general layout of the plan,… The element, and a dangerous one it is, of the jury’s collective or individual taste is thus subordinated, and a verdict is given on ground of pure reasoning….”44 Its adaption to competition also enabled the impressive Beaux-Arts ink-washed drawings to replace mid-nineteenth- century pattern books as a vehicle to advertise ambitious architects’ skill with the competitions’ publication in proliferating journals (using photographs now instead of line engravings), in special competition books like The International Competition for the

Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California (1899) and finally in the three-volume folio American Competitions of 1907-1913.

IV.

One last complication. The height of the American Beaux-Arts, the years from McKim’s

Boston Pubic Library (1888-1895) to World War I, was the very moment of the emergence of institutionalized radicalism in Parisian design, of the art nouveau on the one hand, and of Perret and Garnier’s concrete Mediterranean primitivism (taken up by

Guadet’s own son, Paul) on the other, not to mention a whole “Impressionist” re-thinking of the shaping of the cityscape by the City Architect Louis Bonnier.45 What were Reilly and Croly turning their backs on in Paris? – and were certain American designers more open to it nonetheless? -- for example, the most exemplary, Sullivan’s self-proclaimed student Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1912 Bonnier’s friend Hendrik Petrus Berlage, after a trip to the US the year before, wrote of Wright: “Ich weiss nicht ob Sullivan in Paris studiert hat, aber Wright ist ein Schüler der Ecole des Beaux-Arts”46 Later, in 1925, the young Le Corbusier (still then Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) wrote H. T. Wydeveld of

Wright, “On sentait dans les plans de Wright la bonne ecole de l’Ecole des Beaux-arts 15 d’ici, c’est-à-dire, un inclination vers l’ordre, vers l’organisation, vers une caractère de pure architecture“.47 Did Wright also learn from Paris?

Wright visited Paris twice during his 1909-1910 hygeia but, following Anthony

Alofsin’s careful research, the visit appears to have been touristic.48 Three years later, in

March, 1914, his two principle former assistants, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion

Mahony, visited the city to organize the competition for the Australian parliament building, and left a suggestive record.49 Bonnier and Garnier (the latter through the Lyon mayor, Edouard Hérriot) loom large in their notes and they were on their way to Vienna where Otto Wagner agreed to join the jury and became an active participant in their project. Bonnier, Herriot and Wagner all arranged exhibitions of the Griffins’ work.50

What is interesting is that the French juror they chose was Victor Laloux, most recently architect of the southern block of the Crédit Lyonnais in iron, porcelain and glass. He and Wagner, in turn, proposed they nominate John James Burnet as the British juror

(architect, Griffin noted, of the skeletal Kodak Building).51 What had these people in common? – they were all, in some sense, using the academic vocabulary, but in different ways, liberally.

We have noted the peculiar marriage of Beaux-Arts axiality and accent points – not to mention Garden City spacing and topographical accommodation – achieved by the

Griffins in the Canberra plan, all expressed in powerful ink wash (figure 3). Let me fold this back on Ernest Flagg’s 1892 competition plan for the New York Public Library

(figure 1) which one might argue shares important things with it as a pattern, namely a push and pull of its elements across the field of the drawn sheet most powerful in the testicular reading rooms pressing in at the central delivery space reminiscent of their even 16 more testicular lagoon-lets enframing the Griffins’ central “Federal Triangle”, these ballooning up beyond the constricting Commonwealth and Kings Avenue bridges – a push and pull restated in the flat, metallic-colored lagoon planes amid the ink-washed hill rises. It is time to note, perhaps, the most pervasive influence of Beaux-Arts culture on

American design, its consuming graphicism, its glorious “indication”.52 On paper, the key volumes of a Beaux-Arts design float in a matrix of corridors, vestibules and courtyards – the “circulations” the French would say – which make the immediately legible as well as (in ultimate construction) accessible and unrealistically ample. In addition, there was a word, poché – pocketed – used for the oddly animated quality of

French plan sheets, referring specifically to the drawing together of the building carapace indication into thick, black-ink masses of support and the thinning between these of the enclosing walls, producing an embracing effect of push and pull, an effect extended across the surrounding open spaces of cityscape or gardens around to the point that, for example is Gaston Castel’s “Presidential Palace” of 1913, the enclosed space of the building dissolves in the broader pattern. (figure 4)

One may respond to this emphasizing of the evocative qualities of Beaux-Arts indication that it is a matter of rendering rather than architecture, but in certain instances the tricks of circulation and poché seem to appear, abstracted, in Wright’s work itself, specifically in his plan for the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo of 1904 (figure 5), which

Edgar Tafel says Wright especially liked as a sheet and pinned to his wall.53 In a sense this plan is merely an elaboration of his Ladies Home Journal “prairie” type of 1901, a T- shaped living room/dining room extending out on axis and cross-axis to the right, an entry block mirroring it to the left divided down its length between kitchen and vestibule. 17

But two important novelties appear here transforming it into a Beaux-Arts composition:

Wright’s two halves are thrust apart by his opening a central void which becomes the origin of an unexpected cross-axis shooting out across the back property as an arbor.

And, just as Wright’s conventional domestic apartments step aside to permit this grand new element of circulation, that most fundamental mark of Beaux-Arts planning, poché, appears in the unique “pier clusters” pushing in on that central space at its four diagonals like Flagg’s reading rooms at the Fifth Avenue library, these reappearing left and right to stake out and unify the entry and living room/dining room masses. But this is in no way overt: the “pier clusters” are decorative passages of larger and smaller ink squares and repeat the house’s geometry as a whole. Wright has taken the Paris graphic vocabulary a step further and lightened it, paralleling this abstraction but less impressionistically and more effectively. The Beaux-Arts lesson Americans might learn could lay in its suggestive graphic speech, rarely realizable in building except in such an experimental case as this.

1 A subject of broad and endless fascination most recently touched on by David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. But we do not have a systematic exploration of architects’ experience beyond short pieces by Richard Chafee and Isabelle Gournay (“Americans in Paris”, Journal of Architectural Education 38 #4 [summer, 1985], pp. 22-26; “Architecture at the Fontainebleau School of Arts 1923-1939,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 43 #3 [September, 1986], pp. 270-285), leaving us only James Philip Noffsinger, The Influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on the Architects of the , Washington, D. C., Catholic University of America Press, 1955. 2 Paul R. Baker, , Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980; Richard Chafee, “Hunt in Paris,” The Architecture of Richard Morris Hunt, Susan R. Stein, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 13-45; Architecture and Society: Selected Essays by Henry Van Brunt, William A. Coles, ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969; Caroline Schillaber, Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning 1861-1961: A Hundred Year Chronicle, Cambridge: MIT, 1963, p. 12. Cf. Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, Joan Ockman ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, especially pp. 68ff. 18

3 Significantly, Arthur Rotch and Louis Sullivan, 1874; William Rotch Ware, 1875. 4 Joan Draper, “The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Architectural Profession in he United States: The Case of John Galen Howard, The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof, New York: Oxford, 1977, pp. 209-237. 5 Elizabeth Grossman, The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; The Book of the School, Department of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, 1874-1934, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934. 6 There is an extensive recent literature of the Ecole doctrine and architectural composition: Arthur Drexler, ed., The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977; Richard A. Etlin, Symbolic Space, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; Jacques Lucan, Composition, non-compositin: architecture et théorie, XIXe-XXe siècles, Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2009. 7 The competition specifications at the turn of the century are laid out in Henry Guédy, L’enseignement à l’Ecole Nationale et Spéciale des Beaux-Arts, Section d’architecture, Paris: Aulanier, n. d., pp. 391-432. 8 Expressed neatly in 1941, for example, by Paul Cret himself, “The Ecole des Beaux- Arts and Architectural Education,” Journal of the American Society of Architectural Historians, I # 2 (April, 1941). 9 Ernest Flagg, “The Proposed Tilden Trust Library,” Architectural Review (Boston), I #8 (12 September, 1892), pp. 69-72; Mardges Bacon, Ernest Flagg, Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban reformer, New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1986, esp. pp. 67-68; Francesco Passanti, “The Design of Columbia in the 1890’s: McKim and his Client”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 36 # 2 (May, 1977), pp. 69-84; Barry Bergdoll, Mastering McKim’s Plan, New York: New York: Columbia University, 1997; Leland Roth, McKim, Mead and White, Architects, New York: Harper & Row, 1985, ch. 5, “Ensembles, 1893-1899”. 10 Jacques Gréber emphasizes American ensembles, Architecture aux Etats-Unis, Paris: Payot & Cie, 1920. Cf Paul Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition, New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1984; The Mall in Washington, 1791-1991, Richard Longstreth, ed., Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1991. 11 John W. Reps, Canberra 1912: Plans and Planners of the Australian Capital Competition, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997. It is interesting to read the architect’s explanatory text in which he cites his “parti” (using that word), regretting that time did not permit him to explore others to make his decisions definitive. 12 Cf. Peter Richmond, Marketing Modernisms: The Architecture of Charles Reilly, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001. Cf. Jules Lubbock and Mark Crinson, Architecture – or Profession?, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. 13 Charles Reilly, McKim, Mead and White, London: E. Benn, 1924, pp. pp. 9, 16. 14 “The Work of Messrs. McKim, Mead and White”, Architectural Record, XX #3 (September, 1906), pp. 153-246, esp. pp. 160, 175. 15 Cf. David W. Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Croly asserted that Promise was original inspired by Robert 19

Grant’s 1900 novel Unleavened Bread about a social-climbing woman who uses an earnest architect-husband to death. 16 Loc. cit., p. 182 17 So I was told by Pope’s chief designer, Theodore Young, in the 1960’s. 18 J. Stewart Barney, “The Ecole des Beaux Arts, Its Influence on our Architecture”, Architectural Record, XXII #5 (November, 1907), pp. 333-342; Paul Cret, “The Ecole des Beaux Arts: What its Architectural Teaching Means,” Architectural Record, XXIII (June, 1908), pp. 367-371. 19 Jenney, “A Few Practical Hints,” Inland Architect and News record, XIII (1889), p. 9. Cf. Theodore Turak, William Le Baron Jenney: A Pioneer of Modern Architecture, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986; Ulrich Pfammatter, The Making of the Modern Architect and Engineer, Basel, Boston, Berlin; Birkhauser, 2000. 20 Charles Moore, The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim, Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1929, p. 22. He hoped to meet Viollet-le-Duc and translated, we are told, parts of his works, p. 34. 21 Archives Nationales, Paris, Aj53143: foreign students enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. Sullivan’s drawings after Ruprich-Robert survive at the Chicago Art Institute. 22 Ellen Weill Kramer, The Domestic Architecture of Detlef Lienau, a Conservative Victorian, Conshohocken, PA, 2006; Schilaber, Op. Cit. 23 There were no significant American treatises of philosophical architecture before Leopold Eidlitz’s Germanic Nature and Function of Art of 1881. See Kathryn E. Holliday, Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Golden Age, New York: W. W. Norton, 2008, esp. ch. 5. 24 Atlantic Monthly, 8 (July, 1861), p. 85. Rewritten and republished by Van Brunt: Greek Lines and Other Architectural Essays, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1893, pp. 1-91 25 Cf. Estelle Thibault, La géométrie des émotions, Wavre, BE: Mardaga, 2010, esp. ch. 3. 26 Cf. Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. 27 Cret, 1908, p. 371. He fails to mention just what had occurred fifty years before. 28 Serious discussion of the Beaux–Arts system began in the 1870’s, by 1882 producing Julien Guadet’s L’enseignement de l’architecture and Victor-Marie Ruprich-Robert’s Réflexions sur l’enseignement de l’architecture and discussions at the meetings of the Société Centrale des Architectes and the Congrès Annuel des Architects Français (Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics, XXXIX (1882), cols. 93-94, 230-234 29 The most powerful discursive presentation of the coalescing “Beaux-Arts” procedure, Charles Garnier’s 1871 Le théâtre, is not a textbook, but a 470-page discussion of a single building type in its social function (never mentioning the author’s own competition-winning design for the Paris Opéra). 30 Lawrence Harvey, “The French Mind”, The Builder, XXVIII #1418 (9 April, 1870), p. 280; Hubert Stier, “Ueber architektonischen Unterricht in Frankreich, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 2 # 11 (13 March, 1868), pp. 97-99, #12 (2o March), pp. 105-106, #13 (27 20

March), pp. 117-118, # 14 (3 April), pp. 129-130, #15 (10 April), pp. 141-142, #16 (17 April), pp. 149-150. 31 I discussed these in Drexler, Op. cit., “Architectural Composition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from Charles Percier to Charles Garnier”, pp. 196ff. 32 Anatole de Baudot, L’architecture: le passé, le présent, Paris: Henri Laurens, 1916, p. 198. 33 Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics, IV (1843), col. 162. 34 Kenneth Cardwell, Bernard Maybeck: Artisan, Architect, Artist, Santa Barbara & Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1977, p. 17 35 Charles Moore, Op. cit, ch. 4. 36 The diary remains in family hands but is remarkably detailed and is quoted at length in Harry L. Katz, A Continental Eye: The Art and Architecture of Arthur Rotch, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986. 37 Nancy Ruth Bartlett, More Than a Handsome Box: Education in Architecture at the University of Michigan, 1876-1986, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 1995, pp. 12-25. 38 Turak, Op. cit., p. 345, note 28, gives the list: Andrea Pozzo, Perspectivo Palladio, 4 Books of Architecture Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruprich-Robert, Flore ornamental Own Jones, Grammar of Ornament Edward Hulme, Principles of Ornamental Art Colling, Art Foliage Leo Lesser, Free-hand Ornaments F. Hulme, Plants, their Natural Growth and Treatment Viollet-le-Duc, Discourses on Architecture (being translated by Van Brunt) Fergusson, Handbook of Architecture, History of Architecture 39 Michael Lewis in Architecture School, cited above, discusses the large number of German architects who immigrated to the US in the mid-nineteenth-century and their (small) influence on the emerging American educational system. Yet it must be noted that of the four architecture programs first instituted between 1868 and 1876 – MIT, the University of Illinois, Cornell and Michigan – only one was modeled on the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and another, Illinois, was modeled on the Bauakademie in Berlin by its founder Nathan Ricker. Yet when Columbia founded an architecture program in 1881 they appointed Ware to lead it, fixing the Beaux-Arts system in the nation’s cultural capital and sending a wave of students on to Paris. 40 See Lubbock and Crinson, Op. cit., also Barrington Kaye, The Development of the Architectural Profession in Britain, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960, esp. ch. 8. 41 Letter of 14 June, 1939, Cornell University Archives. I owe this reference to Ethel Goodstein. 42 Baker, Op. cit., pp. 84-87. 43 Cf. Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 42-43. 21

44 Lloyd Warren, “Architecture”, American Yearbook (1913), pp. 770-771. 45 Jean-Louis Cohen, The Future of Architecture since 1889, New York: Phaidon, 2012, ch. 2. 46 Schweizerische Bauzeitung p. 149. The next year, Berlage wrote in his Amrikanische Risheringen, “Ik meen, da took hij de Ecole des Beaux-arts te Parijs bezocht, maar zeker niet om daarvan slaafsche leerling te zijn.” p. 36. 47 Paul Turner, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Young Le Corbusier, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XLII # 4 (December, 1983), pp. 350-359. 48 Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 40-41, 46-48. 49 Eric Nicholls papers, Australian National Library. 50 Griffin, writing to Wagner afterward, cites their common “program”. Their exchange of letters of 1914 survives in private hands. 51 Nichols papers. They had arrived with suggestions of architects to meet from Irving Pond and Andrew Rebori (who had been in Paris 1908-1909), the latter saying his choices were of “Patrons of ateliers at the ‘Beaux-Arts’…whose students are doing work in a modern spirit, giving expression to the problem at hand according to the requirements and conditions involved” – Pascal, Redon, and the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture. 52 John Harbeson’s Study of Architectural Design especially explores indication. 53 Edgar Tafel, Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius, New York: Dover, 1985, p. 91. Also Jack Quinlan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004; On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles, Robert McCarter, ed., London: Phaidon, 2005.