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From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts

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From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts Arthur J. Pulos Published on: Apr 22, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts … to substitute the luxury of taste for the luxury of costliness; to teach that beauty does not imply elaboration or ornament; to employ only those forms and materials which make for simplicity, individuality and dignity of effect. Gustav Stickley, 1901 [125] Simplicity, and not the amount of money spent, is the foundation of all really effective decoration. In fact, money is frequently an absolute bar to good taste, for it leads to show and overelaboration. Louis C. Tiffany, 1910 [200] The Centennial Exposition had promised that machines were capable of providing convenience and manufactured luxury for the citizens of the democracy. However, now that duplicated splendor was readily available, it was no longer good enough for everyone. Americans began to drift away from their egalitarian vision of society. A new lower class was emerging, composed largely of those who had been liberated by the Civil War and the many new immigrants. For them the simplest forms of housing and domestic amenities were sufficient, at least for the moment, and in many cases vastly superior to what had been left behind. There still remained the larger middle class, whose domestic felicities and cultural needs were being defined and directed by tastemakers and manufacturers. The influence of Eastlake, his American advocate Perkins, and others was evident in the displacement of the “honest” Gothic style by a capricious eclecticism of Gothic, rococo, Eastern, and Near Eastern details that were readily adapted to the band saw and the lathe. And where historical models were absent, inventive builders made up their own ornamental designs or purchased them from stock. This potpourri resulted in the so- called Queen Anne style in houses. (Queen Anne houses still survive in many American communities.) The long-established upper class of Americans took its cultural course from the rediscovered heirlooms and the reawakened pride of its colonial inheritance. The Centennial Exposition had revived an interest in colonial architecture and furnishings and helped to launch most of the major collections of early American artifacts. The Exposition contained three exhibits directly related to the colonial era: one of George Washington’s clothing and equipment and a set of china that had belonged to Martha Washington, one of a hunter’s camp, and (most important) a replica of a New England 2 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts cabin built and furnished by the fair’s Women’s Commission. The cabin had a chair borrowed from the descendants of Massachusetts’ first governor, John Endicott; John Alden’s writing desk; and a teapot used by Lafayette. Of particular interest was a small spinning wheel that was presumed to have been brought over on the Mayflower —”Years ago it was thrown aside as useless,” declared a contemporary review, “but when the Centennial movement began to extend its influence over the country, a Miss Tower took hold of it, burnished it up, and put it in condition to be operated on by her, much to the amusement of the visitors.” ([59], 87) The acquisition of such historic treasures not only preserved them for the nation but also provided for their owners a convenient retreat from the tasteless imposition of volatile foreign fashions. From the vantage point of a century, the colonial period came to be viewed as one of genteel elegance. 3 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts A cottage built at Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in the heyday of carpenter eclecticism. This summer haven, with its exuberant concentration of styles, was said to be the “delight of the middle classes.” Dukes County Historical Society Edgar-town, Mass. 4 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts The natural fallout of the Beaux-Arts style were the so-called Queen Anne houses that combined Gothic finials, Palladian windows, French ornament, and Italian piazzas, all according to the architect’s and the carpenter’s imagination. American Architect and Building News, September 16, 1882. 5 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts An interior design described as “strongly marked with the Queen Anne feeling, although the mantle partakes somewhat of the Elizabethan period.” Harper’s Monthly, August 1876. The several distinct styles of the time were blended into a generalized colonial style that continues in favor. American designers and manufacturers must take the colonial style into account when they are creating products for the national market, particularly domestic furnishings such as furniture, fabrics, silver, china, and glassware. Every manufacturer quickly learns that he must include a line of products in the colonial idiom in his catalog in order to attract and hold a sizable segment of consumers. Even the makers of modern products such as television sets, kitchen cabinets, clocks, and telephones are obliged to include at least one model in the cherished style. This affection for the comfortably stable historical style permeates the 6 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts American design ethic and surfaces in preferences for certain colors, for homespun patterns in fabrics, and for the natural textures of wood, stone, and brick in a wide variety of manufactured products. Alongside the wealthy descendants of the colonial establishment (though not quite as secure in status) there appeared a nouveau riche upper class that, in an era of unrestricted competition, managed to capture the fortunes to be had from the harvest of America’s animals, minerals, and timber, from the control of its transportation and communication systems, and from the management of its growing industrial and merchandising empires. Since they did not have a colonial heritage, the new rich looked to the aristocracies of Europe for social and cultural justification. They went abroad to acquire a touch of class, and they enrolled their children in the finishing schools of England and the continent. The wealthy American family trading daughter and dowry for a foreign title is a familiar theme, and theater and music abound with tales of the rich young American who marries the beautiful princess of an impoverished European dynasty. Unlike the wealthy of the colonies, who were for the most part educated to culture, the new rich found it more convenient to employ collectors, architects, decorators, and other professional tastemakers to construct their copies of the palaces, mansions, chateaus, villas, and baronial estates of Europe, to manage their collections, and to adorn them with such examples of the fine and industrial arts as could be pried loose with American dollars. “For better or for worse,” Wayne Andrews has written, “the millionaire was the American hero in the decades between Lincoln’s assassination and Wilson’s inauguration.” ([3], 152) Thorstein Veblen diagnosed the passion of the nouveau riche as “conspicuous consumption”—the notion that wealth must be masqueraded as beauty in order to gratify those who have it. These were the decades, between the Civil War and the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, that established the idea of an income tax to make all Americans share equitably in the costs of operating their government. These were the years before the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the breakup of monopolies, when runaway fortunes could not be spent grandly enough and when extravagance at the top was presumed to be a socially appropriate means of ensuring a stable economy at the bottom. These were the Beaux-Arts years, when the wealthy Eastern establishment and its hired curators of eclectic taste imposed the fashionable French Renaissance, Italian Romanesque, and Graeco-Roman classical styles on the United States. The architects Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895), Henry Hobson Richardson 7 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts (1838–1886), and Charles Follen McKim (1847–1909) all had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and their works represent the influence of the above three styles (respectively) on the American continent. In the eighteenth century, European architects had come to the United States to practice their professions. Now, in the nineteenth century, the flow ran the other way as Americans went abroad to study. (In the twentieth century, the flow would be reversed again as once again European architects would bring their talents to America.) The log cabin built for the Centennial Exposition was considered to be in the style of architecture that characterized the settlers’ cabins in colonial Vermont and Connecticut, but its many windows, neat picket fence, and self-consciously rustic entranceway were out of character with its predecessors. Reference 59. 8 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From Beaux-Arts to Arts and Crafts The interior of the log cabin was called the “kitchen” by those who built it for the Centennial. In fact, it combined every domestic facility save sleeping space. Its furnishings were a mixture of antiques from the rustic to the refined, not unlike the blend that is called “Colonial” today. Reference 59. Richard Morris Hunt was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After some practical experience in Paris, he returned home with a comprehensive library of architecture books and hundreds of photographs of architectural details that undoubtedly served as a lode of ideas for the urban palaces and rural “cottages” he was to design for wealthy American clients.
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