Boss (architecture)

“ How office buildings were gradually received into the realm of architecture and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had risen so high in that realm that few productions of the 1890s in other fields of building can compare in quality of design with the great early skyscrapers is perhaps more significant for western culture in general than the purely technical aspect of the story. ”

“ The architect is not bound to exhibit structure; nor are we to complain of him for concealing it, any more than we should regret that the outer surface of the human frame conceal much of its anatomy; nevertheless, that building will generally be the noblest, which to an intelligent eye discovers the great secrets of its structure, as an animal form does, although from a careless observer they may be concealed. In the vaulting of a Gothic roof it is no deceit to throw the strength into the ribs of it, and make the intermediate vault a mere shell. ”

“ Preoccupied as he is with the building's strength, safety, economy; solving new and staggeringly difficult problems with address and daring, he has scant sympathy with such inconsequent matters as the stylistic purity of a façade, or the profile of a moulding. To the designer, on the other hand, the engineer appears in the light of a subordinate to be used for the promotion of his own ends, or an evil to be endured as an interference with those ends. ”

“ The Probasco fountain in another atmosphere would be a thing of beauty, for one may go far to find so many groups in bronze so good. The Post-office building is one of the best of the Mullet-headed era of our national architecture—so good generally that one wonders that the architect thought it expedient to destroy the effect of the monolith columns by cutting them to resemble superimposed blocks. ”

“ Besides, it depends on the owner whether he desires to build in brick, or rubble work, or dimension stone. Consequently the question of approving any work may be considered under three heads: that is, delicacy of workmanship, sumptuousness, and design. When it appears that a work has been carried out sumptuously, the owner will be the person to be praised for the great outlay which he has authorized; when delicately, the master workman will be approved for his execution; but when proportions and symmetry lend it an imposing effect, then the glory of it will belong to the architect. ”

“ The chief influence in eliminating the architect from the great bulk of our building is the machine itself: in blotting out the elements of personality and individual choice it has blotted out the architect, who inherited these qualities from the carpenter-builder. ”

“ Much the same fashion of architecture is popular nowadays, but people pay more attention to comfort. The governor's pillars were ingeniously disposed so as to darken all the windows looking that way, whether in the double parlours on the first floor, the bed-chambers on the second, or the big ballroom over the entire house on the third. ”

“ Laing's speech, at the opening of the palace, he declares that "an entirely novel order of architecture, producing, by means of unrivaled mechanical ingenuity, the most marvelous and beautiful effects, sprang into existence to provide a building." ”

“ The building must be either quite chaste, or excessively rich in decoration. Every inch of ornament short of a certain quantity will render the whole effect poor and ridiculous; while the pure perpendicular lines of this architecture will always look well if left entirely alone. The architect, therefore, when limited as to expense, should content himself with making his oriels project boldly, channelling their mullions richly, and, in general, rendering his vertical lines delicate and beautiful in their workmanship ”

“ What matters is the ratio of production to creation.
Here lies the justification of the modern architect. Cut off though he is from the actual processes of building, he nevertheless remains the sole surviving craftsman who maintains the relation towards the whole structure that the old handicraft workers used to enjoy in connection with their particular job. The architect can still leave his imprint, and even in the severely utilitarian factory he can take the simple forms of the engineer and turn them into a superb structure like Messrs. Helmle and Corbett’s Fletcher Building in New York. ”

“ From Parris’s granite buildings in Boston of the twenties, through the arcaded English commercial work of the fifties and sixties, to Richardson’s Field store and Sullivan’s skyscrapers in Chicago, St Louis, Buffalo, and New York, enlightened commercial patrons demanded and often received the best architecture of their day. The functional and technical challenges of commercial building seem to have brought out the creative capacities of three generations of architects as no other commissions did so consistently. ”

“ Every necessity becomes a motive of decoration. The roofs, the leading off of the water, the introduction of light, the means of access and circulation to the different stages of the building—even less important matters, such as iron-work, lead-work, ties, props, the means of warming and ventilation, not only are not concealed, as is so often done in our buildings since the sixteenth century, but are, on the contrary, frankly acknowledged, and contribute, by their ingenious combination and the taste which ever presides over their execution, to the enrichment of the architecture. ”

“ The flying buttress, in combination with the intersecting arch, gave [49] birth to a new system of construction, a system on which were raised vast buildings which compel our admiration and demand our careful study, but should not invite our imitation. They are monuments to the ingenuity of the twelfth and thirteenth century [50] architect, but no less are they beacons warning against the perils of a rationalism—more apparent than real—which their authors carried to its extreme limits, casting to the winds all traditional principles, and consequently all authority. ”

“ It had, perhaps, a row of arches down the middle, like the great hall of the palace of Blois, said to be of the thirteenth century, or huge kingposts supporting the ties between rafters, which in that case may have been as long as those of the later roof. The present roof, work of the fourteenth century, marks the beginning of a change in the style of architecture that accompanied and caused great changes in furniture and household woodwork. ”

“ But the flying buttress, or rather the system of construction based on its use, caused a radical change in the art of building of the twelfth century. Stability, which in the ancient buildings was ensured by solid masses at the impost of vaults and arches, was replaced by the balance of parts. ”

“ And especially, if he join agreeable manners to attention to business, he will find employers, who will care even less than he can do, for science and art; and he may perhaps in time be on the Board of Works. Our ministers will rarely take the trouble to appreciate any superior acquirements in architecture; witness the mode in which various public bodies have furnished themselves with architects ”

“ Have we mountains? their peaks must appear over foliage or through it, the highest and boldest catching the eye conspicuously, yet not seen from base to summit, as if we wanted to measure them. Such a prospect as this is always compatible with as much concealment as we choose. In all these pieces of management, the architect's chief enemy is the vanity of his employer, who will always want to see more than he ought to see, and than he will have pleasure in seeing, without reflecting how the spectators pay for his peeping. ”

“ Of all the Renaissance architects, their impulses and interests were nearest, perhaps, to Robert Adam, whose church at West Wycombe could be turned into a ballroom by the simple act of removing the pews, and permitting the gay walls and decorations to speak for themselves. Behind the white staff façade of the World’s Fair buildings was the steel and glass structure of the engineer: the building spoke one [129] language and the “architecture” another. If the coming of the skyscraper had turned masonry into veneer, here was a mode of architecture which was little but veneer. ”

“ The whole scheme of this dome was a daring innovation of one man, and in this it differs from former architectural innovations, which were the comparatively slow outcome of corporate endeavour, progressive changes being so gradual that no wide or sudden departures from habitual modes of building were made at any one time, or by any one person. ”

“ Let, therefore, the architect who has not large resources, choose his point of attack first, and, if he choose size, let him abandon decoration; for, unless they are concentrated, and numerous enough to make their concentration conspicuous, all his ornaments together will not be worth one huge stone. And the choice must be a decided one, without compromise. It must be no question whether his capitals would not look better with a little carving—let him leave them huge as blocks ”

“ Its lack of visible organic connection with the substructure makes it inferior in effect to the dome of Florence, where the structural lines of the edifice, from the ground upward, give a degree of organic unity, and the buttressed half-domed apses, grouped in happy subordination about the base of the drum, prepare the eye to appreciate the majesty of the soaring cupola as it rises over them. The dome of St. Peter's has not the beauty of logical composition. Beauty in architecture may, I think, be almost defined as the artistic coordination of structural parts. ”

“ One of the earliest individual building types to find wholly untraditional expression was the large block of offices. The skyscraper reached maturity early in the hands of Sullivan in Chicago; the later vagaries of the form in New York did not recommend it to European emulation, although skyscraper projects by Mies, by Gropius, and by Le Corbusier were among the most notable early evidences of the birth—on paper—of a new architecture in the years 1919-22. ”

“ Nineteenth-century commercial building need not be very precisely defined. It includes several slightly different sorts of edifices suitable for the needs of business, all consisting of a succession of identical upper storeys subdivided into offices or storerooms, with or without shops or representational premises below. Highly specialized and very lucrative concerns such as banks and insurance companies, to whom prestige of various sorts increasingly appeared a major desideratum, were the first to seek dignity and architectural display by employing architects of established reputation. ”

“ There is a definite connexion here also with the rise of the skyscraper, for those very large commercial buildings already required a vast amount of uninspired draughting that could be efficiently undertaken only by a large force of assistants working in what came later to be derisively called ‘plan-factories’. ”

“ The margin of misuse under this method of construction is necessarily great; the province of design, limited. Instead of the architect’s paying attention to exposure, natural circulation, and direct daylight, and making a layout which will achieve these necessary ends, he is forced to center his efforts on the maximum [165] exploitation of land. Where the natural factors are flouted or neglected, the engineer is always ready to provide a mechanical substitute—“just as good as the original” and much more expensive. ”

“ It is by the chosen few, by our nobility and men of taste and talent, that the decision is made, the fame bestowed, and the artist encouraged. Not so in architecture. There, the power is generally diffused. Every citizen may box himself up in as barbarous a tenement as suits his taste or inclination; the architect is his vassal, and must permit him not only to criticise, but to perpetrate. The palace or the nobleman's seat may be raised in good taste, and become the admiration of a nation ”

“ Against an autumn sunset the steel skeleton of a twenty-story office building in process of construction stood out black and bizarre. It flung up its beams and girders like stern and yet airy music, orderly, miraculously strong, and delicately powerful. From the lower stories, where masons made their music of trowel and hammer, to the top, where steam-riveters rapped out their chorus like giant locusts in a summer field, the great building lived and breathed as if all those human energies that went to its making flowed warm through its steel veins. ”

“ Abroad, more characteristically, such organizations have been built up in offices under a public authority such as those of the London and the Hertfordshire County Councils, the City Architects’ Offices in various German cities, or the Banco Obrero housing agency in Venezuela.
‘Plan-factories’ are undoubtedly conducive to speed and to a certain sort of competence in the execution of large projects, but it must be evident that the architecture they produce will necessarily be anonymous. In defining the character of their competence, moreover, one must be careful not to imply too much. ”

“ This chapter has summarized what was probably the greatest single innovation in nineteenth-century architecture, the rise of a new type of building to a position of prestige and of achievement comparable to that of churches and palaces in earlier periods. The same cannot be said of domestic architecture. The house was hardly a nineteenth-century invention like the office building. It was, however, modified almost beyond recognition as the century progressed, at the hands of several generations of creative architects. ”