American Builders and Building

I propose an "Architectural August" here at Blowin' in the Wind.  Is there a distinctive American style of building?  How about regional styles; what style began in Chicago, or the West Coast, in Virginia, New York?  As an untrained appreciator of buildings, I find myself curious to learn a little more about the lives and public construction projects of four American architects: Thomas Jefferson, Louis Sullivan, Julia Morgan and Robert Moses.  And so you, dear readers, are going to get my amateur riffs and opinions and wonderings about this part of the American landscape: building.  Today, some general thoughts.  Next week: Jefferson and Neo-classicism, Monticello and University of Virginia.  Or maybe Louis Sullivan and the skyscraper.  Not sure.  Stay tuned.....

Americans are both a private people and a public people, and you can see this paradox in our buildings and cityscapes.  We isolate ourselves, and others, in exclusive gated communities and in ghettoized public housing projects.   We build massive cities with dense skylines of towering skyscrapers and get lost in a lonely crowd.   We "nest" in Martha Stewart cuteness in sprawling suburbs and we wait for the elevator to the one thousandth floor with our million closest friends.  Ever since the first Asian crossed the Bering Straights and built a house in Alaska out of ice, or Spanish settlers put up a roof to block the sun in Puerto Rico or New Mexico (long before the English built log cabins in Virginia and Massachusetts), we have built American.

Whaler’s CabinBut none of our buildings are very old, especially compared to other nations. The oldest still standing are in the Southwest: Native American pueblos from 750CE, and Spanish churches from the 16^th century.  Nothing in New England stands from before 1640.  Oldest now in California is 1752 Mission San Juan Capistrano. Here in Monterey County the Spanish Royal Presidio Chapel dates from 1794.  I volunteer as a docent at Point Lobos State Reserve and we brag that the Whaler’s Cabin there was the first building in Monterey Country built by Chinese residents, all the way back in 1851!!  I’ve seen guests from China puzzled and unimpressed by this milestone.  We are a young nation.

And we are a nation that takes up a lot of room and uses a lot of energy.  And so do our buildings.  We citizens and our buildings lead the world in carbon footprint.  We are also champions in the biggest new homes contest; here in the US folks move into a new home with an average size of 2164 square feet, compared to 1206 sq.f. in France and 818 sq.f. for new residences in the UK.  And then we turn on the lights.  Each US household uses over 11,000 kilowatts per hour of electricity per year.  A French home burns 6300 kw/h/year and in the UK it’s 4600.  Turn off the lights, US! 

OK, so we’re young and take up a lot of room.  Anything positive about our building?  Well, we seem to have invented the skyscraper – look for my piece on Louis Sullivan and the Chicago school in coming weeks.  Right, another Amercan thing that’s young and big, the skyscraper.  Actually, not so young; there have been controversies about tall buildings ever since the Tower of Babel. 

But an interesting part of the skyscraper story is that it was the new, cheaper, more flexible and stronger steel being produced down the road in Pittsburgh in the late 19^th century that made possible those soaring towers.  The walls no longer needed to be load bearing; instead, the curtain wall.  It also helped that Mr. Otis invented the elevator.  Up up up we go.

Perhaps it is in building materials, like steel, that we can see our particular American style and heritage most clearly. When we get to Julia Morgan and the Arts and Crafts builders we’ll see how much beautiful exposed wood, especially redwood, they brought inside the houses and castles, like the one she built for Randolph Hearst.  But go a little farther back to the Homestead Act in 1862, which gave millions of folks a free farm in the opening frontier, in exchange for cultivating the land and building a house on it.  Instead of the villages and town of the eastern US and Europe, we find the isolated farmsteads of the Midwest.  No Home Depot nearby, so these remote builders used local materials, like rustic sod, local stone, rough logs.  And farther west and south, they made their own adobe and sun baked roof tiles.  Much of today’s move toward sustainable architecture got its start in these loco-builders, like straw-bale construction 150 years ago.

So is there one “pure” American style of building?  Probably not, with 400 years of history and a diverse population, many of whom brought building preferences with them from another land.  The architects I have chosen to profile this month were all born on US soil.  But we live now in a global building-scape, and prominent architects like Gehry (Canadian), Koolhaas (Dutch), Foster (UK), Piano (Italy), Pei (China) and others are getting the big US commissions. 

There is an amusing list of the top 150 “favorite buildings in America,” a publicity ploy by the American Institute of Architects a few years ago.  The list was widely criticized for emphasis on “likeability” rather than artistry or style.  But still, it’s a fun list to look at, and here’s the top 15. 

Empire State Building, White House, National Cathedral, Jefferson Memorial, Golden Gate Bridge, United States Capitol, Lincoln Memorial, Biltmore/Vanderbilt residence (Asheville, NC), Chrysler Building (NYC), Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, St. Patrick’s Cathedral (NYC), Washington Monument, Grand Central Terminal, Gateway Arch (St.Louis), Supreme Court of the United States.

How many have you been to?

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter