Part 5
Again, an enormous waste is shown in the flooring, roof and air-spaces of the "tower," while this item is but a trifle in the "flat." The six floors, each 16 inches thick, and the roofing make up together in the "tower" 12,000 cubic feet, or nearly the equivalent of an entire story. Add to this 12,000 cubic feet of air-space under the roof and over the concrete, and we have in these items a waste of 24,000 cubic feet, against only 4,000 in the "flat."
Thus we see that the waste space in the "tower" actually exceeds the available. Yet it must be paid for at the same rate with the latter. Deducting the waste in the "flat" from that in the "tower," we find the balance of waste space in the "tower" to be equal to the available, showing graphically that the "tower" must cost, in these items alone, just twice as much as the "flat."
[Illustration: Figure 4.]
Figure 4 shows a block-plan on a very small scale of the apartment-house, and a block-plan on the same scale of 40 "towers" adjoining each other, and having the same available space as the apartment-house. These plans show how much more land is required to give the same accommodations (minus the conveniences and luxuries of an apartment-house) in the "tower" system than in the "flat."
The shaded portions in each block-plan represent the aggregate of available room in each case. This shows very strikingly what an enormous proportion of land and material is wasted in the "tower" system.
In short, the possible saving in first cost for each family adopting the "flat" system of building lies between $14,265 and $28,758, making an aggregate saving for the 80 families occupying the apartment of between one and two millions of dollars.
The annual running expenses are also greatly in favor of the "flat" system when the advantages of coöperation are used to its greatest extent.
Eighty independent Irish cooks give way to a professional _chef_ and half-a-dozen _attachés_. The wages and maintenance of the 80 cooks would amount to an annual sum of not less than $40,000; those of the _chef_ and his assistants to hardly $10,000, making in this one item a possible annual saving of $30,000.
The management of the 80 independent Irish cooks, if possible at all, could only be accomplished by the constant struggle of 80 worried and largely inexperienced owners or their wives. The management of the _chef_ and his _attachés_ could more easily be managed by a single person, either selected from among the 80 families and suitably recompensed, or employed as a professional manager at a regular salary. Or the entire control of the _café_, and kitchen could be let out by contract to some suitable caterer, if preferred.
Corresponding savings are evidently possible in every other department of housekeeping, including steam-heating, ventilating, laundry-work, lighting and elevator-work. In all of these particulars, coöperation, judiciously conducted, has been shown to yield surprising economies.
But there are other advantages even more important than its economy in favor of the "flat." Freedom from housekeeping cares has already been touched upon. In the "tower," life is spent in training and treating with servants, mechanics and market-men. The private cook is a volcano in a house, slumbering at times, but always ready to burst forth into destructive eruption. True repose is out of the question, and we are told that "the motive for foreign travel of perhaps one-half of Americans is rest from household cares and the enjoyment of good attendance, freed from any responsibility in its organization and management."
Security against burglary and fire is another. In a good apartment-house, trained watchmen stand on guard night and day to protect the occupants, and stand-pipes, hose and fire-buckets are provided in all the halls, and kept in repair for emergency.
The family may leave their apartments for travel summer or winter, knowing that their property is as secure as modern appliances, system and ingenuity can make it. Not so with our isolated dwelling. The cost of providing all these means of protection is too great to make them practicable. The result is that the fear of burglary and fire at all times causes uneasiness, particularly on the part of the wife during the absence of her husband.
Beauty in the architectural arrangement of the rooms is a third advantage of the "flat." In this it has all the advantage of the double house or residence of the immensely rich. The rooms may be grouped in a manner which renders possible the highest architectural effect, whereas in the "tower" the perpendicular arrangement evidently precludes such opportunity by limiting the design to a wearisome and monotonous repetition from basement to attic.
No argument can be sustained against the "flat" on the ground of transmission of sound or want of privacy and isolation, for sound may be as fully deadened as in the "tower" by means of the 12-inch brick separating walls shown in our plan, and the most improved deafening treatment of the floor-joists.
Isolation may be made complete in the "flat," the private halls and front doors of each suite being in every respect the equivalent of those in the "tower"; the only difference being that with the "flat" the outer world begins with the public hall and its elevator, while with the "tower" it begins with the public street and its horse-car.
Add to these advantages the possibility for a greatly enlarged and delightful social intercourse which a properly arranged and conducted apartment-house provides, and we have as near an approach to the ideal of a human habitation as has yet been devised.
J. P. PUTNAM.
ARCHITECTURE IN BROOKLYN.
[Illustration]
The city of Brooklyn has at last waked up to realize her size and importance architecturally. Brooklyn, though growing very rapidly and having many buildings of importance, has really had very little good architecture, for the simple reason that the profession, not being in any way organized, could not, as a rule, receive the treatment due respectable architects. For this reason many young men who would not be capable of practising elsewhere, have flocked to this city, and by various methods, many of which are far from honorable, have succeeded in getting control of most of the work. However, we hope for better things.
The Brooklyn Institute some time ago decided to organize a Department of Architecture, and for this purpose a meeting of architects was called, which led to several more meetings and the attendance at these was exceedingly hopeful for the new department, some forty or fifty architects signifying their willingness to help along in the work; finally a public meeting was held in the Institute on Friday December 13, at which some six or seven hundred persons were present, and the Department was fully organized; the constitution carefully thought-out at the previous meetings was adopted, and the following list of officers chosen:
_President_, G. L. Morse; _Vice-President_, Louis De Coppet Berg; _Secretary_, William B. Tubby; _Treasurer_, Gustave A. Jahn; _Committee on Current Work_, Richard M. Upjohn, R. L. Daus and Louis De Coppet Berg; _Committee on Museum and Library_, Walter E. Parfitt, Pierre Le Brun; and Wm. Hamilton Gibson; _Committee on Competitions and Awards_, R. L. Daus, D. E. Laub, Russell Sturgis; _Committee on Professional Practice_, Walter Dickson, Albert F. D'Oench, Richard M. Upjohn; _Committee on Social Intercourse_, H. P. Fowler, Charles T. Mott and General Ingram.
During the necessary intervals of balloting, etc., the President, Mr. George L. Morse, made a short address, setting forth the history of the previous meetings, and congratulating the local architects on the prospect of having a strong and well-organized society.
Mr. Louis De Coppet Berg, of the firm of J. C. Cady & Co., Architects, then addressed the meeting as follows:--
When a young man enters a profession, and particularly the profession of architecture, if perchance he gets an original idea, or a little knowledge, he at once becomes very secretive, tries to keep it all to himself for fear some one else will benefit by it, and marks all his drawings "The property of...," and "Not to be copied, or used, without the consent of the author, _under penalty of the law_." As he grows a little older in his profession he begins to find out that a few others have ideas as well as himself, and know a little something once in a while; and as he grows still older he finds that there are a great many others, who know a great deal more than he does, and who have a great many better ideas than he has; and then it is, that he longs for communication with his professional brethren, and he finds that, in order to get the benefit of their ideas and knowledge, he must freely communicate his own to them. Hence it is that in most of the large cities we find some association of architects; Brooklyn, however, the third city of the Union, is unique in this respect, that it has absolutely no place where professional architects can meet and discuss the different problems of their profession.
To remedy this evil, the Brooklyn Institute proposed to establish a Department of Architecture, and for this purpose called together a large number of local architects.
Now, we have decided that, if we have any Department at all, it shall be a live one; and this reminds me of a squib I read in the paper the other day, telling how, somewhere in Spain, they had unearthed an old painting, which was pronounced a genuine Murillo. It was said that the experts could not as yet determine whether the subject of the cracked and dingy old canvas was a Madonna or a Bull Fight, but that, nevertheless, they did not hesitate to declare that it was a great acquisition to art. Now, that is the trouble with most associations of architects; if the subject for discussion is only old, cracked and dingy enough, they are happy. Nothing delights them more than to spend all their time and energies in discussing Etruscan or other antique architectures, or the exact differentiations between the many styles of architecture. Now, while we value the history of an art, and shall give it all due attention, we propose to remember that the modern architect, besides being an artist, must be one of the most practical and executive of business men.
We admit that our ancestors in the profession designed beautiful castles, magnificent cathedrals and lovely châteaux, but we remember that these castles, these cathedrals, these châteaux were planned without any comfort; that they had no plumbing devices, no methods for cooking, no systems of heating or ventilation, and no way of getting light but the miserable taper; while to-day the architect, besides being a thorough artist, who knows how to design and to color, besides being thoroughly up in the history of his art, must know how to plan for comfort, to construct for strength and stability; must understand all the details of boilers, machinery, dynamos, electric-wiring, heating and ventilating systems, plumbing and sanitation, and lastly must be able to manage the complicated finances of large undertakings.
Now, to carry out these ideas in our work, we shall, in the first place, establish a museum and library, to which we shall welcome all gifts of books, pictures, models, casts, etc., whether illustrating the artistic, or the practical side of the profession. Then we shall have a course of monthly, public lectures by competent authorities, the subjects of which will probably be very largely chosen from the artistic side of the profession. We also propose to have stated meetings of the Department monthly, at which some carefully selected papers will be read by experts, the subjects of which will be given out as long in advance as possible, in order that all may be thoroughly prepared for a full and open discussion; and then, after these meetings, in order to promote sociability amongst the members, and to show how thoroughly practical we are, we propose to have something to eat. We also hope later to establish schools, not only for young men, but particularly for draughtsmen, where they can be taught, not only the art of drawing, but also the many practical branches connected with the profession.
The meeting was also addressed by the Rev. Dr. Chas. H. Hall, President of the Associate Members. He spoke at great length and kept his audience intensely interested by describing his own acquaintance with architecture, beginning with the original negro log-house down South, then the prim buildings of old Andover and Harvard, and finally how he saw the great former St. Ann's of Brooklyn, the likeness of which, he said, could be seen any day on the piers of New York when they were unloading dry-goods boxes; and how he finally went abroad and saw the beautiful architecture of Paris, which he could not praise enough. He was also unstinted in his praise of the modern beauty and architecture of Washington. He also spoke of his visits to London, and, while he admitted that Englishmen thought their architecture beautiful, he took exception, and claimed that the great St. Paul's, though beautiful to the English eye, was a cold barren building, blacked with smoke inside and out, a place where you could not be comfortable, nor hear the speaker at any distance. We regret that we are not able to give a verbatim account of his witty address.
At the end of Dr. Hall's address, the lecturer of the evening, Professor Russell Sturgis, architect, of New York, addressed the meeting as follows, his subject being "The Study of Architecture," with particular reference to the architecture of to-day.
ADDRESS OF MR. RUSSELL STURGIS.
With regard to architecture and all the arts of decoration, there is a strange difference between the practice of them, and such study as looks toward practice, on the one hand, and the history and theory of them, with such study as that involves, on the other. Quite completely are these two studies separated, each from the other. A man may be most active and successful as a practising designer, and successful in an artistic way, too, with no knowledge and little thought of the history of his own branch of art, and with little curiosity as to its philosophy or its poetry. And, on the other hand, a man may be a very earnest student, and a happy and delighted student of the history and criticism of art, and know nothing, and care as little, about the profession or practice of any art, or about studio ways and studio traditions. I do not know that in any branch of human study this distinction is so marked and so strong. This is to be regretted, for many reasons, but it can hardly be done away with so long as the community is generally careless of both the theoretical and the practical--so long as the students and the practitioners alike feel themselves nearly isolated units, floating in a sea of good-humored indifference. This state of things only time can alter. Only time can civilize our new community in intellectual and perspective matters; but there are some other conditions which are more immediately in our power to modify, perhaps--let us see:
It is as true as if it had not been repeated, even to fatigue and boredom, that the arts of decoration have been in a bad way for a good part of the century past, at least among some European and Europeanized nations. I do not imagine that a Frenchman would admit that architecture and the arts of decoration had ever languished in his own society. Your cultivated Frenchman would say that some periods were better than others, but that there were no bad periods; he would say that, to be sure, the style of the First Napoleon's Empire was not a very fortunate style,--too stiff, too absurdly pseudo-classic, unworthy of France, a poor enough successor of the dainty and playful art of Louis XV, or the somewhat more refined and restrained art of Louis XVI: but he would say that it was art still, and the period a not wholly inartistic period; and even of the dull times of the Napoleon of Peace, from 1830 to 1848, while he would confess to a great deal of languor and lack of public spirit of all sorts, except in the struggle which the Romantic artists, headed by Delacroix, waged with the Classicists, headed by Ingres; while he would admit that the abundant wood-cuts and lithographs, the painting and statues much less abundant even in proportion, and the buildings very few and unimportant, were not sufficient to make up a great artistical epoch, that is, for France; yet as for its being an epoch without art,--such a thing as that, he would say France had not known since she was France. And he would be right.
But if said of England it would be pretty nearly true, if it were said that the whole amount of art of the decorative kind that existed in England between 1810 and 1850, for instance, would fill but a small museum, and that its quality would fill but slight requirements, it would require a bold Anglophil to contradict. There came a dull pall, like that of her own black fogs, over social London, and the stucco-fronted languors of Baker Street and Portland Place are no worse than were the dull monotony of the interiors behind them. Veneered and polished mahogany furniture, very much too large and too heavy for the rooms; black haircloth, like the grave clothes of Art, for the covering of everything that could be sat upon; cold, brownish-red curtains, of shiny but not lustrous material; silver candlesticks of monstrous design,--these, and such as these, were the decorative objects which our fathers or our grandfathers admired, or felt that they must admire for want of better, during the unhappy years that I have cited. The delicate carvings that the furniture of a generation just previous had received, were forgotten. People put up with Chippendale chairs in their dining-rooms because they had belonged to their fathers and nothing special was offered to take their place; but there is no record that they cared for them. The richer and more fantastic carvings of Grinling Gibbons had never obtained any general recognition nor availed to modify the woodwork of the domestic interiors of England. The brocades and flowered silks which the eighteenth century had revelled in, and if in England not strong enough artistically to produce them itself, had brought into England from other lands;--these were replaced by the dismal things I have alluded to, and no vestige of them seems to have remained in the parlors of that unhappy time.
Richness of costume had disappeared with the wars of the French Revolution. Embroidered silk coats had given place gradually to claret-colored and blue broadcloth, and this gave place to black, and all variety in costume had disappeared completely; and now, from 1810 to 1850, fantastically varied and interesting house-furnishing and decoration had followed, as I suppose it inevitably must follow; costume, being, one fears, a necessary part of anything like a prosperous artistic epoch.
Out of this gloomy depression the Anglo-Saxon world, in England and in this country, is trying to emerge. It began its efforts with the perfectly natural conviction that by studying the artistic history of the past, something could be done to benefit the arts of the present. The Gothic revival, which you have heard of so much, and which was followed with real ardor and with unquestioning zeal by crowds of devotees for years, beginning with, perhaps, 1840, was an attempt along the most obvious lines,--along what seemed to be the line of least resistance, to change the metaphor. To develop anew an old art, which had flourished so greatly in the past,--how easy! and how certain! How certain were the enthusiasts of that time, that by earnestly poring over and closely analyzing and heartily loving the buildings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such buildings, and others like them, could be built in the nineteenth! How happy was the conviction of all these men that it was not more difficult than that! The secret of what had been done was to be found in the phenomena themselves. There, in this parish church, in this cathedral, lay the secret of their charm. Let us analyze first, they said, and let us put together again the ingredients that our analysis shall have discovered, and we will re-create the thing that we are in search of.
In like manner, in the minor arts, the people of 1850 felt, or some of them did, that they did not know how to weave curtains that it was worth any one's while to hang up, except to shut out the light and shut in the warmth; that so far as beauty of texture, beauty of pattern, and beauty of color went, they were powerless to produce anything of any avail. But they saw that the Venetians of the sixteenth century and the Florentines of the seventeenth century and the French of the eighteenth century had produced splendid stuffs; and although there were no museums in those days that condescended to anything so humble, such stuffs were still to be bought of the bric-à-brac dealers, and very cheap, too, and still existed, rolled up in some old garrets. By studying them, surely the art of making others like them could be learned. And so around the whole circle of the arts of decoration, it was believed, and in thoroughly good faith, and with, as it seemed, perfectly good reason, that the study of what had been would suffice, with zeal and patience and good will, to the production of what should be.
Well, the experiment has failed. Archæology is the most delightful of pursuits, but it is not particularly conducive of good art. The German professor, who knows the most about Phidian sculpture, is as far as his youngest pupil from being able to produce anything Phidian, but, of course, this is not a fair example. The German professor does not profess to be a sculptor. Let us say then, that that sculptor now alive who knows the most, theoretically and historically about Greek art, is as far as his most ignorant contemporary and rival from having Greek methods of work. This is a safe proposition. I do not know who he is, nor can any one tell me. It is not a question of men, but of principles. The study of the monuments of art is one thing, their analysis, their criticism, their comparison, is one of the most attractive, the most fascinating, the most stimulating, the most absorbing of studies, one that I shall never cease commending in the most earnest way to all those persons to whom scholarship is dear and to whom it is a question of recommending a study which is worthy of their most earnest and hearty devotion, but it is not the study of practical art, that is another and a very different thing.