Part 3
What is the solution to this knot of related problems? We can only reach it if we calculate the capacity of each building, multiply this figure by its traffic-producing coefficient, and then set this figure against the capacity of the surrounding streets. Difficult as these computations may appear, they yet are entirely feasible. Upon them is founded the science of zoning, a science which is as yet so imperfectly understood by the majority of us that it has been necessary to describe its origin and purpose in some detail. We may now go on to ask what is likely to be its effect on the architecture of the immediate future. The answer is one which may appear to contradict itself. Devised for the purpose of protecting the street from the undue growth of its buildings, the zoning ordinance must tend before all else to encourage the growth in size of the average individual building, and to grant it a measure of formal autonomy which will rapidly destroy the few remaining vestiges of coherent street design.
A height restriction, such as those in force in England, is founded upon a conception of civic order, but it may in addition have one of three practical objects. It may be designed to prevent unstable construction, or to ensure that the surrounding area is not unduly darkened, or to allow a jet of water to sweep over the roof in an outbreak of fire. The zoning ordinance is concerned with none of these things. Its object is to regulate capacity alone, and this it does by drawing an inclined line upward from the centre of the street, thus fixing an angle within which the outline of the building is forced to remain. Now, it is in the first place to be observed that rapidly sloping walls are as impracticable as they are unsightly in buildings of great height. It follows that the ordinance may best be complied with by breaking up the façade into receding vertical planes, each separated from the next by a narrow terrace. And the larger is the site occupied by a building thus falling back along a fixed angle, the higher this building will be allowed to reach, for in a triangle of which the angles remain constant the height will vary as the base. In the second place, a building measuring more than, say, sixty or seventy feet in depth will require an open area to provide it with an adequate supply of light and air. In a skyscraper of the old-fashioned type it was the custom to place this area at the centre of the building, which became a quadrangular box, encircling the four sides of a deep central void. But it is at its centre that a building erected under the zoning ordinance is allowed to reach its maximum height. To give up this part, more valuable than any other, for the necessary area would of course be folly, and the area is, in consequence, placed where the sacrifice of useful volume will be smallest, that is to say, at the periphery of the building, in such a manner as to lie open to the street.
_A zoned building, consisting of an H-shaped arrangement of parallelepipeds with two external areas. The influence of the American zoning law is visible in the upper part only. It accounts for the stepping-back of the central block and the octagonal tower that surmounts each corner. (Fraternity Clubs Building, New York, by Murgatroyd and Ogden.)_
[Illustration]
A building erected under the zoning ordinance will, therefore, occupy as much ground as its promoter is able to buy with borrowed money, and will, wherever possible, spread itself over the entire area of a city block, so that it is bounded by a street on all four sides. Its outline will, in addition, present two striking characteristics. It will rise on all sides in a succession of receding stages gathered at the summit in a central tower-like mass which, provided its area does not exceed a prescribed limit, may itself escape the restraining influence and rise unhindered. And while at each corner the street wall itself is brought to the full height permissible under the ordinance, the central part of each façade will be recessed so as to form one or several open courts or areas. At the moment of writing, London is about to witness the completion of its first building designed along these lines. Why the American zoning regulations should have been made to govern the design of the new Devonshire House building in London is not excessively clear, but this interesting piece of work does at any rate provide a valuable illustration of the laws of growth to which American architecture will in future be subject. For this reason it is by far the most interesting and the most characteristically modern of our large new buildings. There is just now a curious tendency to describe as modern a small number of structures whose windows are treated in accordance with a short-lived æsthetic fashion of thirty years ago. Devonshire House furnishes proof that architecture is able to be more modern than that, for here the new zoning ordinance is, for the first time in London, shown actively at work.
_A zoned building, more recent than the last, showing the American zoning law in full operation. The central parallelepiped here runs across the two others, thus forming six external areas separated by six buttress-like projections. Each of these projections is stepped back in obedience to the zoning law. (Bell Telephone Building, St. Louis, by Russell and Crowell.)_
[Illustration]
We may now see why it was remarked that zoning had substituted a new architectural impulse for the governing impulse of internal form to which we owe the major masterpieces of architecture. A zoned building can never be a masterpiece in the same sense as these. You cannot compare a zoned building to Chartres Cathedral, any more than you can compare a suit of clothes to a paper-weight. The form of the one is dictated by something working from inside outwards, while the form of the other is the result of an agency working upon the surface from without. The paper-weight may be as beautiful in its way, but its beauty does not arise, as the beauty of clothing arises, from its power to invest the human form with an apt, expressive and dignified integument. In the same manner the zoned building may be beautiful, but not with the beauty of the greatest architecture, which consists in the fashioning of a dwelling-place, human or divine, in such a manner as to guard and delight those who enter into it. The zoned building is, I repeat, like the University of Pittsburg, a matter of cubic feet piled up around a private road. Any new formal impulse that may control its growth resides in the street without; any new formal excellence it may exhibit has for its origin the directing authority of this street. But in spite of the inferior quality of its products, it is easy to see that the zoning ordinance holds out a considerable promise to the architecture of the future, supplying a fresh and vigorous motive in the place of an older that is rapidly failing, and setting up the authority of reason where caprice alone now rules.
Before we leave this subject, a word may perhaps be added concerning the limitations of this method of control. It clearly cannot be applied everywhere with equally pleasing results. A town or a district in which the streets run at right angles to one another will show it at its best, for there, and there only, will it be possible for the defining lines to meet with any degree of regularity. London buildings, too, have sometimes to conform to a stipulated angle, though for another reason than those of New York. But the irregularity of our streets, and the narrowness of most of our building frontages, have caused these controlling angles to become a source of grotesque heterogeneity and ugliness instead of allowing them to establish a new kind of order. Nor should our town be one containing sites excessively large, or have some of its streets so narrowly spaced as to produce sites that are sensibly smaller than the average. The larger area will permit of too great a building height, the smaller of too little, and it would appear necessary that the “street block” should, in addition to a regular outline, observe an approximate equality of size also. Founded upon these two equalities, the zoning ordinances proceed to build up an equality of height, of content, which in its turn begets yet another that is the guarantee of their ultimate success. For nothing will prosper in America that does not pay, and fortunately zoning has been found to pay, and to pay very handsomely. The “realtors” of the big American towns did not take long to discover that, while the building of a skyscraper must enhance the value of the surrounding land, this enhancement is considerably greater where the growth is controlled than where it is left free to congest, and stifle, and darken, as in the licence of nineteenth-century New York. To the neighbouring landowner an unregulated skyscraper, if it pointed to a new opportunity, was at the same time an evil and a discouragement, for, if all buildings simultaneously went up to those same heights, would they not mutually destroy one another? The zoning ordinance has thus become a part of the republican policy of the United States, under which a competitive society is made to bring forth numbers rather than eminence, and watches over these its children with democratic solicitude.
We have examined with some care the evolution of wheeled traffic and the changes its multiplication must inevitably bring about in the appearance of our streets. Is not flying, it may be asked, always described as the locomotion of the future, and is not the shape of our buildings likely to reflect so important a development? The first part of this question would take us beyond the scope of the present essay, but the answer to the second part may perhaps form the subject of a digressive paragraph. One might reasonably say that the design of a building is likely to respond to the needs of aerial traffic in three ways only, but not in any way that is likely to be of great consequence. The first possibility is that a building may be required providing means whereby aeroplanes are enabled to make a safe landing on its roof. A flat roof of ample dimensions thus becomes necessary, and yet we have seen that one of the effects of the zoning ordinance is to break up the roof surface of a building into a series of narrow ledges. A building upon the top of which it is desired to bring an aeroplane to land will, therefore, in those places where zoning prevails, need to be conspicuously low. Possibly a roof may here and there be projected outward beyond the walls of a building, an expedient whose drawbacks are such that it is unlikely to be often adopted. In any case it will be necessary to provide an entrance to the building from this roof, but there is nothing very new about that. The second possibility is that the aeroplane may have to be lowered from the roof of the building to the street level. The easiest way of making this descent is (to quote from a newspaper advertisement of the great Wanamaker exhibition to which I have referred) by “corkscrewing down the exterior of the building.” One of the great mural cartoons included (side by side with a Ford “family aeroplane”) in this exhibition shows an enormous cylindrical tower, encircled by a descending spiral, very much like a corkscrew in appearance. This tower is not, however, an ordinary city building, but, reaching high above the concourse of these, a special structure surmounted by a mooring mast for dirigibles. Happily the building has yet to be designed that will, while giving shelter, however unworthy, to human beings, wrap itself in a broad fire-escape for the convenience of corkscrewing aeroplanes. And there is, on the whole, no ground for supposing that our urban architecture will at any time pay so exorbitant a regard to the advance of the aeroplane as to transform itself in this manner.
But it will be remarked that aerial travel is bound to call into being a number of buildings of a special kind, devoted to this one purpose alone. May we expect such buildings to be as novel and as eminently characteristic as the Wanamaker cartoon would appear to suggest? It is difficult to believe that among them there will be anything more unusual than the dirigible hangar, which is already a familiar sight, and which, to do it justice, has a peculiar interest in that it is the only modern building whose purpose contains an unanswerable argument for a roof vaulted throughout its entire breadth. The hangar built at Orly by the French engineer Freyssinet is perhaps the example best known in this country; if it is not, it certainly deserves to be. But though the rounded shape of a balloon clearly demands a vaulted roof, there is no reason why such roofs should not be used elsewhere, as they have in fact been used for many centuries; and in his Utrecht Post Office the Dutch architect Crouwel has given us a building that, stripped of its great clock and its counters and other furnishings, might easily be mistaken by a wandering dirigible for its accustomed lair. Striking though the appearance of the Orly hangar may be found, it would scarcely be fair to attribute its success to the peculiar function it so efficiently discharges. And if this is all that the dirigible balloon is likely to do for architecture, what shall we say of the aeroplane? It would appear that only when practising the movement described by our American friends as “corkscrewing” will the aeroplane need the help of the architectural innovator. Till then we must remain content to see it inhabit a structure hardly distinguishable from the coach-house of our forbears.
The prospect opened to us by aerial locomotion is limited, for no matter how high our winged vehicles may one moment soar, they cannot approach the earth without losing much of their glamour and strangeness. Let us turn instead to the far more considerable factor which came before us at the beginning of this essay. The emancipation of modern woman was there glanced at in only one of the three aspects of which the two others have still to be regarded. We saw how, as a consumer of wealth, she has been instrumental in withdrawing the art of building from the light of its central inspiration, and depriving it of the most highly treasured of its resources. As a producer of wealth, her influence has perhaps been less momentous, but it is by no means to be disregarded, for the modern dwelling-house exhibits the fruits of it in almost every detail of planning and equipment. So profound are the changes it has suffered that a medium-sized house, built, say, three generations ago, and left in its original state, presents almost insuperable difficulties to the housewife of to-day. Its cavernous succession of kitchens and larders, its monumental boiling ranges, its numberless stairs and endless dim passages, all of these things must fall into desuetude, unless a regiment of muscular girls and women is enlisted to maintain order among them. We all know how in the leisurely age of our great-grandmothers a house was much more loosely, more vaguely planned, with nothing resembling the meticulous precision that is brought to bear upon it to-day. It was not necessary in those days to measure the distance the housewife had to walk in order to put the dinner on the table, for the walk was one which she was never called upon to take. There was no need to place a roomy and well-ventilated linen-cupboard close to the principal bedrooms, for the bedroom linen might be kept anywhere and fetched from anywhere without inflicting appreciable hardship upon the housewife. But wide though the gulf may be that divides the modern house from that of the early nineteenth century, the novelty of the former would not be nearly so apparent were it not for the much broader gulf by which it is divided from that of a generation later. During the second half of the century the romantic revival was scattering over the country a number of houses whose unpracticalness was so gigantic that they could only strike the beholder completely dumb. The labyrinth at Knossos being at that time still undiscovered, these structures are generally presumed to derive from the cathedrals and dungeons of the Middle Ages. It is by comparison with these preposterous inventions that the post-war house stands out in a yet more appealing and more individual light. Instead of losing purpose and definition, like the typical city building, it has gained vastly in both these qualities, and it has gained because, from being the scene of the housewife’s activities, it has become her instrument and ally, and sometimes (it must be admitted) her accomplice even.
The next step, indeed, has already been taken. It is possible even now to watch the modern residence gradually assuming the properties of a machine. At the beginning of the last century nine-tenths of the cost of a house went into the structure, while the remaining tenth paid for its fixtures and equipment. Nowadays we spend almost as much on drains and plumbing, on baths and closets, on bedroom lavatory basins supplied with hot water, on central heating, electric light, telephones and suchlike, as we spend on the building of the house. So remarkable has been this development that an American writer has prophesied a period when houses will be given away free with the plumbing. It is doubtful whether such munificence will ever become a commercial possibility, but the prophecy contains more than a modicum of truth. We may reasonably expect to see all but the most indispensable furniture done away with in the small house of to-morrow, while its walls, ceilings, and doors will assume a blankness and roundedness that has hitherto been thought needful only in the operating chambers of our hospitals. In order still to reduce the housewife’s labours, the apartments will be brought together in those vast blocks that are meeting with such strenuous opposition from private householders in the United States, an opposition to which the zoning authorities have almost invariably given every support. What is the reason for this opposition? It is that a new apartment house will (in the words of a recent American Court pronouncement) “increase the fire hazard” of the district upon which it intrudes, and will be “creative of noises from autos, taxis, milk wagons, drays, etc., in a locality where peace and quiet now prevail; it will obstruct light and air, and sooner or later it will bring with it the immoralities which always attend the building of such structures.” The list of its potential misdeeds goes on, but I have quoted at sufficient length to show what are the conditions to be expected when the house is supplanted by large, noisy, and efficient machines, which none but the richest and the poorest may altogether elude.
Is it inevitable that they will be so supplanted? The displacement is steadily going on, and the scope and rapidity of the process must depend upon the eagerness with which modern woman sets herself to pluck the fruits of liberty that are now so compliantly brought within her reach. It should be borne in mind, however, that the mechanization of the house is inspired by a purpose diametrically opposite to that entertained by the pioneers of modern methods in industry. The triumph of the powerloom over the handloom was conditioned by its ability to produce so many more yards of material than the handloom could be made to yield. But while the machine was introduced into the industrial world in order to multiply the products of labour, the object of the modern house is to diminish the necessity for labour. By exchanging the handloom for the powerloom the weaver could, while still taking the same amount of trouble, produce a greater result, but when the modern housewife moves into a labour-saving flat her object is by taking considerably less trouble to produce the same result as before. How and where she spends the hours of leisure thus acquired is a question which does not bear upon our present argument, except in so far as this leisure has enabled her to raise the drapery store to the exalted place it occupies to-day, and by this means to divert the trend of modern architecture in the direction which we have just been following.
It is, then, largely by virtue of her new position as a producer that the woman of to-day has become able to exercise such a signal influence in her quality of consumer of wealth. But from both these points of view we may perceive her acting immediately upon the main architectural current, while, if we consider her from the conjugal point of view, her influence will show itself only in the flow of the tributary stream which is conveniently described as decoration. It is a regrettable fact that the decorative arts in England had, until they suddenly came within this influence, shown not the smallest sign of vitality since Soane and Nash translated the Attic enthusiasm of Shelley, Landor and Winckelmann into stone and stucco. Learned though he may have been, there can be no doubt that John Soane was as genuinely moved by the masterpieces of Greek decoration as Shelley by the large and authentic voices of Plato and Æschylus. The modern decorator, however, who ransacks the storehouse of history from Robert Adam to the caves of prehistoric man, is never animated by better instincts than those of the merchant adventurer, and often enough by worse. Of a creative impulse he is completely innocent. And what are we to say of the teaching of Ruskin, who followed upon the heels of these great men, except that it was calculated to impart a knowledge not so much of decoration as of botany, while its temper was wholly inimical to such pleasure as might yet be taken here and there in decorative skill? Stifled by the tedious pullulation of Ruskin’s “natural forms,” this pleasure appears to be awakening once more, and it is to modern woman that we must look for the cause of this awakening.