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three
style


When an architectural competition was announced for the New York Public Library on May 21, 1897, Dr. John Shaw Billings, the library’s executive director, was determined that in his building, design would not triumph over function. He had in mind B...
The terms of the architectural competition were strict and included detailed floor plans that the competitors were required to follow. There were two stages, intended to attract new talent as well as established firms. First, six architects were chos...
The projected budget for the new library was not large ($1.7 million) and Billings expected a relatively modest building.* That was not what he got. All three designs were monumental. Carrère & Hastings and Howard & Cauldwell used the Modern French ...
I mentioned the New York Public Library competition when I gave a public lecture in connection with a recent architectural competition for the new Salt Lake City Public Library. The library board had conducted a national search for an architect, visi...
I told my audience that I thought that the Salt Lake City library board would have a more difficult choice than their nineteenth-century New York counterparts. It was not a question of function. The Salt Lake City librarians had prepared an equally e...
The library board awarded the commission to Moshe Safdie, and a year later the plans for the new building were unveiled. The new library will feature an unusual triangular-shaped main building and a curving wall-like structure that encloses a public ...
The coexistence of different architectural styles is nothing new. In a 1913 essay titled “Style in American Architecture,” Ralph Adams Cram identified no less than seven contemporary styles, although he called them “tendencies.” Five were tra...
Cram is right: most historical periods are marked by stylistic confusion; it is stylistic consensus that is unusual. There was such a brief consensus in the late 1890s, when both architects and the American public, under the influence of the immensel...
The inconstancy of the International Style practitioners should have been expected. The history of Western architecture is of architects searching for rules, only to bend and break them. Even Classicism, which appears at first glance to be highly reg...
The headquarters of a company whose logo is a pair of mouse ears obviously demands a different decorum from a temple. In the past, religious buildings and palaces required a narrow stylistic range. As architectural commissions grew to include civic a...
The great architects—Brunelleschi, Palladio, Wren, Richardson, Lutyens—regularly looked to the past for inspiration. In 1965, Richard Meier built the Smith House, which has been called the first International Style revival building. Like all revi...
Although art historians use terms like Gothic Revival and Greek Revival to distinguish later reincarnations of styles, architects look at history differently. “For the serious architect the past exists not as a legacy to be possessed through a self...
Stylistic consistency is much admired today, but it was not always so. In 1419, Filippo Brunelleschi began the Foundling Hospital in Florence, whose delicate arcade of Corinthian columns surmounted by pedimented windows is generally considered the fi...
Domestic architects had to be adaptable, because house styles changed according to fashion. In the United States, Tudor was popular in the 1900s, as was the Free Style; Cotswold and French Provincial appeared in the 1920s. After the 1930s, influenced...
If architectural style is a language—an analogy that is deeply flawed—it is closer to slang than to grammatical prose. Architectural styles are mutable, unregulated, improvised. Architects break the rules, and invent new ones. In part, this is si...
In addition to historical styles, there have also been styles associated with individual architects. The Palladian style made its way from Andrea Palladio to Inigo Jones, from him to Colen Campbell and Lord Burlington, and thence to Thomas Jefferson....
Buildings like Jones’ Palladian Queen’s House in Greenwich, Adler & Sullivan’s Richardsonian Romanesque Auditorium Building in Chicago, and Gordon Bunshaft’s Miesian Lever House are not copies but satisfying originals. However, most personal ...
Inigo Jones consciously based his work on the architecture of Palladio, but he did not think of himself as working in the Palladian “style,” any more than Palladio would have referred to the Classical “style.” Although Renaissance architects ...
The Latin root of “style” is stilus. A stilus was the sharp-pointed tool used to write on wax tablets and, by inference, stilus also referred to the way that something was written. This sense of technique carried over to English, and the original...
Literary style described the way that something was written, expressed, or performed. Architectural style, in Blondel’s sense, describes the way that something was built. Although architecture is often defined in terms of abstractions such as space...
Details are a major preoccupation of the architect. Once the overall form of a building is determined—“the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”—there remains the question not only of what materials are ...
The function of a baseboard is to cover the joint between the wall and the floor, and secondarily to protect the wall from scuffing. There are dozens of ways that this can be done. Baseboards can be prominent or discreet, a complicated assembly of bo...
Railings have a simple function—they must be sturdy enough to support us if we lean on them, and they must provide a secure hand-hold: if railings are open, the spaces between the supports and the rails should be small enough to prevent children fr...
Modern railings are usually metal. In his early villas, Le Corbusier used white-painted pipe railings to create a nautical image; in later buildings like the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, flat steel bars take the place of pipes. Th...
When Brutalism was in fashion, railings were correspondingly heavy: concrete beams, wide enough to sit on but unpleasant to the touch, or massive wood balustrades, as solid as fenders on a truck dock. The vogue among many younger architects today is ...
The transparent railings of I. M. Pei’s East Building are understated, elegant, and luxurious—like the building. “Beauty will result from the form and correspondence of the whole with respect to the several parts,” taught Palladio, “of the ...
The house that Robert Venturi built for his mother in 1964 shook the foundations of the International Style; much of this effect was the result of details. Although Venturi obviously was working in a Modernist idiom—there is a strip window and a st...
Coming through the front door of the Vanna Venturi House one immediately senses that it is an unusual place. A broad stair rises beside the fireplace, then peters out to almost nothing. The fireplace looks like an abstract sculpture, but it has a tra...
Whether one is looking up at the tall dome of the Pantheon, descending the spiraling vortex of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, or standing in the living room of Venturi’s small house, the experience of architecture is above all the experience of bein...
•••
The Postmodern movement that followed the Vanna Venturi House was relatively short-lived but it had an important consequence: it broke the stranglehold of Modernism, leaving designers free to explore other forms of expression. The profusion of styles...
Allan Greenberg is a confirmed Classicist. He does not consider this an anomaly. “To be truly modern,” he writes, “means finding the dynamic balance between eternal human values and the specific demands of the present. Classical architecture pr...
Early in his career, after emigrating to the United States from South Africa, Greenberg was employed writing design standards for courthouses, which led to an unusual commission: the conversion of an empty supermarket into a courthouse. He gave the c...
One of my favorite Greenberg houses is a cottage set among windblown dunes on the eastern seaboard. Completed in 1992, the low-lying building is shingled, but it is not exactly Shingle Style. Recent Shingle Style buildings are often broken down into ...
Hugh Newell Jacobsen studied at Yale under Louis Kahn, worked for Philip Johnson, and opened his own office in 1958. He established himself as a premier residential architect, winning commissions in the United States and abroad and receiving numerous...
The Palmedo House, built in 1988, reinterprets the American Colonial architecture of its location—Long Island. At first glance, the six pavilions resemble a little village, a little Amish village, judging from the austere white wood siding, the pri...
Jacobsen reacts to the collapse of Modernism by seeking a compromise position, while Greenberg anchors himself in the certainties of Classicism. Enrique Norten, the youngest of the three, takes a different course—he is trying to put Modernism back ...
In 1994, Norten built a house for himself and his family on a tight urban site in Mexico City. The three-story street façade is mostly a blank concrete wall; the wall facing the interior walled patio is entirely glass. The main living floor is open,...
Like Greenberg and Jacobsen, Norten reflects on the past. Although his house has little to do formally with the International Style of the flat-roofed stucco villas of the 1920s—except for the white-painted circular steel columns—it shares that p...
Whether one prefers the work of Greenberg, Jacobsen, or Norten is a matter of taste (I happen to like all three). The buildings are different, yet the three architects have something in common. They are serious about what they are doing, that is, the...
Greenberg, Jacobsen, and Norten do not describe what they do in terms of style. I think that there are a number of reasons that architects are uncomfortable talking about the subject. A suspicion of style is a heritage of the Modern Movement, which p...

Coda
Richard Morris Hunt was the most celebrated American architect of the late nineteenth century. His preeminence is reflected by his appointment as the architect of two important national works: the centerpiece building of the Chicago World’s Columbi...
No pair of architects could be more dissimilar than this distinctly odd couple, the proper High Society favorite of the Gilded Age and the untidy bohemian from Santa Monica. Yet they bear comparison. They were both late bloomers. Gehry was 48 when he...
Hunt was 43 when he came into his own. He had established an architectural practice in New York in 1855, almost immediately on his return from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He was moderately successful, achieving local renown for the Tribune Building, an...
Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, is a good example of his stylistic prowess. Hunt modeled the design of this 250-room residence on the Château de Blois, whose style is not the severe Classicism of the Italian Renaissance favored by archi...
Vanderbilt was drawn to French chateaux, which Hunt showed him during a whirlwind European tour, since young George and his wealthy family imagined themselves American aristocrats. There are coats of arms bearing Vs all over the house. Hunt provides ...
Like Hunt, Frank Gehry enlists novel materials in his buildings. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, for example, is clad in titanium, previously used chiefly for building aircraft. The metallic walls curve, twist, and turn. One part of the build...
“The plan is the generator” preached Le Corbusier, but with Gehry, the plan is the result. He appears to design from the outside in. The building as a composition comes first, the interior spaces follow. This implies that he shoehorns functions i...
Gehry’s talent is his exceptional formal imagination; his skill as an architect is to reconcile the forms he imagines with the functional demands of his client. And, of course, to find ways to build those forms. This is generally done without fuss....
Although sophisticated building techniques and innovative materials play a major role in Gehry’s buildings, like Hunt, he keeps technology off center stage. In that regard, he repudiates the mannered industrial style that pervades the work of many ...
Gehry, like Hunt, has changed the course of architecture. That is, he has made us look at our surroundings in a different way. The world of Gehry’s buildings is, at first glance, an odd place. The line between order and disorder is a thin one, and ...