"Inventing the Skyline": the career of Cass Gilbert.

Cass Gilbert practiced architecture in New York from 1899 to 1934, the year of his death. One tends to think of Gilbert as coming a generation later than Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White because his major works began to appear much later than theirs and because his career lasted, unlike theirs, well into the twentieth century. Gilbert also once worked as an assistant in the McKim, Mead & White office. In fact, McKim was Gilbert's senior by only twelve years, White by only six. Though Gilbert began his own practice, in St. Paul, Minnesota, as early as 1885, it was not until ten years later, when he won the competition for the design of the Minnesota State Capitol, that he joined the list of American architects to be reckoned with. That was two years after the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a watershed event in the history of American architecture and urbanism, the dawn of the City Beautiful period to which Gilbert would contribute so much. McKim and White, who as young men were deeply infatuated with John Ruskin, had been influenced by Russell Sturgis and worked for Henry Hobson Richardson. Their careers marked a fascinating (and well-documented) progression from early dabblings in the Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival, through their epochal essays in the "Shingle Style" to their final embrace of an urban classicism. Gilbert, however, seemed to emerge fully formed in the mid-1890s as a brilliant and driven exponent of City Beautiful precepts.

Gilbert was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1859, and as a boy moved with his family to St. Paul. In this he was different from many of the other New York classicists, whose youths took place in a culturally rich and well-connected metropolitan milieu. Stanford White's father, for example, was one of New York's leading nineteenth-century men of letters, whose friends ranged from Frederick Law Olmsted to Edwin Booth. McKim's family lived in a house designed by A. J. Davis. Russell Sturgis was a family friend, and McKim's sister married the son of William Lloyd Garrison. Gilbert was an auslander in New York. Another thing to set him apart from many of his later confreres (White excluded) was the fact that he never attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Instead, in 1878 he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Granted, the architectural training there was closely modeled on that of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but, nonetheless, Gilbert missed out, if not on specific approaches to building design, then on the friendships formed, the atmosphere of the Parisian ateliers, above all on the deep immersion in French language and culture. In some respects, Gilbert was like his fellow Ohioan, the great sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, who had a thorough working understanding of European models though he lacked, unlike Augustus Saint-Gaudens or Daniel Chester French, the experience of prolonged study abroad. Following M.I.T., Gilbert entered the office of McKim, Mead & White in Manhattan before going out on his own, in 1885, in Minnesota.

"Inventing the Skyline: The Architecture of Cass Gilbert" is a fall exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, curated by Margaret Heilbrun, director of the society's magnificent library.(1) Ms. Heilbrun has also edited the companion book to the exhibition. The New-York Historical Society is the principal repository of Cass Gilbert documents, from billing records to personal correspondence to highly finished drawings. In the 1950s, the architectural historian Henry Hope Reed, at a time when Cass Gilbert was distinctly unfashionable, far-sightedly secured the Gilbert archive for the Society. Today, Gilbert is anything but unfashionable. While there is not a single mention of Gilbert in Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture of the 1940s, which stood for some years as the source of all the history a modern architect really needed to know, today it is hard to find an architect of any persuasion, from neoclassicist to the most woolly "deconstructivist," who doesn't regard at least some of Cass Gilbert's productions to be among the genuine masterpieces of American architecture. The New York Historical Society and Columbia University Press are to be commended for making so much of the Gilbert archive available to the public at this time. Mention should also be made of Cass Gilbert, Architect: Modern Traditionalist by Sharon Irish, published last year by Monacelli Press, the first full monograph on Cass Gilbert. Ms. Irish is also a contributor to the present volume.

Gilbert's Minnesota State Capitol demonstrated his thorough grasp of City Beautiful principles, his skill in manipulating classical forms, and his ability to work at monumental scale--this last a very important consideration at a time when the fast-growing cities of a rich nation were requiring buildings of ever grander functional and symbolic scale. Buildings such as railroad stations, public libraries, art museums, and, of course, skyscrapers posed problems, not only of design but also of collaboration among technicians and artists, that seemed tailor-made for the Beaux-Arts graduates, who had worked in collaborative ateliers, learned rigorous principles of formal planning, and designed monumental Prix de Rome projects. Part of the rise of City Beautiful classicism can be laid to the rather mundane fact that only Beaux-Arts-trained architects really knew how to organize the many and disparate parts of large-scale building projects. Gilbert proved his mettle with the Minnesota State Capitol project, and partly on its strength won, in 1899, the competition to design one of New York's most important buildings, the Custom House at Bowling Green. In the same year he won that competition, he was awarded the contract for a New York skyscraper, the Broadway-Chambers Building. It wasn't his first skyscraper design, but it was his first in New York; located at the prominent intersection of Broadway and Chambers Street, it garnered considerable professional and critical attention and is regarded today as one of the most important of what we might call the first generation of mature skyscrapers in New York. Its design followed the vertically tripartite organization that had been pioneered by such architects as Bruce Price and Louis Sullivan. A three-story base of rusticated limestone--an urbane street presence drawing on the formal vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance--yields to an eleven-story shaft of dark brick patterned in emulation of rustication but otherwise unembellished. The top four stories of the building explode in a rich display of classical forms, including pilasters, arches, cartouches, console brackets, and copper cresting in an anthemion motif, with much use of glazed terra cotta. The building at once forthrightly acknowledges what Montgomery Schuyler called "the facts of the case," that this indeed is a steel-framed office building, while at the same time contributing to the classical embellishment of the city. Gilbert had begun his New York practice with a bang, with a building that immediately placed him in the front rank of American skyscraper architects. Meanwhile, work on the Custom House proceeded, and, upon its completion in 1907, Gilbert could lay just claim to being one of the city's three or four most important architects.

The Bowling Green Custom House is the sort of monumental Beaux-Arts building that in the pedagogy of modern architecture was either ignored or snidely dismissed. The ideology that began to emerge in New York in the 1920s held that such historically derivative works were at best the misguided products of atavistic and culturally insecure mentalities, and at worst a variety of what we would call kitsch. Few people continue to feel that way today. The principal reason is that we now know, after decades of modernist architecture, that Beaux-Arts architects employed basically sound principles of urban design. Nikolaus Pevsner may have misused the term "historicism" as a withering rebuke to this sort of thing, but the fact is that architects such as Gilbert borrowed and manipulated patterns from the vast range of Western experience in designing buildings and whole urban precincts. Their designs, in their hierarchical formal arrangements and methods of symbolic expression, gave both legibility to otherwise brutally chaotic cities and a sound framework for these cities' symbolic projection of their own civic memory. The City Beautiful movement, closely allied with turn-of-the-century progressivist social reform movements, sought to create urban orderliness in buildings that would also be, as Ruskin might have put it, great works of public instruction. It is not for nothing that the undisputed masterpieces of modern architecture tend to be of relatively small scale and to exist in relatively isolated settings. Modern urbanism is nearly an oxymoron. Urban form, while hardly impervious to sensible emendation, nonetheless had been largely codified by the time American cities began to emerge as global powerhouses in the late nineteenth century. To the extent we were agreed that New York should take her place among the great cities of Christendom, then classical notions of order and symbolic expression were hardly less appropriate in lower Manhattan in 1900 than they had been in cinquecento Florence. (Twentieth-century New York, after all, is closer in time to the Renaissance than the Renaissance was to ancient Rome.)

The Custom House, as the site where the customs duties were collected that kept afloat the national government in those palmy days before the federal income tax, was one of the city's most important official buildings, perhaps the most important. Thirty years later Gilbert designed the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. Again he employed the formal vocabulary of Renaissance classicism. By then, "advanced" architectural opinion scorned that sort of thing. It is rather startling to think that the Supreme Court building was completed three years after the Museum of Modern Art's International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, whence we got the term "International Style," and only four years before the completion of MOMA's building on West 53rd Street.

Gilbert's career boomed in the wake of the Custom House and Broadway-Chambers projects, which proved him equally adept at monumental civic buildings and at high-rise office buildings. Montgomery Schuyler, Claude Bragdon, and other critics regarded Gilbert's West Street Building (1906-7) as one of the best skyscrapers yet designed, though Schuyler praised even more effusively Gilbert's next New York skyscraper, a work so awesome that it brought together in one building every one of Gilbert's skills as a designer. Three years after the completion of the Custom House and the West Street Building, the self-made retail tycoon Frank W. Woolworth commissioned from Gilbert a skyscraper headquarters for a site across from City Hall Park. Completed in 1913, the Woolworth Building remained for many years the tallest building in the world and the most famous building in New York. Its base and tower form, its soaring verticality, its engineering innovations, its richly embellished surfaces of Gothic ornament executed in glazed white terra cotta have made the Woolworth Building a source of continuing fascination for eighty-seven years. Apparently Woolworth, a man who knew what he liked, told Gilbert that his favorite building was London's Houses of Parliament (not a bad choice!), and rather hoped for something along those lines. Rather than scoff at the tycoon's naivete, Gilbert brilliantly mated Gothic forms to his steel framework to create what the radio preacher Parkes Cadman dubbed the "Cathedral of Commerce." "In its white spectrality," wrote Montgomery Schuyler, "`it shines over city and river.'"

Inventing the Skyline is a visually rich book that reproduces numerous photographs, drawings, and plans from the Gilbert archive and presents them together with five scholarly essays by Gilbert authorities. Sharon Irish writes about the organization of Gilbert's office. Mary Beth Betts contributes two essays, one on the preparation and use of drawings in the Gilbert office, another providing in-depth analyses of twelve important Gilbert projects, including his campus for Oberlin College and his failed plans for the George Washington Bridge. Barbara S. Christen's essay is on Gilbert as planner, and Gail Fenske writes of Gilbert's skyscrapers. Each of these essays draws richly on material from the archive, is well-documented, and provides real insights into Gilbert's work. Still, some things one might have hoped to be present are disappointingly not. For starters, there is precious little on Gilbert's life and background. Granted that the book is meant to bring to public light materials in the Gilbert archive, which presumably does not include his grade school report cards. Nonetheless, a little broader context would enable the reader better to understand these archival materials. On page 248, Gail Fenske writes, "Gilbert's general fascination with color can also be traced to his admiration for the writings of John Ruskin." That's interesting. But Ms. Fenske tells us no more, and does not provide a footnote directing us to further information on this subject. This sort of thing drives me crazy. Even if Sharon Irish covers it in her monograph, we are not told so. Here as elsewhere, the presumption that Sharon Irish's monograph is a necessary adjunct to the present volume slightly rankles. Few people are going to plunk down the money for both books. I don't think more on Gilbert's life or on his "admiration for the writings of John Ruskin," is really going to detract from Sharon Irish's royalties on her monograph. I feel a little cheated.

A worse defect is the surprising paucity of material on Gilbert's collaborations with artists. One of the guiding ideals of Beaux-Arts architecture, with its emphasis on symbolic expression, was that buildings ought to unify the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. Gilbert worked with some of the most talented sculptors and mural painters and decorative artists of the period, yet there is scant mention of these artists and few details of working arrangements. Surely the archive must be replete with material that sheds light on these collaborations, and it is rather mysterious that so little is said on this score. Mary Beth Betts, for example, tells us much about Thomas Johnson, Gilbert's crack draftsman, yet nowhere, so far as I can tell, is mention made that Johnson also designed the famous and playful brackets or "grotesques" in the lobby of the Woolworth Building. Nor is there mention of Otto Heinigke and Owen Bowen, whose Woolworth mosaics are among the most popular aspects of that building's design. Here, too, it seemed we might learn a thing or two about the remarkable stone carver John Donnelly, a man scarcely known yet who may have been one of the handful of the most indispensable artisans during New York's period of civic grandeur. Unlikely myself to dig in this archive any time soon, I eagerly looked forward to this exhibition and book for information about these collaborations, and I am disappointed.

Nevertheless, for the sobriety of its essays, and even more for its lavish reproductions of plans and drawings, Inventing the Skyline is a necessary addition to any shelf of books on American architecture.

(1) "Inventing the Skyline: The Architecture of Cass Gilbert" opened at the New-York Historical Society on September 12, 2000 and will be on view until January 21, 2001. A catalogue, with essays by Mary Beth Betts, Barbara Christen, Gail Fenske, Margaret Heilbrun, and Sharon Lee Irish, has been published by Columbia University Press (306 pages, $50).