Architecture and Democracy | Page 7

home, perhaps, than do
we. But beyond this passenger concourse, where the elevators and

stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded the construction of
a great enclosure, supported only on slender columns and far-flung
trusses roofed with glass. Now latticed columns, steel trusses, and wire
glass are inventions of the modern world too useful to be dispensed
with. Rome could not help the architect here. The mode to which he
was inexorably self-committed in the rest of the building demanded
massive masonry, cornices, mouldings; a tribute to Cæsar which could
be paid everywhere but in this place. The architect's problem then
became to reconcile two diametrically different systems. But between
the west wall of the ancient Roman baths and the modern skeleton
construction of the roof of the human greenhouse there is no attempt at
fusion. The slender latticed columns cut unpleasantly through the
granite cornices and mouldings; the first century A.D. and the twentieth
are here in incongruous juxtaposition--a little thing, easily overlooked,
yet how revealing! How reassuring of the fact "God is not mocked!"
The New York Central terminal speaks to the eye in a modern tongue,
with however French an accent. Its façade suggests a portal, reminding
the beholder that a railway station is in a very literal sense a city gate
placed just as appropriately in the center of the municipality as in
ancient times it was placed in the circuit of the outer walls.
Neither edifice will stand the acid test of Mr. Sullivan's formula, that a
building is an organism and should follow the law of organisms, which
decrees that the form must everywhere follow and express the function,
the function determining and creating its appropriate form. Here are
two eminent examples of "arranged" architecture. Before organic
architecture can come into being our inchoate national life must itself
become organic. Arranged architecture, of the sort we see everywhere,
despite its falsity, is a true expression of the conditions which gave it
birth.
[Illustration: PLATE V. THE NEW YORK CENTRAL TERMINAL]
The grandeur of Rome, the splendour of Paris--what just and adequate
expression do they give of modern American life? Then shall we find
in our great hotels, say, such expression? Truly they represent, in the
phrase of Henry James, "a realized ideal" and a study of them should
reveal that ideal. From such a study we can only conclude that it is life
without effort or responsibility, with every physical need luxuriously
gratified. But these hotels nevertheless represent democracy, it may be

urged, for the reason that every one may there buy board and lodging
and mercenary service if he has the price. The exceeding greatness of
that price, however, makes of it a badge of nobility which converts
these democratic hostelries into feudal castles, more inaccessible to the
Long Denied than as though entered by a drawbridge and surrounded
by a moat.
We need not even glance at the churches, for the tides of our spiritual
life flow no longer in full volume through their portals; neither may the
colleges long detain us, for architecturally considered they give forth a
confusion of tongues which has its analogue in the confusion of ideas
in the collective academic head.
Is our search for some sign of democracy ended, and is it vain? No,
democracy exists in the secret heart of the people, all the people, but it
is a thing so new, so strange, so secret and sacred--the ideal of
brotherhood--that it is unmanifest yet in time and space. It is a thing
born not with the Declaration of Independence, but only yesterday,
with the call to a new crusade. The National Army is its cradle, and it is
nurtured wherever communities unite to serve the sacred cause.
Although menaced by the bloody sword of Imperialism in Europe, it
perhaps stands in no less danger from the secret poison of graft and
greed and treachery here at home. But it is a spiritual birth, and
therefore it cannot perish, but will live to write itself on space in terms
of beauty such as the world has never known.

II
DURING THE WAR
The best thing that can be said about our immediate architectural past is
that it is past, for it has contributed little of value to an architecture of
democracy. During that neo-feudal period the architect prospered,
having his place at the baronial table; but now poor Tom's a-cold on a
war-swept heath, with food only for reflection. This is but natural; the
architect, in so far as he is an artist, is a purveyor of beauty; and the
abnormal conditions inevitable to a state of war are devastating to so
feminine and tender a thing, even though war be the very soil from
which new beauty springs. With Mars in mid-heaven how afflicted is