Art and Craft of the Machine (4 of 10)

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The Art and Craft of the Machine Frank Lloyd Wright (CONTÂ'D)

The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple.

We may here sense an advanced stage of a condition surely entering all art for all time; its already triumphant glare in the deadly struggle taking place here between the machine and the art of structural tradition reveals "art" torn and hung upon the steel frame of commerce, a forlorn head upon a pike, a solemn warning to architects and artists the world over.

We must walk blindfolded not to see that all that this magnificent resource of machine and material has brought us so far is a complete, broadcast degradation of every type and form sacred to the art of old; a pandemonium of tin masks, huddled deformities, and decayed methods; quarreling, lying, and cheating, with hands at each other's throat--or in each other's pockets; and none of the people who do these things, who pay for them or use them, know what they mean, feeling only--when they feel at all--that what is most truly like the past is the safest and therefore the best; as typical Marshall Field,(3) speaking of his new building, has frankly said: "A good copy is the best we can do."

3. Marshall Field (1834-1906), a Chicago merchant, commissioned both Henry Hobson Richardson and the firm of D.H. Burnham and Co. to design his stores. Richardson's wholesale store of 1885 is a building many critics consider to be one of the greatest of the nineteenth century. Field's comment, therefore, probably relates to the later Burnham building. Richardson's untimely death at the age of 48 in 1886 forced Field to Choose a new architect.


A pitiful insult, art and craft!

With this mine of industrial wealth at our feet we have no power to use it except to the perversion of our natural resources? A confession of shame which the merciful ignorance of the yet material frame of things mistakes for glorious achievement.

We half believe in our artistic greatness ourselves when we toss up a pantheon to the god of money in a night or two, or pile up a mammoth aggregation of Roman monuments, sarcophagi, and Greek temples for a post office in a year or two-the patient retinue of the machine pitching in with terrible effectiveness to consummate this unhallowed ambition--this insult to ancient gods. The delicate, impressionable facilities of terra-cotta becoming imitative blocks and voussoirs of toolmarked stone, badgered into all manner of structural gymnastics, or else ignored in vain endeavor to be honest; and granite blocks, cut in the fashion of the followers of Phidias, cunningly arranged about the steel beams and shafts, to look "real" - leaning heavily upon an inner skeleton of steel for support from floor to floor, which strains beneath the "reality" and would fain, I think, lie down to die of shame.

The "masters"-ergo, the fashionable followers of Phidias - have been trying to make this wily skeleton of steel seem seventeen sorts of "architecture" at once, when all the world knows--except the "masters" - that it is not one of them.

See now, how an element - the vanguard of the new art - has entered here, which the structural-art equation cannot satisfy without downright lying and ignoble cheating.

This element is the structural necessity reduced to a skeleton, complete in itself without the craftsman's touch. At once the million and one little ways of satisfying this necessity beautifully, coming to us chiefly through the books as the traditional art of building, vanish away--become history.

The artist is emancipated to work his will with a rational freedom unknown to the laborious art of structural tradition-no longer tied to the meagre unit of brick arch and stone lintel, nor hampered by the grammatical phrase of their making-but he cannot use his freedom.

His tradition cannot think.

He will not think.

His scientific brother has put it to him before he is ready.

The modern tall office-building problem is one representative problem of the machine. The only rational solutions it has received in the world may be counted upon the fingers of one hand. The fact that a great portion of our "architects" and "artists" are shocked by them to the point of offense is as valid objection as that of a child refusing wholesome food because his stomach becomes dyspeptic from over-much unwholesome pastry - albeit he be the cook himself

We may object to the mannerism of these buildings, but we take no exception to their manner nor hide from their evident truth.

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