"Inventing the Skyline": the career of Cass Gilbert.(Review)

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 ...