10 The Revolution in Design—The Industrial ARTS vs Selfish Creation—The New Scale and the Time dimension.
2Europe as usual as pertains to inspirational design is tremendously in the lead. Our clothing, automobile, furniture and other designs still eminate from Europe, even as did the designs of our early and lovely colonial doorways, popularly supposed to have been born here because peculiar to this country in actual execution. America is so rich in material things, that its mind is not attuned to abstract searching to the same degree as in the older civilization. American minds are still so completely satisfied with stylism, as they have not as yet run the gamut of the styles to the extent of mental fatigue and nausea. Europe surfeited with stylism, is going through a revolution in surface design, seeking out every possible harmonious or rythmical projection of plain geometry. In America we have of course our own designers with some popular reception of their new composition; possibly with as great longevity of popular reception as the surface designing from Europe. The revolution is interesting only as a fact and as an indicator of trend.
3 Artists, that is the good ones, are the thinkers who venture into the field of the abstract and with the ideas or truths obtained there create within the realm of consciousness some form of material projection of one, two, three, or four dimensional emphasis, with rhythmic division, sometimes implied, sometimes realistic, of line color, texture, mass and the composition of the whole.
4 Here are important changes of our age. We are more and more advancing into PROGRESS BY CREATION, as opposed to progress by destruction. In either instance progress we must, but, inasmuch as everything must balance, the former bespeaks creation in return, and progress by destruction bespeaks only further destruction. When we have attained a state of sufficiently creative progress will we no longer have cause to fear of war. We are approaching a time when the greatest sin will be falsehood, which is identical with inefficiency, which is further identical with selfishness or evasion of truths for personal gain. We have arrived at a period when artistic projection must be made on it vastly increased scale and of far greater abstraction.
5 Nature has provided no unmixed materials for our use. We are forced to pick the good from the bad, the useful from the useless. By dint of progress, there is no material in our highly specialized design of the best airplane today which is not synthetic. Nature’s mixed materials have been separated into their elements, and as we have seen before, the elements have been recomposed for their useful solution of a problem. If any of the large vested interests in raw materials had conceived the large volume of business that was coming in airplanes they would have badly opposed progress in an effort to maintain volume in their portion of the design. The war taught many industries the folly and short sightedness of such tactics. The building industry has not yet learned of it, or to those who have conceived the problem there has been no solution evident. There is in effect no real building ‘‘industry’’ as we have come to know the word. It is merely a disjointed tailoring practice as applies to housing.
6 The breaking down, resorting, and recomposition of synthetic materials, be they fabric or metals, or any other, has become the great functional use of industry. We cannot, in our present mode of life, afford the time or money, to fabricate synthetic materials at home, by the arts and crafts method. The very paints and canvas of the painter, the paper and pencil of the architect, or the clay and bronze of the sculptor must be fabricated by industry and placed at the disposition of the artist by industry. In the feudalistic past the artists composed their own materials. Their architecture, or the combined arts applied to the housing of life, embodied the use of home made materials, and was incidentally the artistry of one man. Our architecture, broken up into specialized groups on account of the vast amount of formula that now pervades it, cannot overlook, today, industry or the great new tool of industry—METAL. The very strength of metal in tension, which makes possible a scale of fabrication hitherto undreamed of, requires a proper conception of the scale of the picture to be created, by the artist, through industrial channels, before he can properly design in that element. What is more important is that there is required a new modulus of expression, comprehended by and satisfactory to both industrialist and artist.
7 In the days when cloth was spun at home, and we sawed and planed our wood, fabricating our dwellings with these simple tools and materials, the artistry in men was well portrayed in these single endeavors. Industrialism must of necessity imply quantity production. It is uneconomical without it. It is born of the very truth that: what is truthfully good for one is truthfully good for all.
8 The first artists to apply their art to the new industrial canvas were our word artists or authors, who have conceived their manuscripts as not for themselves alone, but for mass production. It is however actually true that the inspirational harmony of art comes to the artist by his individualistic conception and enjoyment.
9 It is when the rhythm of the abstract idea is so strong within him that he must create visual, tangible, or other sensorial evidence thereof, that we have artistic projection. The next artistic movement to attain mass production, was our sheet music. For long have our pencil and brush artists despised the printed reproduction, but today such man as Rockwell Kent, Bernard Boutes De Monvel, Arthur Rackham, etc.. lend their art to the varied pages of the hitherto artistically despised advertising. Lalique and others give their art to mass production of the perfume bottle and other production glassware. The enlightened industrialists (particularly in the fabrics such as Mallinson) have encouraged the artist to express himself in their industrialized effort. Architecture, particularly as applies to the individual home is the last of the arts to be provided with its industrial synthetic media of expression. It is the last of the arts to consider the industrial medium worthy of its projection. (There are of course, notable exceptions to this, but such of the architects who have conceived of the new scale have not been sufficiently versed in industrial affairs to permit of their provision of the media). Quite reasonably so in view of the ramifications of mechanical specialization, which must be compassed as a complete and broad subject between artist and industrialist, with a common language of modular expression, before creation from abstract, artistic thought can therein be expressed. The emancipation will be complete with a common knowledge of both the sense and the formula of the fourth dimension.
10 With the advent of this new architecture is there the great possibility of this country, which already excels in industrial prosaicness, becoming the artistic creational center of the new age. American architecture is where American literature was, back in the early nineteenth century, when its poetry was filled with skylarks and nightingales, there being no character that convinced the perception that there might be beauty in the birds of the new world, the bob-o-link or thrush.
11 This new industrial art does not imply a resurrection of the cast iron deer, or promotion of the quantity production bronze ‘‘Doughboy’’ for the sculptor. The new art is not picayune. It calls forth the skill and harmonious design of the sculptor applied to the whole of the building in consideration of its complete mass and composition, with play of refinement and technique wherever the materials functionally involved provide a suitable medium of expression. Production methods applied to the bronze grills such as are executed by Samuel Yellin, must be the new field of the sculptor. The individual pastorals or other paintings either of past or embryonic master must be considered, in the light of the new industrial scale, as entirely of academic consideration, no matter how lovely. They can serve only as exercises in projection, harmony, scale, and composition. James Munroe Hewlett with his wide architectural experience, and his lifetime study of mural painting, composition and technique, together with his scenery designing and practical creation methods, underlying all of which is his strong character and innate harmony, is nearer to the new artistry as it applies to the concordant embellishment of the twentieth century home, than any other of the real artists in the architectural field. His studies and execution in composition, ably considerate of their setting and functionalism, and quantity projection methods to panels, is the nearest approach to the proper harmonization of the non-structural isolation panels of the coming home.
12 There is that sameness that makes twins, or even brothers and sisters of different ages, oft times indistinguishable to strangers; that makes whole races indistinguishable to the member of another race, yet which, with familiarity, becomes suddenly inconceivable of existence. That kind of sameness embodying character and harmony through repetition is not unhappy. There is the even greater sameness of a flotilla of destroyers, far more accurate in duplication than the human, with inspiring rhythm of appeal when seen in formation under way or moored. Without visible distinguishing mark to the stranger, the destroyers have almost living individualism to their crews. Beyond doubt there is, and always will be, by virtue of characteristic touch and fourth dimensional properties, the greatest difference in the world between original and industrial duplicate in art; none the less, the new art must presage its reproduction and its original must be. if good enough, relegated to private collection, museum, or academy. Like the retired Sire of race horses ‘‘man-o-war’’, the original is too valuable economically to be exploited individually.
13 In recent conversation with one of our leading residential architects on the subject of the great geometrical evolution in design, and its results in interior decoration in Europe and in England, now infiltrating this country, he remarked on the lack of composition, because he could see it only in relation to his composition of the whole of the building. In reality the decorative designers have created many decidedly attractive units of wall panel, floor panel, hanging or piece of furniture (amongst a raft of atrocities), but they are only designing in surfaces for industry has provided, as we have seen, no media as yet. These artists are only, not of their own fault, designing for single consumption, which today must be condemned as selfish, inefficient, expensive, etc.
14 They go so far as to tackle imarchitecture the exterior wall of the house, laying the brick of the feudal era in crazy geometrical lines, only complicating and making more expensive the all ready top heavy problem. We repeat that, one cannot design from the outside in, in the new era. There can be no character unless we design from the inside out.
15 The hovering ‘‘art’’ of Ferro-concrete carving is time or creatively selfish of the employer of the artist. It may attain character as indulged in by the owner or occupant himself for self development. Inasmuch as concrete is too heavy, and involves the ridiculous special composition of job molds, it is hardly worth discussion, though a current topic.
16 The surface must express the interior functionalism and spirit both. Louis Sullivan, American architect, is now being acclaimed by many of the architectural profession, for this truth which he tried valiantly to bring forth in his architectural expression in the early days of the skyscraper. In Louis Sullivan’s day. as even up to the present, industry had not provided the architect with the full media of expression, wherefore, in the light of future conceptions, the renditions seem dull, despite his finer perception and the courage of his convictions. WE WILL HAVE ARRIVED AT OUR NEW ARTISTIC ERA OF ARCHITECTURAL EXPRESSION, WHEN OUR BUILDINGS HAVE LOST THEIR LAST TRACE OF FEUDALISTIC OPPRESSIVENESS; WHEN OUR BUILDINGS ARISE IN CONCENTRATED CENTRAL HIDDEN AREA OF COMPRESSION, IN OPPOSITION TO GRAVITY, BY MEANS OF MAST OR CAISON, REACH OUT IN SPACE FROM THE VERTICLE BY TENSION AND COMPRESSION, COMPRESSION DIMINISHING DIRECTLY AS WE RECEDED FROM THE VERTICAL UNTIL THE BUILDING FINALLY FLOWS DOWNWARD IN PURE TENSION. Then may the exterior enveloping shell, completely freed of spiny skeleton present a lithesome fullness and harmonic grace, not dissimilar to the sheer and lovely, though sufficiently austere lacy veils flowing from the hennins of the fifteenth century French court ladies, so marvelously portrayed in Maurice Boutet de Monvel’s Joan of Arc at the court of Chinon.
17 As a closing admonition to this chapter on the proposed industrial projection of the combined arts in architecture for the birth of a new world culture; there is most applicable the philosophy of Margret Fuller, Marchessa d’Oosoli, critic and inspirational mentor of American literature, quoting from her Woman in the Ninteenth Century, ‘‘What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being—Should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open new, deeper and purer sources of joyous inspiration than have yet refreshed the earth. Let us be wise and not impede the soul.’’