Forging a Unique American Beauty
March 2nd, 2010 | published in Photographed.
We have never said—until the skyscraper—“We want such and such a building because it is suited to our lives , the way we work, the way we play, the way we live—simple, strong, and fairly intelligent lives.” At least, if it has been said before the last few years, it was in a whisper, and the idea was never realized. When a man of wealth among us has desired a home, he has not asked his architect to study the land upon which he was to build, and the stone he could quarry from the land, and the wood he could find in the forest, and the lay of the landscape, and the manner of life of the man who wanted the home. A check was written and the architect started fro Europe, or the Orient, or in any futile direction, and then he returned and imitated in wrong materials the most inappropriate place he had seen and the man lived in the place and was proud and uncomfortable. Thus our homes in general average about as national and personal an expression of our wants as a log cabin on the Boulevard des Italiens or an Indian tepee on the Nile.
But when difficulties arose with our housing problem in one long, narrow tape-measure of a city, and we found ourselves with twice as much business as space, it became impossible to sit around and wonder what Ptolemy would have done in the building line under the circumstances, or even to rely upon the architectural impulses of Italian nobles or the needs of monkish communities in the Middle Ages.
Circumstances put an iron hand upon counterfeit architecture for commercial purposes in New York, and forced us to build something that we, as a nation, needed, that was adapted to our own way of living and working, that in fact possessed national characteristics. The manifestation of this first honest building impulse in America was the skyscraper, maligned, wronged, insulted from the start, and yet up to the present time the finest architectural expression in this country because of the completeness of its adaptation to need. And it is the skyscraper that has changed the outline of New York City, that has revolutionized the quality of it, and that has created the first suggestion of beauty the city had ever laid claim to.
Excerpted from ‘How New York has Redeemed Herself from Ugliness—An Artist’s Revelation of the Beauty of the Skyscraper’ by Giles Edgerton. Originally appearing in The Craftsman, an Illustrated Monthly Magazine in the Interest of Better Art, Better Work, and a Better and More Reasonable Way of Living, volume 11. Published by Gustav Stickley, New York, 1907.