When I first visited Barcelona I was stunned to hear that the Catalan term for the style of Gaudì's magnificently ornate, curvy, opulent, colourful buildings was... "Modernisme"!
Great article! As they used to say, "I agree entirely!"
I have lived in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Spokane, Colorado, and Nebraska. All of my favorite homes (and apartments, and duplexes) are from the 1910s. Across the US, great things were happening in architecture at that time. In two words, it was proportion and details. There were crown moldings, but they were not overdone. The rooms felt like they were the right size: the ceilings were the right height; the windows are the right area, height from the floor and ceiling, and width; The doors were handsome. Ironically, the one space that was like this was a Frank Lloyd Wright duplex in Milwaukee (although a drop ceiling was added which may have thrown everything off).
We also have a magnificent 1915 Steinway piano that absolutely roars.
"Another way to think about the 1870-1920 period, then, would be the streetcar era."
It sounds like you mean that the reliance on horses in US cities declined during those decades, either absolutely or in relative terms?
That's not at all true: "In ten major US cities, the number of teamsters [at that time was defined as persons employed in driving teams of horses] rose 328 percent between 1870 and 1900, while the population as a whole rose only 105 percent."
Planners of that era knew this: "In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows." The world's first international urban planning conference, in NYC in 1898, broke up after 3 days instead of the planned 10 when the delegates could identify no meaningful solutions to the crisis of cities' reliance on horse-drawn transportation for people and goods.
The post-Civil War national railroad boom was part of why horses in cities kept increasing: "Nearly every item shipped by rail needed to be collected and distributed by horses at both ends of the journey. So as rail shipments boomed, so did shipments by horse. Ironically, railroads tended to own the largest fleets of horses in nineteenth-century cities."
That's a fascinating quote. Thank you. And point well taken. It does seem to me that streetcars and other forms of non-animal public transport were a significant shift though - notice Henry Adams mentioning the "electric tram" as a fearsome new technology. It seems to me that charts like this one would show similar patterns for different cities around this time: https://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/portland-mode-share-chart.png
I don’t see how the fact that life was bad for most people who lived in beautiful cities is a reason not to have beautiful cities today. The Construction Physics blog argues that we could build beautiful decorations more cheaply today and with less labor.
While architecture clearly needed to evolve, there was no need for it to become the stripped down, brutal and ugly buildings that haunt modern cities today. Check out this Streetview style map of 1940's NYC:
In this era the streetcars were still present, though waning. If you compare any image from there to its contemporary image, the one from 1941 always looks better (though, to be fair, there were far fewer trees in that time). Also note that this is not just the case for wealthy neighborhoods; even working class housing looks better.
That was a great read, thank you! A note – that's Battersea Power Station, not Tate Modern (Tate Modern is in Bankside Power Station just down the river, both were designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, also the guy who did the ubiquitous red telephone box)
When I first visited Barcelona I was stunned to hear that the Catalan term for the style of Gaudì's magnificently ornate, curvy, opulent, colourful buildings was... "Modernisme"!
Great article! As they used to say, "I agree entirely!"
I have lived in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Spokane, Colorado, and Nebraska. All of my favorite homes (and apartments, and duplexes) are from the 1910s. Across the US, great things were happening in architecture at that time. In two words, it was proportion and details. There were crown moldings, but they were not overdone. The rooms felt like they were the right size: the ceilings were the right height; the windows are the right area, height from the floor and ceiling, and width; The doors were handsome. Ironically, the one space that was like this was a Frank Lloyd Wright duplex in Milwaukee (although a drop ceiling was added which may have thrown everything off).
We also have a magnificent 1915 Steinway piano that absolutely roars.
"Another way to think about the 1870-1920 period, then, would be the streetcar era."
It sounds like you mean that the reliance on horses in US cities declined during those decades, either absolutely or in relative terms?
That's not at all true: "In ten major US cities, the number of teamsters [at that time was defined as persons employed in driving teams of horses] rose 328 percent between 1870 and 1900, while the population as a whole rose only 105 percent."
Planners of that era knew this: "In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows." The world's first international urban planning conference, in NYC in 1898, broke up after 3 days instead of the planned 10 when the delegates could identify no meaningful solutions to the crisis of cities' reliance on horse-drawn transportation for people and goods.
The post-Civil War national railroad boom was part of why horses in cities kept increasing: "Nearly every item shipped by rail needed to be collected and distributed by horses at both ends of the journey. So as rail shipments boomed, so did shipments by horse. Ironically, railroads tended to own the largest fleets of horses in nineteenth-century cities."
https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/07/Access-30-02-Horse-Power.pdf
That's a fascinating quote. Thank you. And point well taken. It does seem to me that streetcars and other forms of non-animal public transport were a significant shift though - notice Henry Adams mentioning the "electric tram" as a fearsome new technology. It seems to me that charts like this one would show similar patterns for different cities around this time: https://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/portland-mode-share-chart.png
I don’t see how the fact that life was bad for most people who lived in beautiful cities is a reason not to have beautiful cities today. The Construction Physics blog argues that we could build beautiful decorations more cheaply today and with less labor.
Great article, and the Immerwahr article looks right up my alley. Thanks!
While architecture clearly needed to evolve, there was no need for it to become the stripped down, brutal and ugly buildings that haunt modern cities today. Check out this Streetview style map of 1940's NYC:
https://1940s.nyc/
In this era the streetcars were still present, though waning. If you compare any image from there to its contemporary image, the one from 1941 always looks better (though, to be fair, there were far fewer trees in that time). Also note that this is not just the case for wealthy neighborhoods; even working class housing looks better.
That was a great read, thank you! A note – that's Battersea Power Station, not Tate Modern (Tate Modern is in Bankside Power Station just down the river, both were designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, also the guy who did the ubiquitous red telephone box)