The Americas

Before the arrival of Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors, the architecture of the ancient Americas bears witness to a diverse set of cultures, each of which evolved—entirely independently of events in the rest of the world—a distinctive but related set of building traditions. The spectacular achievements of the Pre-Columbian civilisations, with their colossal pyramids, palaces and temples, is even more impressive when we consider that they did not make use of the wheel, animal transport of building materials, measures, weights or iron utensils. Their construction techniques, though often characterised by exquisite precision in the field of stonemasonry, were indeed of the most basic sort, and did not engage the use of the true arch. An interesting but largely speculative task would be to compare the phases of architectural development in Pre-Columbian America with the achievements of the ancient Middle East, and intriguing parallels with the typologies of Mesopotamia and Egypt—the great tradition of pyramid and temple construction, for example—would not be difficult to find.

With the exception of some impressive prehistoric earthworks in the American South and Midwest and the remarkable abandoned pueblos of the American Southwest, almost all of the monumental architecture in the Pre-Columbian Americas is to be found in Central and South America. Here the most proficient builders were the Aztecs and their predecessors, the Mayas on the Yucatan peninsula, and, far to the south, the Incas. There are also more isolated but intriguing manifestations of the monumental urge, notably the mysterious ground drawings on the Nazca Plain in Peru (ca. 200 BCE-200 CE), a huge network of lines formed by the removal of rocks and earth to create geometric forms and images of plants and animals; these are only legible, strangely enough, from an aerial perspective. Teotihuacán, or “place of the gods,” was the largest metropolis of Mesoamerica, and its conspicuous ruins are still to be found northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Roughly contemporary with Rome, Teotihuacán was once home to some 200,000 people. Its pyramids, temples and palaces assumed awesome proportions—the Pyramid of the Sun, for example, is about 66 metres high and 230 metres long on each side of its square base. Smaller but more decorative, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacán was ornamented with sculptures of fierce serpent heads and masks of the rain god Tlaloc. Teotihuacán, however, had already been abandoned for half a millennium by the time the conquering Aztecs arrived in the region in the 12th century.

Smaller but equally impressive are the surviving temples of the Maya, who inhabited the dense rainforests of southern Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala from the 4th through the 10th centuries. Mayan temples, built at the behest of dynastic rulers and a priestly caste, were intended to overawe the observer. They consist of earth mounds covered with stone cladding, giving them a characteristically steep profile with a diminutive temple set on top. Since the use of the round arch was unknown, the dark and cramped interior spaces of the Maya builders could only be spanned by simple corbelling, usually of triangular section. It has been speculated that these unwelcoming stone chambers might have been used for storage rather than habitation. Apart from the temples, other large structures tended to be horizontal, set on long earth terraces. Notable here are the courts for the Mayan ball game, which was ritualistic and religious in nature rather than recreational. The temple building tradition was continued in the capitals of the Zapotec and Toltec cultures at Monte Alban and Tula, respectively. These structures, in turn, served as prototypes for the warlike Aztecs. Most Aztec work survives only in fragments, since their capital city, Tenochtitlán, was thoroughly destroyed by Cortés and his conquistadors, and its remains were deliberately buried beneath the colonial capital of Mexico City; recent archaeology has nevertheless uncovered the foundations of the colossal Templo Mayor, the onetime focus of many bloodthirsty Aztec rituals. Much further south, in the Andes mountains of Peru, the Incas set a new standard for mortarless stonemasonry: without the use of iron tools, huge stones were laboriously shaped into rectangular or smoothly polygonal forms, and so closely set together that the blade of a knife cannot be inserted into the joints between them. The massively fortified structures of the Incas, while beautifully crafted, were largely undecorated, notwithstanding early conquistador records that described several buildings as being clad in plates of pure gold. The fortified city of Machu Picchu (15th-16th centuries), only discovered in 1911, was largely protected by its inaccessibility. Set precariously on a mountaintop, it was originally surrounded by huge areas of terraced agricultural land, allowing it to be self-sufficient. While Machu Picchu was fortified, it also served as a centre for Incan religious and astronomical practises.

The next phase of architecture in the Americas came with the arrival of colonial conquerors from Spain and Portugal in the south and from France, England and the Netherlands in the north. All imported their own building traditions, though these were to some extent inflected by available building materials, lack of funds, a dearth of skilled builders, and disparities in climate with the homeland. Colonial churches in Central and South America were in this respect simplified and retardataire versions of Hispanic Baroque models, though the size and elaboration of many larger cathedrals, especially in Mexico and Brazil, often came to rival their Old World models. French-Canadian settlements like Montreal and Quebec tended to reproduce the building patterns of provincial France. In the United States, British colonial buildings of the 18th century, notably the Virginia state capitol at Williamsburg, emulated the more sedate Classicism of the Wren school or the Neo-Palladians back in England, and the Revolution of 1776 saw no dramatic departure from the current versions of Neoclassicism then popular over the Atlantic. It is telling that Charles Bulfinch’s Massachusetts State House in Boston (1795-1797), built in the epicenter of Revolutionary activity, was modelled in part on a British government building in London, William Chambers’ Somerset House (1776-1796). Thomas Jefferson, statesman and amateur architect, built his own country house, Monticello (1769-1809), in a style that accords with English Neo-Palladian precedent, and the sources of many details can be traced to treatises by Palladio or other architectural authorities represented in Jefferson’s personal library. For Jefferson, the form of the Roman temple was appropriate both stylistically and politically for the new Virginia state capitol that he designed (1785), for to him it embodied the most noble mode of architecture known to history while evincing appropriate associations with Roman republicanism. As a long series of American state capitols, churches, banks and government buildings attest, the Neoclassical urge was persistent in the formal architecture of the United States. The 19th century even concluded with a renewed push towards Classical grandeur: this was sparked by the great white pavilions and colonnades of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, thus setting into motion an American ‘Renaissance’ that found more permanent expression in such monuments as McKim, Mead & White’s Boston Public Library (1887-1895), Carrère and Hastings’ New York Public Library (1897-1911), and New York’s much-lamented Pennsylvania Station (1910).

North America closely followed the newer trends in European—and more particularly British—architecture throughout the 19th century, and when successive phases of the Gothic Revival were fashionable in London they also made an appearance in the great churches and public buildings of New York, Washington, Ottawa and Montreal. By the end of the century, however, several American architects, tiring of the inveterate stylistic dependence on older European models, began to take steps towards the achievement of a more distinctively native expression. A pioneer in this regard was the formidable figure of Henry Hobson Richardson, whose Trinity Church in Boston (1872-1877) introduced a radical new style into American architecture: its bold, massy and polychromatic appearance embodies what has since come to be called the Richardsonian Romanesque style, a free and eclectic interpretation of medieval French and Spanish motifs that seems to epitomise the robust and energetic spirit of post-Civil War America. Shortly afterwards, Louis Sullivan, and in turn his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright, proposed that American architecture had to be rooted in both a political ideology of democratic individualism and an acknowledgement of regional nature and topography. The result, a so-called ‘organic’ architecture, revitalised the American tradition but failed to establish a long-lasting school. Most importantly, Sullivan had begun the search for an appropriate relationship with modern technology, the most striking result of which was the birth of the skyscraper. This new and unprecedented building type first appeared in Chicago and then New York in the 1870s and 1880s, prompted by simple economics but made possible by technical advances in steel construction and the invention of the passenger elevator. No inhabitable buildings of this height had yet been attempted in Europe, nor were they to be until after the Second World War. The spiritual apotheosis of the skyscraper typology was attained with the erection of William van Alen’s Chrysler Building in New York City (1928-1930), whose cubistic Art Deco stylings make it the symbol of Jazz Age New York. The construction of Lamb & Harmon’s nearby Empire State Building (1930-1931) took only 410 days, but it held the title of world’s tallest building for some 40 years. Its crowning mast, which in its final form gives the tower a total height of 443 metres, was originally conceived as a mooring point for airships. Though framed in steel, the Empire State Building was nevertheless clad in stone, thus obscuring the crucial technical innovation at its heart.

Constant innovation was the hallmark of the prodigious output of Frank Lloyd Wright from the late 19th century through the 1950s. His innovative ‘Prairie House’ typology of the 1890s, which proposed a new emphasis on horizontality and freedom of internal space, found late but characteristic expression in the Robie house in Chicago (1909). His second great period of creative achievement came in the 1930s, when he produced a series of masterpieces including Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania (1936-1939), the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin (1936), and the innovative and affordable ‘Usonian’ house as represented by the first Herbert Jacobs house, Madison, Wisconsin (1936). Wright’s spatial inventiveness never flagged, and if his last buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1956-1959) or the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California (begun 1957), betray an obsession with geometries of striking appearance but questionable utility, he nevertheless stands for a protean creative energy and an unswervingly personal approach that characterises American architecture at its best.

The indigenous American search for a rapprochement between technology and architecture that had been pursued by Sullivan and Wright was largely overshadowed in the 1930s by the arrival of European modernist émigrés like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose design method already contained this issue at its heart. Due to their great influence in commercial building and architectural pedagogy, Bauhaus-style modernism came to prevail as orthodoxy in North American architecture from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s. Modernism produced a large number of pedestrian structures as well as a handful of acknowledged masterpieces like Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center in Michigan (1946-1955) and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York (1954-1958). Modernism even made limited inroads into the more conservative field of domestic architecture, as most memorably manifested in the Los Angeles school of experimental steel-and-glass house design that was spearheaded by Richard Neutra in the 1920s and taken up again by Charles Eames and his colleagues in the 1950s. In Central and South America, the innovations of modernism were espoused by such pioneers as Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil and Juan O’Gorman and Luis Barragán in Mexico, though these immediately came to be inflected with a distinctively Latin approach manifested in terms of form, materials and vernacular references.

Drawing on the innovations of Le Corbusier and the British Brutalists, a second generation of North American modernists like Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph and Arthur Erickson began to expand the language of modernism to embrace a more varied and sculpturally expressive use of shapes and textures. This sometimes heavy-handed approach came, in turn, to be superseded by a Postmodern experimentation with historical references, largely limited to pastiches of Classical elements; the work of Charles Moore, Michael Graves and Philip Johnson is exemplary of this school. More recently, a renewed interest in the forms—if not the social ideology—of modernism has come to characterise much of the monumental construction of North America, though the introduction of the computer into design and construction has allowed contemporary architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind to achieve buildings of an extraordinary geometrical and spatial complexity that would have been unthinkable only a generation before.