Architects to the Nation: The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect's Office

355 Pages·2000·2.98 MB·English

by  Antoinette J. Lee

Architects to the Nation:
The Rise and Decline of the
Supervising Architect’s Office
ANTOINETTE J. LEE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
ARCHITECTS TO THE NATION

ARCHITECTS
NATION
TO THE
The Rise and Decline of the
Supervising Architect’s Office
antoinette j lee
.
with Foreword by William Seale
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
2000
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul
Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 2000by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198Madison Avenue, New York, New York10016
Oxford is a registered trademark ofOxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission ofOxford University Press.
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lee, Antoinette J. (Antoinette Josephine)
Architects to the nation : the rise and decline ofthe
Supervising Architect’s Office
Antoinette J. Lee with introduction by William Seale.
p. cm.
ISBN0-19-512822-2
1. United States. Dept. ofthe Treasury. Office ofSupervising
Architect. 2. Public buildings—United States—Designs and plans.
I. Title.
NA4421.L44 2000
725(cid:1).1(cid:1)0983—dc21 99-13565
The murals ofHarold Weston (1894–1972) depicting “Architecture
Under Government—Old and New,” Regional Office Building,
General Services Administration (formerly the Procurement Building),
1936–1938, Washington, D.C.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
on acid-free paper
Dedicated to the memory of Karel Yasko
This page intentionally left blank
foreword
William Seale
This book presents a unique view of a strata of American architec-
tural history seen heretofore only in glimpses. It is the story of a bu-
reaucracy, which, somewhat like our National Endowments today,
long ago assumed a significant role in art—in this case architecture—
but unlike the endowments, which stimulate production in the arts
and humanities, the Office of the Supervising Architect of the U.S.
Department of the Treasury was actually in the business of design
and construction, employing professional architects to provide pub-
lic buildings all over the nation.
From his headquarters at the Treasury Building in Washington, the
supervising architect, presiding over a large staff, exercised nearly ex-
clusive control over federal government buildings. He was close to the
Congress, which funded him, and he carried out its wishes with con-
siderable freedom. Few traces remain. The great drafting rooms in
Treasury, long abandoned, their skylights painted over, recently fell to
the wrecking ball. Records of the Office, numbering in the hundreds
of thousands of documents and drawings, were transferred long ago
to the able care of the National Archives. No other historical record
of American architecture is as vast and detailed. These papers are the
basic resource from which Antoinette J. Lee’s history is written.
The production of the supervising architect’s office, from birth in
the early1850s to weakening before political fire in the 1890s and even-
viii foreword
tual death a half-century later, was both remarkable and widespread.
Some of the buildings the office built are icons in American archi-
tecture. In Carson City, Nevada, Ammi B. Young’s United States Mint
stands on the desert, a beacon whose Italianate light shines in the sub-
sequent Nevada State Capitol up the street. The State, War, and Navy
Building, Supervising Architect Alfred B. Mullet’s mighty granite pile
west ofthe White House, is perhaps America’s best expression ofthe
French Second Empire mode.
Supervising Architect William Appleton Potter gave us the high-
towered Post Office and Courthouse in Nashville following his
Gothic ideas. Under Supervising Architect James Knox Taylor, Cass
Gilbert designed and built New York City’s superbly neo-Renaissance
customhouse, an ideal of Beaux-Arts civic beauty, with its elliptical
rotunda and sumptuous art program. Potter’s was a traditional
Treasury product designed in-house, while Gilbert won his commis-
sion under new rules, in a competition among privatefirms.
In addition to monuments, the supervising architect of the
Treasury enriched the American landscape with hundreds of lesser
buildings—post offices, custom houses, courthouses, and marine
hospitals. These buildings form a vernacular of public architecture
for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that cast long
shadows regionally. A few were even “restorations,” such as the re-
modeling of the early seventeenth-century adobe Palace of the
Governors at Santa Fe for federal use, and the transformation of the
eighteenth-century Spanish Governor’s Palace at St. Augustine into a
post office. Still it was the new construction that made the most pro-
found imprint. Distributed from Washington, D.C., as neat, detailed
drawings on oiled linen, these buildings rose in brick or stone and an-
nounced the federal government, often in far-flung places. They were
likely to be the best buildings in town. For the strength of their pres-
ence today, many are the objects of historic preservation.
Design forms the spine of Lee’s study. Did the Office produce
great architecture? Was that its objective in fact, or simply to build
useful and permanent housing for governmental functions? Cer-
tainly the supervising architect could take credit for the rapid trans-
fer of style over the nation. Since then The Fountainheadand the idea
of the architect-as-hero has come to pervade our architectural histo-
ries. The institution of the supervising architect has not heretofore
been well remembered.
Founded in the early stages of the development of the architec-
tural profession in the United States, the Office of the Supervising
foreword ix
Architect of the Treasuryfirst represented an expediency. After the
Civil War, the Office was institutionalized into an organized ma-
chinery and carried the legacy of the Army engineers.
The Officeflourished until 1893—the year, not inconsequentially,
of the World’s Fair in Chicago—when the Tarsney Act of Congress,
ardently supported by the American Institute of Architects, opened
up federal building to private enterprise. Competitions eventually
became a permanent feature offederal design and construction, with
much of their character and specifications shaped by the aia. The ta-
bles turned. Federal contracts being some ofthe largest available, pri-
vate architects now scrambled directly to the lawmakers for favor,
while also laboring in the beginning to create handicaps that would
reduce the number of competitors. Political patronage, thus rechan-
neled, remained a major influence on the practice of public architec-
ture throughout the twentieth century.
Lee’s study unearths what came before, which is a missing and vi-
tally important story. The volumes of architectural history that line
our library shelves rarely give any reference at all to the Office of the
Supervising Architect; when they do, it is usually not to the Office it-
self, but to a notable building the office produced. A few of the su-
pervising architects have been allowed to join the heroes, but most
are little known. Lee’s book opens up a panorama. Architectural his-
torians will find here a new perspective on American architecture and
a valuable resource to keep close at hand.