Architecture, Liberty and Civic Order by Carroll William Westfall

Author:Carroll William Westfall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

BRITAIN’S COLONIAL STUDENTS BECOME AMERICANS

The British colonies in the North American were peopled primarily by emigrants from Britain. They were governed from England, and England was their home country. The colonists who would cut their ties with their mother country and carve out a new nation had been schooled in British traditions in law and architecture. Like their home-country countrymen they had little truck with the new developments in the intellectual realm in France. The problems the colonists had were with their distant and increasingly overweening overseers across the sea, and when it came time for them to “dissolve the political bonds” with those who had proven themselves tyrants, they did something never before done. They founded a new nation on a proposition, one that was discovered through reasoning about the nature of man, one that had to be proven and that they, imperfect men that they were, set out to validate. It was the proposition that men govern best when they govern themselves and imitate the best possible model of government, which is perceptible in the order, harmony, and proportion of nature’s moral order. The tutor in this enterprise was the fund of actual experiences of men across the centuries and in their unique experiences in governing themselves in their own religious and civil orders. Thomas Jefferson put it quite succinctly: “Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than these of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.”31 The words are from his recently printed Notes on the State of Virginia that he sent to James Madison from Paris on September 17, 1787, which coincidently was the date the Constitution’s drafting was completed in Philadelphia.32

Historians of architecture, in their zeal to find a leading place for the United States in their narrative, identified it in the buildings in the later years of the nineteenth century that served the uses of the industrial, commercial revolution. The top-most building in Fletcher’s “Tree” is a commercial office building, the Flatiron in New York by Daniel H. Burnham completed in 1902. It is emblematic of the newest era in his sequence of styles, and used the new technologies introduced in the dynamic modern era. Only the building’s refusal to eschew traditional forms prevents its being admitted among the first icons of Modernism.

This narrative fails to account for the originality of the architecture that served the new federal republic with buildings that it labels as inferior if precocious examples of the neo classicism that Europeans would produce. The narrative misses why they appear as they do and what their content is.

They were built to serve and express the purposes of the role their users and residents played in the civil order. They are, in other words, squarely within the classical tradition, and their builders were that tradition’s heirs and stewards. The Founders looked to that tradition for guidance and to their experience, reason, and judgment to amend it to produce the best possible regime.

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