What Americans take to be a borrowed European tradition turns out to be a national style all of their own.
I recently visited Washington DC, for the first time since I was a boy. Visiting Washington in person is like seeing the Mona Lisa: one has experienced it so many times in reproduction that it is almost eerie to see the real thing. I found the experience fascinating, and I have tried to write down a few of my thoughts and impressions.
Each of the monumental buildings of Washington sits on its own city block, with a border of lawn separating it from the street, like a great roast turkey sitting alone on a silver dish. This quality of distinctness and separateness is a common aspiration of nineteenth-century design, but it was hard for Europeans to achieve amidst their dense and historically layered cities. In London, tremendous monumental buildings are piled up along crowded narrow streets and chaotic traffic islands, like the British Museum on Great Russell Street and the Palace of Westminster on Parliament Square. Not so in Washington, where every grand building rests calmly at the end of a long perspective. This certainly does give the city dignity, though perhaps it loses something of vitality at the same time.
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The buildings themselves are distinctive too. For one thing, most of them are faced in marble. Marble was used extensively for monuments in ancient Rome, but it has not been the dominant building stone in any great city of Europe since then, and in fact very few of Europe’s major buildings feature much exterior marble. Indeed I believe there is only one significant marble structure in London, the Marble Arch, whose material was so distinctive the building was named for it. In every European city the dominant building stone is limestone, or sandstone if limestone is unavailable, or granite if neither is. But because Washington was built so late in history, when transport costs had fallen, the Americans could access the wonderful building marbles of Georgia and Vermont, and create the world’s first marble city since antiquity.
Marble is favored by sculptors because of a feature called subsurface scattering. What this means is that marble is slightly translucent: sunlight not only illumines its surface, but a millimeter or so of its depth, creating a softly luminous quality in certain lights. Human flesh also has this feature, whence arises the special appeal of marble for sculptors of the human figure. I had read about subsurface scattering before, but I had never engaged seriously with the idea and slightly suspected it of being a pious canard. But in Washington, I became a believer. The monuments of Washington do seem to glow softly in the brilliant southern light: this does give them a sensuous quality, which becomes almost overwhelming when a whole city is built this way. I am not sure I am a good enough photographer to capture this effect, but I think you can see something of it in the contrast between the colonnade of the Jefferson Monument (Vermont marble) and the Church of the Madeleine in Paris (Lutetian limestone).
Washington’s monuments are stylistically unusual, too. For monumental architecture, the Americans traditionally favored the neoclassical style, drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity. Many people think of neoclassicism as, so to speak, the official style of Western civilization. There is an element of truth in this, but quite a limited one. When Europeans began to draw on ancient precedents in the Renaissance, they did so loosely and freely, and each country did so in its own way, such that French, German, Spanish and Italian Renaissance styles are highly distinct from each other. These national renaissance traditions continued in various forms for over three centuries. There was then a brief period of international neoclassicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after which European architects mostly returned to their national idioms.
The upshot of this is that the quantum of strictly neoclassical architecture in most European cities is actually very small. The most iconic form of classical architecture is the detached portico (the temple front with columns and a gable). I have had a go at counting detached porticos in the old city of Rome, in some sense the ‘world capital’ of classical architecture. I have found only two unambiguous examples, on the Pantheon and the Temple of Portunus, both of them survivors from antiquity. In Washington, by contrast, there are detached porticos in front of most major buildings, including, starting from the top, the Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Jefferson Monument, the National Gallery, and the Treasury Building.
This leads me to the curious idea that what Americans think of as traditional European architecture – marble neoclassicism – is actually characteristic of Washington in a way that it is not, and has never been, characteristic of any city of post-antique Europe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American thinkers worried that their architects were copying European precedents rather than developing a national style of their own. But perhaps, in their fervor to emulate European antiquity, they had developed an American national style after all.
I find longhaul flights extremely tedious, so I distract myself by watching films. Returning from Washington I watched Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, in which families of aristocratic spacemen compete to rule a Middle Eastern-themed planet called Arrakis. I enjoyed this very much, and I was fascinated by the architecture of the sets. There was something of the Sumerians, something of Boullée’s neoclassicism, a dash of Brazilian modernism, elements from Hindu temple architecture, lots of Islamic motifs, and maybe something of the Mayans, but all pared back, horizontal, massive and monochrome, blended together very harmoniously, plausibly futuristic and ancient at the same time.
The designer of all this seems to be one Patrice Vermette, who has no historical or architectural training at all, having studied communications at Concordia University in Montreal. The star of Dune, an actor called Timothee Chalamet, recently generated something of a rumpus by criticizing the fustiness of opera and ballet. I find it pleasing that among his colleagues he has a historicist designer of some genius, who can draw upon a wide range of fusty sources with virtuosity.