Walt Lockley

Lost World in the LA Public Library

The architect of the Los Angeles Public Library, Bertram Goodhue, is famous
again. Eighty years after his premature death, Goodhue is seen as the last architect
of his breed before the deluge of Modernism, the master of neglected glories and
lost possibilities. The critic Carter Wiseman recently called him the most
underrated American architect: "Goodhue was on the track of an authentically
American architecture, one based in European traditions but expressive of the
special energy that was the mark of (this) country." Somewhere else Wiseman calls
Goodhue's Nebraska Capitol, "A tantalizing vision of a future that might have
been."

Since the LA library is Goodhue's masterwork, you should be able to find lost
possibility written all over it. That's what I came looking for. That's what I found.

Goodhue's Career

The hero of this piece is a Connecticut church builder who rose through the ranks,
not with the customary ticket from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but from sheer
talent. He was known for his gorgeous renderings and illustrations, he designed
typefaces and wrote poetry, and was known for his artistic versatility. Once he had
expanded his own practice away from the Gothic churches built by him partnership
Cram and Goodhue, to both coasts, he broke through to national prominence and
an AIA Gold Medal with a series of masterful public buildings. Then he died. He
died at 55, which is like a golfer dying at 35.

In photos Goodhue appears sensitive and as comfortable in a high white collar as
Tom Wolfe. Goodhue's other major work from the 1910's and 20's includes:

The Physics Building and master plan for Caltech in Pasadena
St. Thomas' Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan
The National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington
The US Military Academy Cadet Chapel at West Point
The Church of the Intercession, New York
And two buildings for the 1915 Exposition in Balboa Park, San Diego,
the California tower (now the Museum of Man) and the Hospitality House

But the LA Library is most comparable to Goodhue's other masterwork, the
Nebraska State Capitol building in Lincoln. The Nebraska capitol is a surprise,
virtually jumping off the prairie floor, four hundred feet of great muted deco colors
and vertical decoration and a gold dome. It's a dramatic departure from the
conventional capitol design, with a central tower instead of a domed rotunda.
Goodhue considered the traditional design trite.

The Capitol was started in 1922 and finished ten years after, with the library started
and finished in between. Though the Capitol is far larger, the fundamental design
approach is the same for both buildings. They stand together as a dual, final
statement.

So why did Goodhue fall into neglect? Modernism has something to do with it.
Goodhue was seen as clinging to a departed set of values, and also difficult to
classify. Neither the Library nor the Capitol are built in any recognizable style. I see
both of them as energetic collisions of Egyptian, Mission, Romanesque volumes,
some movie-studio thrown in, with a dose of retrofuturistic art deco. Goodhue's
originality didn't do Goodhue's reputation any good, since architectural historians
tend to talk in stylistic categories, and Goodhue was something of a stylistic
chameleon to begin with. They call him a borrower.

Even now Goodhue is being rediscovered for the wrong reasons.

The Collaboration

The LA Library is an astonishingly collaborative building. It showcases subsidiary
arts - the statuary, the murals, the chandelier, the tilework, and the landscaping -
far more generously than any other building I remember. Unlike a modern office
tower, where the percent-for-art gesture gets commissioned as an afterthought and
quarantined in an unused plaza, the art in this Library is thematically unified,
various, beautiful, and thoroughly integrated into the identity of the building. They
are the things you remember first. The effect of the rotunda space is all about the
colors, the space, the forms, and the images all working together.

This is typical. Goodhue was multitalented in his own right and had a deep
appreciation for those subsidiary arts. Goodhue, like Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
would have been capable of finishing the whole thing in his own shop. Instead,
he'd developed a team of steady collaborators in the teens and twenties, and he
brought the best here. Goodhue was happier as conductor than soloist:

I should like to be merely one of the three people to produce a building, i.e.,
architect, painter, sculptor. . . I should like to do the plan and the massing of the
building; then. . . turn the ornament (whether sculpture or not makes no difference)
over to a perfectly qualified sculptor, and the color and surface direction (mural
pictures or not as the case may be) to an equally qualified painter.

The work of the German-born sculptor Lee Lawrie is as important to the feel of
the building as anything else. Lawrie is responsible for the exterior figures and
sculptural ornament, the Statue of Civilization and her two Sphinx guardians, and
for the execution of the cast bronze chandelier. Lawrie's work is also on the
Nebraska State Capitol, in the St. Thomas, the National Academy of Sciences, and
Rockefeller Center. Off-topic but irresistible: Lawrie also did the sculpture for what
is now the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1926, and his stone embellishments for
that building include representations of The Seven Ages of Man, the Perils of Land,
Sea, and Air on the Earth's Four Great Continents, the pelican of charity, the
opossum of protection, and the squirrel of frugality.

These are Lawrie's sculpted heads of da Vinci and Justinian, of course, but it was
Goodhue's notion to place those heads conspicuously on the tops of the exterior
piers, and allowing the blurring of building structure and sculptural form. They're
integral rather than applied; organically presented, inseparable from the building's
fabric and impact.

My favorite example is on the Chicago Board of Trade
Building, where two statues flank a clock, where the statues appear to be struggling
out of the stonework as manifestations of some internal spirit.

Goodhue had met the University of Nebraska Professor of Philosophy Hartley
Burr Alexander while planning the Nebraska Capitol.
Alexander volunteered himself to identify the soul of the building. He also took
on "the scholarly compiling of the inscription and symbolism" of the Library
(according to the American Historical Building Survey of 1969) and is presumably
responsible for the theme 'The Light of Learning". For the Nebraska Capitol he
chose the theme "Spirit of the Law as shown in History,", which tells you a lot
about his style right there. Like Lawrie, Alexander also went on to work on
Rockefeller Center.

Along with the architects, this effect of this building also belongs to Dean
Cornwell (the rotunda murals), Julian Garnsey (the ceilings, the painted mosaics
and the Ivanhoe murals), Albert Herter (the California murals), and Charles
Kassler II (the spectacularly odd and destroyed Buffalo Hunt frieze). There's
another member of the Goodhue repertory company not represented in the library:
Hildreth Meiere, who worked on the mosaics of St. Bartholomew's Church in
New York, the dome of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Nebraska
capitol.

So let me point out a couple of things: the use of a true collaborative team, a
certain willingness on Goodhue's part to stand aside and allow his design to
showcase other work, and the inherent balancing act. Outside, those Lawrie
sculptures comprise a real conversation with the Goodhue massing. Inside, the
murals are beautifully defended and presented. The whole library is balanced in
tone between graceful good humor and seriousness. The art's well coordinated
too. In lesser hands this might have been a train wreck.

Goodhue died in New York in April 1924. In November 1931, Raymond Hood
said, "There has been entirely too much talk about the collaboration of architect,
painter and sculptor; nowadays, the collaborators are the architects, the engineer,
and the plumber." Hood's remark carries weight because Hood had the
commission for Rockefeller Plaza, and buildings for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair,
at that time. Hood's remark stings because Hood had hired Lee Lawrie for both of
those buildings. (The extra little twist: Raymond Hood had worked in the offices
of Cram and Goodhue.)

The Topopsychology

The entry sequences of the Capitol and the Library are similar. Although both their
entries are well-marked, the first few steps inside each building are a puzzling let-
down, a long low-ceilinged tunnel-corridor which leads into the underground heart
of the building, and a not-so-obvious way upstairs to the major spaces. This
psychological delay might be intentionally dramatic, or it might not be.

When you talk about topopsychology and human spatial preferences,
you're no longer talking about science. In fact you're leaning dangerously towards
the unjustifiable assertions of feng shui. Nevertheless there are a handful of spatial
preferences that are predictable enough to talk about sensibly. People try to identify
the centers and edges of things. People tend to associate 'up' as more valued and
more divine than 'down', and a bias towards right-handedness prevails as a
worldwide cultural pattern (except, for some reason, among the ancient Chinese).
And there are reliable relationships between ceiling height and social distance, with
higher ceilings in rooms that feel more public.

People seek the centers of things and Goodhue satisfies that urge completely. Both
the Library and Capitol are satisfyingly centric. The Nebraska Capitol is even more
so, because you could say that the locus of every American state is its state capital,
and the locus of that city is normally its downtown capitol building, and Goodhue
allows the visitor to experience the middle of the building, and its city, as a point
marked on the floor in a symmetrical room, which also happens to be the largest
space in the structure. The Capitol owns the dead center of Nebraska. You could
make the case that the Library owns the dead center of LA. It would be fun to hang
out on the margins of the Library's rotunda and watch how people choose to
experience the center.

The ceiling in the rotunda is dizzingly high. Again, typical. This rotunda draws
comparison to the 14th floor observation deck and dome of the Capitol. As a
church architect Goodhue knew how to express a grand idea. From that
perspective it's interesting to notice how the darker stylized outlines in Cornwell's
murals visually echo stained-glass church windows.

Heights come with their own mysteries. One's eyes are irresistibly drawn upwards.
It's like glancing at a bonfire or a television set or a naked person, you really can't
help but look. Whether you stand there and wonder how they change bulbs, or
look up and hope it won't collapse, or you just stand there and absorb the dread of
being in a huge empty volume, it reliably induces a sense of wonder. It's a
ceremonial space that wordlessly suggests larger populations and civic ideals. This
is the venue where city meets citizen.

Its height makes it an undeniably public room. Ceiling heights and the resulting
room acoustics always suggest appropriate social distances between people. And,
after walking through the other original rooms, creating low ceilings and intimacy
may not have been Goodhue's strong point. I regret not having felt the original
rhythm of the building, and I wonder if the spaces once naturally scaled down,
towards the east and the former children's room, which has a pleasing low ceiling.
I think they probably didn't. Many of the working spaces of the Nebraska Capitol
- the Governor's reception room for instance - have 17-, 20-, 22-foot high ceilings
and feel too high. You rattle around in those rooms. Some of the spaces in the
Museum of Man in San Diego are also uncomfortably high.

It's not that Goodhue was necessarily a master of spatial psychology, or that this
grammar-of-rooms is unique. But the Library's spaces are clearly designed to lead
the visitor through an experience. At some point during the subsequent history of
modernism, architects began to turn their attention towards the visual appearance
of their buildings (from across the street or from 5000 feet up or from some other
unlikely point of view) rather than how those buildings feel inside.

The Message

The library is a building that seems animated by some internal spirit. And that
spirit wants to speak.

What is it struggling to say? Well, it has something to do with the faces of
Herodotus, Virgil, Socrates, Justinian, daVinci and Copernicus emerging from its
piers, and something to do with California history presented as a romantic pageant,
and something to do with high ideals and civic virtues and the continuity of
history. This is a building equipped with six powerful ancient patrons outside, a
spooky goddess with two black attack dogs inside, a fairy-tale narrative, and a
celestial map of its own place in the universe.

The cultural value of the message is dubious, these days. You could certainly get a
whiff of WASPy distortion from Cornwell's murals. There's room to question the
depiction of California's settlement as a stately and pleasant adventure, with just
enough deprivation to make a good picture. The Native American dress is
insultingly inauthentic, and you could go on for half an hour about the cultural
meaning of what's being presented.

Those questions are welcome. For my money, though, it's less about the specific
content of the message than the willingness of the builders to encode social values
and leave us a building that's legible, readable, as meaningful as an open book.
This is a building that exerts positive social values.

Its willingness to speak, I think, is the most beautiful and mysterious aspect of the building.

Unfortunately, by contrast, the Nebraska Capitol is a building that won't shut up.
Art historian Annabel Jane Wharton said, "Politics are embodied in the built
environment just as they are in texts and movies," and the Capitol is probably the
least-subtle example on the planet. Where the Library's total effect seems earnest
but good humored, airy, even, the Nebraska capitol is festooned with heavy-handed
symbolism, excruciating Midwestern earnestness, and straight-up corn. Forgive me
for saying so. One look at Hartley Burr Alexander's photograph and you might see
a man who Speaks in Capitals and whose Strivings towards Nobility might have
Benefited from Pruning by the (then-deceased) architect.

Humane Design

All other criticism aside, I remember the Nebraska Capitol most vividly for its
colors. Its exterior colors - not the conventional bleached-white courthouse look -
are chosen and coordinated in a way that reminds me that the palette of most
modern buildings and homes is pretty anemic. If the exterior is pleasant, the
interior artwork and mosaic work are brilliant in both senses of the word, shiny
and angular and avant-garde. The Capitol's a stiff on the outside but it's amazingly
sensual on the inside.

The use of color in the Library is more selective than the Capitol, more restrained,
but it's there in the murals, the painted mosaics and the stenciled ceilings. Along
with the two buildings in Balboa Park, which are otherwise completely dissimilar,
the Library displays multicolored tile at its highest point almost like an emblem.
Concern for color in buildings is part of humane design. And sensitivity to color is
something you don't see any more at all. (Look at the Getty.) Retailers and casino
owners have known for a long time that human reaction to space is primarily
emotional, and that those emotions are tied to the fleeting impressions we collect
in the first few moments. Mostly we perceive colors in those moments.

In 1922 the use of ornament on major American buildings was about to vanish
for 60 years. The mere use of a single non-essential element on their buildings
would later become, weirdly, scandalous events in the careers of Mies (a mere I-
beam on the Seagram's building) and Philip Johnson (a Chippendale crown).

Based on the relatively small amount of decoration on the Library and the Capitol,
Carter Wiseman sees them both as proto-Modern:

One can sense in these buildings the virtual inevitability of the next phase in the
design evolution: the total disappearance of ornament as it had been used for
centuries. But Goodhue did not move fast enough…(he) appeared by contrast with
the Europeans, who had started their journey earlier, to be hopelessly timid, and was
soon cast aside.

Well. I couldn't disagree more. I don't see Goodhue as the first modernist. You
can't see Goodhue's work clearly if you only consider its physical appearance. On
the contrary, Goodhue is the best of the last generation of architects who
understood that a building is to be spatially experienced, not simply looked at.

Ornament is necessary to create a humane spatial experience. Ornament contains a set of
useful strategies for articulating the identity of the building, signaling its use,
defining its relationship to the rest of the community, sculpting the behavior of the
users (where they walk and how fast they walk and where they sit and how long
they sit), and their felt social distances. People are more social in the presence of
ornament. The Modernists walked away from all of these tools. The Library is a
powerful example of what the Modernists lost when they outlawed ornament.

Take a moment and mentally strip the LA Library of its decoration, if you can
imagine that. It loses its civic identity, its grace and its social message. It turns into
a bus station.

There's a principle of visual/spatial density at work in the library's relationship to
the street, although it's no special virtue of Goodhue's. In 1922 architects and
engineers assumed their outsides would be experienced at walking speed, about 3
MPH. We now live in environments designed to cruised at 30 MPH. Old
buildings built to pedestrian scale tend to be narrower, deeper, more ornamented,
more visually intricate, and carefully interfaced to the sidewalk. Buildings put up
after, say, 1940, are smooth and shallow, legible at a glance, simplified to the point
of being featureless, and presented outward. Window displays vanished and shop
signs got bigger letters and fewer words.

All this is reducible to math. The human eye can distinguish about 3 objects or
features per second. A driver passing a 100-foot length of department store at 30
mph (44 fps) can effectively perceive about six or seven features, if he's looking
carefully, which he shouldn't be. A pedestrian walking past the same frontage has
time to absorb 68 features. There's such a big difference between the perceptual
capacity of a driver and a pedestrian that to the man in the street, a building like the
nearby Bonaventure provides so few features, such a small level of visual arousal,
that it makes itself hard to see even when you are next to it. The eye scans right over
a non-feature. Nothing to see and no reason to stay. On the other hand, to a
driver, the spectacle of Justinian emerging from stone slips past undetected.

The library, needless to say, has a beautiful relationship to the street.

There's also a simple relationship between visual density, which is the measurable
number of visual details per square inch, and the attention a certain space will
command. Just as people will reliably slow down in front of mirrors to check
themselves out, a trick that mall managers know very well, people are reliably drawn
by the complex abundance of ordered information. Visual complexity is an
effective way to manage how spaces are used.

Color, ornament, visual density, and pedestrian scale - all this sounds like an
argument for more pleasure. Not that pleasure's such a bad thing. But the issue is
less about taste than creating a humane user experience. The rise of
Modernism brought a set of design characteristics to buildings that still prevail
today: anti-color, anti-ornament, radically simplified and auto-oriented. Whether
the discarding of centuries of building craft was inevitable or not, it was all
discarded anyway. When citizens of Los Angeles come to
the locus of the most famously un-centered and automotive city in the world,
not only do they find a beautiful and enriching institution at the center, but one
that's physically built around their needs.

This library is one of the last in America that was born fully
colorful, fully complex, fully exuberant, fully human, and a great
example of what remains possible.

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