Rockefeller Center is the last major project in the US with a program of figural sculpture and public art. Susan Rather called it "the last gasp of public allegorical sculpture."

In the United States before 1934, public buildings tended to have inscriptions and symbolic sculptures that conveyed messages, messages that often went beyond style information (like "I am Art Deco") and self-advertisement ("I am a tall building") to express social values ("Dignity for the common man"). After 1934, the simplifications of Modernism hit architecture like a blast of winter, stripping off these messages, and leaving behind a lot of blank walls.

Historically, this is kind of a big deal. But apart from nostalgia why should you possibly care?

For two reasons.

For one, the use of ornament was heresy in the architectural establishment for decades, let alone ornament conveying social messages or an understandable narrative. This kind of communication is completely contrary to the spirit of Architectural Modernism, along with every other aspect of user experience, and therefore probably valuable and worth exploring. Prowling around the debris field of Rockefeller Center, piecing together the events of the climatic fatal train wreck of symbolism in American archtiecture, is a very good place to start.

More importantly, integrated architectural messages have the same kind of potent, authoritative, subliminal manipulative power as any other kind of modern branding, and that there is life left in this idea.

The phrase "architectural parlante" (speaking architecture) refers to the concept of buildings that explain their own function or identity.

This never happens today. Watch out there's historical exposition coming your way.

To go back back back, the phrase was associated with Paris-trained architects of the Revolutionary period, the late 1700s, for example in Claude Nicolas Ledoux's unbuilt plans for the salt-producing town of Chaux, where the hoop-makers' houses are shaped like barrels, the river inspector's house straddles the river, and an enormous brothel is in the shape of an enormous erect phallus.

The same idea of the self-explaining building, with more allegorical sculptures and more inscriptions and fewer giant penises, became popular in Parisian Beaux-Arts architecture, and filtered into American civic architecture beginning around 1870. In the 1901 New York Yacht Club building on 44th Street in Manhattan, designed by Warren and Wetmore, the front windows are patterned on the sterns of Dutch ships, and the façade drips with nautical-themed applied sculpture. The same team designed the 1912 Grand Central Terminal, which contains self-explaining architectural elements like the oversized allegorical sculpture group out front, and in ingenious way that the shapes, surfaces, steps, arches, ramps and passageways constitute a language that helps visitors orient themselves and find their way through the building.

Meanwhile allegorical sculpture was going strong in Victorian England, reaching some kind of climax, probably, with the outlandishly elaborate 1870-ish Albert Memorial in London. In the US there were extensive schemes of allegorical sculpture programmed for Worlds Fairs, the 1893 Chicago fair, the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, all progressive and high-minded.

Failing all that, there were words. My favorite chiselled building inscription is on the 1932 Commerce Department Building in Washington D.C.: "The inspiration that guided our forefathers led them to secure above all things the unity of our country. We rest upon government by consent of the governed and the political order of the United States as the expression of a patriotic ideal which welds together all the elements of our national energy promoting the organization that fosters individual initiative. Within this edifice are established agencies that have been created to buttress the life of the people, to clarify their problems and coordinate their resources, seeking to lighten burdens without lessening the responsibility of the citizen. In serving one and all they are dedicated to the purpose of the founders and to the highest hopes of the future with their local administration given to the integrity and welfare of the nation." That's 130 words.

(My second-favorite inscription is from Warren & Wetmore, who reconstructed the library at the University of Louvain, destroyed in the last year of World War I. Warren included the inscription "Furore Teutonico Diruta: Dono Americano Restituta" on the façade, which means "Destroyed by German fury, restored by American generosity," and which touched off a few angry letters.)

So in the late 1920s and the early 1930s big American building projects featured elaborate ornamental schemes expected to convey meanings, sometimes social and/or patriotic meanings, sometimes elaborate self-advertisement. You can see this at work at Hoover Dam, in the neo-Classical national buildings in Washington DC, in the skyscrapers of the late 1920s like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and the Chicago Board of Trade Building and the Guardian Building in Detroit, and a few dozen state capitols and libraries and courthouses of the time.

So the notion that Rockefeller Center would convey something wasn't unusual. In fact, "Firmly believing that a building was a monument that linked individuals to the ideals of civilization, Raymond Hood, the chief architect of the Center, ensured that the friezes, sculptures, and murals provided a "powerful influence for good" conveyed in a structure where all its parts told an "understandable story." (Architectural Forum 51, November 1932.)

 

 

 

 

The architects of Rockefeller Center hired somebody to come up with a cohesive overall message in their art program.

It doesn't seem like it, but they did.

 

Raymond Hood hired a philosophy professor from Nebraska.

It's my deep pleasure to introduce Hartley Burr Alexander.

Raymond Hood hired Hartley Burr Alexander with the title "thematic consultant," which in itself is an interesting and strange job, the job of giving identity and meaning to a group of buildings. Stranger than that, Alexander had professional experience doing this.

Let's let Alexander speak for himself. This quote (reproduced in the Daniel Okrent book) is from Alexander's 32-page documentation of his first scheme, "Homo Faber", Man the Maker:

Its general theme : the VOICE SPEAKING THROUGH TIME AND SPACE, or more figuratively, A VOICE SPEAKING FROM THE CLOUDS…. The tremendous upward sweep of Building No. 1… invites symbolic elements. Obviously only massive engaged forms could be used, these to be treated with utter abstraction…: EXPERIENCE, flanked by HISTORY and SCIENCE… UNDERSTANDING, flanked by REASON and SYMPATHY… These great symbols should be like silver crests rising above one another in a challenging sweep… Cinema Theatre: First Foyer: the STEALING OF THE CORN MAIDENS lured away by the Flute Musician to the Cavern of Mist and Cloud, the entrance to which is a Rainbow arch. There they are concealed beneath the wings of flying birds until the Sun Hero darts his rays through the mists, discovers and frees them, to return dancing to the field…..

Victoria Newhouse says that Alexander's "Homo Faber" theme was accepted in January 1932, which is not exactly true.

The truth is more like "Hartley Burr Alexander was thrown out of John Todd's office". Not once. Nineteen times. Alexander submitted 19 revisions to his thematic scheme before packing up and leaving New York, presumably in tears.

All this was going on in public. And ridiculing Alexander's overly earnest, verbose, off-key aesthetic guidance became a public sport. Lewis Mumford, in the 1/7/33 New Yorker said: "The program laid down for the artists in Rockefeller Center by Hartley Burr Alexander, sometimes professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska, was an amazing piece of unctuous drivel, to speak about it only in the kindliest terms. To the honor of American painters, a handful managed to evade Mr. Alexander's influence…. The sculptors had a tougher time of it."

It's probably the name and the hair and the prose style, but Mumford and other writers treat Alexander like some rube that stumbled onstage by accident. Not hardly.

There's a network of connections between Raymond Hood and Wallace Harrison with Hartley Burr Alexander, and they all travel through another architect who died in 1924, Bertram Goodhue. Goodhue had given Professor Alexander his first thematic gig, in 1921, to develop the thematic scheme for the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln where Alexander was teaching philosophy at the time. Harrison was Goodhue's favorite assistant on the Nebraska State Capitol and would have known Alexander. Hood had also been on Goodhue's payroll fresh out of MIT, before getting fired for going native in France. John D. Rockefeller had been Goodhue's client for the Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago. Harrison had worked for Hood on the Chicago Tribune building, that big competition that Hood won with his neo-Gothic wedding cake, the same competition where Goodhue's entry looks suspiciously similar to the, uh, RCA Building. And Professor Alexander developed the thematic scheme for the two buildings in the United States where the concept of architecture parlante reached its zenith, the Nebraska State Capitol and the Los Angeles Public Library.

Before 1934, major public buildings in the United States carried messages, statements of social purpose, or proto-narratives - constructed sequential experiences. Some messages were about power or faith or joy. Some messages were advertisements for themselves. Buildings communicated to users through their symbolism, through integrated iconography and allegorical sculpture and murals, and through massing.

Take for example the movie palaces of the 1920s, insanely ornate, yes, but their wealth of ornament placed and scaled and lit to have a calculated effect on traffic management and sightline management and social engineering, meant to work on human bodies and minds in a specific way. Or look back to the tradition of integrating human faces and human bodies in Gothic cathedrals meant to present narratives and create emotional impact and educate the illiterate, or the separate Russian Orthodox tradition of human figures in the church building serving as supernatural intermediaries.