The Meaning of Architecture

Abstract

The most important thing to say about Americans and architecture* is that if we value the art of building at all it is usually when it is ancient or exotic or preferably both. This is simply one facet of the general American attitude toward the arts which, if it is changing at all, is changing slowly. Menotti observed some time ago that the typical American father was not very happy if his son asserted that he intended to be a composer. The same uneasiness develops if the son is interested in becoming a ballet dancer, a painter, a poet, an actor, a sculptor, or a physicist, although the sputnik-induced respectability of science and the consequent improvement of the scientist's economic status has, at least for the moment, quieted the parental fears about science as a profession if not as an art. We have to face the fact that at least until very recently the arts and the intellectual pursuits have been peripheral to American life. Calvin Coolidge was true to the current American attitudes when in 1925 he informed the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs that America had no representative contemporary paintings to send. Although there has been some change in the American view of the arts and of artists since then, some increased curiosity about the products, even some improvement in the popular critical taste; although there has been a comparable improvement in the respectability of the artists, the gain has not been great. There may be no country in the civilized world in which the artist is, in the last analysis, held in lower esteem. All this affects what American architecture is, what it has been, and what it is likely to be. For architecture is an art and that must never be forgotten.