An architectural declaration of independence

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has piqued my obsession with the architecture of its birthplace. Of prime appeal for me is how Independence Hall in Philadelphia (built 1732-1753 as the Pennsylvania State House) not only was designed to create the breathing room, elbow room and room to grow for Continental Congress to debate, shape and ratify this pivotal parchment, followed by the Constitution in 1787, but was also conceived with the foresight of America's future expansion and the architectural user-friendliness it would require.

This 1752 drawing shows that the State House had its hip-roofed wings, linked to the headhouse by arcaded hyphens, from the beginning. This civic symmetry touted the edifice's central significance as the seat of the local government.

The building's tripartite arrangement was planned to compartmentalize various bureaucratic functions into separate entities for the sake of efficiency of operation, clarity of location, and hierarchy of social standing. In the central headhouse sat Pennsylvania's Legislative Assembly, Executive Council and Judicial Courts, as well as the Long Gallery the colonial governor used for banquets and public events, all solemnly topped by the cupola-crowned tower where the Liberty Bell rang until its crack reduced it to the status of a sculptural folly, but emblazoned it with its own Mark of Zorro of the justice the founders fought for and the rebellion by which they won us our country.

The West Wing, as its houselike form suggests, housed living quarters for doorkeepers of the Pennsylvania Assembly and books for the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Benjamin Franklin founded in 1731 to make books accessible to all.

Today the West Wing proudly displays the Great Essentials, original printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, paying homage to those founding charters that were debated and drafted in the great room next door.

Also displayed is the Syng Inkstand, into which 56 Continental Congressmen reportedly dipped their quill pens to "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" by signing Timothy Matlack's final scribed parchment of the Declaration.

The identical East Wing stored public documents and governmental paperwork, so that the governing bodies would not be buried in paper as they politicked. Today the East Wing houses the America's National Parks store, a gift shop selling historical books, 250th-anniversary souvenirs, and mementos such as magnets, postcards, and miniature Liberty Bells. Proceeds from their sales directly fund educational and preservation programs at the Independence National Historical Park.

The foyer and bridal stair in the entry tower give us a taste of the Hall's sheer expanse by ushering us up to the grand rooms. We also see how architects Andrew Hamilton and Edmund Woolley distributed the Hall's load-bearing columns to create unobstructed spaces, in a proto-modernist vein.

The ornate woodwork – banisters, scrolls, wainscoting, pediments, Palladian window, fluted Ionic pilasters, crown moldings – gave historical framework to the Liberty Bell until its 1976 relocation to accommodate more tourists.

Today the bell hangs solo in the ultramodern Liberty Bell Center, in plain window-wall sight of its old home but bereft of its historical milieu. Yet this new setting sheds new light and space on the bell's fortes and flaws.

Now we clearly see the wood yoke, its metal ties and bolts, the relief lettering of its recasters' names (Pass & Stow), the clapper, the braces, the edge frayed by souvenir hunters' pinching fingers, and the crack – which was not caused solely by ringing, but mainly by repairs gone awry. In 1846, to ring the bell for George Washington's birthday, the existing hairline crack was drill-widened to retard it and reduce its buzz when rung. (Forty drill-marks can be seen along the seam.) This worked at first – the ringing was "clear as a bell" on the Founding Father's anniversary – but soon the fissure spread, silencing the chime for good.

Nonetheless, the crack has become symbolic of the struggle and strain with which our founders fought for our freedom, emerging scarred and cracked but largely intact. The crack is also a distinguishing mark that sets this bell apart from others, much as how the Leaning Tower of Pisa derives its tourist appeal from its tilt.

The Assembly Room supplied the requisite elegance for Pennsylvania Assembly meetings and ratification of the Declaration and Constitution, giving civic grace to these occasions without excessive visual distractions.

The scrolled pediment that enthrones the central seat of the President of Continental Congress was the perfect regal mitre for John Hancock to enscribe his famed signature on the Declaration (and coin the logo for the eponymous life insurer).

But most of all I can hear the strains of "Sit down, John!" echo through the chamber in the movie 1776 as John Adams implores his congressional adversaries to "Vote yes! Vote for independency!" and rants about how "we piddle, twiddle, and resolve, not one damn thing do we solve!" in his plaint about the political inefficiency Indy Hall's designers sought to curb.

To reduce piddling and twiddling, the designers created the Committee Room. Pedimented doors provided a tasteful setting for the Assembly's committees to attempt to resolve conflicts and for local militia to store ammo (hence the muskets – I had to laugh at their sign, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE GUNS).

The Governor's Council Chambers provided wood-panel warmth and fireplace radiance for colonial governors' meetings with the Council to green-light or red-light legislation the popularly elected Pennsylvania Assembly had passed.

The Supreme Court Chamber was an incubator for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's growth in power and, well, supremacy, as a future model for the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Fluted pilasters, triglyph friezes, pediments, turned-baluster rails, and a painting of the Pennsylvania Coat of Arms (replacing King George III's in 1785) lent learned solemnity to the chamber.
The three arches signified the open democracy to come.

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Sullivan's travels come home

World Trade Center West, the signature building of Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, may be my favorite of the diversely creative palette of buildings that kicked off the development of the city's Seaport District but unfortunately failed to inspire future designs of comparable originality there. For me, there are two reasons why this postmodern masterpiece rises above the rest.

Seaport World Trade Center, Boston. Photo by SeaportBostonHotel (CC BY-SA 4.0).

For one, it was designed by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (KMW) in their signature postmodern style of squared columns articulating and monumentalizing building structure in the classical column tradition, but with the geometric simplicity of those Cuisenaire rods many of us learned mathematical concepts from (or just built things with) in school. 

This gives World Trade Center West an outstanding expression of structural honesty in the soar of its verticality, unlike its undistinguished neighbors, Seaport Boston Hotel (above, center) and World Trade Center East (above, left), whose brick and sandstone cladding largely obscure their structure in a rather pompous fashion—and especially unlike the steel-and-glass skyscrapers that largely dominate Seaport's streetscape now. KMW used brick and a cantilevered cornice on World Trade Center West to recall the historic brick warehouse buildings of nearby Fort Point Channel, and the curving western façade allows more of its offices picturesque waterfront views, with a nod to the brick bowfront architecture of Beacon Hill and the South End as well as the billows of waves and ship sails. "The form, language and materials of the building relate to the maritime character of the site," according to KMW's website.

Wainwright Building (1891, Louis Sullivan), St. Louis, MO.
Photo by W. LeMay (CC BY-SA 2.0).

World Trade Center West also recalls the brick high-rises of Louis Henry Sullivan—my second reason for making it the cream of Seaport's crop. As the virtual inventor of the skyscraper, Sullivan went for an honest, organic expression of the skyscraper's structure and the upward soar of its verticality, hence the brick piers culminating in Celtic-inspired floral ornamentation at the cornice, giving the impression that they are growing up like flowers. That was what Sullivan meant by "form follows function": the soaring vertical form of a skyscraper is shaped by its function as a tall building housing multiple offices, yet it stands as a monument to progress — upward mobility, and the necessity to build taller on limited footprints to house increasing populations of workers. For that was the proper function of the skyscraper, in Sullivan's mind, which gave it its monumental form.

Interestingly enough, Sullivan was born in Boston, but never practiced there. He detested its architecture for being too cramped and old-fashioned for his taste. Ever the innovator, he was drawn to the from-scratch reconstruction of Chicago following its Great Fire of 1871, where he could leave his own imprint on a new city in the sky. So I'm grateful that KMW was paying tribute to Sullivan's Boston origins with their World Trade Center West. This, in effect, brought him home to the city he had abandoned, to show what an impact he had, both in the new Chicago and now in the new neighborhood built from scratch in Boston — the Seaport District.

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'Complete fabrication'

That writing prompt I received in a recent Meetup writing group meeting got me to thinking that "complete fabrication," indeed may be the answer to the housing crisis we are ignoring, neglecting, disdaining, or forgetting the existence of. Mobile homes, prefabricated homes, tech-built homes—all the technology is there, the price is right, and the living is easy, so why don't we do them more often? Are we too focused on the bad rap prefab has gotten as a symbol of just eking by, living hand-to-mouth? Is the Sears-Roebuck kit of parts of the past not dream-home enough for us? 

In short, are we too upwardly mobile to go mobile?

Frankly, mobile homes and trailers fascinate me, for the way they bring back the vintage practice of homesteading, as a couple I knew did when they bought some cheap land in the population-challenged community of Friendsville, Pennsylvania, placed a mobile home like this one on top of it, and made the perfect housewarming temple out of it. 

A mobile home and trailer park on the cliffs above Beer, Devon, England.

Riding by a trailer-park community on largely unspoiled land in rural Connecticut that resembled this one in England, I realized how little is necessary to meet our living needs. And there are more than 100 such communities in Massachusetts—are people aware of them? Or does the mobile-home, trailer-park image suggest homelessness and vagrancy? 

Are we too proud to live in our only affordable option? Or does complete fabrication mean it'll wear out quickly, either when it shows wear and tear or when our interests change and we become upwardly 'mobile' again?

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Inside out, outside in

Edith Farnsworth House (1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), Plano, Illinois. Photo by Teemu008 from Palatine, Illinois (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Photos by Paul R. Burley (CC BY-SA 4.0).

That line from the 1971 song "Perpetual Change" by the art-rock band Yes perfectly describes that breed of building bent on exposing its innards to looky-loos by glazing the barrier that's supposed to preserve its users' privacy, so from the outside we can notice the inner perpetual change as occupants shuffle about, gesticulations fly, furniture is rearranged, styles are changed, or (heaven forbid) crimes are witnessed.

This is not unlike the way actors break the "fourth wall" to invite their audiences into their private worlds by revealing secrets, spilling their guts, or asking for sympathy or help, most notably as the island-stranded Prospero does at the close of Shakespeare's The Tempest:

As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

Photo by Paul R. Burley (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Edith Farnsworth House (1951) in Plano, Illinois, recently renamed for its owner to honor her vision for it as well as her architect's, epitomizes this transparency. Its window-walls reveal all indoor functions – bedroom, kitchen, living room – unifying them with the outdoors in a two-way exchange.

                                        Glass House (1948, Philip Johnson), New Canaan, Connecticut. Photos by Edelteil (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Glass House (1948, Philip Johnson), New Canaan, Connecticut.
Photos by Edelteil (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Going further with this dissolution between the interior private world and the exterior public realm is Philip Johnson's Glass House (1948) in New Canaan, Connecticut. In fact, it forced its owner to sacrifice privacy — unless its isolation in a forested idyll remote from urban hustle-and-bustle was his definition of privacy. When COVID caused many to flee to second homes in the suburbs, the exurbs, and the rurals, such a house would especially come in handy. This was how both the Edith Farnsworth House and the Glass House were ahead of their time sociologically as well as architecturally, made to order for mass exoduses.

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The 'hills' of Harvard

(L-R) Science Center, Memorial Hall, Gund Hall, Adolphus Busch Hall; Art Museums in foreground. Photo by Nick Allen (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Memorial Hall (1870-77, Ware & Van Brunt), Gund Hall (1972, John Andrews), Harvard University.

Brick and stone historicism has clearly predominated Harvard University's architectural history as the gold (or crimson) standard for campus construction, save for sporadic breaches of this tradition when the midcentury/ millennial modernism of reinforced concrete, steel framing, window walls and skylights became fashionable according to what school of thought was governing the Graduate School of Design or the Building Committee's impulses.

Science Center (1972-73, Josep Lluis Sert), Harvard University.

Adolphus Busch Hall, (1912-1921, German Bestelmeyer), Harvard University.

Yet I recently noticed a common thread among the stylistic diversity these traditions and their disruptions produced: a "hill" building technique that clustered and stacked an edifice like a pyramid, directing the eye upward to a summit of one kind or another. 

In so doing, each of these "hills" articulates and distinguishes its individual parts and "divisions" on its exterior, cluing us in to the multiple uses the building was assigned as we optically mount to its summit. Though that is a common characteristic of modern architecture ("form follows function," in Louis Sullivan's words), some of Harvard's historical styles had already adapted that practice as early as the mid-19th century.

Photo by chensiyuan (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Initiating this building-bulking approach to Harvard's campus expansion was Memorial Hall, built in 1870-77 from a High Victorian Gothic design by William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt in memory of Harvard alumni who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Union in the Civil War. The building's diversified massing denotes its multiple functions, which Henry James described in The Bostonians (1885-86) as:

...three main divisions: one of them a theater, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War.

Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The first "division" is Sanders Theatre. Modeled on Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre (1664-1669) at Oxford, Sanders adapts the in-the-round configuration of Rome's Theatre of Marcellus of the 1st century B.C. and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre of 1614, with wood-encased iron ties elegantly opening the space to all present.

Sanders' rotund room is externally expressed as a basilica articulates its rounded apse. The mansard roof with "streaky bacon" slate tilework shapes the soar of the ceiling, hence the resonance of the acoustics. Busts of orators Demosthenes, Cicero, John Chrysostom, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Edmund Burke, and Daniel Webster adorn the semicircle of lancet-arched dormer gables.

Annenberg Hall, Memorial Hall. Photo by Bestbudbrian (CC BY-SA 4.0).

James' second "division" is Annenberg Hall, a dining hall paralleling the majesty of the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Curving hammerbeam rafters with quatrefoil cutouts uphold the mansard roof's soaring structure and inject the space with awe-inspiring drama, ecclesiastically enriched by stained-glass windows and grand chandeliers.

Photo by P.K. Nelson (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Stained-glass windows, brick buttresses, and a mountainous gable continuing the streaky-bacon slate work articulate Annenberg as a dignified space to enjoy a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. A cloister with Gothic-arched side entries on either side presents a welcoming, open-ended "porch" to the main attraction, as a narthex introduces a church.

Photo by pundit (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The final "division" is the visually elaborate central portion, crowned by the landmark copper-finial-adorned bell tower and bookended by pairs of peaked turrets flanking stained-glass-window-surmounted entrances. This signifies the space with the highest level of architectural ceremony and social remembrance, the Memorial Transept. In this cross-space that comprises the horizontal segment of the Latin cross Memorial Hall forms as a whole, ribbed vaulting, lancet arches, marble plaques and floors, stained-glass windows, monumental chandeliers, and carved woodwork combine to visually impel us to pay respect to those who perished in the United States' most divisive, decisive war, with the solemnity of the most sacred of Gothic cathedrals.

Repurposing Memorial Hall's pyramidal schemata and tripartite division in a Germanic context is Adolphus Busch Hall, built in 1921 from a design by a Dresden architect whose name reveals the style: German Bestelmeyer.

From a stacked central clock tower splays out diverse wings and ells denoting diverse art collections in what was originally called the Germanic Museum. All are unified by a stucco finish that breaks with Harvard's brick tradition as a forerunner to the gray-beige concrete of its modernist structures. Maintaining the building's historical integrity are a terra cotta tile roof, classical balustrades, and the tri-level clock tower that gives it the landmark dignity of a Rathaus or Gaswerk in a German town.

The hall was originally designed to house collections and reproductions of German art from the country's Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods, as indicated by the triumvirate aggregate of wings and ells and the interior's off-white stonework and muted classicism, which casts off stylistic pretensions to let the art run the show. Since the collections have been consolidated in the Harvard Art Museums, Adolphus Busch Hall is today a popular rental venue that adds a Teutonic touch to weddings, banquets, cocktail parties and other private functions. 

Dunster House (1930, Charles Coolidge), Harvard University. Photo by Vadivel Ramasamy.

Dunster House, one of Harvard's twelve undergraduate residential houses built in the 1930s along the Charles River under then President Abbott Lawrence Lowell's House Plan, is the most imaginative of the houses. Architect Charles Coolidge had a tight triangular site to work with, which he elegantly symbolized in the prevalence of triangular pediments amid the parts and their pyramidal hillock rise toward the central bell tower. This was modeled on Christopher Wren's Tom Tower of Christ Church, Oxford (1681-82), with a more Georgian than Gothic slant, for Harvard tradition's sake.

Dunster articulates its individual parts forthrightly, as a residential village providing 475 undergrads and 25 staff members with a dining hall, a library, music practice rooms, an art studio, a student kitchen and grille, a gym and squash court, and a smart classroom.

George Gund Hall broke the rules. By building from the inside out and expressing its structure as sculptural form, Harvard Graduate School of Design alumnus John Andrews was determined to make his school's new home exemplary of the Corbusian concrete brutalism and the steel-and-glass framework of the International Style that were trendy in 1972.

Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri (CC BY 3.0).

Yet, in doing so, the building preserved its predecessors' essentials: the triangular bent that shaped Dunster Hall, the light grayness that made Adolphus Busch Hall deviate from Harvard's crimson-brick norm, the ceiling-beam exposure of Memorial Hall, and the "hilliness" of all three, but with more of a steep 

incline this time, in the form of steps and levels of "trays" of drafting tables for students to complete their projects under the luminar purity of skylights, with the bare-bones expression of the roof-rafter structure constantly hovering over their heads to remind them of the architectonic principles they had to focus on in the modern age of design.

Such honest structural expression allowed Gund Hall to expand Memorial Hall's "porch" and "cloister" to new heights and breadths with the use of pilotis, or cylindrical concrete columns, as load-bearing elements. This formed a broad, deep verandah that gave as much exposure to the building's progenitor — Memorial Hall — across the street as it did to Gund's structure internally.

Photo by Gunnar Klack (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Structural sincerity stretches sky-high at the Science Center (1972-73), a daringly defiant mammoth of modernism that delineates its parts to the point of discord among them. In doing so, architect Josep Lluis Sert — then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design — extolled the scientific advancements taught inside by expressing them the form of advanced engineering and construction, clustering and stepping them as a jumbled pile to represent the ongoing growth and progress of science — in essence, the scientific method, and the erratic process of constant discovery, articulated by exposing the architectonic method of the building's construction.

The "spider" of angled roof-girders crowns the lecture hall with an entomological reference that proclaims the building's scientific use monumentally — and a handsome pair of "hills" the ziggurat and spider doth make.

The stepped semi-ziggurat provides a setback to avoid casting a skyscraper's shadow on the plaza. This gives the building a sculptural presence like that of El Castillo at Chichen Itza in Mexico (below). 

El Castillo, Chichen Itza, Mexico (8th–12th c. AD). Photo by Alastair Rae (CC BY-SA 2.0).

This is how the Science Center respectfully defers to Memorial Hall as Gund Hall did: by lessening its bulk so it won't block Memorial's majestic view. The ziggurat also pays respect to its surroundings by grounding itself as a one-story lecture-hall pavilion, inviting students inside on a human scale...

...only to soar beyond that scale to awestrike its occupants with "a magnificent Piranesi-like interior with the volume of Boston's Symphony Hall," as Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd put it in Harvard: An Architectural History. This Piranesian symphony is rife with spatial expressions of the far-reaching dimensions of science: skylit atria, suspended staircases, balcony overlooks, endless corridors, and more labyrinthine adventures through space and light. This web of wonder creates a network of hills, plateaus and valleys that visually prepare us for the adventures through science students and faculty are about to experience in this cosmos of classrooms, labs, lecture halls, offices, a library, and various landing places for relaxation, phone-recharing and laptop travail.

Chain of Life (1996) by John Robinson. Photo by Charles Ling.

Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954) sandscape by Constantino Nivola. Photo by Sarah C.

Picking up on the art-display tradition of Memorial Hall and the Germanic Museum, the Science Center has some of its own, including John Robinson's Chain of Life (1996), an atrium-suspended mobile depicting the compound of two carbon atoms (black), one nitrogen atom (green), one oxygen atom (blue) and two hydrogen atoms (chrome) that theoretically made life on earth possible; and Constantino Nivola's sandscape Olivetti Showroom Wall Relief (1954), transported from the New York City display room of the Olivetti typewriter company as a bas-relief mural of whimsical abstraction to add more life to the Science Center's antiseptic modernism.

More to come...

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