Architecture and Nature

Creating the American Landscape

Sarah Bonnemaison, Christine Macy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134455386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Winner of the 2006 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award!

The word 'nature' comes from natura, Latin for birth - as do the words nation, native and innate. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. In the United States, the relationship between nation and nature has been central to its colonial and post-colonial history, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity.

Architecture and Nature presents an in-depth study of how changing ideas of what nature is and what it means for the country have been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century.

Chapter 1
Exhibiting wilderness at the Columbian Exposition, 1893

While the slow-moving wheels of the Corliss steam engine were the centerpiece of the American Centennial Exhibition that was held in Philadelphia in 1876, the agrarian fair that surrounded the giant engine showed that even after the Civil War, the United States was still a farming society. If, as Leo Marx has suggested, the Corliss engine represented “the machine in the garden,” we find only seventeen years later a reversal of this symbolism in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. How the nation changed in less than a generation! In the rotunda of the US Government Building, in the heart of an exposition dedicated to civilization and progress, we find a giant redwood tree. Now the “garden” was in the “machine” (see Figure 1.1).¹

The giant tree was the most popular exhibit of the Chicago fair. It was not, of course, a whole sequoia, for how could such a large tree be transported and kept alive? Instead, visitors crowded to see a 23-foot diameter section of a giant redwood (once 300 feet tall) from General Grant Park in California’s Tulare County. Those who had never seen the giant trees of California were informed by the exhibition catalog that this was “the largest section of redwood ever moved.” Inside the 14-inch thick enclosure of bark, a spiral stair brought visitors up the tree past a series of photographs showing how it had been felled fifteen feet above the ground and carried eastward on ten railroad boxcars.² The “big tree” of California functioned as a symbol of the republic. In the usual nationalistic rhetoric of nineteenth century exposition catalogs, it was described as “a fitting natural emblem of the powerful and beneficent republic that has also grown up on American soil.”³ In that respect, the fact that it was named in honor of General John Noble, Secretary of the Interior, was not without significance. Throughout the 1880s, the American Forestry Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science had been arguing that the vast stands of virgin timber on public lands should not pass into private ownership. In 1891, Noble secured an amendment to the General Land Law Revision Act which granted the President authority to create forest reserves by proclamation.⁴ In honoring Noble, the exhibit in the US Government Building reminded the public that the government had acted wisely in preserving forests for future generations. In that sense, the “big tree” expressed the late nineteenth century optimism for progress through management. For if there was no longer a frontier, there were still areas of virgin forest that were being saved from private ownership through governmental authority.

The tree was also a testimonial to the grandeur of American wilderness. As Julie Brown says, “this was perhaps the perfect exhibition artifact: authentic, imposing, and without replication.”⁵ Rhetorically, it stood in for the wilderness. As visitors climbed the inside of the tree, they were able to touch the real thing, smell the potent perfume of its bark, and be overwhelmed by the sheer size of this arboreal monster. Clearly, the stump did not draw crowds for its intrinsic beauty. Like a relic, its power rested rather in its authenticity, in the fact that it was once three hundred feet tall, eighty feet in circumference, and over two thousand years old.

As visitors reached the top of the staircase, they stepped out onto a panoramic viewing platform under the rotunda. In keeping with the nineteenth century’s love for lofty vantage points, the platform allowed the public an overview of the building’s interior, which extended like a cross into the four wings of the exhibitions.⁶ On the platform, visitors could turn their bodies to the four compass points and view the achievements of civilization in the new world. Brilliantly colored paintings on the second story of the surrounding rotunda depicted the transformation of natural resources into manufactured products. The catalog explained, “the respective leading industries of the north, south, east and west are allegorically represented in the panels, viz. lumber and mining, cotton and shipping, manufactures and agriculture.”⁷ Thus, the major American industries were completely surrounding this relic of nature. And why is nature in the center of the exposition? At one level, the redwood tree in the US Government Building symbolically represented the beginning of government efforts to conserve natural resources and designate areas of the American west as national preserves. But at another level, the privileged place held by this authentic bit of wilderness represents a shift in the way Americans conceived of nature in general and wilderness in particular. This chapter explores how this shift was carried out, metaphorically and literally, in the landscapes, buildings and statuary of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.

By 1893, most people knew that the continent had been settled, that the open plains with roaming buffalo were a thing of the past. The nation had been cautioned by the federal government to inventory its resources. But perhaps the most succinct expression of the significance of this fact was made by Frederick Jackson Turner, in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” before an audience of two hundred historians assembled for the exposition.⁸ The 1890 census had officially declared the end of the frontier - defined as a density of two or more inhabitants to the square mile next to unsettled land. In his paper, Turner linked the frontier experience to American development of democracy and character. “The most important thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land” he argued, and the advance of each successive frontier was “the outer edge of the wave - the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”⁹ Pointing to the frontier as the essential formative experience of Americans,Turner stressed the central importance of the encounter between “man” and “wilderness.”¹⁰ That encounter was seen as overwhelming, “at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish.”¹¹ By showing that the encounter with wilderness was a fundamental part of American identity, Turner recuperated the past to construct a national identity for the future.¹²

Thanking him for a copy of the paper sent the following year, Theodore Roosevelt congratulated Turner, “the pamphlet on the Frontier … struck some first class ideas” he wrote, and “put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.”¹³ And as Turner’s paper drew more attention, he was offered a prestigious post in the history department at Harvard University. Clearly, Turner’s formulation of the significance of the frontier experience to a specifically American identity echoed many ideas shared by the country’s elite, which explains its immediate success and the endurance of his “frontier thesis.”

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the wilderness cult had been gaining adherents and Turner’s focus on the point of contact between “man” and “wilderness” simply added to a general belief among reformers that “without some contact with nature, civilization constricted to the American city would not survive.”¹⁴ But with the official declaration of the end of the frontier, people began to confront with a degree of embarrassment the country’s disfigured landscapes and inhuman cities, and to recognize that there were no longer large expanses of “free land” or wilderness. Up to the late nineteenth century, the frontier had operated in the collective imagination as a gate of escape. After the civil war, the dramatic escalation of the US Army in eradicating Indian settlement on the Great Plains paved the way for the railroads to move in and take the best land. Farmers then came for what was left.¹⁵ By the 1890s, little arable land remained and renting had increasingly become the only option for those moving west to farm. With the close of the era of continental expansion, the nation was now, in Turner’s words, “thrown back upon itself.” If, as Turner suggested, the frontier experience had been essential to Americans becoming who they were as a people, without the frontier the future of the nation as a democracy was full of uncertainty.

The year Turner gave his lecture at the exposition, there was plenty to worry about. The economy was in collapse, factories had closed their doors and relations between labor and capital were explosive. M. Christine Boyer explains that by the end of 1893, “a quarter of the capital invested in railroads was in receivership; mills, factories, and mines had been shut down in large numbers, furnaces were slack, and capital timid, new construction was suspended, some five hundred banks and fifteen thousand businesses had failed, and a ruinous wheat crop and limited European demand had cut back agricultural output. Employment, especially in northern cities, began to fall drastically.”¹⁶ As a consequence, hundreds of thousands lost their homes and were roaming the streets looking for the means to survive. The struggle foralternatives, however, was stronger than ever. The 1880s witnessed almost ten thousand strikes and lockouts in the country, and 1893 represented the year when, in the view of historians such as Alan Trachtenberg, the frequency and violence of the conflicts between robber barons and workers had effectively culminated in a “class war.”¹⁷

With the end of the frontier, symbolizing for industrialists the end of economic expansion, both industrial and governmental elites felt the need to take control of the nation’s resources. Both conservation leaders and corporate elites shared a “mutual revulsion against unrestrained competition and undirected economic development. Both groups placed a premium on large-scale capital organization, technology, and industry-wide cooperation and planning to abolish the uncertainties and waste of competitive resource use.”¹⁸ For the governing bodies, there is no doubt that conservation was a convenient way to cut through the conventional political lines of Republican and Democrat. Ultimately, their shared enemy was the working class and conservation became a way to close ranks on a common cause. As the political and technical aspects of conservation began to take shape, a discourse about wilderness as an experience of the past also began to develop. Artists such as Frederic Remington depicted the grandeur of the American landscape populated with noble Indians and free-roaming game, and novelists such as Owen Wister created legendary figures such as the genteel Virginian who is drawn to the harsh unrelenting terrain of the west. Landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted advocated the preservation of wilderness scenery like Niagara Falls, and architects such as Henry Hobson Richardson developed a style of architecture that drew from geological imagery.

In naming their pioneering building type of the skyscraper, the business elites of Chicago turned to tropes of wilderness and frontier. The best-known example is perhaps the Monadnock Building, Burnham and Root’s massive masonry skyscraper of 1891, named after the mountain in Maine (see Figure 1.2). The Katahdin, designed by Holabird and Roche in 1893 directly adjacent to the Monadnock, referred to another mountain in Maine, famous as the site where Thoreau had his seminal vision of the wilderness as an awesome, untamable force. Richardson’s “geological” architecture celebrated the rock the country was built on, using massive masonry to express the lofty ambitions of the business classes in the new building type. Indeed, as Robert Bruegmann says, “the skyscrapers were viewed as some kind of immense and uncontrollable force of nature.” Examples pairing skyscrapers with wilderness abound: the first skyscraper, the Montauk (1881), as well as the Pontiac (1884-91), Marquette (1891-5) and Lakota (1893) buildings are all named after Indians and frontiersmen. In the Marquette building, sculpted cameos of Indian chiefs and white explorers, executed by the sculptor Edward Kemeys, alternate with mosaics of frontier encounters. Such architectural ornamentation served to glorify the frontier spirit of capitalists, breaking new ground.

In the Columbian Exposition, we find exhibits that speak to this changingview of wilderness which took place at the turn of the century.¹⁹ This emerging discourse is at times conflicted and contradictory, partly because it is still in the process of formation. It includes exhibits like the giant redwood tree and it sheds light on the design of the exposition grounds, in particular the lagoon and wooded islands in the center of the exposition, which represent the value of wilderness as a precinct put aside from everyday life (see Figure 1.3). A small log cabin situated on one of these islands presents a third view. Known as the Hunter’s Camp, this cabin and its nearby animal statuary represents an argument for the conservation of big game animals on wilderness preserves. We have isolated these three elements - the redwood tree, the islands in the lagoon and the hunter’s camp - from the rich array of exhibitsat the fair in order to study the emerging discourse on wilderness and conservation at the end of the nineteenth century. Turning to the plan o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustration credits
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Exhibiting wilderness at the Columbian Exposition, 1893
• Chapter 2: Accommodating the nature tourist in the national parks, 1903
• Chapter 3: Putting nature to work with the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933
• Chapter 4: Nature preserved in the nuclear age: the Case Study Houses of Los Angeles, 1945
• Chapter 5: Closing the circle: the geodesic domes and a new ecological consciousness, 1967
• Selected bibliography