Great Design Is in the Details

By Eve Zibart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, Feb. 3, 2005

If architecture is one of the lesser arts -- sketched with a straight edge and subject to the necessities of engineering -- it is nevertheless one of the few dedicated to the exaltation of both body and soul. It aspires to transform shelter into an aesthetic environment, to make office buildings and academia into metaphors of commerce and philosophy, to join cities and cultures by bridge and by portal, to lift the eye skyward and to celebrate human accomplishment.

All that, and generally without a fraction of the fanfare the season's skirt length inspires.

The truth is, most Americans notice architecture only sporadically and, as with most arts, often because the architect has achieved celebrity status -- Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, etc. -- or because it concerns a focal point of a society's history, such as the Vietnam Veterans and World War II memorials here or the twin towers site in New York. And especially in the case of these cultural touchstones, the disinterested design is often made subservient to popular emotion.

So it is one of the several small but genuine pleasures of the National Building Museum's ongoing exhibition "Cityscapes Revealed: Highlights From the Collection" that it reminds us of the more general and often generous facets of architecture and construction. The first sampling of the museum's own impressive but rarely seen holdings, it combines glimpses into many of those other "lesser arts" -- the ornamental friezes, cornices, dormers, vault ribs, tiles and sconces -- as well as the draftsmanship, sheer physical labor and industrial innovations that are brought together in fine architecture. It also serves as a reminder (at least for those of a romantic turn) of several of the eras in which then-revolutionary design was believed to represent the future or the idealized past of human creation.

Referring only to late-19th- and 20th-century American buildings, this is not a large exhibit or an officious one. Rather, it presents itself almost as a giant-size set of building blocks (including a selection of popular toy sets and miniature bricks for hands-on play) such as elaborate cast-iron elevator grills, terra cotta, glass and sheet metal, arches, columns and tiles.

A group of photographs and decorative exterior pieces points out that terra cotta was both an aesthetic choice and a public safety matter. It could be glazed (the famous white facade of the Wrigley Building in Chicago), "bronzed" by paint (a bas-relief sculpture of three Union Army horsemen from the creator of the Building Museum's own monumental outside frieze) or molded into elaborate wreaths and rosettes; and its fireproof qualities were a mandatory improvement after the horrendous Chicago fire of 1871.

A lovely glass-negative image of Pittsburgh's World War I-era Union Arcade, built by industrialist Henry Clay Frick (whose New York City home is now a glorious museum of architectural and decorative as well as fine arts), shows a Gothic-detailed, mansard-roof celebration of American industrial primacy -- something like a more brazenly self-celebratory Old Executive Office Building.

From the S.H. Kress & Co. collection is a fabulous drawing of the dime store chain's building in Phoenix, which opened in 1933, depicting an art deco masterpiece with a pair of lizard-shaped terra cotta forms crawling up toward the roof line.

A sampler of aluminum finishes, leathery to wood-grained to diamond-embossed to mirror sleek, is mounted alongside a photo of the Alcoa Tower in Pittsburgh, which became an icon of postwar architecture, sheathed entirely in stamped-aluminum panels, and a brazen advertisement for the future of aluminum construction. A Renaissance-inspired dormer surround from the Andrew Carnegie House on Manhattan's Upper East Side (now the Cooper-Hewitt museum) was constructed entirely of copper; it and its fellows were replaced with identical surrounds only after 90 years' service.

Among photographic records of construction are a series depicting nine 1904 warehouses on Baltimore's Light and Pratt streets and another of the B&O Railroad warehouses that are now part of the Camden Yards complex. A fine quartet of gelatin silver prints from 1931-32 traces the construction of the gorgeous Art Deco Cincinnati Union Terminal Building, a futuristic triumph of streamlined and integrated commercial, cultural and engineering design.

A piece of facade from a mercantile exposition hall in Salt Lake City, painted galvanized sheet metal; soldered copper "acroteria" (defined as ornamental crests or statues along the roof or pediment of a building, a nice term to know); and stamped zinc wreaths and garlands show how lighter and less expensive materials gradually replaced cast iron.

A 1958 design by Ernest Brothers for a Park Avenue mansion bedroom was executed as a maquette, a small shoebox-like model like the backdrop of an elaborate paper-doll collection but with the proposed moldings, mantelpiece, window dressings and wallpapers all colored in. Brothers personally selected the fabrics and door handles and even designed the carpets for his clients.

Among the most amazing drawings are three examples from the Turner City Collection, which become a kind of architectural survey course. Starting in 1910, developer Henry C. Turner commissioned illustrators to assemble mock cities composed entirely of Turner projects from all over the country, commercial, industrial, municipal and private, as a promotional tool -- "an illustrated annual report," as the exhibit caption puts it. As the company expanded, the drawings had to get bigger; the version of "Turner City 2002" has about 160 buildings, including (in this Super Bowl week) another little detail to attract younger exhibit-goers: the Seattle Seahawks stadium.