By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Monday, November 17, 2008
BUFFALO, New York: One of the most cynical clichés in architecture is that poverty is good for preservation. The poor don't bulldoze historic neighborhoods to make way for fancy new high-rises.
That assumption came to mind when I stepped off a plane here recently. Buffalo is home to some of the greatest American architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with major architects like Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright building marvels here. Together they shaped one of the grandest early visions of the democratic American city.
Yet Buffalo is more commonly identified with the crumbling infrastructure, abandoned homes and dwindling jobs that have defined the Rust Belt for the past 50 years. And for decades its architecture has seemed strangely frozen in time.
Now the city is reaching a crossroads. Just as local preservationists are completing restorations on some of the city's most important landmarks, the federal government is considering a plan that could wipe out part of a historic neighborhood. Meanwhile Mayor Byron Brown is being pressed to revise a proposal that would have demolished hundreds of abandoned homes.
The outcome of these plans will go far in determining the city's prospects for economic recovery, but it could also offer a rare opportunity to re-examine the relationship between preserving the past and building a future.
Buffalo was founded on a rich tradition of architectural experimentation. The architects who worked here were among the first to break with European traditions to create an aesthetic of their own, rooted in American ideals about individualism, commerce and social mobility. And today its grass-roots preservation movement is driven by a vibrant coalition of part-time preservationists, amateur historians and third-generation residents who have made reclaiming the city's history a deeply personal mission.
At a time when oil prices and oil dependence are forcing us to rethink the wisdom of suburban and exurban living, Buffalo could eventually offer a blueprint for repairing other shrinking postindustrial U.S. cities.
Touring Buffalo's monuments is about as close as you can get to experiencing firsthand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like. The city's rise began in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, which opened trade with the heartland. By the end of the 19th century, the city's grain silos and steel mills had become architectural pilgrimage sites for European Modernists like Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut, who saw them as the great cathedrals of Modernity. In their vast scale and technological efficiency, they reflected a triumphant America and sent a warning signal to Europe that it was fast becoming less relevant.
Yet it is the parade of celebrated architects who worked here as much as the city's industrial achievements that makes Buffalo a living history lesson. Daniel Burnham's 1896 Ellicott Square Building, with its mighty Italian Renaissance facade, towers over the corner of Main and Church Streets. Just a block away is Louis Sullivan's 1895 Guarantee Building, a classic of early skyscraper design.
Across town, Henry Hobson Richardson built his largest commission: the 1870 Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, composed of a pair of soaring Romanesque towers flanked by low brick pavilions. Light and air poured in through tall windows; spacious 18-foot-wide, or 5.5-meter-wide, corridors were designed to promote interaction among the inmates, an idea that would be refined by Modernists in their communal housing projects decades later.
But it was Wright who made the decisive leap from an architecture that drew mainly on European stylistic precedents to one that was rooted in a growing cultural self-confidence. Wright built two of those great pillars of American architecture here, the 1904 Larkin Building and the 1905 Darwin D. Martin House.
Although torn down in 1950, the Larkin Building, designed as the headquarters of the Larkin Soap Company, remains one of the most influential designs of the 20th century. Wright invented floor-to-ceiling glass doors, double-pane windows and toilets affixed to the walls for this monument to U.S. business. Massive, forbidding brick piers anchoring the exterior signaled a break with classical historical styles. The light-filled atrium piercing its five floors, with managers visible at their desks at the bottom, turned the traditional office hierarchy on its head.
The Martin House, a Prairie House complex of five buildings on a vast suburban lot, is the domestic counterpart to this vision. No European architect had come close to imagining such a fluid world. A composition of low brick structures, terraces, pergolas and gardens in which man and landscape were in tune, the design celebrated a democratic ideal of family life in which traditional social barriers, and the walls that reinforce them, were finally torn down.
Yet Wright's genius lay in his ability to accomplish this feat while conveying a profound serenity. The low roof and broad cantilevered eaves both beckoned to the horizon and provided shelter. The grid of wood beams in the living room, set just below ceiling level, visually broke down the space into discrete rooms while maintaining a sense of openness. Above all, this architecture represented freedom both from Europe's suffocating traditions and from the feelings of cultural inferiority that had defined U.S. architecture since the earliest days of the republic.
This departure from recycled European precedents is reflected in the city's late-19th-century urban planning as well. Buffalo's original plan from the early 19th century was loosely based on Pierre Charles L'Enfant's 1791 plan for Washington, an Americanized version of Paris's system of radiating boulevards. Its civic core, dominated by a mountainous City Hall, reads as an isolated fragment of a City Beautiful plan that was never fully realized.
Olmsted, as much social reformer as landscape architect, had visited John Paxson's Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, a pioneering project designed to better the lives of the city's working class. When he returned to New York, he expanded on that vision in his designs for Central and Prospect Parks, which he conceived as realms of psychological healing that could also break down class boundaries.
In Buffalo he realized an even grander ambition, creating a vast network of parks and parkways that he hoped would have "a civilizing effect" on the "dangerous classes" populating the American city. Flanked by rows of elm trees, the parkways were broken up by a series of gorgeous landscaped roundabouts, slowing the city's rhythms of movement into something more majestic yet distinctly democratic.
It didn't last of course. By the 1950s Buffalo's economy had already embarked on its long path to disintegration. Economic decline was exacerbated by race riots in 1967 and white flight to the suburbs. Even so, many of the city's most revered monuments survived.
Despite the destruction of some surrounding structures, the main house at the Martin complex remained intact. Richardson's asylum closed in the mid-1970s, and though one of its wings was demolished to make room for a new hospital next door, the bulk of the building still towers over Olmsted's park.
Today Buffalo is a collection of fragile museum pieces with a covey of local stewards struggling to preserve them as a means to help save the city.
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