The Architecture of the Beaux-Arts

The Capital study on the inside front cover is also courteSy of MOMA. A ny American architect growing up after World War I has probably felt two great architectural presences around him. First, that of the frontier, with vast spaces, constant growth into those spaces and things made quickly, flimsily, and soon abandoned. Second, that of the Ecole des which-when brought to the United States around 1900-caused us to create monumental buildings, boulevards and even whole city centers like monadnocks among the chaos of American ticky-tacky; construct ons vast in scale and incredibly permanent in their masonry (steel-stiffened) construction. Both of these have remained strangely mysterious to us. We try, on the one hand, to find some accommodation with the frontier while, on the other hand, admitting that the most convincing architecture of our personal experience is that of the ruins of this Beaux-Arts ideal. The secret of architecture, we are told, was its understanding of architectural composition. Georges Gromort in his lectures at the Ecole defined composition thus: