(2 of 4)
On the last day was announced the election of a new president—Robert David Kohn of Manhattan, also president of the New York Building Congress and the Society for Ethical Culture (whose meeting house he designed). With his partner, Charles Butler, he planned Manhattan's great new Byzantine Temple Emanuel. By himself, he designed the newest building of R. H. Macy & Co. ("It's Smart to be Thrifty"), and is Macy's regular consultant. As president he succeeds big, genial Charles Herrick Hammond of Chicago, active municipal architect, tireless worker in behalf of the profession's public relations, who usually flies to out-of-town conferences with skill acquired in the War.
Architects have one thing in common—they are the least advertised professional men in the world. They do not sign their work. Advertising copy writers never get a McKim, Mead & White or a Warren & Wetmore account. Even in the pages of architectural journals you will look in vain for architects' advertisements. Everyone has heard of the Woolworth Building, the Lincoln Memorial and the palatial Pocantico Hills residence of John Davison Rockefeller, yet few laymen can name the designers (Cass Gilbert, Henry Bacon, Delano & Aldrich, respectively). The feats of great lawyers and even doctors are popularly associated with their names. But if you want an architect you have to go and get him, and the information you have as to his worth is usually conveyed by word of mouth.
The fact that William Van Alen does not boast in national advertising that he is responsible for Manhattan's Chrysler Building may be attributed to the innate dignity of a profession, which prefers to let its works stand for themselves, considers it cheap to ballyhoo a matter of merit. Other considerations make it difficult for the layman to comprehend the architectural world. In the '80s and '90s most publicly admired architecture was a refined adaptation of traditional forms—Classic, Medieval or Romanesque. Such great personalities as McKim, Mead & White, Carrere & Hastings, and H. H. Richardson emerged as leaders of this tendency. Today, however, the tendencies are much more multiple and diverse.
There are extreme reactionaries, like Boston's Ralph Adams Cram, who meticulously follow one archaic style (in Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine and his other works, Mr. Cram is bent on literal, scholarly transcription of the Gothic). There are innumerable firms which practice the modern adaptation of old forms. The delicate permutations of Manhattan's Delano & Aldrich on the basis of the Georgian style may be cited in example, as may the Classical adaptations of Philadelphia's Paul Philippe Cret, the modernized "collegiate" Gothic of Manhattan's James Gamble Rogers, the translations of Mediterranean styles by Myron Hunt for the sunny expanses of California.