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There was, however, a more positive and socially responsible side to this. The "American Renaissance" also produced some of the finest public buildings of the 19th century. There had been noble churches in the U.S. before, but none as boldly resplendent in space and decor as Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church (1872-97) in Boston. There had been libraries too, but none as ambitious as the great Boston Public Library (1887-95), designed by McKim, Mead & White. The library was the first major public building in the neo-Italian Renaissance style that was to become de rigueur in formal architecture. It expressed the praiseworthy idea that the citizen is the reason for the state; that public architecture should be generous, bold and finely built.
Patrons, architects and artists didn't just want to imitate the Renaissance; they hoped to outdo it. Americans could take the trophies of high European culture and make them their own. Above all, they connected to the Renaissance by buying it. The Gilded Age began the process whereby the museum began to supplant the church as the emblematic focus of American cities. The suction of American capital was turned on the old collections of Europe. Out of it came some of the greatest museums in the world, from the encyclopedic Metropolitan in New York to the choice Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
This epoch of self-assertion through the arts, especially architecture, flourished until the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Indeed, it continued thereafter, for the New Deal conceived of the vast public work as an expression of shared potential, communal will and can-do. Its epitome, though, was the skyscraper, that uniquely American form. As a symbol of Promethean energy, the skyscraper has never been surpassed. It is the architecture of smooth-flowing congestion, an American ideal, and it took ever more glorious forms in such designs as the Empire State Building and the great, self-sufficient urban complex of Rockefeller Center.
After World War II, nothing of such magnitude would be tried in America; the triumph of the glass-box International Style meant the death of ornament and a recoil from "fine" material. Nor, in the '70s and '80s, was the cheap pasteboard revivalism of Postmodernist historical quotation going to revive a sense of grandeur. Moreover, with the exception of various memorials, and of such projects as Richard Meier's six-building Getty Center in Los Angeles (to be completed later this year), the level of grand commissions for public benefit flattened out.
What had gone wrong? Perhaps the confidence of patronage, in a time when it was increasingly difficult to create public art because of the erosion of shared public values; perhaps the privacy and obscurity of so much of the art itself; perhaps the shift of social discourse toward the moving image and away from the static one. More likely a mixture of all three. In the '80s and '90s, things would get big and expensive, but no longer grand.