An appetite for the real, the pragmatic and the scientifically verifiable had long been resident in 19th century America. But it was brought to a peak in the wake of the Civil War. The journalistic eye was equal, as a transmitter of (sometimes unbearable) reality, to that of the novelist or poet; the camera replaced the draftsman in reportage. This was new. American public culture was now driven by technique--the skills that built bridges and docks and railroads, the scientific laws that underwrote Americans' conquest of their environment. There was no ghost in the machine, only the machine itself.
As the index of social reality shifted from the farm and the village to the impacted, simmering cities, a distinct visual aesthetic was bound to rise from American utilitarianism. It showed itself earliest--and most dramatically--in the art where science, material and common social needs intersected: architecture. Its great expression was the iron grid, which begat the skyscraper. The technology of cast-iron joists and columns as the skeleton of a multistory building had come from Europe, but it mutated and ramified in the U.S., especially in New York City. There early architects like Daniel Badger (1806-84) popularized it and crossed it with mass production.
The master image of America's industrial potential, however, was the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883. Designed by John Roebling and his son Washington Roebling, built by thousands of workers laboring under perilous and sacrificial conditions on the high cables or underwater in the caissons, it was the greatest engineering feat of 19th century America and, with a central span of 1,595 ft., by far the longest suspension bridge in the world. Its soaring Gothic-arched towers also predicted the vertical city, whose chief element--the high, steel-framed palazzo block--had been adumbrated by Badger but reached its first maturity outside New York in the 1890s, in the buildings of Louis Sullivan and others.
Sullivan (1856-1924) was America's first great modern architect. It's a curious twist of fate that, having written hundreds of thousands of words about architecture, he should be known to most people today by one phrase: "Form follows function." It became the motto of all functionalist designers, but it doesn't represent Sullivan's own ideas at all. He wasn't antidecoration. He was, rather, one of the greatest designers of decorative detail, in an age that excelled in it. But he insisted on the primacy of the main masses. Both this and the love of inventive detail would form the youthful imagination of his protege, the cranky, overbearing genius who remains the outstanding American architect of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright.
The art of painting does not go in tandem with those of architecture and engineering. Yet when painting aspires to a "scientific" analysis of things in sight, when the ego of the artist recedes behind the task of examination, one can at least speak of parallels. The American Realist generation of the turn of the century would not have disagreed. One of them was Thomas Anshutz (1851-1912), best known for his small factory scene, The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880. It's a piercing image of American youth and strength, feeling its new muscle (literally) in the post-Civil War industrial surge.