38
PARTISAN REVIEW
III's empue which they proceeded to deposit on the shores of
Lake Michigan.
For the 1893 Fair they took the Paris Fair of 1889 as their
prototype. Whited bastard and columnar fronts were arranged
along the axis of a grand canal. To terminate the axis, Richard M.
Hunt built a dome fit to put the one on the lnvalides to shame. Yet
they fell far behind the culture they imitated. At the Paris Fair,
much had been done in using iron, concrete and terra cotta to
lighten traditional stone forms. In the buildings, iron framework
had been frankly exposed; Eiffel's Tower had been permitted to
steal the show from the Beaux Arts domes and the statues. But the
New Yorkers did everything to hide their ironwork. The French
had experimented with colored terra cotta and cast stone, but
Daniel Burnham's New Yorkers said "Let us make it all perfectly
white." A "whitewash gang" was immediately set to blowing white
paint on stuccoed columns, cornices and Francophile sculpture.
.The effect of the Fair upon the millions who saw it is de–
scribed by Sullivan: "These crowds were astonished. They beheld
what was for them an amazing revelation of the architectural art,
of which previously they ·in comparison had known nothing. To
them it was a veritable Apocalypse, a
~essage
inspired from on
high. Upon it their imagination shaped new ideals. They went
away, spreading over the land, returning to their homes, each one
of them carrying in his soul the shadow of a white cloud, each of
them permeated by the most subtle and slow-acting of poisons; an
imperceptible miasma within the white shadow of a higher culture."
The nature of the architecture which was to dominate the
American scene between 1893 and 1918 was foreshadowed in the
character of the two men who most influenced the design of the
Fair. Daniel Burnham and Charles F. McKim were industrial
entrepreneurs in architecture. Burnham represented the hard,
pushing, spittoon-cluttered frontier capitalism in Chicago. McKim
was part of the Wall Street-Fifth Avenue-Newport culture of the
East which had borrowed its coloration from Paris. The influ–
ence of McKim on Burnham was considerable, while the influence
of both men on the architecture of their time was enormous.
Together they planned the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial and the
Arlington Bridge in a composition which gives Washington so
imperial a tone.
