AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE
43
tasks. And even in design his authority was curbed as the judgment
of builders and real estate agents gained greater influence. Today
on such large scale work as "Parkchester" they serve as simple
cogs in the construction machinery.
III.
The record as I have written it here is of the arrest between
1893 and 1918 of a movement toward functionalism which had
been gathering momentum in Chicago of the 'Eighties. The halt was
called by New York architects serving a plutocracy which borrowed
its culture from France. Not having acquired full confidence in
its own pragmatic culture, the people of Chicago and the Western
States accepted the esthetic leadership of the New Yorkers-a
leadership asserted or usurped at the World's Fair of 1893. From
that date a studious eclecticism marks its rise.
But the undercurrent of hard, practical, businesslike thinking
which had produced the Monadnock Building in Chicago continued
under the eclectic surface. The American capitalists had adopted
the showy, regal, bourgeois culture of France for general purposes.
But in their quieter moments-in the design of their warehouses
and office buildings, they retained an august puritanism. Gradually
the wave of practicality gathered strength as it was discovered
that, here and there, the conspicuous waste of people like McKim,
Burnham and Stanford White was an impediment to business.
These architects couldn't organize large scale and speedy building
construction, contractors could. So the word of the contractors
became law. The wave of practicality advanced over the receding
one of shoWy eclecticism.
This record does not mean that McKim as a leader of the
eclectic architects had not adopted practical methods. He had
been forced into a big voJume of production in order to stay in
competitive business at all. He rationalized or depersonalized
"style"-put the elements of Roman architecture on the assembly
line and started a training school for design mechanics. But such
depersonalization of style is a rather contradictory activity. It
soon appeared that the rustications, cornices, cartouches and belt
courses with which McKim's journeymen enriched buildings-were
all rather dead. Hence it was not for practical reasons alone that
