The Art of pure colour

T H E A R T O F P U R E C O L O U R 1 JOHN WELLBORN ROOT AND THE ROLE OF POLYCHROMY IN ARCHITECTURE

by Valentino Danilo Matteis

It’s 1891: twenty years have passed since the ashes of the Great Fire have cooled, and one of the most astonishing buildings in Chicago has just been completed.

It is an enormous pile of purple/brown bricks produced by the Indiana–based Anderson Pressed Brick Company, and perfectly aligned by masons from George Fuller and Co. 2 . A building whose top recalls the termination of an ancient

Egyptian papyrus column, reaching the vertiginous height (for the times) of sixteen stories. With no ornamentation, apart from its unusual colour, carefully detailed bay-windows, and a gently curving cornice and basement, the Monadnock is without a doubt one of the strangest and most interesting buildings in the architectural history of Chicago. Designed

by John W. Root and Daniel H. Burnham

1 ROOT : “Art of Pure Color” Inland Architect and Builder, n° 5 (June 1883), pp. 66‐67; n° 6 (July 1883), pp. 80‐ 82; n° 1 (August 1883), p. 89; n° 2 (September 1883), p. 106.

2 LESLIE: “Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934”, University of Illinois Press, 15 May 2013.

The Monadnock Building from S. Federal St. © Valentino Danilo Matteis

in several phases from 1885, it looms over the corner of Dearborn and Jackson streets, not far from the Chicago Public Library by Hammond, Beeby and Babka.

One of the last tall buildings (the title of true “last” goes to the Woman’s Temple by Burnham & Root, completed in 1892 3 ) with a structure made of brick pylons and an internal steel frame, it is an especially contradictory building where the apparent impression of unity and cohesion, given by its uniform brick “veil”, is actually hiding a much more hybrid and complex structure.

In this specific design, Root tried to finally address the role of the tall office building in the city if Chicago by experimenting with the aesthetic possibilities of brick construction, both in detailing (or lack of them) and colour.

office building should mainly express repose 4 , firmness, and coherence.

Metropolitan dwellers were too busy to appreciate fine detail while being literally immersed in the chaos of the metropolis, and this repose would be achieved by using simple masses free of ornamentation. He wrote, somehow anticipating George Simmel’s essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) and his concept of the blase attitude of city-dwellers: “Each detail in a building goes for little with the general public, and they are more impressed by the use of certain materials, by the general arrangement of masses, by the effect of lightness or solidity than by the fine quality of its historical references”5.

In his writings in Inland Architect, Root reflected on the aesthetic quality of buildings in Chicago, especially the tall office building typology. In his eyes, the 3 LESLIE: “Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934”, University of Illinois Press, 15 May 2013.

4 ROOT: “A Great Architectural Problem” in Inland Architect and News Record, n° 5 (June 1890), pp. 67‐71

5 ROOT: “Architectural Ornamentation” in Inland Architect and Builder, n° 5 (April 1885), pp. 54‐55

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The Monadnock Building from S. Dearborn St. © Valentino Danilo Matteis

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The Monadnock Building from S. Dearborn St 3D reconstruction of the original idea by Root of grading the color of bricks. © Valentino Danilo Matteis

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (1872), Tate Britain, London

More specifically in the Art of Pure Color, a paper published serially in several editions of Inland Architect and Builders in 1883, he developed the idea of an architecture whose effect depended on colour and polychromy, rather than ornament. He credited Ruskin for the organic approach

to the problem of colour and the inherent structure of objects, sharing his idea that in nature often we see colour dissociated from internal structure6, further validating the possibility of a purely chromatic experience of architecture, independent from issues of materiality and structure.

6 ROOT : “Art of Pure Color” Inland Architect and Builder, n° 5 (June 1883), pp. 66‐67 ; n° 6 (July 1883),

pp. 80‐82 ; n° 1 (August 1883), p. 89 ; n° 2 (September 1883), p. 106

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This kind of perceptive, yet unexpectedly practical view of the architectural problem — by removing ornament, and contributing, to a degree, towards reducing costs — of the tall office building, well matched the need for frugality of the Monadnock’s investors, Peter and Shepard Brooks, who relentlessly pursued the idea of extreme simplicity and economy in their projects.

Even before, in the Montauk Block (1885), Root tried to persuade the building’s developer Peter Brooks to use coloured stained glass, failing spectacularly to the latter’s objection that:

This led, however, to a misinterpretation of the stylistic appearance of the Monadnock as something of purely utilitarian intent, a sort of non-designed, nondescript building, where function was the sole driver of style. This could not have been farther from the truth.

Together with the concept of an appropriate strategy for each scale, he defined a form of colour “fitness” for different situations that would guide interior colour schemes: entrance halls would be in strong, warm colours, expressing greetings and welcome, while libraries should be of a more subdued tone, inducing contemplation.10

“colored glass is main nonsense — a passing fashion, inappropriate in a mercantile building and worse of all, it obstructs light.

Strike it all out.”9.

Root’s ideas on architecture were detailed and comprehensive, if not those of a visionary, combining practical strategies and structural finesse; the monolithic result of the Monadnock we now perceive is only one visible aspect of the architectural philosophy he espoused.

Regarding colour and polychromy in his designs, Root generally tried to follow Ruskin’s theory of colour in dealing with different scales: small buildings would be rendered with a variety of materials and colours, while on larger scale buildings a subtler approach should be used by applying a gradation of tones7.

Although he never managed to realise any large-scale projects of polychromatic architecture — the schemes may have been deemed too expensive, but they were also probably too extreme for the times — he was a clear advocate of the matter and wrote several papers about perception and polychromatism, which are surprisingly up to date with contemporary theories on the subject. He tried to combine organic theories of architecture developing in Chicago at the time with colour theories shared by artists and architects such as Kandinsky and Bruno Taut, as well as Wagnerian theories on synaesthesia. His theoretical ideas were much in the spirit of many other contemporary artists and intellectuals of the period, who attempted to combine multiple sensorial inputs and

Harriet Monroe, author of the architect’s biography, reported that “many remember his desire to grade the colour of the building from brown bricks at the bottom to yellow at the top” referring to the scheme Burnham & Root devised for the Monadnock but failed to realise; a particular solution proposed also for another building, the Rialto8 (built in 1886 and demolished in 1940), that once again failed to be realised.

7 WEINGARDEN: The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan's Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth‐ Century Color Theory, Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 243‐260 8 MERWOOD–SALISBURY: Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago

Architecture and Urbanism), Chicago, University Of Chicago Press; 15 July 2009.

9 Ibid.

10 PRESTIANO: The Inland Architect, Chicago’s Major Architectural Journal, 1883–1908, UMI Research Press – Architecture and Urban Design, No. 9, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1973.

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) — The Morning after the Deluge — Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843), Tate Britain, London

modes of expression from colour and shapes, to music and materials, into comprehensive artistic experiences.

accused the latter that he was just “throwing pot of colours in the face of the public” through his atmospheric, almost abstract paintings, Root sided with the painter, arguing persuasively for the possibility of an architecture (and art) aesthetic based on the perceptive quality of colour, freed by the “hard edges” of drawing.

His bold proposal that buildings should rely on the “art of pure color,” rather than traditional ornamental schemes, is also related to his pronounced admiration for the painter James McNeill Whistler’s experiments with tonal harmony, 11 and goes on to greatly influence Sullivan’s development as a colourist after the untimely death of Root in 1891, just as the Monadnock building was being completed. During the libel case between Ruskin and Whistler, when the first

As a matter of fact, Root considered music as the most evolved, and refined, means for expressing emotions and abstract notions (again, Harriet Monroe confirms that Root was deeply interested in musical studies, and even became a talented

11 MERWOOD–SALISBURY: Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago

Architecture and Urbanism), Chicago, University Of Chicago Press; 15 July 2009.

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into the greenness of fields and the bloom of flowers.”

organist while studying drawing at Oxford College), but argued that in future it would be colour itself that would replace music in its role as master medium and conveyor of pure emotion.

Until the time of colour’s triumph, artists and designers were to use a musical vocabulary to better explain their ideas, not unlike the manner in which Whistler would title his paintings: “Nocturne: Blue and Gold” or the famous “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1”. In the Art of Pure Color he wrote:

In a sort of retelling of the historical discussion between Florence’s supremacy in “disegno” (the drawing, the form) and the colourist approach of Venetian painters, Root sided with the latter. He believed that terracotta tiles, stained glass and mosaics should not be subordinated as decorative elements to accent this or that particular elevation, but their deep colours should suffuse city-dwellers in an ever-changing glow of coloured lights, where contours would almost vanish as in a painting by JMW Turner.

“the arrangements of color will be written upon a score, like the notes of music, and we shall sit enchanted while the performer plays for us this symphony. As in the great Im Walde symphony by Raff we hear the twitter of birds, the sighing of trees, and all mysterious music of the forest, so in this color-symphony we shall see the lifting of gray clouds, the first rosy streaks of dawn, the molten gold poured from the sky into lakes and brooks, and the final coming of Apollo. In another symphony we shall see, as in Beethoven's Eroica, the struggle of the human soul through mists of doubt, through darks of despair, into fullness of day,

His interpretation of the role of colour was infused also with contemporary theories of perception and emotion that were being developed in the field of psychology. He likened the idea of “form” 12 to a newspaper that must be read to be understood, while colour has a more immediate, emotional effect, that is not mediated by symbolic or historical iconography, nor allusion. In this more

Jules Guerin, image from the 1909 plan for Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham 12 ROOT: “Architectural Ornamentation” in Inland Architect and Builder, n° 5 (April 1885), pp. 54‐55

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relation to the idea that primary colours were connected to a more “savage” state — by interpreting the latter as a more “natural” one — that could potentially save society from its current ‘unnatural’ state of hectic urbanisation 15 , a way to renew humanity’s relationship with the city through colour and its positive emotional feedback. Like Ruskin, he had a clear vision of a polychromatic architecture that would bring nature back into the world’s cityscapes. This “symphony of colours” would evoke

direct — more natural, we can say — approach, Root found a manner in which to restore a natural connection between man and his environment, lost in the development of the industrial city and its chaotic way of life.

It is the architect’s biographer Harriet Monroe that adds another piece to the mosaic of influences and interests that informed Root’s aesthetical philosophy.

Both Burnham and Root were members of a Swedenborgian Church in Chicago, the Union Park Temple. 13 Members of this church followed the teachings of a Swedish eighteenth-century scientist and mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg, who considered the physical world an imperfect copy of a spiritual one, whose invisible order can only be seen by those who are “enlightened”. Sunlight itself was seen as the manifestation of God in the physical world, and the colour spectrum was seen as carrying part of that invisible order: with the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow relating to three main aspects of the Holy Spirit, love, faith and life respectively.

The admiration that Root felt towards painters like George Inness, Camille Corot and William Turner, who, according to Root, used colour to reveal the metaphysical, is entirely comprehensible when understood in this context.

“…The full verdure of woods, the warm blue of a summer sky, the eternal joyousness of blooming flowers, crystallised into unfolding colour and greeting us in our daily avocations”16.

It becomes quite clear that the unusual aesthetic result of the Monadnock, that hulking pile of oddly coloured bricks, is not an uncontrolled, merely commercial choice, but a carefully crafted one, undoubtedly resulting from the remarkable synthesis of several overlapping desires: simplicity from the client, Burnham’s sense of pragmatism, and Root’s refined aesthetic philosophy. The concluding sections of the “Art of Pure Color” are a testament to the ideal city that Root hoped would someday come about, and which maybe his friend Burnham still dreamt of in the coloured illustration by Jules Guerin of his 1909 Plan of Chicago.

He wrote:

The idea of colour perception was also frequently discussed as a meditation upon cultural development: in his Grammar of Ornament (1856), Owen Jones had proposed a sort of evolution in colour perception, from ancient times -when only primary colours were perceived- towards a more developed understanding of secondary and tertiary colours 14 . Root adopted a more optimistic approach in

“Think for a moment what our streets can become if to the somber grans of stone and red of brick were added the full, unfading bloom of glass, marble and tiles. These combined by artists of sensibility […] would fill our cities with the eternal joy of color”17.

13 MONROE: John Wellborn Root ‐ A Study of His Life and Work Houghton, Miffin & Co, NY, 1896.

14 MERWOOD–SALISBURY: Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago Architecture and Urbanism), Chicago, University Of Chicago Press; 15 July 2009.

15 Ibid.

16 ROOT : “Art of Pure Color” Inland Architect and Builder, n° 5 (June 1883), pp. 66‐67 ; n° 6 (July 1883), pp. 80‐82 ; n° 1 (August 1883), p. 89 ; n° 2 (September 1883), p. 106 17 Ibid.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

for a general overview on Chicago’s School of Architecture

Carl CONDIT: The Chicago School of Architecture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, .

Thomas LESLIE: Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934, University of Illinois Press, 15 May 2013.

Joanna Rachel MERWOOD–SALISBURY: The Mechanisation of Cladding: the Chicago Skyscraper and the Constructions of Architectural Modernity, Ph.D. Thesis, 2003.

Robert PRESTIANO: The Inland Architect, Chicago’s Major Architectural Journal, – , UMI Research Press – Architecture and Urban Design, No. , Ann Arbor, Michigan, .

on the subject of colour and polychromy in Root’s work

Joanna Rachel MERWOOD–SALISBURY: Chicago : The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago Architecture and Urbanism), Chicago, University Of Chicago Press; July .

Lauren S. WEINGARDEN: The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan's Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth‐Century Color Theory, Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 243‐260 John Wellborn ROOT : Art of Pure Color in Inland Architect and Builder, n° 5 (June 1883), pp. 66‐67; n° 6 (July 1883), pp. 80‐82; n° 1 (August 1883), p. 89; n° 2 (September 1883), p. 106.

on John Wellborn Root

Donald HOFFMAN: The Architecture of John Wellborn Root, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, .

—: The Meaning of Architecture; Buildings and Wri ngs by John Wellborn Root, New York Horizon Press, .

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Harriet MONROE: John Wellborn Root ‐ A Study of His Life and Work Houghton, Miffin & Co, NY, .

John Wellborn ROOT: Architects of Chicago in Inland Architect and News Record 16, n° 8 (January 1891), pp. 91‐92

—: Architectural Ornamentation in Inland Architect and Builder, n° 5 (April 1885), pp.

54‐55 —: Broad Art Criticism in Inland Architect and News Record, n° 11 (February 1888), pp. 3‐5

—: A Great Architectural Problem in Inland Architect and News Record, n° 5 (June 1890), pp. 67‐71

—: Style in Inland Architect and Builder, n° 10 (January 1887), pp. 99‐101

—: The Value of Type in Art in Inland Architect and Builder, n° 4 (November 1883), p.

132

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