“The Architecture of American Commerce”

AboutAdapted from a BBC Third Programme broadcast by a British architect who spent a year teaching at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, this essay argues that mid-century Americans possessed the climate, wealth, materials, and civic enthusiasm for architectural patronage that postwar Britain lacked, and that this patronage found its most vital expression not in private mansions — Richard Morris Hunt's Vanderbilt houses — but in commercial and public building, particularly in the American West. Atkinson surveys frontier boomtown architecture (Denver's Brown Palace Hotel, Mormon Salt Lake City, Central City's Opera House) before turning to Chicago, where H. H. Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store and Louis Sullivan's steel-framed skyscrapers established a distinctly American commercial architecture. He contrasts Sullivan's ideal of the isolated, slim commercial tower, realized decades later in Lever House, with Frank Lloyd Wright's inward-turned commercial interiors — the Larkin Building and the Johnson Wax offices — and closes by praising the General Motors Technical Center as the era's exemplar of decentralized industrial planning.

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