Art: Native School

Critics have said that the most artistically significant things in U. S. architecture are not skyscrapers or state capitols but grain-elevators, barns, oil-cracking stills. They say that because the grain-elevator is not plastered with irrelevant art and decoration, because the barn was not preconceived in Paris or Athens, because these buildings are simple, sincere and to-the-point. they are Good.

To stimulate the real native tradition latent in such architecture there should be, the critics have said, a really native architectural school. Such a school is now in the up-building at Lake Forest, Ill.

Out of a small institute of landscape architecture sponsored by the Garden Club of Lake Forest, has grown a Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The late Edward Lamed Ryerson. steel & iron man, left money for the movement. Active as officers are Walter Stanton Brewster (broker), Tiffany Blake (Chicago Tribune editorial writer), Alfred E. Hamill (Hathaway & Co., paper), Mrs. John E. Geary (North Shore clubwoman). Director is Stanley Hart White, associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois. Students are picked yearly from the architectural schools of five Midwestern institutions—Iowa State College, the universities of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Armour Institute of Technology (Chicago). They study in the summer session under architects of the Chicago region, on the campus of Lake Forest College. Thus far difficulty has been encountered finding really able candidates for instruction. Most Midwestern architectural students feel the need of going to old-established—and foreign-influenced—schools such as Pennsylvania, Columbia, Yale, and spending their summers abroad.

Last fortnight’s Foundation news was as stimulating to old-established imaginations as it probably will be hard to “sell” to the kind of imaginations it aimed to benefit: Condé Nast, eastern smartchart publisher (House & Garden, Vogue, Vanity Fair) promised the Foundation $2,500 per year for three years for unique traveling fellow-ships—unique because all the traveling will be done, not among European chalets, chateaux and cathedrals, but in the U. S. among barns, grain-elevators, oil-cracking plants.