Naïve Modern Style and the Geometric House

“Naïve Modern” is a term we have had to invent for one of the most prolific architectural styles of New York City. It is a curious state of affairs: many thousands of buildings made in a highly distinct style, dominant in many neighborhoods, but without a name to use for it. “Naïve” is meant here in the sense of ‘culturally unsophisticated’. An alternative name might be ‘Outsider Modern’.

New York surged into the 20th century and began a period of accelerated expansion in every available direction, but this development was marked by remarkable disconnection between substance and the style of its growth. The substance was a vast network of underground railways, the electrification of everything, the explosion of ‘skyscrapers’ that astonished the world, and so on. The style was, emphatically and by consensus, Neo-Classicism; a renewed embrace of architectural vocabulary of the Roman Empire and Italian Renaissance. The exteriors of the century’s new forms of buildings, New Law Tenements, Apartment Houses and Steel-Frame Commercial Buildings, were translated through 15th century Florence (though, to be fair, the Woolworth Building is an 800-foot high evocation of English Gothic). All prestige projects (the Flatiron Building, the Metropolitan Life Tower, Grand Central Terminal) were executed in the semi-official Beaux Arts style or another historicist mode, and all major architects (McKim, Meade and White, Carriere and Hastings, Napoleon LeBrun and Sons) designed historicist architecture.

We call this period, roughly spanning the interval between the turn of the century and the end of World War 1, ‘Premodern’. Materially, the city of mass production, electricity and steel had arrived but was not really accepted by its arbiters of taste. Men such as Henry James who remained, in some ways, captives to notions of aristocratic superiority. A cloak of tradition served to soften the revolutionary shocks of transition to an increasingly diverse, industrializing and mass cultural city.

While elite opinion in New York in the new century resisted frankly modern styles (and would continue to do so well into the 20s) it is clear that some builders and clients of the Premodern Period at lower social levels chafed at historicism and sought to express the urban reality they experienced through the design of their modest commercial buildings and homes. We may surmise that some immigrant and first generation New Yorkers had had enough of the legacy of tradition they left behind in eastern and southern Europe (feudalism, anti-Semitism, poverty) and welcomed this opportunity to celebrate modernity (industrialization, technology, meritocracy) and the elevation of their status in a new world.

The style we call Naïve Modern begins to take shape around 1910. It is characterized firstly by abstraction and secondly by the absence of references to architectural history or representational elements: no cornices, festoons, cartouches, quoins, arches, columns or friezes, no gargoyles, bas relief figures, vines, fig or acanthus leaves. Its medium is primarily patterned brickwork, usually monochrome gray brick for small commercial and industrial buildings in Manhattan; usually red or combinations of red with dark gray/brown or tan brick for houses and mixed-use buildings in the boroughs. In the most intense examples of outer borough Naïve Modern, the geometric brick designs made with contrasting brick are remarkably dense and complex, and genuinely strange. Nothing about these patterns clearly relates to any cultural points of reference, expect perhaps to geometric patterns of machine-made textiles (550 E 98th St, Brooklyn). The rigor of the exclusion of traditional iconography, either architectural, national or religious, leads to the conclusion that the goal of Naïve Modern was to celebrate the contemporary moment, the Machine Age.

Naïve Modern was enabled by the simplicity and availability of its materials (brick) and the relatively high level of craft of masons in this period. It could proceed with only building contractors and bricklayers, without much participation from architects. The forms for nearly all of its buildings are simple, symmetrical, rectangular prisms, without setbacks. Nevertheless, the geometric patterns of brick can be devilishly complicated, sometimes enhanced with the addition of triangular or trapezoidal bricks.

Occasionally, lines of raised brick frame doorways or window or mark other edges. The only opportunity to use form to express Naïve Modern is through roof lines, which are characteristically ‘broken’, with sections of parapet wall raised from the top edge of the building. Many variations of this ‘crenellated’ treatment crown thousands of two- and three-story buildings that line the streets of whole neighborhoods rolled out in the 20s, Bronx River (in Soundview), East Elmhurst, East Flatbush, and many others.

Only one symbol is pervasively common in Naïve Modern style, and it is perfectly abstract and geometrical: the rhombus. This ‘diamond shape’ was the universal talisman of modernity and it appears on many thousands of buildings erected between 1910 and 1925. In fairness, the rhombus is worked into the designs of all sorts of facades from this period, including ones that are amalgams of styles or almost completely utilitarian and otherwise featureless. The rhombus shape is either woven with brick or is made from another material and then set in brickwork. Once you become aware of the rhombus, you will see it everywhere, it will haunt you.

Although tens of thousands of buildings expressing some degree of Naïve Modern were erected in New York during the city’s greatest building boom, no mention of this geometric, ahistorical style is made in any survey of the time we can find. It seems to be the case that not more than a handful of buildings of Naïve Modern in New York City have been given official landmark status, and those (like 401 W 14th St/Apple Store) only because they were in Landmark Historical Districts where every building is designated. Even the Jackson Heights Historical Districts, which celebrates middle class domestic architecture of the boroughs in the 20s, seems deliberately to have been drawn to exclude remarkable Naïve Modern houses of the same vintage as the landmarked ‘storybook cottages’ only yards away.

The sponsors of this architecture were not prominent people, probably many were not fully fluent in English and few would have had higher education. The small businessmen, contractors and homeowners who created Naïve Modern operated at the lowest strata of real estate development: working class neighborhood houses and sweatshop factory lofts. In fact, not one ‘prestige’ building in New York was executed in Naïve Modern; not one Naïve Modern building is more than six stories high. The authors of this orphan style left no descriptions or their intentions or thinking that we know about; these would likely exist in letters and private documents not published pronouncements articulating their theories of modernity in architecture. Naïve Modern buildings can be considered almost as a kind of folk art, expressed by clients newly empowered to make a personal statement through architecture. The fact that many of them chose at this moment to make abstract and geometric designs suggesting the zig-zagging of electricity and the rhythm of industrial mass production is fascinating and mysterious.

Naïve Modern in New York can be considered in several categories:

  1. The muted, usually monochrome gray-brick, utilitarian, small factory/office Manhattan type: These are actually fairly limited in number, usually only a few stories in height, concentrated somewhat in the Garment and Fur Districts, with some in the Lower East Side (now Chinatown) where sweatshops were (and are) mixed with tenements. Many high-rise loft buildings of the Garment District are amalgams of historicist fantasy and Naïve Modern. Some were built as garages, including probably the most visible Naïve Modern building, 401 W 14th St, mentioned above. As a general rule, Naïve Modern was priced out of Manhattan and is expressed there episodically and always without frills. Frankly, Manhattan Naïve Modern is pretty dreary. We only know of one group of wholly Naïve Modern tenements in Manhattan (Manhattan Terrace in Inwood/Fort George).

  2. the red and dark brown brick, outer-borough, rowhouse Fabric type: These are successor to turn-of-the-century Late Brownstones and smaller New Law Tenements and they were built in a comparable range of quality, sometimes cheaply but many with good finishes. This is by far the most numerous variety, characteristically developed in groups, sometimes whole blocks. These were build as detached, semi-detached and attached houses. On main streets of newly urbanized development, they are often mixed-use, with storefronts on the first floor and apartments above. Many are stylistic hybrids combining geometric brickwork with features of ‘cottage’-type houses or historicist ornamentation. As always, people who were attracted to both ‘classy’ treatments and a contemporary look often saw no reason to choose one to the exclusion of the other.

  3. Finally, there is the ‘one-off’ Corona type: These are individual projects and sometimes have a slightly ‘folk art’ quality to them, with occasionally less than the most professional masonry. The name comes from the interesting collection of them in Corona, Queens, which mostly uses a combination of red with yellow or tan brick.

In the late 20s, after the arrival of an officially sanctioned modern style, Art Deco, Naïve Modern comes to an abrupt halt, and this is not a coincidence. Low-budget builders nearly always try to imitate, as best they can, the established fashions of the day. The difficulty here is that Art Deco is hard to do on a tight budget, characteristically requiring a variety of special materials beyond brick and crafts beyond that of masonry. The use of Art Deco in downmarket projects, residential or commercial, was actually quite limited. We can surmise that, confronted with a celebrated modern style that they could not feasibly imitate, builders of working class housing and utilitarian commercial structures abandoned the unsanctioned style of Naïve Modern, a genre that was now passe. Commercial development was nearly halted by the Depression in any case. A surprising number of low-rise multiple-dwellings and houses continued to be built in the boroughs through the 30s, but largely in the cottage mode of Middle Village and Addisleigh Park.

So, how can we explain the consistent invisibility of Naïve Modern to architectural history, an anonymity that has persisted for a hundred years? One reason may be that not one, even slightly, prominent Naïve Modern building was made in New York that might represent the style in cultural awareness. But the answer must lie in the perceived tackiness attached to is lower-middle class social basis, the deadliest of all associations to connoisseurs. Here is another disconnection between style and substance. Formally speaking, the style of Naïve Modern does not really exist; the substance of Naïve Modern is a living reality for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, a cityscape made with pride and optimism, hiding in plain sight.

* When the NYC Landmarks Commission encounters any non-historicist building of the Premodern Period, it often uses the label ‘Arts and Crafts’, as it does with the Apple Store building in the Meatpacking District. This is inappropriate in several ways. The Arts and Crafts movement was important in the Premodern Period (1900-1920) but its impact was limited in urban development generally and has few pure expressions in New York. While Arts and Crafts rejected historicism and classicism, the style, as its name conveys, evangelized against mass production and industrialization. It is characterized by rich ornamentation, variety of materials and polychromatic elements, often suggesting or explicitly representing organic forms. Arts and Crafts is not an abstract style whereas Naïve Modern is rigorously so.

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