WHILE the new bronze doors of the Boston Public Library may be little criticised from the standpoint of their artistic merit and interest as bas-reliefs, it seems open to question if the panels, as now employed, are suitable or indeed appropriate and logical solutions of the door problem. A bronze door especially, from its weight and the consequent difficulty with which it is moved, should be nicely adjusted to the conditions under which it must be constantly viewed. And these six new doors or “valves,” designed by Daniel C. French to fill the three openings from the vestibule to the lower hallway, cannot be considered as being actually satisfying.
To set aside for the moment any consideration of their appropriateness to the architectural environment in which they are placed, and take up only the questions they first suggest, it is the notable disregard of the ordinary and conventional attributes that custom and necessity have provided for the treatment of the swinging door that is so strongly evidenced in these designs that it first demands attention. If architecture is the art of construction, as it has been tersely defined, it is certainly to be expected that the problem presented in these doors should have been solved in such a way as to, at least, suggest the construction that we know is necessary to properly retain their shape, of which the treatment and design itself should be the logical expression.
In these new gates this principle has been utterly ignored, and the effect upon the eye, familiarized to the suggestion of support that is furnished by the customary visible door framing, is unpleasant, not to say disagreeable. Aside from the disregard of this psychological aspect of the case, the actual fact that no recognition of this necessary construction is given in the design, is so unfortunate that the beholder cannot bring himself to regard these bronze reliefs as swinging doors. If they had been immovable panels set within a well-defined architectural border or frame, including a lower or bottom rail as its most important member, or resting upon some supporting belt course, more in the way in which the famous bas-reliefs in the Fountain of the Innocents at Paris were used by Jean Goujon, the result would have been less open to criticism.
The striving for originality that actuated the designer is not only commendable in itself, but is indeed a very considerable adjunct to the modern spirit that is yearly becoming more strongly evidenced in the arts But if this spirit is not employed with a proper understanding of its relative importance and value, and with the necessary restraint and conservatism, it is well-nigh certain to become ridiculous, as in instances of “L'Art Nouveau”.
As regards their appropriateness to the position, the very slight relief in which the panels are modeled is little fitted to the lighting, which is insufficient as well as poorly placed, coming but directly in front of the doorways. Their lack of harmony with the architectural environment in which they are set is even more condemnable where the entire building is such an inspired and scholarly development from the best Italian Renaissance forms, a style which should have been adopted as the very first essential of so important an accessory as might have been furnished by these doors.
It is, of course, purely a coincidence that a set of bronze doors should have been recently installed in another building by the same architects and in a location removed by but a few miles from the Boston Library. Yet those doors happen to be such beautiful adaptations of Renaissance precedent that they would have been immeasurably more effective and better suited to the environment and surroundings in the more centrally located and important building on Copley square.
