[ Credit]

Illustration 8. Lincoln Memorial, 1923.

In order to create architecture symbolic of authority, Kahn derived the basic composition of his portico from a very popular building recently completed by his close friend Henry Bacon: the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. (1911-22) (Illustration 8). Kahn and Bacon traveled together in Europe in 1891, and remained close for the remainder of their lives. Bacon died in 1924, and Kahn most likely conceived of the central portico as an homage to his celebrated friend.

Both buildings utilized fluted Doric columns to support entablatures of similar proportions and prominent attic stories. Both buildings have similar, dense, horizontal proportions, whose hard edges are softened by classical antefixae along the parapets. The power of Kahn’s quotation would not have been lost on contemporary audiences, especially those who followed architecture.

In 1923, Bacon’s templar Lincoln Memorial created a sensation, crystallizing the nation’s obsession with Lincoln, his life, and moral example. At this time Lincoln’s name memorialized a wide variety of things: Victor D. Brenner’s design for the Lincoln penny was introduced in 1909, the Lincoln motorcar in 1918, and promoters campaigned for the construction of the Lincoln Highway in 1913. Many popular and scholarly biographies were done on the 16th president at the time, including Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln The Prairie Years of 1926; these biographies examined in minute detail his political, military, and moral choices, lionizing him and building his reputation. During this time of the cult of Lincoln, Bacon’s Memorial was published everywhere, and the architect was showered with honors; President Harding took the unusual step of awarding Bacon the American Institute of Architect’s highest achievement award, the A.I.A. Gold Medal, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, using the Memorial as a patriotic backdrop for a political photo opportunity. Bacon’s monument embodied in classical architectural form the moral purity and power of the Lincoln myth.

The noted New York architect Ralph Adams Cram, a leading conservative, curmudugeonly critic of his time, wrote of the Lincoln Memorial: "Here is one of the most significant civil structures in America, consecrated to a great and holy memory, occupying a site of distinction and importance in the chief city of the nation." [7] Cram’s effusive praise was rare, attributable to his enthusiasm for both the pure, templar form of the Bacon design and the "almost mythical memory of Lincoln." [8] The Lincoln Memorial stands as probably the high point of Beaux-Arts Classicism in the United States; subsequently to its construction, the archaeological qualities of classical revivalism became less popular, particularly in the wake of the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris and the rise of the Bauhaus in Germany. Yet, at this time, in the early 1920s, Albert Kahn utilized a still-powerful vocabulary to energize and distinguish the façade of Angell Hall.