Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
AMERICAN
ARCHITECTURE
Studies
BY
MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
1892
Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
TO
K. L. S.
_CONTENTS_
PAGE
THE POINT OF VIEW 1
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE 6
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES 52
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 68
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 86
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE:
I. CHICAGO 112
II. ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS 168
_ILLUSTRATIONS_
NEW YORK:
PAGE
RECESSED BALCONY, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE 13
DOORWAYS ON MADISON AVENUE 17
ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET 19
DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET 21
HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET 22
HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE 25
DOORWAY AT FIFTH AVENUE AND SIXTY-SEVENTH STREET 33
GLIMPSE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE FROM MADISON AVENUE 35
FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN’S HOUSE 37
ORIEL IN W. K. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE 39
REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH AVENUE 42
DOORWAY OF GUERNSEY BUILDING, BROADWAY 44
UNITED BANK BUILDING 46
POST BUILDING 47
GATEWAY OF MILLS BUILDING 49
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES:
HOUSE OF W. K. VANDERBILT 53
HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT 59
HOUSES OF W. H. VANDERBILT 63
POST AND RAILING, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE 67
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE:
THE BRIDGE FROM THE BROOKLYN SIDE 69
BRIDGE AT MINNEAPOLIS 75
SECTION OF BROOKLYN BRIDGE TOWER 77
SECTION OF ANCHORAGE. (SIDE VIEW.) 81
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL:
PROPOSED CATHEDRAL AT ALBANY 87
WEST ELEVATION 91
EAST ELEVATION 95
GROUND-PLAN 99
TRANSVERSE SECTION THROUGH CHOIR 105
CHICAGO:
CLOCK TOWER, DEARBORN STATION 112
FROM THE CITY AND COUNTY BUILDING 118
THE ART INSTITUTE 121
ENTRANCE TO THE ART INSTITUTE 123
BALCONY OF AUDITORIUM 125
TOWER OF AUDITORIUM 127
THE FIELD BUILDING 131
ARCADE FROM THE STUDEBAKER BUILDING 135
THE OWINGS BUILDING 139
CORNER OF INSURANCE EXCHANGE 141
ENTRANCE TO THE PHŒNIX BUILDING 145
ORIEL, PHŒNIX BUILDING 147
JANUA RICHARDSONIENSIS 152
ORIEL OF DWELLING 154
DWELLING IN LAKE SHORE DRIVE 156
DWELLING IN PRAIRIE AVENUE 158
FRONT IN DEARBORN AVENUE 163
A HOUSE OF BOWLDERS 165
A BYZANTINE CORBEL 166
ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS:
PUBLIC LIBRARY, MINNEAPOLIS 176
ENTRANCE TO PUBLIC LIBRARY, MINNEAPOLIS 177
THE PEOPLE’S CHURCH, ST. PAUL 178
UNITARIAN CHURCH, MINNEAPOLIS 180
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ST. PAUL 182
WEST HOTEL, MINNEAPOLIS 183
LUMBER EXCHANGE, MINNEAPOLIS 187
ENTRANCE TO BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS 188
CORNER OF BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS 190
THE “GLOBE” BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS 191
ENTRANCE TO “PIONEER PRESS” BUILDING, ST. PAUL 192
CORNER OF “PIONEER PRESS” BUILDING 193
BANK OF MINNESOTA, ST. PAUL 195
TOP OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL 196
ENTRANCE TO NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL 198
NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS 200
VESTIBULE OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING,
MINNEAPOLIS 201
DWELLING IN MINNEAPOLIS 202
DWELLING IN ST. PAUL 203
PORTE-COCHÈRE, ST. PAUL 204
PORCH IN ST. PAUL 205
FROM A DWELLING IN ST. PAUL 206
DWELLINGS IN ST. PAUL 207
PORCH IN ST. PAUL 209
[Illustration]_THE POINT OF VIEW_
The connection between the papers here collected, in addition to their
common subject-matter, is their common point of view. Of this I do not
know that I can make a clearer or briefer statement than I made in a
speech delivered, in response to the toast of “Architecture,” at the
fifth annual banquet of the National Association of Builders, given
February 12, 1891, at the Lenox Lyceum, in New York. Accordingly I
reprint here the report of my remarks:
“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the National Association of
Builders,--You will not expect from me, in responding to this
toast, any exhibition of that facetious spirit with which some of
my predecessors have entertained you. It has, indeed, been said
that American humor has never found full expression except in
architecture. It has also been said by an honored friend of mine,
himself an architect, whom I hoped to see here to-night, that
American architecture was the art of covering one thing with
another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, would
not be desirable. But I hope you will agree with me that, though
the expression is comic, the fact, so far as it is a fact, is
serious even to sadness. It is a great pleasure and a great
privilege for me to speak to this sentiment, and it is especially a
privilege for me to speak upon it to an association of builders,
because it seems to me that the real, radical defect of modern
architecture in general, if not of American architecture in
particular, is the estrangement between architecture and
building--between the poetry and the prose, so to speak, of the art
of building, which can never be disjoined without injury to both.
If you look into any dictionary or into any cyclopædia under
‘architecture,’ you will find that it is the art of building; but I
don’t think that you would arrive at that definition from an
inspection of the streets of any modern city. I think, on the
contrary, that if you were to scrape down to the face of the main
wall of the buildings of these streets, you would find that you had
simply removed all the architecture, and that you had left the
buildings as good as ever; that is to say, the buildings in which
the definition I have quoted is illustrated are in the minority,
and the buildings of which I have just spoken are in the majority;
and the more architectural pretensions the building has, the more
apt it is to illustrate this defect of which I have spoken.
“It is, I believe, historically true, in the history of the world,
with one conspicuous exception, that down to the Italian
Renaissance, some four centuries ago, the architect was himself a
builder. The exception is the classical period in Rome. The Grecian
builders, as all of you know, had taken the simplest possible
construction, that of the post and lintel, two uprights carrying a
crossbeam, and they had developed that into a refined and beautiful
thing. The Romans admired that, and they wished to reproduce it in
their own buildings, but the construction of their own buildings
was an arched construction; it was a wall pierced with arches.
They did not develop that construction into what it might have
been. They simply pierced their wall with arches and overlaid it
with an envelope of the artistic expression of another
construction, which they coarsened in the process. According to
some accounts, they hired Greek decorators to overlay it with this
architecture which had nothing to do with it, and there was the
first illustration in all history of this difference between the
art of architecture and the art of building. In every other country
in the world the architect had been the builder. I think that is
true down to the Italian Renaissance; and then building was really
a lost art. There hadn’t been anything really built in the
fifteenth century; and they began to employ general artists,
painters and sculptors and goldsmiths, to design their buildings,
and these men had no models before them except this Grecian-Roman
architecture of which I speak.[A] These men reproduced that in
their designs, and left the builder to construct it the best way he
could, and that, I am told, is a process which sometimes prevails
in the present time. But before that everything had been a simple
development of the construction and the material of the building,
and since that men have thought they perceived that architecture
was one thing and building was another, and they have gone on to
design buildings without any sort of reference to the materials of
which they were composed, or the manner in which they were put
together. That is the origin of the exclusively modern practice of
working in architectural styles, as it is called. Why, before the
fifteenth century, I don’t suppose any man who began to build a
building ever thought in what style he should compose it any more
than I thought before I got up here in what language I should
address you; he simply built in the language to which he was
accustomed and which he knew. You will find this perfect truth is
the great charm of Grecian architecture, and ten or fifteen
centuries later it was the great charm of Gothic architecture; that
is to say, that it was founded upon fact, that it was the truth,
that it was the thing the man was doing that he was concerned
about, even in those pieces of architecture which seem to us the
most exuberant, the most fantastic, like the front of Rouen, or
like the cathedral of which Longfellow speaks, as you all remember:
“‘How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while, canopied with leaves,
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers.’
Even in those things there was that logical, law-abiding, sensible,
practical adherence to the facts of construction, to the art of
building, which we have so long lost, and which I hope we are
getting back again.
“There are examples, in the work of our modern architecture, of
architects who design with this same truth, with this same reality,
with this same sincerity that animated the old builders before the
coming-in of this artificial and irrelevant system of design, and
one of them is the building in which I am informed a great many of
you spent last evening; I mean the Casino. I don’t know any more
admirable illustration of real, genuine, modern architecture than
that building; and among all its merits I don’t know any merit
greater than the fidelity with which the design follows the facts
of structure in the features, in the material, in everything. It is
a building in baked clay; there isn’t a feature in it in brick or
in terra-cotta which could be translated into any other material
without loss. It is a beautiful, adequate, modern performance. I
say this without any reservation, because unfortunately the genius
who, in great part, designed that building has gone from us; and
there are many things by living architects, whom I cannot mention
because they are living, which exhibit these same merits. There is
one other example that I would like to mention here, because many
of you know his work; I mean the late John Wellborn Root, of
Chicago. I shouldn’t mention him either if he hadn’t,
unfortunately, gone from us. Mr. Root’s buildings exhibit the same
true sincerity--the knowledge of the material with which he had to
do, the fulfilment of the purpose which he had to perform. I don’t
know any greater loss that could have happened to the architecture
of this country and to the architecture of the future than that man
dying before his prime. These are stimulating and fruitful examples
to the architects of the present time to bring their art more into
alliance, more into union, more into identity, with the art of
building; and it is by these means, gentlemen, and by these means
only, that we can ever gain a living, a progressive, a real
architecture--the architecture of the future.”
[Illustration]_CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE_[B]
The new departure is an apt name for what some of its conductors
describe as the new “school” in architecture and decoration. It has
still, after nearly ten years of almost complete sway among the young
architects of England and of the United States, all the signs of a
departure--we might say of a hurried departure--and gives no hint of an
arrival, or even of a direction. It is, in fact, a general “breaking-up”
in building, as the dispersion of Babel was in speech, and we can only
and somewhat desperately hope that the utterances of every man upon whom
a dialect has suddenly fallen may at least be intelligible to himself.
From a “movement” so exclusively centrifugal that it assumes rather the
character of an explosion than of an evolution, not much achievement can
be looked for. In fact, the “movement” has not, thus far, either in
England or in the United States, produced a monument which anybody but
its author would venture to pronounce very good. Not to go back to the
times when Gothic architecture was vernacular in England, it has
produced nothing which can be put in competition with the works either
of the English classical revival, or with the works of the English
Gothic revival--with St. Paul’s and the Radcliffe Library, on the one
hand, or with Westminster Palace and the Manchester Town-hall, on the
other. Before the “movement” began, the architects of Europe and America
were divided into two camps. They professed themselves either
Renaissance or Gothic architects. The mediævalists acknowledged a
subjection to certain principles of design. The classicists accepted
certain forms and formulæ as efficacious and final. They were both,
therefore, under some restraint. But the new movement seems to mean that
aspiring genius shall not be fettered by mechanical laws or academic
rules, by reason or by revelation, but that every architect shall build
what is right in his own eyes, even if analysis finds it absurd and
Vitruvius condemns it as incorrect.
“Queen Anne” is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a
multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work
which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient
vagueness about the term which fits it for that use. But it is rather
noteworthy that the effect of what is most specifically known as Queen
Anne is to restrain the exuberances of design. Whoever recalls
Viollet-le-Duc’s pregnant saying, that “only primitive sources supply
the energy for a long career,” would scarcely select the reign of Queen
Anne out of all English history for a point of departure in the history
of any one of the plastic arts. The bloated Renaissance of Wren’s
successors, such as is shown in Queen’s College and in Aldrich’s church
architecture in Oxford, was its distinctive attainment in architecture.
The minute and ingenious woodcarving of Grinling Gibbons was its
distinctive attainment in decoration. Nothing could show more forcibly
the degeneracy of art at the period which of late years has been
represented as an æsthetic renascence than the acceptance of these
wood-carvings, which in execution and all technical qualities are as
complete, and in design and all imaginative qualities are as trivial and
commonplace, as contemporary Italian sculpture, as works of art
comparable to the graceful inventions of Jean Goujon, and clearly
preferable to the sometimes rude but always purposeful decoration of
mediæval churches.
The revivalists of Queen Anne have not confined their attentions to the
reign of that sovereign. They have searched the Jacobean and the
Georgian periods as well, and have sucked the dregs of the whole English
Renaissance. Unhappily, nowhere in Europe was the Renaissance so
unproductive as in the British Islands. It was so unproductive, indeed,
that Continental historians of architecture have scarcely taken the
trouble to look it up or to refer to it at all. Not merely since the
beginning of the Gothic revival, but since the beginning of the Greek
revival that was stimulated by the publication of Stuart’s work on
Athens, in which for the first time uncorrupted Greek types could be
studied, what contemporary architects have ransacked as a treasury was
considered a mere lumber-room, and fell not so much into disesteem as
into oblivion. During two generations nobody any more thought of
studying the works of English architecture from Hawksmoor to
“Capability” Brown, than anybody thought of studying the poetry of
Blackmore and Hayley. The attempt within the past ten years to raise to
the rank of inspirations the relics of this decadence, which for years
had been regarded by everybody as rather ugly and ridiculous, is one of
the strangest episodes in the strange history of modern architecture.
Mr. Norman Shaw has been the chief evangelist of this strange revival.
Mr. Shaw is a very clever designer, with a special felicity in piquant
and picturesque groupings, which he had shown in Gothic work, especially
in country-houses, before the caprice seized him of uniting free
composition with classic detail, and the attempt at this union is what
is most distinctively known as Queen Anne. Whoever considers the
elements of this combination would hardly hope that the result could be
a chemical union, or more than a mechanical mixture. Classic detail is
the outcome and accompaniment of the simplest construction possible,
which was employed by the Greek architects in the simplest combination
possible, and precisely because it was so simple and so primitive they
were enabled to reduce it to an “order,” and to carry it to a pitch of
purity, lucidity, and refinement to which the most enthusiastic
mediævalist will scarcely maintain that more complicated constructions
have ever attained. But this very perfection, which was only attainable
when life was simple and the world was young, this necessary relation
between the construction and the detail of Greek Doric, makes it forever
impossible that Greek detail should be successfully “adapted” to modern
buildings. A late writer on the theory of architecture has said of Greek
architecture: “As partisans of its historical glory, we should desire
that it remain forever in its historical shrine.” We laugh at the men of
two generations ago who covered Europe and America with private and
public buildings in reproduction as exact as they could contrive of
Grecian temples. But, after all, if the Greek temple be the ultimate,
consummate flower, not only of all actual but of all possible
architectural art, were not these men wiser in their generation than
their successors who have taken the Greek temple to pieces and tried to
construct modern buildings out of its fragments? There is even
something touching and admirable, in this view, in the readiness and
completeness of the sacrifice to beauty which the reproducers of the
Greek temples made of all their merely material comforts and
conveniences, something that we miss in the adapters. The Romans can
scarcely be said to have attempted this adaptation. They built Roman
buildings for purposes and by methods which had never entered the minds
of Greek architects to conceive, and they built them with no more
thought of art than enters the mind of a modern railway engineer in
designing a truss bridge. After they were designed according to their
requirements it was that the Roman engineer overlaid them with an
irrelevant trellis of Greek architecture, debasing and corrupting the
Greek architecture in the process. And it is this hybrid architecture,
which analysis would at once have dissolved into its component parts,
that was accepted without analysis as the starting-point of “the new
departure” of the fifteenth century, and the ultimate English debasement
of which in the eighteenth is taken by the contemporary architects of
England and America as the starting-point of the new departure in the
nineteenth. It cannot be said that Mr. Norman Shaw and his followers
have succeeded in the task of combining free composition with classic
detail, which the Romans forbore to attempt, and in which the French
architects of the sixteenth century failed. Every attempt to fit antique
detail to a building faithfully designed to meet modern requirements
shows that it cannot be so fitted without being transformed, and--since
the sole excuse for the attempt is that it cannot be bettered--without
being debased. What the Queen Anne men have done is virtually what the
Romans did. They have shirked the impossible problem they unnecessarily
imposed upon themselves, and have either overlaid or inlaid their
buildings with their architecture. Of course the result of this process
can no more be accepted as an architectural organism than if they had
hung water-proof paper on the outer walls instead of decorating them
with carving, or moulding, or what not, built in the walls, but no more
architecturally related to them than the paper-hanging. But this is
precisely what has been done in every “free classic” building, with more
or less skill and dissimulation of the process. It is seldom done with
the winning candor with which it has been done in the house of Mr. W. H.
Vanderbilt in New York, which is officially described as a specimen of
the “Greek Renaissance,” possibly because its architectural details are
all Roman. In that edifice two bands of exquisite carving--exquisite in
execution, that is to say--which girdle the building, simply occur on
the wall at levels where they are quite meaningless in relation to the
building; where, consequently, they would not help the expression of the
building, if the building could be said to have any expression beyond
that of settled gloom; and where the irrelevant carving, not being
framed by itself, would contradict the expression of a structure which
was architecturally, and not alone mechanically, a building. How much
this carving would gain by being framed away, so that if it did not
help, it should at least not injure, the architecture to which it is
attached, may be seen by comparing these Vanderbilt houses with a
brown-stone house, in formal Renaissance, in upper Fifth Avenue, near
Sixty-ninth Street, where the carving is neither better cut nor more
abundant than that of the Vanderbilt houses, but where its disposition
at least appears to be premeditated, and not casual.
It would scarcely be worth while to point out the faults of designs, if
they can even be described as such, so generally disesteemed as those
of the two houses built for Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, “those boxes of brown
stone with architecture appliqué.” But it is worth pointing out that the
radical error, which in these appears so crudely and naïvely as to be
patent to the wayfaring man who has never thought about architecture, is
latent in all the works of the Queen Anne movement--to which these
houses do not specifically belong--and must vitiate every attempt to
adjust classic detail to free and modern composition. Classic detail
cannot grow out of modern structures faithfully designed for modern
purposes as it grows out of antique structure, or as Gothic ornament
grows out of Gothic structure, like an efflorescence. It must be
“adjusted” as visibly an after-thought, and to say this is to say that
in all Queen Anne buildings the architecture is appliqué.
However, to disparage Queen Anne is not to explain its acceptance. It
looks like a mere masquerade of nineteenth-century men in
eighteenth-century clothes, and with many of its practitioners it is no
more. In England it seems to have originated as a caprice by which a
clever and dashing but by no means epoch-making architect misled the
younger and weaker of his brethren. In this country, which had never
been much more architecturally than an English colony, there seemed
special reasons for following the new fashion of being old-fashioned.
American architects, and American builders before there were any
American architects, had been exhorted, as they have lately been
exhorted again, to do something distinctively American. The colonial
building, which was done by trained English mechanics, was of the same
character as the contemporary domestic work of England, and showed in
its ornament the same unreflecting acceptance of a set of forms and
formulæ bequeathed as a tradition of the trade and
[Illustration: RECESSED BALCONY, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTH AVENUE.
Herter Brothers, Architects.]
part of the outfit of a journeyman. Although Jefferson complained that
in his time and in rural Virginia it was impossible to “find a workman
who could draw an order,” it is evident that there was no difficulty of
that kind in other parts of the country. These trained workmen, it is to
be noted, were all carpenters, and there is probably no work in stone
which shows an equal precision and facility in workmanship. Such
buildings as the New York City Hall and the Albany Academy were clearly
the work of architects of culture according to the standard of the time.
The only architectural qualities of the works of the mechanics were the
moderation and respectability of detail, which they had learned as part
of their trade, and it is quite absurd to ascribe to these buildings any
value as works of art. It is particularly absurd to assign the
degradation of house-building which undoubtedly followed, and which made
the typical American house, after the Greek temple had spent its force,
the most vulgar habitation ever built by man, to the substitution of
book-learned architects for handicraftsmen. People talk as if the middle
part of Fifth Avenue, the brown-stone high-stoop house with its bloated
detail, which displaced the prim precision of the older work, had been
done by educated architects. In fact, there was hardly a single building
put up in New York after the design of an educated architect between the
works we have mentioned and the erection of Trinity Church by Mr. Upjohn
in 1845, which not only marked a great advance over anything that had
been done before, but began the Gothic revival to which we directly or
indirectly owe whatever of merit has been done since, including so much
of Queen Anne as, not being Queen Anne, is good. But the bulk of the
building which gave its architectural character to New York and to the
country continued to be done by mechanics, who continued, so far as
they could, to supply the demand of the market, who gradually lost the
training their predecessors had enjoyed, and who lost also all sense of
the necessity for that training in the new demand that their work should
be, above all things, “American.” As the slang of to-day puts it, they
were exhorted, as the architects are still sometimes exhorted, to “talk
United States.” They might have answered that there was no such
language, and that a few bits of slang did not constitute a poetical
vocabulary. The feeling which urges an artist to be patriotic by being
different from other people not long ago led Mr. Walt Whitman to resent
the absence of an “autochthonous” poetry, and has lately led a newspaper
writer to call the attention of a New England building committee to the
log cabin as the most suitable motive for a town-hall they are going to
build.
The Northern reader notes with mild amusement the occasional resentment
in the Southern press of the absence of a “distinctive Southern
literature,” and perceives the plaint to be provincial; but he is not so
quick to perceive that his own clamor for an American this or that is
equally provincial. The hard lot of the American painter has often been
bewailed, in that, when he has tried to rid himself of his provincialism
by learning to paint, and has learned to paint more or less as other men
do who have learned to paint, he is straightway berated for not being
provincial. If American literature or painting or architecture be good,
the Americanism of it may safely be left to take care of itself. But a
man cannot be expected to innovate to much purpose upon usages with
which he is unfamiliar; and the effects which Mr. Whitman’s admonition
to his fellow-poets to “fix their verses to the gauge of the
round-globe” would probably have upon an aspiring young poet, conscious
[Illustration: DOORWAYS ON MADISON AVENUE.
G. E. Harney, and McKim, Mead, & White, Architects.]
of genius, but weak in his parts of speech, are the effects which the
demand for aboriginality actually had upon the race of builders, whether
they were content with that title, or without any sufficient provocation
described themselves as architects. They undoubtedly attained
difference, and their works did not remind the travelled observer of any
of the masterpieces of Europe. It is quite conceivable and not at all
discreditable that the wild work of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should
have led architects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks
behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Washington Square, and to
sigh for a return of the times when the common street architecture of
New York was sober and respectable, even if it was conventional and
stupid.
This justifiable preference for Bowling Green and Washington Square and
St. John’s Park over Broadway and Madison Square and Murray Hill, for an
architecture confessedly colonial over an architecture aggressively
provincial, is no doubt the explanation why so many of our younger
architects made haste to fall in behind the Queen Anne standard. What we
really have a right to blame them for is for not so far analyzing their
own emotions as to discover that the qualities they admired in the older
work, or admired by comparison with the newer, were not dependent upon
the actual details in which they found them. To be “content to dwell in
decencies forever” was not considered the mark of a lofty character even
by a poet of the time of Queen Anne. If virtue were, indeed, “too
painful an endeavor,” and if there were no choice except between the
state of dwelling in decencies and the state of dwelling in indecencies
forever, we could but admit that they had chosen the better part. But
they were not, in fact, confined to a choice between these alternatives.
The Gothic revival in England, after twenty years, had succeeded in
establishing something much more like a real vernacular architecture
than had been known in England before since the building of the
cathedrals--an architecture which, although starting from formulas and
traditions, had attained to principles, and was true, earnest, and
[Illustration: ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET.
C. C. Haight, Architect.]
alive. It was quite inevitable that it should be crude in proportion as
it was alive, according to the frankness with which it recognized that
we live in times unknown to the ancients, and endeavored to respond with
changes in its organism to changes wrought in its environment by new
requirements and new knowledge, with forms necessarily rude, inchoate,
embryonic, as beseems the formative period of letters and of arts as of
life, in contrast with the ultimate refinement which is the mark of a
completed development. But that these crudities would be refined was
also inevitable; that they were in process of refinement was apparent.
Another generation of artists as earnest as those who began the Gothic
revival might have brought this rough and swelling bud to a splendid
blossom. But in an evil hour, and under a strange spell, the young
architects of the United States followed the young architects of England
in preferring the refinements of a fixed and developed architecture to
the rudenesses of a living and growing architecture. Because they did
not see their way at once to “supply every deficiency and symmetrize
every disproportion,” they did not leave this for their successors, but
abandoned the attempt at an expression of the things they were doing for
the elegant expression in antique architecture of meanings that have
grown meaningless to modern men.
They have had their way in New York for seven or eight years, during a
period unprecedented in building activity, and out of all comparison in
the profusion with which money has been lavished upon building and
decoration. What have they gained for architectural art? They have,
indeed, subjected many miles of sandstone to the refining influence of
egg-and-dart mouldings (the designer of a house in Fifth Avenue has so
much faith in the efficacy of that ornament that he has belted his
street front with three rows of it, one above the other), and triglyphs
(faithfully to have contemplated which softens the manners, nor suffers
to be rude) have been brought within the reach of the humblest in the
decoration of tenement-houses. They have built so much and so
expensively that they have produced in minds--like some of their
own--which do not reflect much upon these things the impression that if
luxury and art be not synonymous, they are at least inseparably
connected, with the latter in the capacity of handmaiden. But will any
educated architect assert that the characteristic monuments of the last
five or six years--greatly superior in quantity, and superior by a great
multiple in cost--are equal in architectural value to the work of the
decade preceding? Suppose that Mr. Norman Shaw had not bedevilled the
weaker of his brethren, and that this unprecedented building activity
and this unparalleled spending of money that have fallen under the
control of architects had been directed along the lines laid down by the
Gothic revivalists, and had extended, consolidated, and refined the work
begun and carried on here by such architects as Mr. Upjohn, Mr. Eidlitz,
Mr. Withers, Mr. Cady, Mr. Potter, and Mr. Wight, will any educated
architect maintain that the result of such a process would not have been
nobler monuments than any to which we can point as characteristic
products of the later movement?
[Illustration: DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET.
R. H. Robertson, Architect.]
We might ask Mr. Harney, for example, who has been one of the noteworthy
contributors to the works of both periods, whether in falling to “grace”
he has not fallen from something more important. One can readily
understand that Mr. Harney, in contemplating the effect of his completed
work in the respectable warehouse at the corner of Bond Street and
Broadway, should have been disappointed in the effect of much of the
detail he had designed for his building, should have found some of it
rude, some of it disproportionate
[Illustration: HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET.
Bruce Price, Architect.]
to its function and position, and none of it exquisite in modelling. It
is also intelligible that he may have been dissatisfied with some parts
even of his still more successful house at Fifth Avenue and
Fifty-seventh Street, which, always a grateful object, has lately
acquired an air of additional distinction from the eager architectural
competition which has set in alongside of it, and the results of which
give an air of unquestionable animation--the animation of excited
controversy--to Fifty-seventh Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. This
dissatisfaction, if the architect underwent it, was a wholesome
discontent which we should have expected to see allayed by more
thoroughly studied detail in Mr. Harney’s succeeding work. But it seems
to have been a morbid sensitiveness to the defects of his work which led
Mr. Harney to abandon altogether, and in despair, the practice of
architectural design, and, when he had another commercial building to
do, to erect in Wall Street an entirely ineffectual structure, of which
the architecture that one carries away with him consists in a
crow-stepped gable, an irrelevant entablature appliqué which crosses the
building half-way up, and windows covered with flat arches, the
key-stones of which are “shored up” by the mullions; and, when he had
another city house to do, to depute the design of it to some unknown
carpenter who died before he was born, and to reproduce accurately in
Madison Avenue a Vandam or Charlton Street house built out of due time,
with a familiar “old New York” doorway, in the jambs of which quoins
intercept sheaves of mouldings. This confession that a carpenter of 1825
was a better-trained designer than an educated architect of 1880 is very
possibly creditable to the personal modesty of the latter; but Mr.
Harney’s own earlier works sufficiently testify that it does not do him
justice.
Mr. Cady, one of the most important and distinguished of the
contributors to the Gothic revival in New York, has also of late years
become a convert to the new movement, and seems from our point of view
to have thrown himself away with even less sufficient cause than that
which impelled Mr. Harney to his rash act. For we have distinctly
admitted that Mr. Harney had reason to be dissatisfied with his Gothic
detail, while we cannot make that admission in behalf of Mr. Cady. Mr.
Cady’s newer work is shown in a house of red-brick and brown sandstone,
which he contributed to the architectural competition just noticed. This
edifice shows a desire to live at peace in the midst of very quarrelsome
neighbors. Mr. Cady, indeed, could scarcely design a vulgar and
vociferous work if he tried. At any rate, he has never tried, and does
not in the least need to be put under the bonds of a style in order to
insure his keeping the peace. One wonders what Mr. Cady believes himself
to have gained in abandoning the style of his brilliant Art Building in
Brooklyn for the style of his not very noticeable house in Fifty-seventh
Street.
Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; but it can also be
attained, by architects who are really in quest of it, in other styles
quite as well, which admit a much wider range of expression, while the
student is forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre repertory of
Queen Anne any other quality than quietude can be expressed. Its
successes in domestic architecture are mainly the successes of
unnoticeableness, which is really the character not only of the
dwellings just mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth
Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, and of a house,
which has the great advantage of double the usual frontage, by Messrs.
McKim, Mead, & White, in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s
reproduction; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street by
these latter architects, which looks less like a work of architectural
art than a magnified piece of furniture “with the Chippendale feeling,”
can scarcely be called successful, while the house they designed for Mr.
Astor in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street front in
brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called Queen Anne, in spite of
the three rows of egg-and-dart moulding, already remarked, which crown
its rock-faced basement. The highest praise to which these typical Queen
Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thoroughly studied detail, such
as the treatment of the oriel in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is
that they look like eligible mansions for highly respectable families
content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also the highest
praise that can be bestowed upon their prototypes of the Georgian era.
We can repeat the admission that it is far better they should look like
that than like the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons,
without thereby admitting that the prim and prosaic expression of
respectability never so eminent can be scored as a triumph in domestic
architecture. The domestic architecture of Venice, or Rouen, or
Nuremberg has something more to say to us than that. And a touch of such
spirit and picturesqueness as Mr. Bruce Price has given us in a brick
house in Fifty-sixth Street (p. 22), or as Mr. Hunt has given us not
only in the elaborately ornate house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, but in
some dwellings in upper Madison Avenue, is more to be desired than a
mere omission to outrage decorum.
[Illustration: HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.]
Such as the successes of Queen Anne in domestic architecture are, they
are its only successes, although it is only fair to say that much
interesting work has been done in it, if not strictly of it, in suburban
houses and sea-side cottages, which do not come within our present
scope. A “feature” suffices for the architecture of a narrow street
front, and a feature may be compiled out of the repertory of Queen Anne
by a designer who thinks that result a reward of his pains. The oriel,
for example, in effect comprises the architecture of the house just
mentioned as designed by Mr. Haight. But even in a house which is only a
feature the classic detail is not always adjusted without a visible
incongruity to the constructions, out of which classic detail cannot
spontaneously grow as it grew out of classic constructions. The doorway,
for example, of the house designed by Mr. Robertson, which is virtually
repeated in the window over it, is a moulded round arch standing upon
pilasters of its own width, and thus apparently making of the jamb and
arch a complete and detached construction. That is to say, the pilasters
seem to carry the arch. The architect of the New York Post-office has
done the same thing in a much ruder way. But the elegance of Mr.
Robertson’s detail cannot rid even the spectator who does not stop to
analyze the source of the feeling of an uneasy sensation that what is
thus elegantly expressed is not the fact. An arch does, in fact,
exercise a lateral as well as a vertical pressure; and if the arch and
its vertical supports formed a detached construction, as they here
appear to do, the arch would be unstable. Insensible as the classical
Romans were to considerations of artistic expression, they were not so
insensible as this. They recognized the existence of a lateral pressure
by marking the impost of the arches with a continuous moulding, thus
allying the arch with its lateral abutment as well as with its vertical
support; and here the architect of the Post-office, wiser, or, if
thought be not predicable of his architecture, more fortunate than Mr.
Robertson, has been content to imitate them.
The buildings in which these solecisms appear, we repeat, are the
successes of Queen Anne. For structures more complicated most of its
practitioners have shrunk from invoking it. Messrs. Peabody and Stearns,
indeed, took the ground, when they designed the Union League Club House,
that a “feature” supplied a sufficient idea for that edifice; and that a
portico of four large Roman Corinthian columns in front, subdued to an
equal number of brick pilasters on the side, would meet the
architectural requirements of the case, if they let their consciousness
play freely over the remaining surfaces without reference to this
central thought. But the result has scarcely justified this belief, and
the spectator finds that the building, in spite of the unifying
influence of a large and simple roof, in addition to the feature in
question, does not make a total impression, but is scattering and
confused; while its parts, taken singly, are feeble in spite of their
extravagant scale. This, indeed, is not even a sacrifice to the
conventions, but a specimen of what can be achieved in a style of gentle
dulness gone rampant. If tame Queen Anne is a somewhat ineffectual
thing, what shall be said of wild Queen Anne? There is nothing wild
about two other public buildings in which architects have ventured upon
Queen Anne--one a hospital, in Park Avenue, by Mr. Haight, and one an
“institution” of some other kind, in Lexington Avenue, by Mr. Fernbach.
Both of these, indeed, are tame, and whatever the differences of detail
may be, both have much the same expression, so that one carries away
from either, as from one of the commonplace faces which we are always
confounding, an impression which may be that of the other--in either
case of a centre with projecting wings separately roofed, and the whole
wall overlaid with a shallow trellis of brick-work, too shallow to be
serviceable as buttresses, and serviceable only as the badge of the
alleged “style.” It seems hard upon an owner that he should be required
to pay money for rectangular applications of brick which can scarcely
strengthen his building appreciably, and can hardly be held to beautify
it, by way merely of labelling it, “This is Queen Anne.” And this
resemblance, be it noted, which is not so much a specific resemblance as
the expression of an amiable characterlessness common to both, is not
all to be imputed to the architects, except upon the ground of their
choice of a style. The works of both of them have character, and not at
all the same character, when they are working in a style which is a real
form-language in which meanings can be expressed, and not a mere little
phrase-book containing elegant extracts wherewith to garnish aimless
discourse. Mr. Fernbach,[C] as is testified by such works as the
“Staats-Zeitung” building and the German Savings-Bank in New York, and
the building of the Mutual Insurance Company in Philadelphia, is one of
the most accomplished practitioners in this country of academic
Renaissance. Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is a
highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not their fault if Queen
Anne, when spread over an extensive façade, spreads thin.
Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the temerity to attempt
a Queen Anne church, and the success of his essay is not such as to
invite imitation. The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue,
with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, which are of a rugged
rusticity, with the needful openings left square-headed and unmodelled;
but these walls are crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow
shingles, under a broad gable, and its openings united under a thin ogee
canopy of painted pine. There is here and there a little classic detail,
which, if it pleases the designer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the
interior that is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what the
German critics call the “playful use” of forms devised for one
construction and one material in another material and with no visible
construction; and the result of this pleasantry is what a German
professor, celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “an important
joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, the treatment
passes a joke, for the mahogany nave arches, with their little
protruding key-woods, and their supporting posts incased
in boxed pedestals, are actually doing the work of carrying the
clere-story--unless, indeed, there is a concealed system of
iron-work--although their function is so far sacrificed to their form
that they are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective
fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne contains no forms
that can be even tortured into the construction of an open ceiling, the
architect has omitted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere
loft, sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as in the
fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is entirely playful, so that
the interior of the church seems to be a collection of pleasantries. In
a dining-room, for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but
really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes seems to be
ruled out by the previous question as to the admissibility in the sacred
edifice of levity even of the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for
the appliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeed for the
designers of “cozy” churches in general, that there is no official
censorship of church architecture as there is of church music, and that
no rubric makes it the duty of every minister, with such assistance as
he can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to suppress all
light and unseemly architecture by which vain and ungodly persons
profane the service of the sanctuary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the
spirit in which we have been asking other architects, what he has gained
by abandoning such an effort as he made some ten years before in the
Phillips Memorial Church to develop a composition out of his subject in
favor of these scraps of quotations, and of quotations neither fresh nor
very pregnant! He might answer that the church in which we admire at
least the effort was a somewhat untamed and obstreperous fabric, and
that the present edifice is much more chastened and subdued. It is tame,
no doubt, and Mr. Robertson’s talent, when he works in Queen Anne, is
subdued--
“subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand;”