the earlier with the later work, could fail to feel that the attempt to
express something, however crude and so far unsuccessful the attempt
might have been, was a more manly and artistic employment than this
elegant trifling, in which the highest attainable success has an element
of puerility. In truth, it is gratifying to remark that the argument by
which we have supposed the architect to have solaced himself for the
result of his ecclesiastical labors in Queen Anne does not seem to have
convinced himself, and that a later work still, a sandstone church
farther down the same avenue, is a much more serious piece of design,
being an attempt to develop the architecture out of the structure
itself. It would be especially unjust to misapply to Mr. Robertson’s
Queen Anne church the saying that the style is the man, for the church
last mentioned shows that Mr. Robertson is a man of talents, when he
gives his talents a chance.
Thus far we have been speaking of the respectable and conservative
element in the new departure, of the Extreme Right, so to speak, and
generally of works which were seriously designed, and so are entitled to
be seriously considered. It is not so pleasant to turn to the Extreme
Left, a frantic and vociferous mob, who welcome the “new departure” as
the disestablishment of all standards, whether of authority or of
reason, and as an emancipation from all restraints, even those of public
decency, and who avail themselves of the remission of them from academic
restraints to those imposed by their own sense of propriety by promptly
showing that they haven’t any. The tame decorum of one phase of the new
departure is supplemented by the violent indecorum of another. Sometimes
the same designers march now with one wing and now with the other of the
divergent host. Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, for example, have consoled
themselves for what now almost seems to have been the enforced
sedateness of the houses we have noticed, by a mad orgy of bad
architecture in East Fifty-fifth Street. The scene of this excess almost
immediately adjoins the dignified and respectable dwelling designed by
Mr. Haight, and almost frights that edifice from its propriety, and the
designers seem to have been led into it by the baleful example of older
persons who ought to have known better, and who committed the maddest
freaks in the artistic quarter of the London suburb of Chelsea while in
a condition of total irresponsibility alike to any convictions and to
any conventions of architectural art. The present indecorum has been
committed in the design of two dwellings which consist of a ferociously
rugged basement and parapeted cornice in granite, with two or three
irregularly disposed tin dormers emerging above, and with a flat and
shallow screen of brick wall inserted between them, as between the upper
and the nether millstone, and having its thinness emphasized at all the
angles by shallow incisions forming a series of brick weather-strips, as
it were, a square reticulation of which traverses the plane surfaces
also. It is quite conceivable that rugged simplicity may have suggested
itself to a designer as a desirable character for a city house, but it
seems scarcely possible that squareness and flatness and thinness should
have appeared desirable, and quite impossible that beauty should have
seemed to dwell in a building the top and bottom of which were
characterized by rugged simplicity, and the middle by squareness and
flatness and thinness. The details, whether in brick or granite or tin,
are as preposterous as the conception of a building with its parts thus
swearing at each other. The round-headed doorway is surmounted with the
imitation in granite of a metal flap secured to the rest of the block
from which it is cut by similitudes in granite of iron bolt-heads. In
the basement respectable blocks of granite are subjected to the
indignity of being decorated with streaming ribbons in low-relief. In
truth, the only detail of the work which one can contemplate even with
tolerance is a grill in the basement doorway which is the simplest
possible trellis of iron rods.
Indecorous and incoherent as this edifice unquestionably is, it has yet
the air of a gentleman taking his pleasure, albeit in a perverse and
vicious fashion, when compared, for example, with the dwellings in red
brick
[Illustration: DOORWAY AT FIFTH AVENUE AND SIXTY-SEVENTH STREET.]
and brown stone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street.
In these there is no composition whatever, and the effect is so
scattering, and the whole is so fortuitous an aggregation of unrelated
parts, that it is impossible to describe the houses or to remember them
when one’s back is turned. Their fragments only recur to memory, as the
blurred images of a hideous dream. So one recalls the Batavian grace of
the bulbous gables; the oriel-windows, so set as to seem in imminent
danger of toppling out; the egg-and-dart moulding, niggled up and down
jambs of brick-work connected by flat openings with protruding
key-stones; the whiplashes cut in sandstone blocks; the decorative
detail fished from the slums of the Rococo. These are not subjects for
architectural criticism; they call for the intervention of an
architectural police. They are cases of disorderly conduct done in brick
and brown stone. Hazardous as the superlative degree generally is, it is
not much of a hazard to say that they are the most thoroughly
discreditable buildings ever erected in New York, and it is to be noted
that they are thoroughly characteristic of the period. Such a nightmare
might, perhaps, have entered the brain of some speculative builder
during the wildest vulgarity of the brown-stone period, but he would not
have had the effrontery to build it, being deterred by the consideration
that nobody would face public ridicule by consenting to live in it. Some
speculator is, however, convinced that there is now a market for a house
which stands upon the street corner, and screeches for people to come
and look at it, when there is nothing in it worth looking at; and we
must take shame to ourselves from the reflection that the speculator may
be right in counting upon this extreme vulgarization of the public
taste, and that, at any rate, there is no police to prevent the emission
of the screech upon the public highway.
This is the result of a demand for “something new” upon a mind incapable
of producing anything good. The screech is the utterance of the Sweet
Singer of Michigan, exhorted not to mind about grammar, but “to fix her
verses to the gauge of the round globe.” It is an extreme instance, to
be sure; but there are others only less discreditable, and only to be
dealt with in the way of what is called “slashing” criticism, which
[Illustration: GLIMPSE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE FROM MADISON AVENUE.
C. C. Haight, Architect.]
probably never yet served any more important purpose than to ease the
critic’s mind. It is enough to indicate these things, and to point out
that they are all produced by the strain in the minds of incompetent
designers after originality and aboriginality--a purpose essentially
vulgar, which would vitiate the work even of a competent designer
wherever it could be detected. For although the pursuit of excellence is
sure to result in novelty, the pursuit of novelty is sure not to result
in excellence. The extreme instance we have cited is still an instance
of a tendency to which all the younger generation of architects, of whom
so much was hoped, and of whom, considering their opportunities, so
little of value has come, have more or less yielded--the tendency to
take themselves too seriously and their art not seriously enough, and to
imagine that anything that occurs to them is for that reason good enough
to build, without asking it any questions. Such caricatures of
architecture as these houses would not occur to the mind of an educated
architect; but when all restraints, rational and academic, are removed,
even educated architects, as we have seen, will not always take the
trouble to analyze their conceptions before embodying them in durable
brick and stone. It is from this that it comes that, as we said awhile
ago, the characteristic works of the present period are distinctly
inferior to the characteristic works of the preceding period. It is not
that thoroughly good buildings have not been done within the latter
period, but that they are not characteristic of the period. The
buildings which appear to have been done by architects, and yet fail to
stand the tests either of sense or of style, date themselves infallibly
as having been done since 1876. One must resort to external evidence to
ascertain whether the buildings that are honorable monuments to their
architects were done before or since Mr. Norman Shaw did all this
mischief.
First among these, one has little hesitation in placing the new
buildings designed by Mr. Haight for Columbia College. Mr. Haight has
not here been in pursuit of novelty, but has been content with
conforming his structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus
arrived at so as to heighten their inherent expression. And although he
has kept within the limits of historical English Gothic in doing this,
the result of the process is an individual building with a
characteristic
[Illustration: FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN’S HOUSE.
Calvert Vaux, Architect.]
expression of its own, the most successful piece of Gothic design that
has been done in New York since Mr. Withers designed the Jefferson
Market Court-house. In Queen Anne, as we saw, Mr. Haight’s work was not
very distinguishable from the work of a very different architect. With a
vocabulary limited to fifty words, not much can be expressed. But when
he permits himself the use of language, it is seen that Mr. Haight can
express thoughts. In composition and in detail these buildings are
thoroughly studied and thoroughly effective. In the earlier, a street
front of a whole block on Madison Avenue, the designer has resisted the
temptation to diversify his building into unrest, but has built a wall
of three stories in red brick and light sandstone, the broad and quiet
aspect of which is enhanced by the grouping of the openings, and not
disturbed by the chimney-stacks and the oriel and the turret which
animate the composition. The later building, of the same materials, has
been built for the library of the college, and the large hall which
contains this is in effect the building. This is treated with equal
skill, and to the same result of cloistral repose, of harmony and
dignity and grace. These vigorous and refined works show, if the showing
were needed, except by the architects of the new departure, that vigor
does not necessarily involve bowlders, nor refinement microscopic
mouldings, and that these short-cuts to architectural effect are rather
sorry and shabby substitutes for faithful and skilful design. That these
works of Mr. Haight’s are grammatically “correct” Gothic is not, to our
mind, either a merit or a defect. But it shows how wide is the range of
expression possible in the architecture of the Middle Ages, and of its
pliability to modern uses, that without a departure from precedent the
needs of an American college in the nineteenth century can be completely
answered in that architecture; for there is no innovation in Mr.
Haight’s work, unless we include the iron roof, which is partly visible
from the floor of the hall. There are one or two “survivals” of forms
which have lost their functions, as the unpierced pinnacled turrets at
the angles of the library building and the crenellated parapet of the
porch in the quadrangle. But, upon the whole, the result upon which the
college and its architect are to be congratulated has been attained by
following the advice of the sculptor who informed his pupil that the art
was not difficult: “You simply take a piece of marble and leave out what
you don’t want.” Mr. Haight has taken what he wanted in Gothic
architecture for the uses of Columbia College, and with the trivial
exceptions we have noted has left out the rest. And what is true of this
work is equally true of an unpretending and picturesque piece of late
Gothic, erected from Mr. Haight’s designs for St. Thomas’s School, in
East Fifty-ninth Street.
[Illustration: ORIEL IN W. K. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTY-SECOND STREET.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.]
Another interesting piece of Gothic work, though this time of distinctly
Victorian Gothic, is the house designed by Mr. Vaux for Governor Tilden.
The interest of this, however, is rather in the detail of form and color
than in general composition, since the building is architecturally only
a street front, and since the slightness of the projections and the lack
of visible and emphasized depth in the wall itself give it the
appearance rather of a screen than of one face of a building, and the
small gables which surmount it too evidently exist for the sole purpose
of animating the sky-line. But the color treatment of this front is
admirable, and recalls the best work of the most successful colorist in
architecture whom we have ever had in New York--Mr. Wrey Mould. It is
characteristic that interesting treatment of color, like every other
properly architectural development, has been stopped short by the new
“movement.” An unusually large variety of colors, and those of the most
positive tints that natural stones supply, has here been employed and
harmonized; and, what is even rarer, they have all been used with
architectural propriety to accentuate the construction and to heighten
its effect. An ingenious and novel use of dark granite, which when
polished is almost black, and which is employed in narrow bands
precisely where it is wanted, deserves particular remark. The decorative
carving attracts attention chiefly by its profusion, and by the
exquisite crispness and delicacy of its execution. In both these
respects the only parallel to it is in the house of Mr. W. K.
Vanderbilt, for, as we have seen, the carving upon the houses of Mr. W.
H. Vanderbilt does not count. That this carving counts so fully is the
result of the skill of the architect in fixing its place and adjusting
its scale so that it everywhere assists the architecture, and is better
in its place than it would be in another place.
[Illustration: REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH
AVENUE.
George B. Post, Architect.]
These things are equally true of the equally profuse carving in the
house designed by Mr. Hunt for Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt; but this, although
in a monochrome of gray limestone, would have a high architectural
interest without the least decoration by force of design alone. The
decorative detail is scarcely so well adjusted to the building in scale
as that in the house just mentioned, or in the house designed for Mr.
Cornelius Vanderbilt by Mr. Post, being partly lost by its minuteness,
but it has the same merit of being in the right place, and designed for
its place, and is cut with the same perfection. In a more recent work of
Mr. Hunt’s, the Guernsey Building, in lower Broadway--a street front in
distinctly modern Gothic--there is assuredly no error in scale on the
side of minuteness; but the treatment, in mass and in detail, is marked
by great vigor and animation, and the architecture of the building is an
emphatic expression of its structure.
Another commercial building, at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street,
is by the architects of the Union League Club, and seems to have been
designed under the pressure of a recent discovery that that building
would not do. There is no doubt about the discovery; it is only a pity
that it should not have been made from the drawings before they were
translated into masonry. Clear, however, as the architects were on this
point, they were not so clear when they began the United Bank Building
what would do, and the first two stories look like a series of tentative
experiments to find out. They were proving all things, perhaps, with the
intention of holding fast that which was good. The practice of
projecting bowlders, especially in soft sandstone, has already been
mentioned as a somewhat slovenly substitute for the expression of vigor
by modelling. Bowlders are projected from the piers of this basement in
the most ferocious and blood-curdling manner--so ferocious, indeed, that
the architects repented them of their bullying behavior. It is like the
fear that came upon Snug the joiner, of the consequences that would
ensue if ladies took him for the king of beasts: “Another prologue must
tell he is not a lion.” And so the architects seem to have taken the
counsel of Nick Bottom: “Half his face must be seen through the lion’s
neck;
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF GUERNSEY BUILDING, BROADWAY.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.]
and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same
defect--Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or, I would request
you, or, I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble: my life for
yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life.
No. I am no such thing: I am a man as other men are: and there, indeed,
let him name his name; and tell them plainly he is Snug the
joiner”--that is to say, Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, architects. The
“other prologue,” which is calculated to reassure the most timid, is the
treatment of the first floor, where a disclaimer of any offensive
intention is made in the insertion between the openings of pairs of
banded pilasters, between the capitals of which is inserted the novel
and pleasing ornament of a key-stone. In order to make sure that they
are not strong enough to do any harm, they are not only designed with
much feebleness, but they are projected from the face of the wall they
might otherwise be imagined to strengthen, and set upon brackets.
Between these Renaissance pilasters are Romanesque entrance arches, in
which there is a return to truculence of demeanor; but these are seen to
be not entrances at all, but only innocent windows of bank parlors, and
the real entrances under them, covered with trefoiled gablets in cast
iron, are obviously harmless. It is quite fair to say that up to the top
of the first story there is no design in the building, nothing that
betrays any evidence of a general intention. But having built thus far
in futile search of a motive and of a style, they came upon both, and
built over this aimless and restless collection of inconsistent details
a purposeful, peaceable, and consistent brick building, a series of
powerful piers connected by and sustaining powerful arches, defined by a
light label moulding, and enriched at the springing with a well-designed
belt of foliage. It seems incredible that the authors of this
respectable building should be also the authors of the basement on which
it stands. At the angle is the ingenious device of a griffin
“displayed,” and with one wing folded back against either wall, to carry
the metal socket of the flag-staff. This feature in all its details is
designed with great spirit and picturesqueness. But the architectural
impulse fails in the attic story, which should obviously be here the
richest part of the building, and which is the baldest, being only a
series of rectangular holes, without either modelling or decoration, and
without relation in their grouping to the openings immediately under
them.
[Illustration: UNITED BANK BUILDING.
Peabody & Stearns, Architects.]
By far the most successful, however, of all the recent commercial
buildings is the Post Building, designed by Mr. Post, and executed,
above the blue-stone basement, in yellow brick and yellow terra-cotta.
The site is an irregular tetragon at the intersection of three streets,
and the court, made necessary by the depth of the plot, instead of being
a well sunk in the middle of the building, is made a recess in one of
the long sides. This
[Illustration: “POST” BUILDING.
George B. Post, Architect.]
arrangement is not only practically convenient, but, like every
arrangement obviously dictated by practical convenience, is capable of
becoming architecturally effective, and here becomes so. The openings
are admirably well grouped between the powerful piers, and, what is a
rare attainment in “elevator architecture,” there is abundant variety in
their treatment, without the look of restlessness and caprice which
generally attends an effort for variety in a many-storied building. The
detail enhances the effect of this disposition. It is well adjusted to
its function and position, nowhere excessive in quantity or in scale,
and nowhere meagre, and it is in itself rich and refined. It is designed
in “free Renaissance,” that is to say, the designer has undertaken to
model the building faithfully, according to its plan and construction,
in Renaissance architecture, leaving out all that he does not want. Mr.
Haight, as we saw, was able to achieve that result without transcending
the lines of academic Gothic. Mr. Post has put his academic Renaissance
into the alembic of analysis, and where the analysis has been complete
his Renaissance architecture has volatilized and disappeared. We are
very sure that he had no real use for the imitations in terra-cotta of
protruding key-stones, for example, and these are almost the only badges
left his building of the style with which he started, except the
capitals of the pilasters, and the Ionic capitals of the very pretty
shafted arcade which forms the attic. But for these comparatively
trivial incidents of his work, Mr. Post’s free Renaissance would have to
be classified as Gothic, if it were really necessary to classify it at
all, except as good architecture. Mr. Post, in fact, has done on his own
account what the Romanesque builders did. They, too, were doing “free
classic.” They began with classical Roman architecture, and, steadily
leaving out what they did not want, they arrived at Westminster and
Amiens and Cologne.
It is strange to see so thoroughly studied a performance as this
succeeded by so thoroughly unstudied a performance as the Mills
Building, by the same architect. But possibly ten-story buildings, which
must be built in a year, will not wait for architects to mature designs
which would make the buildings of interest to students of architecture
as well as to investors. Whatever the cause may be, the result is
unfortunate; for after the grandiose and somewhat swaggering Roman
gateway, and the portcullis which it encloses, have been taken out, the
rest of the Mills Building may safely be thrown away. The portcullis is
really an interesting piece of iron-work both in design and in
workmanship, although in both it is distinctly inferior to such a piece
of work as the nondescript beast in cast iron that performs the humble
office of holding a sign in Cedar Street, and that might have been
wrought in the thirteenth century, so grotesque, so skilful, so charged
with the spirit of artistic and enjoyed handicraft it is. [See initial
letter.]
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF MILLS BUILDING.
George B. Post, Architect.]