builds a structure which is meant to outlast him, whether it be a temple
of religion or a work of bare utility like this. It so happens that the
work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some
knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility;
not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. This is in
itself characteristic of our time. It is true of no other people since
the Romans, and of none before. Like the Roman remains, the duration of
this work of ours will show that we knew how to build. “A Roman work,”
we often hear it said of the bridge, and it is in many ways true. It is
far beyond any Roman monument in refinement of mechanical skill. It is
Roman in its massiveness and durability. It is Roman, too, in its
disregard of art, in resting satisfied with the practical solution of
the great problem of its builders, without a sign of that skill which
would have explained and emphasized the process of construction at every
step, and everywhere, in whole and in part, made the structure tell of
the work it was doing. There have been periods in history when this
æsthetic purpose would have seemed to the builder of such a monument as
much a matter of course, as necessary a part of his work, as the
practical purpose which animated the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. It
would have seemed so to the engineer of a bridge in Athens in the second
century before our era, or to the engineer of a bridge in Western Europe
in the thirteenth century of our era. The utilitarian treatment of our
monument is as striking and as characteristic a mark of the period as
its utilitarian purpose. It is a noble work of engineering; it is not a
work of architecture.
The most strictly scientific of constructors would scarcely take the
ground that he did not care how his work looked, when his work was so
conspicuous and so durable as the Brooklyn Bridge, and he must be aware
that a training in scientific construction alone will not secure an
architectural result. It is more probable that he looks upon the current
architectural devices as frivolous and irrelevant to the work upon which
he is engaged, and consoles himself for his ignorance of them by
contempt. Architecture is to him the unintelligent use of building
material. Assuredly this view is borne out by a majority of the
“architecturesque” buildings that he sees, and he does not lack express
authority for it. Whereas the engineer’s definition of good masonry is
“the least material to perform a certain duty,” Mr. Fergusson declares
that “an architect ought always to allow himself such a margin of
strength that he may disregard or play with his construction;” and Mr.
Ruskin defines architecture to be the addition to a building of
unnecessary features. An engineer has, therefore, some warrant for
considering that he is sacrificing to the graces and doing all that can
reasonably be expected of him to produce an architectural monument, if
in designing the piers of a chain-bridge he employs an unnecessary
amount of material and adds unnecessary features. But if we go back to
the time when engineers were artists, and study what a modern scientific
writer has described as “that paragon of constructive skill, a Pointed
cathedral,” we shall find that the architecture and the construction
cannot be disjoined. The work of the mediæeval builder in his capacity
of artist was to expound, emphasize, and refine upon the work he did in
his capacity of constructor, and to develop and heighten its inherent
effect. And it is of this kind of skill that the work of the modern
engineer, in so far as he is only an engineer, shows no trace.
Reduced to its simplest expression, and as it has actually been used for
unknown periods in Asia and in South America, a suspension-bridge
consists of two parallel ropes swung from side to side of a ravine, and
carrying the platform over which the passenger walks. As the span
increases, so that the dip makes the ropes impracticable, the land ends
of the ropes are hoisted some distance above the roadway which they
carry. If nothing can be found there strong enough to hold them, they
are simply passed over, say, forked trees, and the ends made fast to
other trees or held down with stones. This is the essential construction
of the Brooklyn Bridge. The ropes become four cables sixteen inches
thick, of 5541 steel wires; the forked tree becomes a tower 276 feet
high, and 8260 square feet in area at the base; the bowlder to hold down
the end of the rope becomes a mass of masonry of 60,000 tons’ weight;
the shaky platform becomes a great street, 85 feet wide, of five firm
roadways. But the man who first carried his rope over the forked tree
was the inventor of the arrangement which, developed through all the
refinements of modern mechanics, forms the groundwork of the Brooklyn
Bridge.
This statement of the germinal idea of a chain-bridge will, perhaps,
give a clearer notion of the functions of the several parts of the
Brooklyn Bridge than a consideration of the complicated structure in its
ultimate evolution, in which these functions are partly lost sight of.
But if the structure had been architecturally designed, these things
would have been emphasized at every point and in every way. The function
of the great “towers,” so called, being merely to hold up the cables, it
is plain that three isolated piers would have performed that
[Illustration: BRIDGE AT MINNEAPOLIS.
Thomas M. Griffith, Engineer.]
function, and the stability of these piers, loaded as they are by the
cables, would very possibly have been assured, even if they had been
completely detached from each other. But in order at once to stiffen and
to load them, so as to make the area of resistance to the force of the
wind equal to the whole area of the towers, the openings through which
the roadways run are closed above by steep pointed arches, and the
spandrels of these filled with a wall which rises to the summit of the
piers, where a flat coping covers the whole. There is a woful lack of
expression in this arrangement. The piers should assert themselves
starkly and unmistakably as the bones of the structure, and the wall
above the arches be subordinated to a mere filling. It should be
distinctly withdrawn from the face of the piers instead of being, as in
fact it is, only distinguished from them by their shallow and
ineffectual projections. It should be distinctly dropped below their
summits instead of rising to the same height, and being included under a
common cornice. To see what a difference in effect this very obvious
differentiation of parts would have made, glance at the sketch of a
suspension-bridge at Minneapolis. This is not, upon the whole, a
laudable design, and it contains several survivals of conventional
architectural forms meaningless in their present place. But the mere
subduing of the archway to a strut between the piers explains--not
forcibly, perhaps, nor elegantly, but unmistakably--the main purpose of
the structure, and the functional relation of its parts. A drawing of
one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge without its cables would tell
the spectator nothing; the structure itself will tell our New-Zealander
nothing of its uses. With its flat top and its level coping, indicating
that the whole was meant to be evenly loaded, it would seem to be the
base of a missing superstructure rather than what it is.
The flatness of the top alone conceals instead of expressing the
structure. It is of the first practical necessity that the great cables
should move freely in their saddles, so as always to keep the pressure
upon the piers directly vertical, and very ingenious appliances have
been employed to attain this end, and to avoid chafing the cables. But
the design of the piers themselves
[Illustration]
tells us absolutely nothing of all this. The cable simply disappears on
one side and reappears on the other, as if it were two separate cables,
one on each side, instead of one continuous chain. Look at this section
of the top of the tower, and see how an exquisite refinement of
mechanical arrangement may coexist with absolute insensibility to the
desirableness even of an architectural expression of this arrangement.
The architecture of this crowning member of the tower has nothing
whatever to do with the purpose for which the structure exists. Is it
not perfectly evident that an architectural expression of this
mechanical arrangement would require that the line of the summit,
instead of this meaningless flat coping, should, to begin with, be a
crest of roof, its double slope following the line of the cable which it
shelters? Here the very channel through which the cable runs is not
designed, but is a mere hole occurring casually, and not by
premeditation, in the midst of the mouldings which form the cornice of
the tower. This is architectural barbarism.
Other opportunities offered for architectural expression in the towers
themselves were in the treatment of the buttresses, in the treatment of
the balconies which girdle the tower at the height of the roadway, and
in the modelling of the arches. The girth of each of the towers at the
water-line is 398 feet. At the roof-course it is 378 feet. The reduction
is effected by means of five or six offsets, which withdraw each face of
the tower four feet between the bottom and the top, and each end six
feet. The counter-forts, eight in all, on the sides of the outer piers
and on the faces of all the piers, are mere applied strips, very shallow
in proportion to their width, and terminating in the capital-like
projections which are casually pierced to receive the cables. It may
make, perhaps, no serious difference in the mechanical efficiency of
these counter-forts whether their area be narrow and deep or broad and
shallow. But an increase of depth in proportion to width would of
itself, with its higher lights and sharper shadows, have made forcible
masses of what are now ineffectual features. This inherent effect would
be very greatly enhanced if the offsets themselves were accentuated by
sharp and decisive modelling. As it is, emphasis seems to have been
studiously avoided. The offsets are merely long batterings of the wall,
which do nothing to separate the piers into related parts with definite
transitions, and so to refine the crudity of the masses. To see the
difference between a mechanical and a monumental conception of a great
structure, compare these towers with the front of Amiens, or of
Strasburg, or of Notre Dame of Paris. Of course the designer of a modern
bridge must not attempt to reproduce in his work “those misty masses of
multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower.” That would be a more fatal
fault than the rudeness and crudeness with which we have to charge the
design of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. The ornament of the
cathedrals, so far as it is separable from their structure, has nothing
for the designer of the bridge even of suggestion. But to see how masses
may be modelled so as to be made to speak, look at the modelled masses
of the tower of Amiens, the stark lines of essential structure framing
the screen of wall between them, in contrast with the uniform deadness
here of buttress and curtain wall; the crisp emphasis of lines of light
and hollows of black shade which mark the transitions between parts of
structure in the west front of Rheims, in contrast with the lack of
emphasis in the offsets of the bridge tower; the spirit of the gargoyled
balconies that belt the towers of Notre Dame, and the spiritlessness of
the parapeted balconies that encircle the tower of the bridge. And note,
too (we are not now speaking of the decoration of the cathedrals), that
all this transcendent superiority arises merely from a development and
emphasis of the inherent expression of the masses themselves, which in
the bridge are left so crude, and in the cathedral towers are refined so
far. It need not, and indeed should not, have been carried so far in
this architecture of reason and utility as in the architecture of a
poetical religion. The mere rudiments of those works would have
furnished all the expression that is necessary or desirable here. But
these rudiments are wanting. What can we say but that the designer of
the cathedral began where the designer of the bridge left off? If our
New-Zealander should extend his travels, and come upon these monuments
also, what would be his surprise at finding documentary proof that the
bridge was built six hundred years after the cathedrals, and that the
generation which built the bridge looked backward and downward upon the
generation which built the cathedrals as rude and barbarous and
unreasoning in comparison with themselves!
What we have said of the towers is true also of the anchorages. The
bowlder which the Peruvian rolls upon the end of his rope to hold it
down is here a mass of 60,000 tons. Scientifically it is adjusted to its
purpose, no doubt, with the most exact nicety. Artistically it is still
but a bowlder rolled upon a rope. It would probably be impracticable to
exhibit the anchor plate which takes the ultimate strain of this mile
and more of cable, though we may be sure that our Greek or our Gothic
bridge-builder would not have admitted its impracticability without as
exhaustive an investigation as the modern bridge-builder has given to
the mechanical aspects of his problem. But it was certainly practicable
to indicate the function of the anchorage itself, to build it up in
masses which should seem to hold the cable to the earth, or a double
arch like--or rather unlike--the double arch of the main tower, turned
between piers which should visibly answer the same purpose. Instead of
either of these, or of any technical device for the same purpose, the
weight above is a crude mass, so far from being adapted to its function
in its form, that one has to look with some care to find it from the
street below, and to distinguish it from the approaches.
What we have called the balconies at the level of the roadway are not
“practical” balconies, since they open from the driveways, and not from
the walk, and are not accessible as points of view. The purpose of a
projection at this point is to secure as great a breadth as possible for
the system of wind-braces under the floor of the bridge. This purpose is
attained by the projection, but is only masked by the imitations of
balconies, instead of being architecturally expressed, as it might have
been unmistakably expressed, by the bold projection of a granite spur
from the angle of the pier.
There are, probably, few arches in the world--certainly there can be
none outside of works of modern engineering--of anything like the span,
height, thickness, and conspicuousness of those in the bridge towers
which are so little effective. Like the brute mass of wall above them,
they are impressive only by magnitude. The great depth of the archway is
only seen as a matter of mensuration, not felt as a poetical impression,
as it would have been if the labors of the constructor had been
supplemented by the labors of an artist; if the shallow strips of pier
had become real buttresses, and the jamb and arch had been narrowed by
emphatic successions of withdrawal, instead of being merely tunnelled
through the mass; if the intrados of the arch itself had been
accentuated by modelling, instead of being weakened by the actual
recession of its voussoirs behind the plane of the wall.
[Illustration: SECTION OF TOP AND BACK OF ANCHORAGE.
(SIDE VIEW.)]
The approaches themselves are greatly impressive, as indeed the towers
are also, by magnitude and massiveness. The street bridges are uniformly
imposing by size and span, and especially attractive also by reason of
the fact that through them we get what is to be got nowhere else in our
rectangular city, glimpses and “bits” of buildings. The most successful
of them all, and the most successful feature architecturally of all the
masonry of the bridge, is the simple, massive, and low bridge of two
arches which spans North William Street, in New York. The arcades
between the streets are imposing by number and repetition as well as by
massiveness, and by the Roman durability which marks all the work. They
suffer, however, from two causes. The coping, the arches, and the piers,
which are the emphatic parts of structure, are lighter in color than the
unemphasized and rock-faced fields of the wall, and this is always a
misfortune when it is not an error. The arches are of the form called
“Florentine”--that is to say, round within and pointed without. The
deepest voussoirs are thus those at the crown of the arch. This is the
reverse of the disposition which would be dictated by mechanical
considerations alone. Architecturally it has the drawback of
interrupting at every arch the successive and diminishing wheelings
which make a long arcade of great openings so impressive in a
perspective view. The form seems to have been chosen on account of the
facility it afforded, by lengthening the upper voussoirs, to conform the
ridge line of the arches to the slope of the roadway, while keeping the
springing line horizontal. This gradual diminution of the arches
shoreward enhances the apparent length of the approach looking in that
direction, but correspondingly shortens it looking towards the bridge;
and it seems, upon the whole, that it would have been better to carry
the arches through level, without attempting to dissemble the
difference between their line and that of the roadway. There are some
shabby and flimsy details of iron work, which mar the monumental effect
of the great roadway itself, while the design of the iron stations at
either end is grossly illiterate, and discreditable to the great work.
Imitations in cast iron of stone capitals surmount and emphatically
contradict posts profusely studded with bolt-heads; and other solecisms,
alike against constructional reason and architectural tradition, are
rife in these unfortunate edifices, which do what they can to vulgarize
the great structure to which they give access.
Vulgarity certainly cannot be charged against any integral portion of
the great work itself. There is nothing frivolous and nothing
ostentatious even in the details which we have noted, and in which we
have not been so much criticising the crowning work of a great
engineer’s career as noting the spirit of our age. It is scarcely fair
to say, even, as was said by an architectural journal when the
completion of the bridge was doubtful, that if it were left incomplete
its towers would stand “in unnecessary ugliness.” Its defects in design
are not misdeeds, but shortcomings. They are the defects of being
rudimentary, of not being completely developed. The anatomy of the
towers and of the anchorages is not brought out in their modelling.
Their fingers, so to speak, are all thumbs. Their impressiveness is
inherent in their mass, and is what it could not help being. The ugliest
of great bridges is undoubtedly Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge; and this
is ugly, not because it is square and straight, but because it tells
nothing of itself. It is a mere flat surface, and almost absolutely
inexpressive, compared, for example, with such a piece of iron-work as
the truss which carries the roadway of the bridge over Franklin Square,
in which the function of every joint and member is apparent. But a far
nobler thing than this is the central span of the great bridge itself,
its roadway slowly sweeping upward to meet the swift swoop of its
cables. We have complained of the lack of expression in the towers of
their anatomy, but this is anatomy only, a skeletonized structure in
which, as in a scientific diagram, we see--even the layman sees--the
interplay of forces represented by an abstraction of lines. What
monument of any architecture can speak its story more clearly and more
forcibly than this gossamer architecture, through which its purpose,
like “the spider’s touch”--
“So exquisitely fine,
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line”?
This aerial bow, as it hangs between the busy cities, “curving on a sky
imbrued with color,” is perfect as an organism of nature. It is an
organism of nature. There was no question in the mind of its designer of
“good taste” or of appearance. He learned the law that struck its
curves, the law that fixed the strength and the relation of its parts,
and he applied the law. His work is beautiful, as the work of a
ship-builder is unfailingly beautiful in the forms and outlines in which
he is only studying “what the water likes,” without a thought of beauty,
and as it is almost unfailingly ugly when he does what he likes for the
sake of beauty. The designer of the Brooklyn Bridge has made a beautiful
structure out of an exquisite refinement of utility, in a work in which
the lines of forces constitute the structure. Where a more massive
material forbade him to skeletonize the structure, and the lines of
effort and resistance needed to be brought out by modelling, he has
failed to bring them out, and his structure is only as impressive as it
needs must be. It has not helped his work, as we have seen, to trust his
own sense of beauty, and to contradict or to conceal what he was doing
in accordance with its dictates. As little would it have helped him to
invoke the aid of a commonplace architect to plaster his structure with
triglyphs or to indent it with trefoils. But an architect who pursued
his calling in the spirit and with the skill of the mediæval builders of
whom we have been speaking, who knew in his province the lesson the
engineer has re-enforced in his, that “Nature can only be commanded by
obeying her,” and that the function of an organism, in art as in nature,
must determine its form--such an architect might have helped the
designer of the Brooklyn Bridge to make it one of the noblest monuments
of architecture in the world, as it is one of the greatest and most
honorable works of engineering.
[Illustration]_AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL_
I
The saying that ours is not a cathedral-building age is so obviously
true, and so familiar, that the proposal to erect in New York the most
important religious monument on this side of the Atlantic strikes many,
and perhaps most, cultivated persons with a sense of incongruity. It is
so especially true that this is not a cathedral-building country that an
American cathedral seems a violation of the unities in place not less
than in time--an anatopism as well as an anachronism. It is a reflection
calculated to give us pause that even while we were considering what
should be the character of an American cathedral in the city of New
York, the Assembly of the State, being in possession of what was
acclaimed at the time of its opening as “the most monumental interior in
this country,” should have decided to demolish rather than to restore
its most monumental feature, and should have been hopelessly vulgarizing
it by substituting for its stone-work a system of iron posts veneered
with wood, and of beams enclosing panels of papier-maché, without
eliciting any general or effective protest.
The very marked increase of interest in the art of architecture in this
country within the last few years has been accompanied by a
corresponding advance in the practice of that art, but it has scarcely
as yet
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CATHEDRAL OF
ALL-SAINTS AT ALBANY, N. Y.
By Henry Hobson Richardson.]
produced any manifestations that can be called monumental. Our
monuments, like those of the Romans, are the works of engineers, and not
of architects. In fact, the disproportion in magnitude and in interest
between the Roman baths and aqueducts and the Roman temples is
exaggerated in the relation between our works of utility and our works
of art. Our engineers stand ready to span wider openings and to rear
loftier structures than were ever bridged or raised before, provided
anybody can be convinced that these unprecedented operations will “pay.”
The result of their labors, on the æsthetic side, is fairly summed up in
the remark of a recent European visitor that public works in America are
executed without reference to art.