promulgated the project of an American cathedral, this very prevalence
and predominance of the utilitarian spirit makes it most desirable that
there should be a conspicuous counteraction and an impressive reminder,
in a great commercial town, that there are other than commercial
interests and other than physical needs. A “metropolitan” church, in the
modern sense of the adjective, dominating the more prosaic erections of
a city, as a cathedral must do if reared upon the noble site secured for
the Cathedral of New York, is the conversion into a beacon of Mr.
Ruskin’s “lamp of sacrifice.” It belongs to its function that it could
not by any conceivable possibility “pay,” and that it should be, first
of all, a religious monument. There is some danger that this may be
forgotten, for in the design of ordinary churches, in which the
architects who have been working at the problem presented by the
cathedral are commonly exercised, they feel at every turn the pressure
of the utilitarian spirit. They are required to “accommodate” a
congregation, in most cases at a minimum of cost, so that the preacher
may be well seen and heard of all. The muses of acoustics, ventilation,
and sanitary plumbing preside over their labors, necessarily to the
greater or less detriment of architecture. The features that give
dignity to the minsters of the Middle Ages are apt to be obstructive of
the comfort of the congregation. If a cathedral were to be merely or
mainly a huge auditorium, nearly all the traditions of ecclesiastical
architecture would have to be sacrificed. Doubtless, in a true cathedral
of such dimensions as those contemplated for the Cathedral of New York,
an ample space for preaching must accrue. But a building in which this
space is the object of the design can scarcely become a cathedral. Mr.
R. L. Stevenson, considering the apse of Noyon, observes: “I could never
fathom how any man dares to lift up his voice in a cathedral. What has
he to say that will not be an anticlimax? For though I have heard a
considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so
expressive as a cathedral. ’Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches
day and night, not only telling you of man’s art and aspirations in the
past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies.” At all events,
a cathedral is much more and other than a place to preach in. If that
alone were its purpose, it would be best fulfilled by an enclosed and
unobstructed space, extending to the limits of the carrying power of the
human voice. But such an erection would resemble a mediæval cathedral
much less than it would resemble a modern rink.
In truth, the justification of a modern and Protestant cathedral is not
to be looked for in its “usefulness.” The altar, and not the pulpit, is
the centre and culmination of its interior design, as it can scarcely be
said
[Illustration: Design for All Saints’ Cathedral at Albany. by h. h.
Richardson
WEST ELEVATION.]
to be the centre of “congregational worship.” The old cathedrals are
most admirably adapted to be the theatres of ecclesiastical processions
and pageants; and although the Episcopal Church has a more highly
developed ritual than any other Protestant body, it does not provide for
these on a cathedral scale. The Church of England cannot be said really
to employ the minsters it has inherited. An eminent architect, who was
not only an Englishman, but an “Anglo-Catholic,” was compelled to
describe an ancient cathedral in its modern English use as merely “a
museum of antiquities, with a free sacred concert on Sunday.” Even among
Catholic countries Spain is almost, if not quite, alone in fully using
her mediæval cathedrals as modern churches of the people, instead of
secluding them as “historical monuments” from the ordinary life of the
nation. In a country in which the arts of reading and writing have been
acquired by but a small fraction of the people, the saying of Victor
Hugo cannot have come true. The book has not destroyed the church, and
the invention of printing has not affected either the spirit or the form
of devotion. The dramatic and spectacular instinct, so strong among the
Southern nations, and among the English-speaking peoples perhaps weaker
than anywhere else, has found natural vent, in a country in which the
type of religion has remained mediæval, in those gorgeous ceremonials,
addressed to the imagination and not to the intellect, which really
require and employ the stage and the scenery of a mediæval cathedral.
Not York or Salisbury, not Cologne or Strasburg, not Rheims or Amiens,
hardly Milan or St. Peter’s itself, so fully shows to our generation the
popular need which the mediæval minsters were meant to answer as it is
shown to travellers on one of the great feasts of the Church in Toledo
or Seville. The tardy completion of Cologne under the auspices of a
Protestant emperor, and by the contributions of Protestant Germany, not
as any longer the temple of the national faith, but as an architectural
monument of which the German people have reason to be proud, and the
completion of which is a monument also of the union of Germany, more
fitly represents the modern attitude of mind respecting cathedrals.
An American Protestant church nearly as long as Cologne (and such is the
dimension proposed for the Cathedral of New York) is obviously far
beyond the limits of a convenient auditorium, and beyond the ritual
requirements of the Episcopal Church. In such a structure the space
occupied by the largest congregation that can be assembled within the
sound of a single voice is but a fragment, and such a congregation
itself but an incident to be recognized and provided for, indeed, but by
no means to be allowed to become the chief object of design. But the aim
of these remarks has been to show that it is by its success as an
architectural monument that the cathedral must be justified, if it is to
be justified at all. In this point of view the very excess, which in any
utilitarian point of view is wasteful, becomes an element of
impressiveness as being an emphatic rejection in a building erected to
the glory of God, of “the nicely calculated less or more” that is
suitable and inevitable to buildings erected primarily for the use of
man.
II
Mr. Richardson’s design for the Cathedral of All-Saints at Albany is
herewith so fully illustrated as to enable the architect to estimate the
effect the interior would have had in execution, and the untrained
reader to form an impression of the exterior effect, which, however
[Illustration: EAST ELEVATION.]
incomplete, can scarcely be misleading. The design is, perhaps, the most
suggestive contribution that has thus far been made to the solution of
the architectural problem of a modern cathedral which the diocese of New
York has undertaken. At all events, the influence of it was more easy to
be traced in the designs for that work than the influence of any
building actually erected on this side of the ocean. In part this was
due to the merits of the design itself; in part to the immense vigor and
large picturesqueness of the executed works of its author--qualities
that have so impressed themselves upon the younger generation of
American architects that there is scarcely a contemporary work of
importance that does not betray his influence, and that the Provençal
Romanesque, in which his personal power of design was manifested, may
already be said almost to have become the style of the country. It must
be manifest, however, that it would be an injustice to Mr. Richardson’s
memory to take his design for the Albany Cathedral as his contribution
to the civic--one may almost say the national--problem of the present.
For this design was prepared under rigid limitations of space and of
cost; and though its rejection is said to have been due to its excess of
these latter, it is by no means what its author would have devised for a
project in which there is no limitation. The Cathedral of All-Saints was
to be rather a parish church of unusual dimensions than a cathedral; and
the dimensions were still so restricted, and “seating capacity” still so
important, that the accommodation of the congregation became a main
object rather than an incident of the plan from which the structure
proceeds.
Without reference to its scale, the design for the Cathedral of Albany
confesses the limitations that have been relaxed for the Cathedral of
New York, and that render it unavailable as a direct model. These appear
mainly in the interior, but, as we shall presently see, they affect the
exterior design as well. As it was in the beginnings of the art of
building, so now stone remains the material of monumental structures. In
durability it is rivalled, if it be rivalled, by metal alone, and such
experiments as the flèche of Rouen and the tower of Paris have not yet
convinced mankind of the possibility of a monumental metallic
architecture. Timber remains the most acceptable substitute, but timber
in a cathedral is plainly a substitute, and monumental architecture
admits no substitutes in the structure of a great building. A stone
ceiling must be regarded as an indispensable requisite of a true
cathedral; and although very impressive and noble cathedrals still
exhibit wooden ceilings, they so far come short of fulfilling the idea
of a cathedral, and the antiquarians are pretty well agreed that the
purpose of the builders was to make their ceilings as durable as their
walls, and that they failed to carry out their purpose either through
lack of means or through doubt of their own ability to construct stone
ceilings. Considering the elaborate expositions of construction in the
true timber roofs of the English Gothic, the boarded ceilings of Ely and
Peterborough were plainly makeshifts, and equally a makeshift would be
the wooden ceiling, of trefoil section, hung to the timbers of the roof
and concealing its construction, which Mr. Richardson designed for the
Albany Cathedral.
We come here rather unexpectedly, upon the question of “style.” If a
vaulted ceiling be so eminently desirable in a purely monumental
building as to amount to an architectural necessity, it is equally clear
that the groined vault--that is to say, the vault formed by the
[Illustration: GROUND-PLAN.]
intersection of two or more vaults--is necessary to the complete
development of the vaulting system; and for this the Romance
architecture in which Mr. Richardson preferred to work, and which in a
general way may be called the style of his design for Albany, does not
provide.[E] The churches of the Provençal Romanesque were vaulted, but
with a continuous tunnel vault, supported equally at all points, and
demanding an enormous thickness of wall, pierced by few and small
openings, to withstand the lateral thrust of the arch. The introduction
of groined vaults involved a concentration of the supports and of the
counterforts--that is to say, a series of buttresses in place of a
continuous wall. The piers of the nave and the exterior buttresses,
connected by flying buttresses with the vaults the thrust of which they
withstood, thus constituted the framework of the building, and the wall
between the buttresses became a mere screen, as finally it did become an
avowed screen of painted glass. The history of this development of the
vault is the history of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic
architecture. The mediæval architects carried this development to its
extreme, leaving at last, as in the Sainte Chapelle, no wall at all, and
their work has been described as an attempt to “etherealize matter.” It
may very well be doubted whether the architect of a modern cathedral
should not stop short of the result they reached, and strive for a
simpler and more robust treatment than theirs--in other words, for a
treatment more Romanesque. But if we assume that the cathedral shall be
ceiled in material as durable and monumental as that of its walls, we
cannot reject the labors of the generations of artistic builders who
concerned themselves with that problem, and attained so brilliant a
solution of it. To take the instance before us, the clere-story of the
nave and of the choir is in effect a continuous arcade of narrow-pointed
lancets. It needs a second glance to note that they are grouped in
pairs, and that the piers between the pairs are slightly broader than
the piers dividing the openings of each pair. The slight increase in
mass quite suffices to account in the interior for the principal roof
timber which rests upon it, and, with the vaulting-shaft, to continue
upward the line of the nave-pier. But if the flying buttress, necessary
to transfer the thrust of the vault, were built at this point, the
arcade of the exterior would be effectually interrupted, and the space
between the buttresses set off into a single bay, as in the wall of the
aisle below, which does, in fact, represent a vault. In that case a
single large opening would naturally take the place of the pair of
lancets, still further emphasizing the division into bays, and the side
of the nave would at once bear a much stronger resemblance than it now
bears to the accepted type of a cathedral. In the choir a like result
would follow, and it would be emphasized at the east end. The circle of
apsidal chapels is one of the most striking and most successful features
of Mr. Richardson’s design. As will be seen from the ground-plan,
however, these are features that do not proceed from the interior
arrangement so much as features to which the interior arrangement is
conformed. Even when viewed from the outside the undeniable power and
picturesqueness of the group is marred by the suggestion of something
forced and arbitrary in their arrangement. There are precedents in
Romanesque architecture for such a disposition, among them “the great
triapsal swing” of the twelfth-century churches of Cologne, though
evidently the example that inspired Mr. Richardson was the chevet of
Clermont in Auvergne, which he has followed even to the introduction of
the mosaic above the springing of the arches. All these, however, are
much simpler than the apse designed for Albany. What Mr. Richardson
doubtless had in mind was to reproduce the effect of the ring of chapels
that forms the chevet of a French Gothic cathedral, without reproducing
Gothic forms. But the flying buttresses that radiate from the apse of a
French Gothic cathedral determine and bound the chapels that fill the
spaces between them, and, by making these appear integral parts of the
main structure, save them from the look they would otherwise have of
extraneous appendages.
III
It seems, then, that the question of style in a modern cathedral is not
to be determined according to the individual preference of a designer
for round arches or pointed, for openings traceried or plain. If the
problem he is working at has been successfully solved heretofore, he is
not at liberty to ignore this solution because it falls without the
limits of the historical period he has proposed to himself, and to
content himself with an incomplete solution. Of course this remark does
not apply as a criticism to Mr. Richardson’s design for Albany, prepared
under limitations that he was compelled to observe, but which the
competitors for the Cathedral of New York were at liberty to disregard.
Whether he was right in so far sacrificing the monumental character of
his interior to the monumental features of his exterior, is not a
practical question for designers of whom no sacrifice in either
direction is demanded. There are very noble examples of vaulted
architecture in the Romanesque period--examples which it will be glory
enough for the architect of the Cathedral of New York if he succeeds in
equalling without slavishly imitating. But in all these there is a lack
of that complete correspondence between the interior and the exterior
structure that makes the organic unity of a true cathedral, and that was
attained for the first time in the thirteenth century, after a series of
tentative experiments embodied in these very Romanesque buildings.[F] It
is by no means necessary for an architect to revert to these experiments
because he does not sympathize with the expression of strained intensity
and “otherworldliness” which the Gothic architects attained, and prefers
the more robust, more massive, more mundane aspect of the Romanesque
monuments that preceded the great cathedrals. The modelling of these
cathedrals is carried so far that nothing is left unmodelled; there are
no longer any surfaces; the whole structure is anatomized; and the
modern architect, even while he stands astonished at the result of this
unsparing analysis, may yet say, “It were to consider too curiously to
consider so.” But it is not by refusing the aid these wonderful
structures offer him that he can advance upon or equal them. The
development of a cathedral requires, indeed, a system of piers and
vaults and flying arches and weighted buttresses. But these need not be
the same features in modelling, in detail, or in expression that we know
in historical examples. Instances are not wanting to show that they
[Illustration: TRANSVERSE SECTION THROUGH CHOIR.
Heyden Hawley]
may be massed with the stalwart simplicity of the Romanesque builders as
well as drawn into the complex and bewildering forms they assumed in the
later Gothic. In his design for Albany, Mr. Richardson has shown very
clearly that an artist, whose individuality is strong enough, can put
its stamp upon whatever he adopts. The common distinction that
Romanesque is a round-arched and Gothic a pointed style, is shown to be
baseless in an unmistakably Romanesque church in which all the openings
of the clere-story are pointed lancets, in which the pointed openings
elsewhere far outnumber the round arches, and in which the architect has
introduced tracery, sparingly but effectively, without at all marring
the unity of the structure. Nay, the church owes the suggestion of some
of its noblest features to works that did not exist until the period
classified as Romanesque had closed. A modern architect forfeits his
birthright who does not use all that the past has to offer him of help;
and his originality is impeached only if he does not overrule to his own
purposes what he adopts, if he copies instead of using. The west front
of Albany, for example, is the west front of Notre Dame of Paris, with
differences, as marked as the resemblances, which convert it into a new
creation. The three entrances, burrowed through the thickness of the
wall and not projected from the face, are repeated, but with a strong
and decorated belt course at their springing. The buttresses, bringing
down the line of the towers at Paris and dividing the front into three,
are omitted, and a balustrade in relief takes the place of the line of
statues. The flanking towers thus rise from a continuous base, and a
tall mock-arcade marks their lines in the next stage and emphasizes the
flanking wall, which in the mediæval example is pierced with a double
arch on each side of the rose-window, and the central wall is here
recessed to serve the same purpose of detaching the towers which in
Notre Dame is answered by the buttresses, while above the rose-window
another balustrade corresponds to the tall traceried arcade, and the
lancets of the belfry stage, double in Notre Dame, are here grouped in
threes. Except the buttresses, every feature of the old front has its
counterpart, but by the emphasis given to the horizontal lines, and the
diminution of the vertical lines, in one instance amounting to an
effacement, the whole aspect of the façade is transformed. This is an
admirable example of the manner in which a modern architect may employ
his inheritance. Another, not less admirable, is the adoption in the
transept entrance of the main and most characteristic feature of the
famous “triple northern porch” of Chartres, the interpolation of narrow
arches between the main portals and below the springing of their arches.
This is a still more signal instance of what we have been saying of the
power of changing the expression of a feature while retaining its
substance, for the northern porch of Chartres is one of the loveliest
fantasies of a late and highly ornate Gothic, and it is here translated
back into the severer Romanesque, as all the structural features of a
fully developed cathedral might be.
IV
But it is not in its details nor in its features, fine as many of these
are, that Mr. Richardson’s design for Albany offers the most inspiring
suggestions and the safest model. It is in the sense that pervades it of
the all-importance of the relation of its masses, and in the mastery it
shows of architectural composition. It was long ago noted as a mark of
an artistic work of architecture that it “pyramidizes,” and this
implies a single culminating feature to which the parts converge and
rise. In the work which first fixed Mr. Richardson’s rank among American
architects--Trinity Church in Boston--the most striking merit of the
design is the manner in which the parts are subordinated to the noble
and massive central tower. In his design for Albany the same
subordination is carried through more gradations, and it is both more
subtle and more successful. The outer aisles of the nave are secluded
altogether from the interior, and set off in the “cloisters” or loggie
that are among the most effective features of the building, and among
the happiest suggestions its designer derived from the study of Spanish
architecture. The roofs of these recede to the walls of the aisle
proper, the roofs of which are conspicuous, so that the clere-story is
seen above a succession of terraces. At the east end the circle of
chapels and the aisle roofs and the sharp slope of the main roof rise in
receding masses that converge towards the great central tower, which
from the side broadens down upon the flanking towers of the transept.
The relation between the western and the central towers is far happier
than in the earlier example, and the central tower itself shows as great
an advance upon the tower of Trinity as does that upon the tower of
Salamanca, from which the suggestion of it was derived. But the western
front is perhaps the most brilliantly successful illustration of its
author’s power. We have seen that Mr. Richardson refused the aid of the
buttresses, which with their successive offsets narrow the fronts of
Gothic cathedrals as they rise, but he replaced them with a series of
devices that answer the same purpose almost as effectively. The flanking
towers are themselves flanked at the base by low polygonal hooded
structures that are succeeded by attached turrets reaching to the
belfry stage. The roofs of the western towers themselves next converge
towards the looming bulk of the central feature, to which they serve as
pinnacles. Surely in all the achievements of architectural amity through
variety that the Middle Ages have bequeathed to us, there are few that
in nobleness and dignity surpass the effect that is promised by Mr.
Richardson’s design for the west front of Albany, and in modern work
where shall we look for a parallel.
This very central tower may serve as a reminder of the point in which a
modern cathedral may mark an architectural advance upon the mediæval art
which, in most respects, its builders may be well content if they can
equal. For the culminating feature of the exterior should be the
culminating feature of the interior also, and it was this need that the
mediæval architects left unanswered. They recognized it, and in the
cimborio of the Spanish cathedral, and in such experiments as the
octagon of Ely, they made the beginnings of an answer, but these are no
more to be accepted as complete than the Romanesque system of vaulting,
which the Gothic architects developed to its perfection. The flèche of a
French cathedral emphasizes rather than supplies the need of such a
culmination. The central towers of such English cathedrals as possess
them are purely exterior ornaments, as unrelated to the body of the
church as its western towers. In Mr. Richardson’s design the tall and
narrow dome at the crossing would not be apprehensible as a crowning
feature, except from a point of view almost directly beneath it, while
its external form does not intimate its interior function. It was a true
feeling that led the architects of the Italian Renaissance to embrace
the aisles as well as the nave under the central dome, though they
clothed their construction in untrue forms. To develop true forms for
it is the one advance upon past ecclesiastical architecture which seems
to be possible, and to develop these may be said to be the central
problem of design in an American cathedral.
[Illustration]_GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE_
I.--CHICAGO
[Illustration: CLOCK TOWER, DEARBORN STATION.
C. L. W. Eidlitz, Architect.]