arrangement obviously forced or arbitrary. In the Insurance Exchange the
centre is signalized by a balconied projection over the entrance,
extending through the architectural basement--the dado, so to speak,
which is here the principal division; by a widening of the pier and a
concentration of the central openings in the second division, and above
by an interruption of the otherwise unbroken arcade that traverses the
attic. In the Rookery it is marked by a slight projection, which above
is still further projected into tall corbelled pinnacles, and the wall
thus bounded is slightly bowed, and its openings diminished and
multiplied. In the Phœnix Building this bowing is carried so much
further as to result in a corbelled oriel, extending through four
stories, and repeated on a smaller scale at each end of the principal
front and in the centre of each shorter front. This feature may perhaps
be excepted from the general praise the buildings deserve of a strict
adherence to their utilitarian purpose. Not that even in Chicago a
business man may not have occasion to look out of the window, nor that,
if he does, he may not be pardoned for desiring to extend his view
beyond the walls and windows of over the way. An oriel-window is not
necessarily an incongruity in a “business block,” but the treatment of
these oriels is a little fantastic and a little ornate for their
destination, and belongs rather to domestic than to commercial
architecture, and it is not in any case fortunate. This is the sole
exception, however, to be made on this score. The entrances, to be sure,
are enriched with a decoration beyond the mere expression of the
structure which has elsewhere been the rule, but they do not appear
incongruous. The entrance to a building that houses the population of a
considerable village must be wide, and if its height were regulated by
that of the human figure it would resemble the burrow by which the
Esquimau gains access to his snow-hut, and become a manifest absurdity
as the portal of a ten-story building. It must be large and conspicuous,
and it should be stately, and it were a “very cynical asperity” to deny
to the designer the privilege of enhancing by ornament the necessary
stateliness of the one feature of his building which must arrest, for a
moment at least, the attention of the most
[Illustration: ORIEL, PHŒNIX BUILDING.
Burnham & Root, Architects.]
preoccupied visitor. It cannot be said that such a feature as the
entrance of the Phœnix Building is intensely characteristic of a modern
business block, but it can be said that in its place it does not in the
least disturb the impression the structure makes of a modern business
block. If beauty be its own excuse for being, this entrance needs no
other, for assuredly it is one of the most beautiful and artistic works
that American architecture has to show, so admirably proportioned it is,
and so admirably detailed, so clear and emphatic without exaggeration is
the expression of the structure, and so rich and refined the ornament.
Upon the whole these buildings, by far the most successful and
impressive of the business buildings of Chicago, not merely attest the
skill of their architects, but reward their self-denial in making the
design for a commercial building out of its own elements, however
unpromising these may seem; in permitting the building, in a word, to
impose its design upon them and in following its indications, rather
than in imposing upon the building a design derived from anything but a
consideration of its own requirements. Hence it is that, without showing
anywhere any strain after originality, these structures are more
original than structures in which such a strain is evident. “The merit
of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.” The designer did not
permit himself to be diverted from the problem in hand by a
consideration of the irrelevant beauties of Roman theatres, or
Florentine palaces, or Flemish town-halls, and accordingly the work is
not reminiscent of these nor of any previous architectural types, of
which so many contemporary buildings have the air of being adaptations
under extreme difficulties. It is to the same directness and sincerity
in the attempt to solve a novel problem that these buildings owe what is
not their least attraction, in the sense they convey of a reserved
power. The architect of a commercial palace seems often to be
discharging his architectural vocabulary and wreaking his entire faculty
of expression upon that contradiction in terms. Some of the buildings of
which we have been speaking exhibit this prodigality. There is something
especially grateful and welcome in turning from one of them to a
building like one of those now in question, which suggests by comparison
that, after he had completed the design of it, the architect might still
have had something left--in his portfolios and in his intellect.
In considering the domestic architecture of Chicago it is necessary to
recur to the topographical conditions, for these have had as marked an
influence upon it as they have had upon the commercial quarter, although
this influence operates in almost the opposite direction. The commercial
centre--the quarter of wholesale traffic and of “high finance”--is
huddled into the space between the lake and the river. But when this
limit is once passed there is no natural limit. No longer pent up, the
whole boundless continent is Chicago’s, and the instinct of expansion is
at liberty to assert itself in every direction but the east, where it is
confronted by Lake Michigan. There is thus no east side in Chicago to
supplement the north and the west and the south sides, among which the
dwellings of the people are divided, but there is no natural obstacle
whatsoever to the development of the city in these three directions, and
no natural reason why it should expand in one rather than in another
except what is again furnished by the lake. To the minority of people,
who live where they will and not where they must, this is a considerable
exception, and one would suppose that the fashionable quarter would be
that quarter from which the lake is most accessible. This is distinctly
enough the north side, which a stranger, without the slightest interest,
present or prospective, in Chicago real estate, may be pardoned for
inferring to be the most desirable for residence. For it happens that
the dwellers upon the south side are cut off from any practical or
picturesque use of the lake by the fact that the shore to the south of
the city is occupied by railroad tracks, and the nearest houses of any
pretensions are turned away from the water, of which only the horses
stabled in the rear are in a position to enjoy the view. The inference
that the north is the most eligible of the sides one finds to be
violently combated by the residents of the south and the west, and he
finds also that, instead of one admittedly fashionable quarter, as in
every other city, Chicago has three claimants for that distinction. Each
of these quarters has its centre and its dependencies, and between each
two there is a large area either unoccupied, or occupied with dwellings
very much humbler than those that line the avenues that are severally
the boasts of the competing sides. The three appear to have received
nearly equal shares of municipal attention, for there is a park for
each--nay, there are three parks for the west side, though these are
thus far well beyond the limit of fashion if not of population, and
nominally two for the south side, though even these bear more the
relation to the quarter for which they were provided that the Central
Park bore to New York in 1870 than that which it bears in 1891. They are
still, that is to say, rather outlying pleasure-grounds accessible to
excursionists than parks in actual public use. Lincoln Park, the park of
the north side, is the only one of the parks of Chicago that as yet
deserves this description, and the north side is much to be
congratulated upon possessing such a resort. It has the great advantage
of an unobstructed frontage upon the lake, and it is kept with the same
skill and propriety with which it was planned.
It will be evident from all this that in the three residential quarters
of Chicago there is plenty of room, and it is this spaciousness that
gives a pervading characteristic to its domestic architecture. The most
fashionable avenues are not filled with the serried ranks of houses one
expects to see in a city of a million people. On the contrary, in
Michigan Avenue and Prairie Avenue, on the south side, and in the
corresponding streets in the other quarters, there is commonly a
considerable strip of sward in front of the house, and often at the
sides as well. The houses are often completely or partly detached, and
they are frequently of a generous breadth, and always of a moderate
height. Three stories is the limit, which is rarely exceeded even in the
costliest dwellings. Conditions so different prevail in all the Eastern
cities, even in Philadelphia, the roominess of which is one of its
sources of local pride, that to the inhabitant of any one of them the
domestic building of Chicago indicates a much less populous city than
Chicago is, and its character seems rather suburban than urban. In the
main, this character of suburbanity is heightened by the architectural
treatment of the dwellings. There are exceptions, and some of them are
conspicuous and painful exceptions; but the rule is that the architect
attempts to make the house even of a rich man look like a home rather
than like a palace, and that there is very little of the mere
ostentation of riches. Even upon the speculative builder this feeling
seems to have imposed itself; and however crude and violent his work may
be in other ways, it does not very often offend in this particular
direction. The commercial palace against which we have been inveighing
is by no means so offensive as the domestic sham palace, and from this
latter offence Chicago is much freer than most older American cities.
The grateful result is that the houses in the best quarters are apt to
look eminently “livable;” and though inequalities of fortune are visible
enough, there is not so visible as to be conspicuous any attempt of the
more fortunate to force them on the notice of the less fortunate. In
other words, Chicago is, in its outward aspect at least, the most
democratic of great American cities, and its aspect increases one’s
wonder that anarchism should have sprung up in this rich and level
soil--to which, of course, the answer is that it didn’t, being
distinctly an exotic.
Another characteristic of the domestic architecture of Chicago there
is--less prevalent than this absence of pretentiousness and mere
display, but still prevalent enough to be very noteworthy--and that is
the evidence it affords of an admiration for the work of Mr. Richardson,
which, if not inordinate, is at least undiscriminating and misapplied.
What region of our land, indeed,
[Illustration: JANUA RICHARDSONIENSIS.
N’Importe Qui, Architect.]
is not full of his labors, done vicariously, and with a zeal not
according to knowledge? In Chicago his misunderstood example has
fructified much more in the quarters of residence than in the business
quarters, insomuch that one can scarcely walk around a square, either in
the north or in the south side, without seeing some familiar feature or
detail, which has often been borrowed outright from one of his works,
and is reproduced without reference to its context. Now the great and
merited success of Richardson was as personal and incommunicable as any
artistic success can be. It was due to his faculty of reducing a
complicated problem to its simplest and most forcible expression. More
specifically, it was due to his faculty for seizing some feature of his
building, developing it into predominance, and skilfully subordinating
the rest of his composition to it, until this feature became the
building. It was his power of disposing masses, his insistence upon
largeness and simplicity, his impatience of niggling, his
straightforward and virile handling of his tasks, that made his
successes brilliant, and even his failures interesting. Very much of all
this is a matter of temperament, and Richardson’s best buildings were
the express images of that impetuous and exuberant personality that all
who knew him remember. He used to tell of a tourist from Holland in whom
admiration for his art had induced a desire to make his acquaintance,
and who upon being introduced to him exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Richardson, how
you are like your work!” “Now wasn’t that a Dutch remark?” Richardson
concluded the story. Indeed, the tact of the salutation must be admitted
to have been somewhat Batavian, but it was not without critical value.
One cannot conceive of Richardson’s work as having been done by an
anæmic architect, or by a self-distrustful architect, or by a professor
of architecture, faithful as his own professional preparation had been.
There is a distinction well recognized in the art to which architecture
has more or less plausibly been likened that is no less valid as applied
to architecture itself--the distinction between “school music” and
“bravura music.” If we adopt this distinction, Richardson must be
classed among the bravura performers in architecture, who are
[Illustration: ORIEL OF DWELLING.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.]
eligible rather for admiration than for study. Assuredly designers will
get nothing but good from his work if they learn from it to try for
largeness and simplicity, to avoid niggling, and to consider first of
all the disposition of their masses. But these are merits that cannot be
transferred from a photograph. They are quite independent of a fondness
for the Provençal Romanesque, and still more of an exaggeration of the
depth of voussoirs and of the dwarfishness of pillars. These things are
readily enough imitable, as nearly every block of dwellings in Chicago
testifies, but they are scarcely worth imitating. In Richardson’s best
work there is apt to be some questionable detail, since the success or
failure of his building is commonly decided before the consideration of
detail arises, and it is this questionable detail that the imitators are
apt to reproduce without asking
[Illustration: DWELLING IN LAKE SHORE DRIVE.
H. H. Richardson, Architect.]
it any questions. Moreover, it will probably be agreed by most students
that Richardson’s city houses are, upon the whole, and in spite of some
noteworthy exceptions, the least successful of his works. As it happens,
there are two of them in Chicago itself, one on the north side and one
on the south, and if their author had done nothing else, it is likely
that they would be accepted rather as warnings than as examples. The
principal front of the former has the simple leading motive that one
seldom fails to find in the work of its architect, in the central open
loggia of each of its three stories, flanked on each side by an abutment
of solid wall, and the apportionment of the front between voids and
solids is just and felicitous. Three loggie seem an excessive allowance
for the town-house of a single family; but if we waive this point as an
affair between the architect and his client exclusively, it must be
owned that the arrangement supplies a motive susceptible of very
effective development. In this case it cannot be said to have been
developed effectively; nay, it can hardly be said to have been developed
in an architectural sense at all, and the result proves that though a
skilful disposition of masses is much, it is not everything. We have
just been saying that the success or failure of Richardson’s work was in
a great degree independent of the merit of the detail, but this dwelling
scarcely exhibits any detail. This is the more a drawback because the
loggia is a feature of which lightness and openness is the essential
characteristic, and which seems, therefore, to demand a certain elegance
of treatment, as was recognized alike by the architects of the Gothic
and the Renaissance palaces in Italy, from which we derive the feature
and the name. It is, indeed, in the contrast between the lightened and
enriched fenestration of the centre and the massiveness of the flanking
walls that the potential effectiveness of the arrangement resides. Here,
however, there is no lightening and no enrichment. Rude vigor
characterizes as much the enclosed arcades as the enclosing walls, and
becomes as much the predominant expression of the front of a dwelling of
moderate dimensions as of the huge façades of the Field warehouse. Such
modelling as is introduced tends rather to enforce than to mitigate this
expression, for the piers of the lower arcade are squared, and the
intercalated shafts of the upper are doubled perpendicularly to the
front, as are the shafts of the colonnade above, so as to lay an
additional stress upon the thickness of a wall that is here manifestly a
mere screen. The continuation of the abacus of the arcade through the
wall and its reappearance as the transom of the flanking windows is an
effective device that loses some of its effectiveness from its
introduction into both arcades. It scarcely modifies the impression the
front makes of lacking detail altogether. The double-dentilled
string-course that marks off and corbels out the attic is virtually the
only moulding the front shows. Yet the need of mouldings is not less now
than it was in the remote antiquity when a forgotten Egyptian artist
perceived the necessity of some expedient to subdivide a wall, to mark a
level, to sharpen or to soften a transition. For three thousand years
his successors have agreed with him, and for a modern architect to
abjure the use of these devices is to deny himself the rhetoric of his
art. The incompleteness that comes of this abjuration in the present
instance must be apparent to the least-trained layman, who vaguely feels
that “something is the matter” with the building thus deprived of a
source of expression, for which the texture given to the whole front by
the exhibition of the bonding of the masonry, skilful and successful as
this is in itself, by no means compensates. The sensitive architect must
yearn to set the stone-cutters at work anew to bring out the expression
of those parts that are especially in need of rhetorical exposition, to
accentuate the sills of the arcades, to define and refine their arches,
to emphasize the continuous line of the abacus, and especially to mark
the summit of the sloping basement, which now is merged into the plane
of the main wall, without the suggestion of a plinth. It is conceivable
that an architect might, by the skilful employment of color, so treat a
front, without the least projection or recess from top to bottom or from
end to end, as to make us forget to deplore the absence of mouldings.
Some interesting attempts in that direction have, in fact, been made,
and complete success in such an attempt would be entitled to the praise
of a tour de force. But when in a monochromatic wall the designer omits
the members that should express and emphasize and adorn his structural
dispositions without offering any substitute for them, his building will
appear, as this dwelling appears, a work merely “blocked out” and left
unfinished; and if it be the work of a highly endowed and highly
accomplished designer like Richardson, the deficiency must be set down
merely as an unlucky caprice. We have been speaking exclusively of the
longer front, since it is manifest that the shorter shares its
incompleteness, without the partial compensation of a strong and
striking composition, which would carry off much unsuccessful detail,
though it is not strong enough to carry off the lack of detail, even
with the powerful and simple roof that covers the whole--in itself an
admirable and entirely satisfactory piece of work.
[Illustration: DWELLING IN PRAIRIE AVENUE.
H. H. Richardson, Architect.]
Capriciousness may with as much justice be charged upon the only other
example of Richardson’s domestic architecture in Chicago, which, even
more than the house we have been considering, arrests attention and
prevents apathy, but which also seems even more from the purpose of
domestic architecture. Upon the longer though less conspicuous front it
lacks any central and controlling motive; and on the shorter and more
conspicuous, this motive, about which the architect so seldom leaves the
beholder in any doubt, is obscured by the addition at one end of a
series of openings irrelevant to it, having no counterpart upon the
other, and serving to weaken at a critical point the wall, the emphasis
of whose massiveness and lateral expanse may be said to be the whole
purport of the design, to which everything else is quite ruthlessly
sacrificed. For this the building is kept as low as possible, insomuch
that the ridge of its rather steep roof only reaches the level of the
third story of the adjoining house. For this the openings are diminished
in size upon both sides, insomuch that they become mere orifices for the
admission of light, and in number upon the long side, insomuch that the
designer seems to regard them as annoying interruptions to his essay in
the treatment of blank wall. A granite wall over a hundred and fifty
feet long, as in the side of this dwelling, almost unbroken, and with
its structure clearly exhibited, is sure enough to arrest and strike the
beholder; and so is the shorter front, in which the same treatment
prevails, with a little more of ungracious concession to practical needs
in the more numerous openings; but the beholder can scarcely accept the
result as an eligible residence. The treatment is, even more strictly
than in the house on the north side, an exposition of masonry. There is
here, to be sure, some decorative detail in the filling; of the head of
the doorway and in the sill above it, but this detail is so minute, in
the case of the egg-and-dart that adorns the sill, so microscopic, that
it does not count at all in the general effect. A moulding that does
count in the general effect, and that vindicates itself at the expense
of the structural features not thus developed, is the main cornice, an
emphatic and appropriate profile. In this building there seems to be a
real attempt to supply the place of mouldings by modifications of the
masonry, which in the other forms an unvaried reticulation over the
whole surface. In this not only are the horizontal joints accentuated,
and the vertical joints slurred so as to assist very greatly in the
emphasis of length, but the courses that are structurally of unusual
importance, the sills and lintels of the openings, are doubled in width,
thus strongly belting the building at their several levels. Here again a
device that needs only to be expressed in modelling to answer an
artistic purpose fails to make up for the absence of modelling. The
merits of the building as a building, however, are much effaced when it
is considered as a dwelling, and the structure ceases to be defensible,
except, indeed, in a military sense. The whole aspect of the exterior is
so gloomy and forbidding and unhomelike that but for its neighborhood
one would infer its purpose to be not domestic, but penal. Lovelace has
assured us that “stone walls do not a prison make,” but when a building
consists as exclusively as possible of bare stone walls, it irresistibly
suggests a place of involuntary seclusion, even though minds especially
“innocent and quiet” might take it for a hermitage. Indeed, if one were
to take it for a dwelling expressive of the character of its inmates, he
must suppose it to be the abode of a recluse or of a misanthrope, though
when Timon secures a large plot upon a fashionable avenue, and erects a
costly building to show his aversion to the society of his kind, he
exposes the sincerity of his misanthropical sentiments to suspicion.
Assuming that the owner does not profess such sentiments, but is much
like his fellow-citizens, the character of his abode must be referred to
a whim on the part of his architect--a Titanic, or rather a Gargantuan
freak. For there is at least nothing petty or puerile about the design
of these houses. They bear an unmistakably strong and individual stamp,
and failures as, upon the whole, they must be called, they really
increase the admiration aroused by their author’s successes for the
power of design that can make even wilful error so interesting.