the building, having little congruity either with the straightforward
and structural treatment of the main building, or with the bulbous
picturesqueness of the gables. The care with which its detail is studied
is evident, and also the elegance of the detail in its kind and in its
place; but it does not seem to be in its place anywhere out-of-doors,
and still less as applied to the entrance of a business block to which
it is merely applied, and from which it is not developed. Its extreme
delicacy, indeed, almost gives the impression that it is meant to be a
still small voice of scholarly protest on the part of an “Eastern”
architect against a “boisterous and rough-hewn” Westernness. A still
smaller voice of protest seems to be emitted by the design of the
Endicott Arcade, the voice of one crying, very softly, in the
wilderness. So ostentatiously discreet is the detail of this building,
indeed, so minute the scale of it, and so studious the avoidance of
anything like stress and the effort for understatement, that the very
quietness of its remonstrance gives it the effect of vociferation.
“He who in quest of quiet ‘Silence’ hoots,
Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.”
It seems to be an explicit expostulation, for example, with the
architect of the Guaranty Loan Building in Minneapolis, which has many
striking details not without ingenuity, and certainly not without
“enterprise,” but as certainly without the refinement that comes of a
studied and affectionate elaboration, insomuch that this also may be
admitted to be W----n, and to invite the full force of Dryden’s
criticism. The building in the exterior of which this mild remonstrance
is made has an interior feature that is noteworthy for other qualities
than the avoidance of indiscretion and overstatement--the “arcade,” so
called, from which it takes its name--a broad corridor, sumptuous in
material and treatment to the “palatial” point, one’s admiration for
which is not destroyed, though it is abated, by a consideration of its
irrelevancy to a business block. The building of the New York Life in
Minneapolis, by the same architects as the building of the same
corporation in St. Paul, is more readily recognizable by a New-Yorker as
their work. It is a much more commonplace and a much more utilitarian
composition--a basement of four stories, of which two are in masonry,
carrying a central division also of four and an attic of two, the
superstructure
[Illustration: NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.
Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects.]
being of brick-work. The two principal divisions are too nearly equal;
nor does the change of material effected by building the two upper
stories of the basement in brick-work achieve the rhythmic relation for
the attainment of which it was doubtless introduced. But the structure
is nevertheless a more satisfactory example of commercial architecture
than the St. Paul building. Its entrance, of four fluted and banded
columns of a very free Roman Doric, with the platform on consoles above,
has strength and dignity, and is a feature that can evidently be freely
exposed to the weather, and that is not incongruous as the portal of a
great commercial building. A very noteworthy feature of the interior is
the double spiral staircase in metal that has apparently been inspired
by the famous rood screen of St. Étienne du Mont in Paris, and that is a
very taking and successful design, in which the treatment of the
material is ingenious and characteristic.
[Illustration: VESTIBULE OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING,
MINNEAPOLIS.]
We have seen that the huddled condition of the business quarter of St.
Paul, practically a disadvantage in comparison with the spaciousness of
Minneapolis, has become architecturally a positive advantage. The
natural advantages with respect to the quarters of residence seem to be
strongly on the side of St. Paul. The
[Illustration: DWELLING IN MINNEAPOLIS.
Harry W. Jones, Architect.]
river-front at Minneapolis is not available for house-building, nor is
there any other topographical indication of a fashionable quarter,
except what is furnished by the slight undulations of the plateau. The
more pretentious houses are for the most part scattered, and, of course,
much more isolated than the towering commercial buildings. On the other
hand, the fashionable quarter of St. Paul is distinctly marked out by
nature. It could not have been established anywhere but at the edge of
the bluff overhanging the town and commanding the Mississippi. Surely
this height must have been one of those eminences that struck the
imagination of Trollope when they were yet unoccupied. And now the
“noble residences” have come to crown the hill-side, and really noble
residences many of them are. There are perhaps as skilfully designed
houses in the younger city, and certainly there are houses as costly;
but there is nothing to be compared with the massing of the handsome
houses of St. Paul upon the ridge
[Illustration: DWELLING IN ST. PAUL.
Mould & McNichol, Architects.]
above the river. Indeed, there are very few streets in the United States
that give in as high a degree as Summit Avenue the sense of an
expenditure liberal without ostentation, directed by skill, and
restrained by taste. What mainly strikes a pilgrim from the East is not
so much the merit of the best of these houses, as the fact that there
are no bad ones; none, at least, so bad as to disturb the general
impression of richness and refinement, and none that make the crude
display of “new money” that is to be seen in the fashionable quarters of
cities even richer and far older. The houses rise, to borrow one of
Ruskin’s eloquent phrases, “in fair fulfilment of domestic service and
modesty of home seclusion.” The air of completeness, of finish, of
“keeping,” so rare in American towns, is here as marked as at Newport.
In the architecture there is a wide variety, which does not, however,
suffice to destroy the homogeneousness of the total effect. Suggestions
from the Romanesque perhaps prevail, and testify anew to the
[Illustration: PORTE-COCHÈRE, ST. PAUL.
Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.]
influence of Richardson, though there are suggestions from the
Renaissance and from pointed architecture that show scholarship as well
as invention. The cleverness and ingenuity of a porte-cochère of two
pointed arches are not diminished by the likelihood that it was
suggested by a canopied tomb in a cathedral. But, indeed, from whatever
source the inspiration of the architects may have come, it is everywhere
plain that they have had no intention of presenting “examples” of
historical architecture, and highly unlikely that they would be
disturbed by the detection in their work of solecisms that were such
merely from the academic point of view. It is scarcely worth while to go
into specific criticism of their domestic work. To illustrate it is to
show that the designers of the best of it are quite abreast of the
architects of the older parts of the country, and that they are able to
command an equal skill of craftsmanship in the execution of their
designs.
[Illustration: PORCH IN ST. PAUL.
Mould & McNichol, Architects.]
This does not answer our question whether there is any such thing as
Western architecture, or whether these papers should not rather have
been entitled “Glimpses of Architecture in the West.” The interest in
this art throughout the West is at least as general as the interest in
it throughout the East, and it is attested in the twin cities by the
existence of a flourishing and enterprising periodical, the
“Northwestern Architect,” to which I am glad to confess my obligations.
It is natural that this interest, when joined to an intense local
patriotism, should lead to a magnifying of the Westernness of such
structures as are the subjects of local pride. It is common enough to
hear the same local patriot who declaims to you in praise of Western
architecture explain also
[Illustration: FROM A DWELLING IN ST. PAUL.
Gilbert & Taylor, Architects.]
that the specimens of it which he commends to your admiration are the
work of architects of “Eastern” birth or training. Now, if not in
Dickens’s time, the “man of Boston raisin’” is recognized in the West to
have his uses. The question whether there is any American architecture
is not yet so triumphantly answered that it is other than provincial to
lay much stress on local differences. The general impression that the
Eastern observer derives from Western architecture is the same that
American architecture in general makes upon the European observer; and
that is, that it is a very much emancipated architecture. Our architects
are assuredly less trammelled by tradition than those of any older
countries, and the architects of the West are even less trammelled than
those of the East. Their characteristic buildings show this
characteristic equally, whether they be good or bad. The towering
commercial structures that are forced upon them by new conditions and
[Illustration: DWELLINGS IN ST. PAUL.
Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.]
facilities are very seldom specimens of any historical style; and the
best and the worst of these, the most and the least studied, are apt to
be equally hard to classify. To be emancipated is not a merit; and to
judge whether or not it is an advantage, one needs to examine the
performances in which the emancipation is exhibited. “That a good man be
‘free,’ as we call it,” says Carlyle, in one of his most emphatic
Jeremiads--“be permitted to unfold himself in works of goodness and
nobleness--is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable; to
him and to those about him. But that a bad man be ‘free’--permitted to
unfold himself in _his_ particular way--is, contrariwise, the fatallest
curse you could inflict upon him; curse, and nothing else, to him and
all his neighbors.”
There is here not a question of morals, but of knowledge and competency.
The restraints in architecture of a recognized school, of a prevailing
style, are useful and salutary in proportion to the absence of restraint
that the architect is capable of imposing upon himself. The secular
tradition of French architecture, imposed by public authority and
inculcated by official academics, is felt as a trammel by many
architects, who, nevertheless, have every reason to feel grateful for
the power of design which this same official curriculum has trained and
developed. In England the fear of the archæologists and of the
ecclesiologists operated, during the period of modern Gothic at least,
with equal force, though without any official sanction. To be
“ungrammatical,” not to adopt a particular phase of historical
architecture, and not to confine one’s self to it in a design, was there
the unforgivable offence, even though the incongruities that resulted
from transcending it were imperceptible to an artist and obvious only to
an archæologist. A designer thoroughly trained under either of these
systems, and then transferred to this country as a practitioner, must
feel, as many such a practitioner has in fact felt, that he was suddenly
unshackled, and that his emancipation was an unmixed advantage to him;
but it is none the less true that his power to use his liberty wisely
came from the discipline that was now relaxed. The academic prolusions
of the Beaux Arts, or the exercises of a draughtsman, have served their
purpose in qualifying him for independent design. The advocates of the
curriculum of the English public schools maintain that,
[Illustration: PORCH IN ST. PAUL.
A. H. Stem, Architect.]
obsolete as it seems, even the practice of making Latin verses has its
great benefits in imparting to the pupil the command of literary form
and of beauty of diction. There are many examples to sustain this
contention, as well as the analogous contention that a faithful study
and reproduction of antique or of mediæval architecture are highly
useful, if not altogether indispensable, to cultivate an architect’s
power of design. Only it may be pointed out that the use of these
studies is to enable the student to express himself with more power and
grace in the vernacular, and that one no longer reverts to Latin verse
when he has really something to say. The monuments that are accepted as
models by the modern world are themselves the results of the labors of
successive generations. It was by a secular process that the same
structural elements employed at Thebes and Karnac were developed to the
perfection of the Parthenon. In proportion to the newness of their
problems it is to be expected that the efforts of our architects will be
crude; but there is a vast difference between the crudity of a serious
and matured attempt to do a new thing and the crudity of mere ignorance
and self-sufficiency. Evidently the progress of American architecture
will not be promoted by the labors of designers, whether they be
“Western” or “Eastern,” who have merely “lived in the alms basket” of
architectural forms, and whose notion of architecture consists in
multiplying “features,” as who should think to enhance the
expressiveness of the human countenance by adorning it with two noses.
One cannot neologize with any promise of success unless he knows what is
already in the dictionary; and a professional equipment that puts its
owner really in possession of the best that has been done in the world
is indispensable to successful eclecticism in architecture. On the other
hand, it is equally true that no progress can result from the labors of
architects whose training has made them so fastidious that they are more
revolted by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt to
express a new meaning than by the failure to make the attempt, and so
conceal what they are really doing behind a mask of historical
architecture, of which the elegance is quite irrelevant. This latter
fault is that of modern architecture in general. The history of that
architecture indicates that it is a fault even more unpromising of
progress than the crudities of an emancipated architecture, in which the
discipline of the designer fails to supply the place of the artificial
check of an historical style. It is more feasible to tame exuberances
than to create a soul under the ribs of death. The emancipation of
American architecture is thus ultimately more hopeful than if it were
put under academic bonds to keep the peace. It may freely be admitted
that many of its manifestations are not for the present joyous, but
grievous, and that to throw upon the individual designer the
responsibility withheld from a designer with whom fidelity to style is
the first duty is a process that fails when his work, as has been
wittily said, “shows no more self-restraint than a bunch of
fire-crackers.” But these papers have also borne witness that there are
among the emancipated practitioners of architecture in the West men who
have shown that they can use their liberty wisely, and whose work can be
hailed as among the hopeful beginnings of a national architecture.
THE END
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FOOTNOTES:
[A] Of course this needs modification, since the mediæval buildings
of Italy were accessible to the designers of the Renaissance. What
I suppose I had in mind was to point out that they had no knowledge
of the original Grecian monuments, from which the classical Roman
architecture was derived.
[B] “Recent Building in New York,” 1883.
[C] Died 1883.
[D] See illustration, page 39.
[E] The alternative of a domical construction is not here considered,
though it was adopted in that one of the designs for the Cathedral
of New York that was chosen for further development. The competitive
design could not be accepted as a solution of the problem, since the
domed interior was masked, instead of being expressed, by the exterior.
[F] See Mr. Charles Herbert Moore’s excellent “Development and
Character of Gothic Architecture,” published since this paper was
written; a work which no student of Gothic or of cathedral-building can
afford not to read.
[G] See illustration, p. 75.