With business booming and vanishing, with people coming and going, with
land continually changing hands, what encouragement was there for the
stable achievements of architecture? In vain does the architect antic
and grimace to conceal his despair; his business is to put on a front.
If he is not a Pecksniff at heart, he will at any rate have to serve
Mr. Veneering. A guide book of 1826 refers to a Masonic Hall “somewhat
in the Gothic style”; and we can characterize all the buildings of the
period by saying that they were “somewhat” like architecture--a little
more than scenery, a little less than solids.
For a while it seemed as if the Gothic revival might give the
prevailing cast to nineteenth-century building; for if this mode was
adopted at first because it was picturesque and historic it was later
reënforced by the conviction that it was a natural and scientific mode
of construction, that it stood for growth and function, as against the
arbitrary character of the classic work. The symbols of the organic
world were rife in the thought of this period, for in the sphere of
thought biology was supplanting physics, and Gothic architecture was
supposed peculiarly to be in the line of growth, while that of the
Renaissance cut across and, heretically, denied the principle of
organic development. Unfortunately the process of disintegration
had gone so far that no one current of thought had the power to
dominate; and the Gothic style proved to be only the first of a number
of discordant influences, derived from industry, from history, from
archæology.
Indeed, the chief sign that bears witness to the disintegration of
architecture during the formative days of the pioneer is eclecticism;
but there is still another--the attempt to justify the industrial
process by using solely the materials it had created in abundance. In
discussing the plans for the Smithsonian Institution, Robert Dale Owen
observed that “of late years a rival material, from the mine, seems
encroaching on these [stone, clay, wood] and the next generation may
see, arising on our continent, villages, or it may be cities, of iron.”
What Owen’s generation actually did see, apart from sheet-iron façades
and zinc cornices, was the Crystal Palace, which was built in New
York in 1853 in imitation of London’s exhibition hall of 1850. Ruskin
described the original Crystal Palace, with sardonic justice, as a
magnified conservatory; and that is about all that can be said for
either building. As exercises in technique they doubtless taught
many lessons to the iron masters and engineers; but they had scarcely
anything to contribute to architecture. A later generation built the
train sheds for their smoky railways on this pattern; but the precedent
lingers today chiefly in subway kiosks and window-fronts, and even here
it has created no fresh forms for itself--unless the blank expanse of
a plate-glass window framed in metallic grilles can be called a fresh
form.
The growth of eclecticism, on the other hand, had by the middle of the
century given the American city the aspect of a museum and the American
countryside a touch of the picture-book. Washington Irving’s Sunnyside
and the first Smithsonian building were in the predominant Gothic mode;
but Poe described the mansion of a not altogether imaginary Arnheim as
semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic; and the old Tombs prison in New York got
its name from the Egyptian character of its façade. Who can doubt that
the design for a _Byzantine_ cottage, shown in The American Cottage
Builder (1854), was somewhere carried out?
Nettled by the criticism that America was not Europe, the pioneer
determined to bring Europe to his doors. Relatively few American
architects during the period, however, had been abroad, and still
fewer had been there to any purpose; even men of culture and
imagination like Hawthorne and Emerson were not at home in the physical
environment of Europe, however intimate they were with its mind. The
buildings that were erected under the inspiration of European tours
only accentuated the barbarism of the American scene and the poverty of
the architect’s imagination.
A good part of our architecture today still exhibits the parvenu’s
uneasiness, and is by turns French, Italian, or more or less obsolete
English; but we do not, perhaps, realize with what a difference;
for photography and archæological research now make it possible to
produce buildings which have all the virtues of the original except
originality, whereas the earlier, illiterate development of foreign
examples, rehearsed in memory, resulted in a conglomerate form which
resembled nothing so much, perhaps, as P. T. Barnum’s mermaid.
If the Crystal Palace represents the extreme of industrial art, Colonel
Colt’s Armsmear represents the opposite--untutored romanticism.
Armsmear was built near Hartford, between 1855 and 1862. A writer in
the Art Journal for 1876 calls this mansion a “characteristic type
of the unique.” It was a “long, grand, impressive, contradictory,
beautiful, strange thing.... An Italian villa in stone, massive,
noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided principles of
architecture, it is like the mind of its originator, bold and unusual
in its combinations.... There is no doubt it is a little Turkish among
other things, on one side it has domes, pinnacles, and light, lavish
ornamentation, such as Oriental taste delights in.... Yet, although
the villa is Italian and cosmopolitan, the feeling is English. It is
an English home in its substantiality, its home-like and comfortable
aspects.”
It is, alas! impossible to illustrate in these pages this remarkable
specimen of American architecture; but in a lecture on the Present
and Future Prospects of Chicago (1846), I have discovered its exact
literary equivalent, and it will sum up the crudity and cultural
wistfulness of the period perhaps better than any overt description:
“I thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the patience you have
manifested on this occasion, and promise never more to offend in like
manner, so long. I have now, as Cowper observes--
‘Roved for fruit,
Roved far, and gathered much....’
“And can, I think with Scott, surely say that--
‘To his promise just
Vich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’
“I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlangtoghford,
‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’
“Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell does on another:
‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!
And charge with all your chivalry.’
“And should you in the contest fall, remember with old Homer--
‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’
“Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful strains:
‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!
Were the last words of Marmion.’”
_That_ was American architecture between 1820 and the Civil War--a
collection of tags, thrown at random against a building. Architectural
forms were brought together by a mere juxtaposition of materials,
held in place by neither imagination nor logic. There are a number
of honorable exceptions to this rule, for architects like Renwick,
who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Upjohn, who built Trinity
Church, had a more sincere understanding of the conventional task; and
by any standard of esthetic decency the old Gothic building of New
York University, on Washington Square, was a far finer structure than
the bulky office building that has taken its place. Nevertheless, this
saving remnant does not alter the character of the great mass of work,
any more than the occasionally excellent cast-iron balconies, brought
over from the London of the Regency, alter the depressing character
of the great mass of domestic building. In elevation and interior
treatment, these ante-bellum buildings were all what-nots. Souvenirs
of architecture, their forms dimly recall the monuments of the past
without in any sense taking their place.
To tell the truth, a pall had fallen over the industrial city:
contemporary writers in the ’forties and ’fifties speak of the
filth and smoke, and without doubt the chocolate brownstone front
was introduced as a measure of protective coloration. In this dingy
environment, men turned to nature as a refuge against the soiled
and bedraggled works of man’s creation; and as the creeping factory
and railroad train removed Nature farther from their doors, the park
was introduced as a more convenient means of escape. The congested
capitals of Europe had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans,
like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and Central Park, planned
in 1853, was the first of the great landscape parks to serve as a
people’s pleasance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered landscape
and the muddled city, the park alone re-created the traditions of
civilization--of man naturalized, and therefore at home, of nature
humanized, and therefore enriched. And even today our parks are what
our cities should be, and are not.
By 1860 the halcyon day of American civilization was over; the spirit
had lingered in letters and scholarship, in the work of Parkman and
Motley and Emerson and Melville and Thoreau, but the sun had already
sunk below the horizon, and what seemed a promise was in reality an
afterglow. By the time the Civil War came, architecture had recorded
faithfully the social transformation; it was sullen, grim, gauche,
unstable. While in almost every age architecture has an independent
value to the spirit, so that we can rejoice in Chartres or Winchester
even though we have abandoned the Roman faith, in the early industrial
period architecture is reduced to a symptom. Romanticism had not
restored the past, nor had industrialism made the future more welcome.
Architecture wandered between two worlds, “one dead, the other
powerless to be born.”