I
Between 1860 and 1890, some of the forces that were latent in
industrialism were realized in American architecture. Where the first
pioneers had fared timidly, hampered by insufficient resources, the
generation that had been stimulated by war industries and profiteering,
by the discovery of petroleum and natural gas, by the spanning of the
American continent and by cable communication with Europe, rioted over
its new-found wealth.
“The Song of the Broad-Ax” still faintly lingered on the Pacific
slopes; but the land pioneer was rapidly giving way to the pioneer
in industry; and for perhaps the first time during the century, the
surplus of capital outran the immediate demand for new plant and
equipment. The Iron Age reached its peak of achievement in a series
of great bridges, beginning with the Eads Bridge at St. Louis; and
romanticism made a last stand. It will pay us, perhaps, to take one
last look at the romantic effort, in order to see how impossible and
hopeless was the task it set out to perform.
In England, the romantic movement in architecture had made the return
to the Middle Ages a definite symbol of social reform: in Ruskin’s mind
it was associated with the restoration of a medieval type of polity,
something like a reformed manor, while with Morris it meant cutting
loose from the machine and returning to the meticulous handicraft of
the town-guilds. In America, the romantic movement lacked these social
and economic implications; and while it is not unfair to say that the
literary expression of English romanticism was on the whole much better
than the architecture, in the proportion that The Stones of Venice was
better than the Ashmolean Museum or the Albert Memorial, the reverse is
true on this side of the Atlantic.
Inarticulate as H. H. Richardson, the chief exponent of American
romanticism, was, it seemed for a while as if he might breast the
tide of mechanical industry and create for a good part of the scene a
sense of stability and harmony which it had all too plainly lacked. In
relation to his age, however, Richardson was in the biological sense a
“sport”; surrounded by jerry-builders, who had degraded the craft of
building, and engineers who ignored it, he was perhaps the last of the
great medieval line of master-masons.
Richardson began his career in America directly after the Civil War.
Almost the first of the new generation of Americans to be trained by
the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he brought back to America none of those
atrocious adaptations of the French Renaissance like the New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston Post Offices. On the contrary, he had come
under the influence of Viollet-le-Duc; and for about ten years he
struggled with incongruous forms and materials in the anomalous manner
known as Free Gothic. The end of this period of experiment came in
1872, when he received the commission for Trinity Church in Boston; and
although it was not until ten years later that he saw any Romanesque
buildings other than in photographs--for he had not traveled during
his student-years in Paris--it was in this sturdy mode that he cast
his best work. Richardson was not a decorator, but a builder: in going
back to Romanesque precedent, with its round arches and massive stone
members, he was following out a dictum of Viollet-le-Duc’s: “only
primitive sources supply the energy for a long career.” Turning away
from “applied Gothic,” Richardson started to build from the bottom
up. So far had the art of masonry disappeared that in Trinity Church
Richardson sometimes introduced struts and girders without any attempt
to assimilate them in the composition; but as far as any single man
could absorb and live with a vanished tradition, Richardson did.
The proof of Richardson’s genius as a builder lies in the difference
between the accepted drawings for Trinity Church and the finished
building. His ideas altered with the progress of the work, and in
almost every case the building itself is a vast improvement over the
paper design. Moreover, in his capacity as master-mason, Richardson
trained an able corps of craftsmen; and so pervasive was his influence
that one still finds on houses Richardson never saw, the touches of
delicate, leafy stone-carving he had introduced. With carving and
sculpture, the other arts entered, and by his fine designs and exacting
standards of work, Richardson elevated the position of the minor
crafts, at the same time that he turned over unreservedly to men like
John La Farge and Augustus St. Gaudens the major elements of decoration.
Probably most people who know Richardson’s name vaguely associate
him with ecclesiastical work; but Richardson’s brand of romanticism
was a genuine attempt to embrace the age, and in his long list of
public works there are but five churches. If the Pittsburgh Court
House and Trinity Church stand out as the hugest of his architectural
conceptions, it is the smaller buildings that test the skill and
imagination of the master, and the public libraries at North Easton,
Malden, and Quincy, Mass., and some of the little railway stations
in Massachusetts stand on an equally high level. Richardson pitted
his own single powers against the barbarism of the Gilded Age; but,
unlike his contemporaries in England, he did not turn his back upon
the excellences of industrialism. “The things I want most to design,”
he said to his biographer, “are a grain-elevator and the interior of a
great river-steamboat.”
In short, Richardson sought to dominate his age. So nearly did he
succeed that in a symposium on the ten finest buildings in America,
conducted by an architectural journal in the ’eighties, Richardson
was given five. This was no easy victory, and, to tell the truth,
it was only a partial one. The case of the State Capitol at Albany,
which Richardson and Eidlitz took in hand in 1878, after five
million dollars had been squandered on it in the course of ten years’
misconstruction, scarcely caricatures the conditions under which the
arts struggled to exist. Begun in the style of the Roman Renaissance,
the building under Richardson’s impetuous touch began to take on
Romanesque proportions, only to be legislated back into Renaissance by
the offended lawgivers!
William Morris Hunt, then at the height of his powers, was commissioned
to paint two large mural compositions for the assembly chamber of
this blessed building. So much time had been spent in mismanaging the
structure that Hunt was given only two months to transfer his cartouche
to the panels; but he worked heroically, and, as one of his biographers
says, the work was a great triumph. Great, perhaps--but temporary!
“The building had fallen into the hands of a political ring, and the
poor construction was revealed in the leaking of the massive roof and
the settling of the whole structure. Before ten years had passed,
great portions of Hunt’s paintings flaked off, and what remained was
walled up behind the rebuilding necessary to avert utter ruin.” In a
period like this, Richardson’s comparative success takes on heroic
proportions.