With the little eddies of eclecticism, with the rage for the Mansard
roof, or the introduction of German Gothic, and, a little later, the
taste for Queen Anne domesticity, there is scarcely any need to deal;
they represented only the dispersion of taste and the collapse of
judgment which marked the Gilded Age.
Up to the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, Richardson had imitators,
and they were not always mean ones. L. H. Buffington, in Minneapolis,
had to his credit a number of buildings which would not, perhaps,
have dishonored the master himself; but, as so often happens, the
tags in Richardson’s work were easier to imitate than his spirit
and inventiveness; and the chief marks of the style he created are
the all-too-solid courses of rough stone, the round arch, the squat
columns, and the contrasts in color between the light granite and the
dark sandstone or serpentine. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, an excellent
architectural critic, once said, not without reason, that Richardson’s
houses were not defensible except in a military sense; but one is
tempted to read into these ponderous forms partly the architect’s
unconscious desire to combat the infirmity and jerry-building of his
lower contemporaries, and partly his patron’s anxiety to have a seat of
refuge against the uneasy proletariat. A new feudalism was entrenching
itself behind the stockades of Homestead and the other steel-towns
of the Pittsburgh district. Here was a mode of building, solid,
formidable, at times almost brutal, that served the esthetic needs of
the barons of coal and steel almost as well as the classic met those
heroes who had survived the War of Independence.
I have emphasized what was strong and fine in Richardson’s work in
order to show how free it was from the minor faults of romanticism; and
yet it reckoned without its host, and Richardson, alas! left scarcely
a trace upon the period that followed. Romanticism was welcomed when
it built churches; tolerated when it built libraries; petted when it
built fine houses; but it could not go much farther. Richardson was a
mason, and masonry was being driven out by steel; he was an original
artist, and original art was being thrust into the background by
connoisseurship and collection; he was a builder, and architecture
was committing itself more and more to the paper plan; he insisted
upon building foursquare, and building was doomed more and more to
_façaderie_. The very strength of Richardson’s buildings was a fatal
weakness in the growing centers of commerce and industry. It takes more
than a little audacity to tear down one of Richardson’s monuments,
and so, rather ironically, they have held their own against the
insurrections of traffic and realty speculation; but the difficulty of
getting rid of these Romanesque structures only increased the demand
for a more frail and facile method of construction.
Romanticism met its great defeat in the office-building. By the use
of the passenger elevator, first designed for an exhibition-tower
adjacent to the Crystal Palace in 1853, it had become possible to raise
the height of buildings to seven stories: the desire for ground-rents
presently increased the height to ten. Beyond this, mere masonry could
not go without thickening the supporting piers to such an extent that
on a twenty-foot lot more than a quarter of the width would be lost
on the lower floors. Richardson’s Marshall Field Building in Chicago
was seven stories high; and that was about as far as solid stone or
brick could climb without becoming undignified and futile by its
bulk. The possibilities of masonry and the possibilities of commercial
gain through ground-rents were at loggerheads, and by 1888 masonry was
defeated.
Richardson, fortunately, did not live to see the undermining of the
tradition he had founded and almost established. Within a decade of
his death, however, only the empty forms of architecture remained, for
the steel-cage of the engineer had become the new structural reality.
By 1890 the ground-landlord had discovered, in the language of the
pioneer’s favorite game, that “the roof’s the limit.” If that was so,
why limit the roof? With this canny perception the skyscraper sprang
into being.
During this Gilded Age the standard of the best building had risen
almost as high as it had been in America in any earlier period; but
the mass of good building had relatively decreased; and the domestic
dwellings in both city and country lost those final touches of
craftsmanship that had lingered, here and there, up to the Civil War.
In the awkward country villas that began to fill the still-remote
suburbs of the larger cities, all sense of style and proportion were
lost: the plan was marked by meaningless irregularities; a dingy,
muddy color spread over the wooden façades. There exists a huge and
beautifully printed volume, of which, I believe, there are not more
than a hundred copies, on the villas of Newport in 1876: the compiler
thereof sought to satisfy the vanity of the original owners and the
curiosity of a later generation; yet mid all these examples of the
“novel” and the “unique,” there is not a single mansion that would
satisfy any conceivable line of descendants.
If the level of architecture was low in the country, it touched the
bottom of the abyss in the city. As early as 1835 the multiple-family
tenement had been introduced in New York as a means of producing
congestion, raising the ground-rents, and satisfying in the worst
possible way the need of the new immigrants for housing. The conditions
of life in these tenements were infinitely lower than they had been
in the most primitive farmhouse of the colonial period; their lack of
light, lack of water, lack of sanitary facilities, and lack of privacy,
created an admirable milieu for the propagation of vice and disease,
and their existence in a period which was boasting loudly of the
advance of science and industrialism shows, to say the least, how the
myths which inspired the age stood between the eye and reality, and
obscured the actual state of the modern industrial community.
To the disgrace of the architectural profession in America, the
worst features of tenement-house construction were standardized in
the so-called dumb-bell tenement which won the first prize in the
model tenement-house competition of 1879; and the tenements which
were designed after this pattern in the succeeding years combined a
maximum lack of privacy with a minimum of light and air. The gridiron
street-design, the narrow frontage, the deep lot, all conspired to make
good housing difficult in the larger cities: within this framework
good house-design, indeed, still is difficult. The dumb-bell tenement
of the Gilded Age, however, raised bad housing into an art; and the
acquisition of this art in its later developments is now one of the
stigmata of “progress” in a modern American city. I say this without
irony; the matter is too grave for jest.
During these same ’seventies, the benefits of poor housing were
extended in New York to those with money enough to afford something
better: the Paris flat was introduced. The legitimate excuse for the
small apartment was the difficulty of obtaining household service,
and the futility of keeping up large houses for small families: this,
however, had nothing to do with the actual form that the apartment
took, for, apart from the desire for congestion-rents, it is as easy to
build apartments for two families as for twenty. The flat is a genuine
convenience for the well-to-do visitor to a city; it gives him the
atmosphere of a home without many of its major complications, and those
who got the taste for this life in Paris were not altogether absurd in
desiring to enjoy the same benefits in New York. Unfortunately, what
suits a visitor does not necessarily meet the demands of a permanent
resident: one may tolerate a blank wall for a week or a month without
being depressed, particularly since a good part of a visitor’s time
is spent outside his home; but to live year after year facing a blank
wall or an equally-frowning façade opposite is to be condemned to the
environment of a penitentiary.
The result of building apartments in New York and elsewhere was not
cheaper rents for smaller quarters: it was smaller quarters without
the cheap rents. Those who wanted sunlight and a pleasant view paid a
premium for it; those who did not get either paid more than enough
for what they got. The result of building apartments which would
satisfy only a visitor was to make every family visitors: before the
acute housing shortage, yearly removals to new premises were the only
palliative that made their occupancy tolerable. The amount of wear and
tear and waste, the loss of energy and money and good spirits, produced
by the inability of the architect to design adequately under the
pecuniary standards of the Gilded Age was colossal. The urban nomad in
his own way was as great a spendthrift as the pioneer of the prairie.
Both of them had been unable to create a permanent civilization; and
both of them paid the price for it.