If the romantic movement in America proved that the architect could
capture only a small part of the field, and go no further than the
interests of privilege allowed, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge
showed how well industrialism could handle its problems when its
purposes were not limited by the necessity for sloppy workmanship
and quick turnover. The story of its building is a tribute to both
science and humanity. When John Roebling, the designer of the bridge,
died in the midst of his job, the business of construction was taken
up by his son, and by his devotion to his task in season and out of
season, Washington Roebling became an invalid. Confined to his house
on Columbia Heights, for ten years the younger Roebling watched the
work through a telescope, and directed it as a general would direct a
battle. So goes the legend: it runs rather higher than the tales of
mean prudence or mechanical skill which glorified Mr. Samuel Smiles’
heroes.
The bridge itself was a testimony to the swift progress of physical
science. The strong lines of the bridge, and the beautiful curve
described by its suspended cables, were derived from an elegant formula
in mathematical physics--the elastic curve. If the architectural
elements of the massive piers have perhaps too much the bare quality of
engineering, if the pointed arches meet esthetic betrayal in the flat
solidity of the cornices, if, in short, the masonry does not sing as
Richardson alone perhaps could have made it sing, the steel work itself
makes up for this, by the architectural beauty of its pattern; so that
beyond any other aspect of New York, I think, the Brooklyn Bridge
has been a source of joy and inspiration to the artist. In the later
bridges the spanning members are sturdier and the supporting piers and
cables are lighter and less essential; and they suffer esthetically by
the very ease of their triumph over the difficulties of engineering.
All that the age had just cause for pride in--its advances in science,
its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of
dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried
and the impossible--came to a head in the Brooklyn Bridge. What was
grotesque and barbarous in industrialism was sloughed off in the
great bridges. These avenues of communication are, paradoxically, the
only enduring monuments that witness a period of uneasy industrial
transition; and to this day they communicate a feeling of dignity,
stability, and unwavering poise.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1884; Richardson died, after
finishing the Pittsburgh Court House, in 1886. There was a short period
during which the echoes of Richardson’s style resounded in the work
of the Western architects; and then in New York two of Richardson’s
own pupils, Messrs. McKim and White, who had caught the spirit of the
period that was to follow the passing of the frontier, prepared an
appropriate mold for its activities. By far the finest things in the
late ’eighties are the shingled houses which Richardson and Stanford
White and a few others developed for seaboard estates: they recovered
the spirit of the early vernacular work, and continued the colonial
tradition without even faintly recalling colonial forms. This new note,
however, was scarcely sounded before it died out; and in the twenty
years that followed the conflict between industrialism and romanticism
was swallowed up and finally forgotten in the rise of a new mode.
Richardson had not died too soon. The quality of mind and culture which
shines through his work was opposed to nearly every manifestation of
the period that succeeded him.
From this time on, romanticism retained a place for itself only by
forfeiting its claims to occupy the whole province of architecture. In
churches and college halls where the traditional tie with the Middle
Ages had never perhaps been completely broken, its triumphs have been
genuine; but although Mr. J. G. Rogers’ Harkness Memorial at Yale,
or Messrs. Goodhue and Cram’s St. Thomas’ Church, for example, leave
little to be desired in themselves, they have established no precedent
for the hundred other kinds of building which the modern community
requires; and it is not without significance that in his most recent
efforts Mr. Goodhue, for one, had abandoned the molds of romanticism.
Unlike Richardson, the surviving romanticists now demand a certain
insulation from the modern world; the more intelligent exponents of the
movement believe with Dr. Ralph Adams Cram that there is no hope for
its achievement throughout the community without a return to “Walled
Towns.”
Such a retreat is the equivalent of surrender. To hold to Gothic
precedent in the hope of re-creating the medieval community is to
hope that an ancient bottle will turn potassium permanganate into
claret. The romanticists have never fully faced the social and economic
problems that attend their architectural solutions: the result is that
they have been dependent upon assistance from the very forces and
institutions which, fundamentally, they aim to combat. Isolated on
little islands, secure for the moment, romanticism must view the work
on the mainland with a gesture of irate despair; and the only future it
dares to face lies behind it!