FASHION IN ARCHITECTURE
The milestones of art are the signboards of history. Political moves may
or may not signify. Treaties international are usually effected by
skilful diplomacy, foes may be bluffed by naval and military manœuvres;
but the art of a nation betrays its innermost confidences--the stuff
whereof ’tis made.
If, however, as happened at the Centennial Exposition in 1876, a
political advent coincides with one in art, that milestone becomes an
epoch-marker extraordinary. In 1876 the arts of the world, for the first
time, were made to pass before this people as an alluring pageant, and a
general desire to avail ourselves of them returned to replace the vacuum
that had existed since the platform of Andrew Jackson denounced the
refinements of life as attributes of an overbearing aristocracy,
patroons and manor-lords, and necessarily
PLATE LXII.
[Illustration: ULTRA-FASHIONABLE, QUEEN-ANNE ARCHITECTURE.]
[Illustration: FASHIONABLE HOUSE--EASTLAKE SCHOOL.]
fraught with every danger to a nation’s liberty and strength.
But let us see how unintelligently, nevertheless, we went about the new
art movement. Like the North American Indian who habitually first learns
the vices of civilization, we were not slow to discover the meretricious
in whatever art the old world chose to exhibit, and this we began
assiduously to adapt, especially in the field of applied ornament.
A school of design called the “Eastlake school” (Plate LXII), I believe,
was the first to emerge from the confused mass of ideas with which the
American brain became suddenly surcharged. As the Rococo in France had
been called down by the Empire, so was our Scaramouch architecture of
the Reign of Terror, with all its extravagant circular work, called down
by the Centennial, and straight lines innumerable--congeries of straight
lines--became the rage. Mouldings were no longer returned, but died
against perpendicular members the faces of which were also ornamented by
lines. With the jig-saw still dangerously convenient there was shortly
evolved from the Eastlake propaganda, at first devoted to the
manufacture of furniture, an American travesty of the eighteenth century
châlet of Switzerland. The historic châlets were covered with ornament.
On close inspection, however, this ornament was easily seen to be hand
carving of the most skilful description; but never mind, our jig-saws
could fake it sufficiently well to please a not over-fastidious public
taste, and it is hence we derive fashionable house number one.
But the Eastlake style was not the only product of the Centennial.
Contemporary if not coördinate was the Romanesque revival undertaken by
H. H. Richardson (see Plate V), also a certain type of Victorian-Gothic
(see Plate LXIII) associated more or less with the name of Richard
Morris Hunt, neither of which could be expressed in wood, and therefore,
represented the more expensive fashions. The references to the
Romanesque revival which occur in Chapter I of this review will answer,
I hope, for that fashion in architecture, so I will proceed with some
desultory reflections upon the Victorian-Gothic style.
Mr. Hunt was probably the most remarkable
PLATE LXIII.
[Illustration: “BELLWOOD,” MADISON, N. J. EPOCH 1878.]
architect this country has produced. His professional training occupied
some twelve years of his life, which he spent mostly in universities
abroad. He told me this himself when I called upon him, now many years
since, for encouragement and advice. He sat me upon a high stool in his
private office, and related about twelve chapters of his memoirs, as
nearly as I can recollect, i. e., one chapter for each year of his
prodigious scholarship, all of which I have no doubt was intended for my
good, which I trust it has, in some measure, accomplished. Returning to
this country laden with scholastic honors, for twenty-five years this
brilliant _diplomé_ concerned himself principally with academic detail.
Rarely did he go beyond the integument of a structure with his
characteristic impress, apparently satisfied to decorate according to
the canons of the Ecole des Beaux Arts the architecture _sui generis_ of
America.
About this time the Victorian-Gothic school of design was advertising
its merits, in which school Mr. Hunt found a congenial medium to exploit
his essentially grammatical detail, and Bellwood at Madison, New
Jersey, supplies me a fine example of this once very fashionable
architecture and of Mr. Hunt’s work of that period. In 1897 I was
consulted by Mr. Bell, who had purchased the place from Mr. Twombly,
regarding a proposed extension to the house. Although not at all in
sympathy with what Montgomery Schuyler calls Mr. Hunt’s “staccato
style,” I remembered the episode of Michelangelo and the plans of St.
Peter’s by Bramante, and advised that the ruling spirit in any new work
directly attached to the main building of the estate should be
Victorian-Gothic notwithstanding that the style had gone completely out
of vogue, and I, myself, had been obliged to remove some of the interior
woodwork for Mr. Bell, which, while academic in every line, was crying
ugly--so ugly that nobody could look at it a minute without
irritability. But my devotion to art lost me the only profitable part of
the work, for Carrère and Hastings were subsequently employed to erect
an Elizabethan end which I have taken care not to show in the
illustration, not because of lack of architectonic merit in the
extension, but because it impairs just so much of the historic value of
the subject.
Technically, Bellwood is admirable. It looks to me just like the Earl of
Beaconsfield and the Congress of Berlin or the period at which the
Victorian age was in the midst of glory, but from the standpoint of
true, Anglo-Saxon home feeling, it does not satisfy. Mr. Hunt was an
academician above everything. We see this one idea in all his early
work, its culmination regardless of ugliness being exploited in the
_Tribune_ Building in Park Row.
But a new mission in life awaited Mr. Hunt. After all these years of
mediocrity of talent, and when he was passed fifty years of age, it was
as if some angel had descended in the night while he slept, and had
whispered the one magic word with which he was ever after to immortalize
himself, namely--“Adaptation!” For suddenly, without a word of warning,
this remarkable man designed the house of W. K. Vanderbilt at the corner
of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, the pioneer and a very
beautiful adaptation of French Renaissance which made its architect
famous almost before it was completed (Plate LXX). More than this his
success with the new medium of expression in which Mr. Hunt soon
received other commissions, attracted to his office the life-long
clients of other architects to whom no angels had whispered, and who
were without sensations of their own. Notably was it so in the case of
Mrs. Gerry, who had just come into possession of her father’s money, and
who did not hesitate to turn down her father’s architects as well as
those who had faithfully served her husband in order that Mr. Hunt might
build her new house at Sixty-first Street; while even the late Cornelius
Vanderbilt would not positively decide upon the amplification of his
enormous dwelling at Fifty-eighth Street until Mr. Hunt had consulted
with his architect. This was a signal tribute to Mr. Hunt, and required
the greatest delicacy upon his part, to which I believe he was equal.
In justice to the apparent partiality of the adaptation angel for Mr.
Hunt, I must say that he was not entirely alone in her favors, but that
there were other architects who had learned how to adapt English
Renaissance of the Georges as cleverly as Mr. Hunt could adapt French
châteaux, and who were, therefore, not seriously inconvenienced. But I
see I am running before my
PLATE LXIV.
[Illustration: A QUEEN-ANNE HOUSE AT SHORT HILLS, N. J.
FREDERICK B. WHITE (deceased), Architect.]
[Illustration: AN ULTRA-FASHIONABLE COLONIAL HOUSE OF THE PRESENT DAY.
1904.]
horse to market, and must reserve the consideration of this later
architectural development for a chapter upon the art of adaptation while
I return for the present to “Fashion in Architecture.”
And now I come to a much execrated style of architecture--the Queen Anne
style, the last direct influence of the Centennial Exposition and the
first fashion to incorporate the vital spark of Anglo-Saxon home
feeling. It was the suggestion of historic home atmosphere, though much
disguised with American nonsense, that appealed to the better educated
people without their knowing it. They thought Queen Anne architecture to
be merely another clever fashion, more clever because odder and stranger
than any of its predecessors; indeed, the architects themselves, most
expert with its vagaries, could not have told you the real secret of its
popularity. Like all fashions in architecture, it was burlesqued and
ruined while its most active votaries still living have passed on to a
higher plane--the plane of adaptation--and do not like to reflect upon
the Queen Anne houses they once erected. The fact of it was, the nation
was groping in the dark, and if the truth must be told, it is groping
in the dark still; but we have learned this much beyond refutation: a
purely sensational and affected style of architecture such as was the
Queen Anne style practised in this country is relegated now to the cheap
speculative builder; the better class of Americans know that the secret
of successful architecture does not lie in odd conceits and invention,
at any rate.
There was once a young man named Frederick B. White, whose short and
brilliant life is worth putting on record here. For if there was ever an
architect who was _facile princeps_ with Queen Anne architecture, it was
he. He came from Princeton University at a time when the revival was in
its first flush, and nobody, it seems to me, ever grasped the spirit of
the style in so admirable a way. In Plate LXIV I have the honor of
presenting an edifying example of this architect’s work, the Queen Anne
dwelling-house at its best, and between this example and the Queen Anne
house shown in Plate LXII the reader will, without doubt, note many
degrees of deterioration in both taste and harmony.
PLATE LXV.
[Illustration: A COUNTRY HOUSE, SAN MATEO, CAL.
BRUCE PRICE, Architect.]
To make his audience at the Brooklyn Tabernacle laugh the late Dr.
Talmage called the Queen Anne style the most abominable of all styles of
architecture. But when legitimately developed there is nothing the
matter with the Queen Anne style at all. It was the Jacobin and bastard
features without antecedents and _raison d’être_ that brought it into
ridicule, and caused a composite style of American dwelling-house, Queen
Anne in motive but Romanesque in detail, to make the necessary apologies
to the public in the guise of an improved substitute. (See Plate LXV.)
Though an avowed composition crossed by this strain and by that, the
Queen Anne substitute was yet academic and correct in all its detail,
and has survived to this day. I mean to say that this ingenious
composite style is still exploited by representative architects. It can
be made to simulate home-feeling after a fashion, although there is
always that bizarre note present which characterizes fashion as its
first object, while by no stretch of the imagination may we associate
our ancestors or history with such a palpably modern American
suburbanite as is illustrated herewith.
I know not whose perspicacity it was that first discovered in the
Colonial exemplars of the Grand Epoch a fashion the popularity of which
was soon to eclipse all the foregoing fashions I have enumerated, and
which, moreover, continues to be most in vogue. But the Colonial germ,
during the early eighties, seems to have been in the air and sporadic
throughout the country. It is the greatest fallacy, however, to say, as
many learned reviewers of Colonial architecture do, that its symmetry,
restfulness and good proportion generally caused it to rise superior to
other schools of design, because that is not true. The preceding styles
properly developed all had compensating virtues. The secret of the
Colonial revival was the same inherent vital spark that had previously
commended the Queen Anne architecture, only the Colonial houses
possessed it to a far greater degree. For it was not only English
history, always intimately associated with our own, that they expressed,
but authentic memoirs of the American people themselves.
To the first Colonial revivalists the true merit of the Colonial houses
was entirely latent in them, though
[Illustration: THE H. A. C. TAYLOR HOUSE, NEWPORT, R. I. EPOCH, 1885.
(From a sketch by the Author.)]
influenced by it as by a magnet: and I regret that the cleverest
architects to-day are still working upon the fallacious formula of
symmetry, restfulness and good proportion while they often garble
American history with much interpolated foreign material and
anachronism. I do not want the reader to suppose that the
ultra-fashionable Colonial house herein illustrated (Plate LXIV), was
the work of the cleverest architect in America, but I needed to make
clear this point about interpolated material, and so have selected a
most unblushing example of it.
On page 129 I submit a hurriedly executed sketch of one of our earliest
adaptations of a Colonial house of the Grand Epoch. This house was
designed in 1885 by some of our cleverest architects indeed, though it
is extremely doubtful if they had any deeper purpose in it than to
exploit a fashionable dwelling for Newport at the time. To-day, these
same architects would do it very differently. On no account would they
put two Palladian windows with huge sheets of plate glass in such close
conjunction as is seen in the sketch imposing triplet windows with
cornices, elaborated by
PLATE LXVI.
[Illustration: DOORWAY AT SHARON, CONN.
“By evening I was so tired looking at fashionable architecture that my
invitation to supper at Aunt Muriel’s was grateful beyond words. We had
sugar-cured ham (cured on the place), home-made bread, toasted and
buttered, Ceylon tea, brewed at table from an antique Dresden
tea-caddie, old-fashioned raised cake, and honey as put up by the
bees.”]
applied ornament directly overhead. Such modern obtrusion would be
relegated to their draughtsman who has set up in business for himself,
and to whom they might direct the poorer-class client seeking a
low-priced plan. Experience alone has taught these architects that the
closer the adaptation up to a certain point, the greater the success. I
do not believe that they ever think of expressing history in executing
their designs. Certainly, they do not look upon their profession as
eleemosynary to make the world a more beautiful world, a kindlier world,
a happier world for mankind generally. The chances are they are still
figuring very closely with American cunning and expediency for
commercial martinets, whose favor means the largest commissions, and
whose unwelcome personal influence we so often run across when least
expecting in modern architecture, and which is sure to disenchant us
with it.