THE PELICAN HISTORY OF ART
EDITED BY NIKOLAUS PEVSNER
Z15
ARCHITECTURE: NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
HENRY-RUSSELL HITCHCOCK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HENRY-RUSSELL HITCHCOCK
ARCHITECTURE
NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH
CENTURIES
[Illustration]
PENGUIN BOOKS
BALTIMORE · MARYLAND
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_First published 1958_
_Second edition 1963_
_Penguin Books Inc._
_3300 Clipper Mill Road, Baltimore, Maryland_
*
_Copyright_ © _1958 Henry-Russell Hitchcock_
*
_Made and printed in
Great Britain_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
A.C. O’M.-W.
*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ix
LIST OF PLATES xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xix
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xx
INTRODUCTION xxi
Part One
_1800-1850_
1. ROMANTIC CLASSICISM AROUND 1800 1
2. THE DOCTRINE OF J.-N.-L. DURAND AND ITS 20
APPLICATION IN NORTHERN EUROPE
3. FRANCE AND THE REST OF THE CONTINENT 43
4. GREAT BRITAIN 59
5. THE NEW WORLD 77
6. THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL 93
7. BUILDING WITH IRON AND GLASS: 1790-1855 115
Part Two
_1850-1900_
8. SECOND EMPIRE PARIS, UNITED ITALY, AND 131
IMPERIAL-AND-ROYAL VIENNA
9. SECOND EMPIRE AND COGNATE MODES 152
ELSEWHERE
10. HIGH VICTORIAN GOTHIC IN ENGLAND 173
11. LATER NEO-GOTHIC OUTSIDE ENGLAND 191
12. NORMAN SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 206
13. H. H. RICHARDSON AND McKIM, MEAD & WHITE 221
14. THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE IN 233
ENGLAND AND AMERICA
15. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DETACHED HOUSE IN 253
ENGLAND AND AMERICA FROM 1800 TO 1900
Part Three
_1890-1955_
16. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ART NOUVEAU: 281
VICTOR HORTA
17. THE SPREAD OF THE ART NOUVEAU: THE WORK 292
OF C. R. MACKINTOSH AND ANTONI GAUDÍ
18. MODERN ARCHITECTS OF THE FIRST 307
GENERATION IN FRANCE: AUGUSTE PERRET
AND TONY GARNIER
19. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND HIS CALIFORNIA 320
CONTEMPORARIES
20. PETER BEHRENS AND OTHER GERMAN 336
ARCHITECTS
21. THE FIRST GENERATION IN AUSTRIA, 349
HOLLAND, AND SCANDINAVIA
22. THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: 363
WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN
DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH
23. LATER WORK OF THE LEADERS OF THE SECOND 380
GENERATION
24. ARCHITECTURE CALLED TRADITIONAL IN THE 392
TWENTIETH CENTURY
25. ARCHITECTURE AT THE MID CENTURY 411
EPILOGUE 429
NOTES 439
BIBLIOGRAPHY 473
_The Plates_ 484
INDEX 677
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF FIGURES
1 Friedrich Weinbrenner: Karlsruhe, 17
Marktplatz, 1804-24, plan
2 J.-N.-L. Durand: ‘Vertical Combinations’ 21
(from _Précis des leçons_, II, plate
3)
3 J.-N.-L. Durand: ‘Galleries’ (from 24
_Précis des leçons_, II, plate 14)
4 Leo von Klenze; Munich, War Office, 26
1824-6, elevation (from Klenze,
_Sammlung_, III, plate x)
5 K. F. von Schinkel: project for Neue 29
Wache, Berlin, 1816 (from Schinkel,
_Sammlung_, I, plate 1)
6 K. F. von Schinkel: Berlin, Altes 31
Museum, 1824-8, section (from
Schinkel, _Sammlung_, I, plate 40)
7 K. F. von Schinkel: Berlin, Feilner 34
house, 1829, elevation (from Schinkel,
_Sammlung_, plate 113)
8 Gottfried Semper: Dresden, Opera House 37
(first), 1837-41, plan (from Semper,
Das _Königliche Hoftheater_, plate 1)
9 J.-I. Hittorff: project for country 47
house for Comte de W., 1830, elevation
(from Normand, _Paris moderne_, I,
plate 71)
10 John Nash: London, Regent Street and 65
Regent’s Park, 1812-27, plan (from
Summerson, _John Nash_)
11 John Haviland: Philadelphia, Eastern 79
Penitentiary, 1823-35, plan (from
Crawford, _Report_, plate 1)
12 Thomas Jefferson: Charlottesville, Va., 83
University of Virginia, 1817-26, plan
(from Kimball, _Thomas Jefferson_)
13 Isaiah Rogers: Boston, Tremont House, 87
1828-9, plan (from Eliot, _A
Description of the Tremont House_)
14 H.-P.-F. Labrouste: Paris, Bibliothèque 125
Sainte-Geneviève, (1839), 1843-50,
section (from _Allgemeine Bauzeitung_,
1851, plate 386)
15 J.-L.-C. Garnier: Paris, Opéra, 1863-74, 139
plan (from Garnier, _Nouvel opéra_, I,
plate 9)
16 Vilhelm Petersen and Ferdinand Jensen: 156
Copenhagen, Søtorvet, 1873-6,
elevation (Kunstakademiets Bibliotek,
Copenhagen)
17 Antoni Gaudí: project for Palau Güell, 203
Barcelona, 1885, elevation (from
Ráfols, _Gaudí_, p. 54)
18 W. Eden Nesfield: Kew Gardens, Lodge, 208
1867, elevation (Courtesy of Victoria
and Albert Museum)
19 R. Norman Shaw: Leyswood, Sussex, 1868, 210
plan (from Muthesius, _Das Englische
Haus_, I, figure 81)
20 D. H. Burnham and F. L. Olmsted: 231
Chicago, World’s Fair, 1893, plan
(from Edgell, _American Architecture
of Today_, figure 36)
21 T. F. Hunt: house-plan, 1827 (from Hunt, 255
_Designs for Parsonage Houses_, plate
IV)
22 A. J. Downing: house-plan, 1842 (from 258
Downing, _Cottage Residences_, figure
50)
23 Philip Webb: Arisaig, Inverness-shire, 260
1863, plan (Courtesy of J.
Brandon-Jones)
24 Nesfield & Shaw: Cloverley Hall, 261
Shropshire, 1865-8, plan (from
_Architectural Review_, 1 (1897), p.
244)
25 Philip Webb: Barnet, Hertfordshire, 262
Trevor Hall, 1868-70, plan (Courtesy
of Victoria and Albert Museum)
26 W. R. Emerson: Mount Desert, Maine, 266
house, 1879, plan (from Scully, _The
Shingle Style_, figure 46)
27 McKim, Mead & White: Newport, R.I., 268
Isaac Bell, Jr, house, 1881-2, plan
(from Sheldon, _Artistic Houses_)
28 Bruce Price: Tuxedo Park, N.Y., Tower 270
House, 1885-6 (from Scully, _The
Shingle Style_, figure 109)
29 Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, Isidore 272
Heller house, 1897, plan (from
Hitchcock, _In the Nature of
Materials_, figure 44)
30 Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, J. W. 273
Husser house, 1899, plan (from
Hitchcock, _In the Nature of
Materials_, figure 46)
31 Frank Lloyd Wright: Kankakee, Ill., 274
Warren Hickox house, 1900, plan (from
Hitchcock, _In the Nature of
Materials_, figure 54)
32 C. F. A. Voysey: Lake Windermere, 277
Broadleys, 1898-9, plan (Courtesy of
J. Brandon-Jones)
33 M. H. Baillie Scott: Trevista, c. 1905, 278
plan (from Baillie Scott, _Houses and
Gardens_, 1906, p. 155)
34 Victor Horta: Brussels, Aubecq house, 290
1900, plan (Courtesy of J. Delhaye)
35 Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Casa Milá, 304
1905-10, plan of typical floor
(Courtesy of Amics de Gaudí)
36 Auguste Perret: Paris, block of flats, 311
25 bis Rue Franklin, 1902-3, plan
(from _Architecture d’Aujourd’hui_,
October 1932, p. 19)
37 Auguste Perret: Le Raincy, S.-et-O., 313
Notre-Dame, 1922-3, plan (from
Pfammatter, _Betonkirchen_, p. 38)
38 Frank Lloyd Wright: Highland Park, Ill., 322
W. W. Willitts house, 1902, plan (from
Hitchcock, _In the Nature of
Materials_, figure 74)
39 Frank Lloyd Wright: Glencoe, Ill., W. A. 323
Glasner house, 1905, plan (from
Hitchcock, _In the Nature of
Materials_, figure 111)
40 Frank Lloyd Wright: Pasadena, Cal., Mrs 327
G. M. Millard house, 1923, plans (from
Hitchcock, _In the Nature of
Materials_, figure 251)
41 Frank Lloyd Wright: Minneapolis, M. C. 328
Willey house, 1934, plan (from
Hitchcock, _In the Nature of
Materials_, figure 317)
42 Frank Lloyd Wright: Middleton, Wis., 331
Herbert Jacobs house, 1948, plan (from
Hitchcock and Drexler, _Built in
U.S.A._, p. 121)
43 Adolf Loos: Vienna, Gustav Scheu house, 353
1912, plan (Courtesy of Dr Ludwig
Münz)
44 Le Corbusier: First project for Citrohan 368
house, 1919-20, perspective (from Le
Corbusier, _Œuvre complète_, I, p. 31)
45 Le Corbusier: Second project for 369
Citrohan house, 1922, plans and
section (from Le Corbusier, _Œuvre
complète_, I, p. 44)
46 Le Corbusier: Vaucresson, S.-et-O., 371
house, 1923, plans (from Le Corbusier,
_Œuvre complète_, I, p. 51)
47 Le Corbusier: Poissy, S.-et-O., Savoye 372
house, 1929-30, plan (from Hitchcock,
_Modern Architecture_, p. 67)
48 Walter Gropius: Dessau, Bauhaus, 1925-6, 374
plans (from Hitchcock, _Modern
Architecture_, p. 67)
49 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Project for 375
brick country house, 1922, plan (from
Johnson, _Mies van der Rohe_, p. 32)
50 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Brno, 376
Tugendhat house, 1930, plan (from
Hitchcock, _Modern Architecture_, p.
127)
51 Le Corbusier: Marseilles, Unité 386
d’Habitation, 1946-52, section of
three storeys (from Le Corbusier,
_Œuvre complète_, V, p. 211)
52 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Chicago, 389
Illinois Institute of Technology,
1939-41, general plan (from Johnson,
_Mies van der Rohe_, 2nd ed., p. 134)
53 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Plano, Ill., 390
Dr Edith Farnsworth House, 1950, plan
(from Johnson, _Mies van der Rohe_, p.
170)
54 Sir Edwin Lutyens: Hampstead Garden 406
Suburb, London, North and South
Squares, 1908 (from Weaver, _Houses
and Gardens_ (Country Life), 1913,
figure 480)
55 Saarinen & Saarinen: Warren, Mich., 419
General Motors Technical Institute,
1946-55, layout (Courtesy of General
Motors)
56 Osvaldo Arthur Bratke: São Paulo, 425
Morumbí, Bratke house, 1953, plan
(from Hitchcock, _Latin American
Architecture_, p. 174)
57 Philip Johnson: Wayzata, Minn., Richard 426
S. Davis house, 1954 (from
_Architectural Review_, 1955, pp.
236-47)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF PLATES
ABBREVIATION N.B.R. – NATIONAL BUILDINGS RECORD
1 J.-G. Soufflot and others: Paris, Panthéon
(Sainte-Geneviève), 1757-90 (Archives
Photographiques—Paris)
2 (A) C.-N. Ledoux: Paris, Barrière de la Villette,
1784-9 (Archives Photographiques—Paris)
2 (B) C.-N. Ledoux: Project for Coopery, c. 1785 (from
Ledoux, _L’ Architecture_, 1)
2 (C) L.-E. Boullée: Project for City Hall, c. 1785 (H.
Rosenau)
3 Sir John Soane: London, Bank of England, Consols
Office, 1794 (F. R. Yerbury)
4 (A) Sir John Soane: London, Bank of England, Waiting
Room Court, 1804 (F. R. Yerbury)
4 (B) C. F. Hansen: Copenhagen, Vor Frue Kirke, 1811-29
(Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen)
5 Benjamin H. Latrobe: Baltimore, Catholic
Cathedral, 1805-18 (J. H. Schaefer & Son)
6 (A) Sir John Soane: Tyringham, Buckinghamshire,
Entrance Gate, 1792-7 (Soane Museum)
6 (B) Percier and Fontaine: Paris, Rue de Rivoli,
1802-55 (A. Leconte)
7 J.-F.-T. Chalgrin and others: Paris, Arc de
Triomphe de l’Étoile, 1806-35 (Giraudon)
8 (A) Thomas de Thomon: Petersburg, Bourse, 1804-16
(Courtesy of T. J. McCormick)
8 (B) A.-T. Brongniart and others: Paris, Bourse,
1808-15 (R. Viollet)
9 (A) Friedrich Gilly: Project for monument to Frederick
the Great, 1797 (F. Stoedtner)
9 (B) Leo von Klenze: Munich, Glyptothek, 1816-30 (F.
Kaufmann)
10 (A) Friedrich Weinbrenner: Karlsruhe, Marktplatz,
1804-24 (Staatliches Amt für Denkmalpflege,
Karlsruhe)
10 (B) Friedrich von Gärtner: Munich, Ludwigskirche and
Staatsbibliothek, 1829-40 and 1831-40 (from an
engraving by E. Rauch)
11 (A) Heinrich Hübsch: Baden-Baden, Trinkhalle, 1840 (H.
Kuhn)
11 (B) Wimmel & Forsmann: Hamburg, Johanneum, 1836-9 (E.
Gorsten)
12 K. F. von Schinkel: Berlin, Schauspielhaus,
1819-21
13 K. F. von Schinkel: Berlin, Altes Museum, 1824-8
14 (A) K. F. von Schinkel: Potsdam, Court Gardener’s
House, 1829-31
14 (B) G. L. F. Laves: Hanover, Opera House, 1845-52 (H.
Wagner)
15 Ludwig Persius: Potsdam, Friedenskirche, 1845-8
16 (A) Leo von Klenze: Regensburg (nr), Walhalla, 1831-42
(from Klenze, _Walhalla_, plate VI)
16 (B) M. G. B. Bindesbøll: Copenhagen, Thorwaldsen
Museum, Court, 1839-48 (Jonals)
17 (A) Friedrich von Gärtner: Athens, Old Palace, 1837-41
(Tensi)
17 (B) Peter Speeth: Würzburg, Frauenzuchthaus, 1809 (F.
Stoedtner)
18 (A) P.-F.-L. Fontaine: Paris, Chapelle Expiatoire,
1816-24 (Archives Photographiques—Paris)
18 (B) L.-H. Lebas: Paris, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, 1823-36
(Archives Photographiques—Paris)
19 J.-B. Lepère and J.-I. Hittorff: Paris,
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, 1824-44 (from _Paris dans
sa splendeur_)
20 Douillard Frères: Nantes, Hospice Général, 1832-6
(from Gourlier, _Choix d’édifices publics_, III)
21 H.-P.-F. Labrouste: Paris, Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève, 1843-50 (Bulloz)
22 (A) É.-H. Godde and J.-B. Lesueur: Paris, extension of
Hôtel de Ville, 1837-49 (from a contemporary
lithograph)
22 (B) F.-A. Duquesney: Paris, Gare de l’Est, 1847-52
(Archives Photographiques—Paris)
23 (A) Giuseppe Jappelli and Antonio Gradenigo: Padua,
Caffè Pedrocchi, 1816-31 (Alinari)
23 (B) Antonio Niccolini: Naples, San Carlo Opera House,
1810-12 (Alinari)
24 Raffaelle Stern: Rome, Vatican Museum, Braccio
Nuovo, 1817-21 (D. Anderson)
25 A. de Simone: Caserta, Royal Palace, Sala di
Marte, 1807 (Alinari)
26 (A) Pietro Bianchi: Naples, San Francesco di Paola,
1816-24 (Alinari)
26 (B) Giuseppe Frizzi and others: Turin, Piazza Vittorio
Veneto, laid out in 1818; with Gran Madre di Dio
by Ferdinando Bonsignore, 1818-31 (G.
Cambursano)
27 (A) A. A. Monferran: Petersburg, St Isaac’s Cathedral,
1817-57 (Mansell)
27 (B) A. A. Monferran: Petersburg, Alexander Column,
1829; and K. I. Rossi: Petersburg, General Staff
Arches, 1819-29 (Courtesy of T. J. McCormick)
27 (C) A.-J. Pellechet: Paris, block of flats, 10 Place
de la Bourse, 1834 (J. R. Johnson)
28 (A) Sir John Soane: London, Royal Hospital, Chelsea,
Stables, 1814-17 (N.B.R.)
28 (B) Sir John Soane: London, Bank of England, Colonial
Office, 1818-23 (F. R. Yerbury)
29 Alexander Thomson: Glasgow, Caledonia Road Free
Church, 1856-7 (T. & R. Annan)
30 John Nash: London, Piccadilly Circus and Lower
Regent Street, 1817-19 (from lithograph by T. S.
Boys)
31 London, Hyde Park Corner: Decimus Burton, Screen,
1825, Arch, 1825; William Wilkins, St George’s
Hospital, 1827-8; Benjamin Dean Wyatt, Apsley
House, 1828 (from lithograph by T. S. Boys)
32 John Nash and James Thomson: London, Regent’s
Park, Cumberland Terrace, 1826-7 (A. F.
Kersting)
33 Sir Robert Smirke: London, British Museum, south
front, completed 1847 (A. F. Kersting)
34 (A) H. L. Elmes: Liverpool, St George’s Hall, 1841-54
(Hulton Picture Library)
34 (B) W. H. Playfair: Edinburgh, Royal Scottish
Institution, National Gallery of Scotland, and
Free Church College, 1822-36, 1850-4, and
1846-50 (F. C. Inglis)
35 (A) Alexander Thomson: Glasgow, Moray Place,
Strathbungo, 1859 (T. & R. Annan)
35 (B) Sir Charles Barry: London, Travellers’ Club and
Reform Club, 1830-2 and 1838-40 (N.B.R.)
36 J. W. Wild: London, Christ Church, Streatham,
1840-2 (J. R. Johnson)
37 (A) Sir Charles Barry: original design for Highclere
Castle, Hampshire, _c._ 1840 (S. W. Newbery)
37 (B) Cuthbert Brodrick: Leeds, Corn Exchange, 1860-3
(N.B.R.)
38 (A) Robert Mills: Washington, Treasury Department,
1836-42 (Horydczak)
38 (B) Thomas Jefferson: Charlottesville, Va. University
of Virginia, 1817-26 (F. Nichols)
39 (A) Thomas U. Walter and others: Columbus, Ohio, State
Capitol, 1839-61 (Ohio Development and Publicity
Commission)
39 (B) James C. Bucklin: Providence, R.I., Washington
Buildings, 1843 (F. Hacker)
40 William Strickland: Philadelphia, Merchants’
Exchange, 1832-4 (Historical Society of
Pennsylvania)
41 Isaiah Rogers: Boston, Tremont House, 1828-9 (from
Eliot, _A Description of the Tremont House_)
42 (A) A. J. Davis: New York, Colonnade Row, 1832 (W.
Andrews)
42 (B) Russell Warren: Newport, R.I., Elmhyrst, _c._ 1833
(from Hitchcock, _Rhode Island Architecture_)
43 (A) Henry A. Sykes: Springfield, Mass., Stebbins
house, 1849 (R.E. Pope)
43 (B) Alexander Parris: Boston, David Sears house, 1816
(Southworth & Hawes)
44 Thomas A. Tefft: Providence, R.I., Union Station,
begun 1848 (R.I. Historical Society)
45 Amherst, Mass., Amherst College, Dormitories,
1821-2, Chapel, 1827 (Courtesy of Amherst
College)
46 William Clarke: Utica, N.Y., Insane Asylum,
1837-43 (Courtesy of Munson-Williams-Proctor
Institute)
47 (A) John Notman: Philadelphia, Atheneum, 1845-7 (W.
Andrews)
47 (B) J. M. J. Rebelo: Rio de Janeiro, Palacio
Itamaratí, 1851-4 (G. E. Kidder Smith)
48 John Nash: Brighton, Royal Pavilion, as remodelled
1815-23 (N.B.R.)
49 C. A. Busby: Gwrych Castle, near Abergele,
completed 1815
50 (A) John Nash: Blaise Hamlet, near Bristol, 1811
(N.B.R.)
50 (B) Thomas Rickman and Henry Hutchinson: Cambridge, St
John’s College, New Court, 1825-31 (A. C.
Barrington Brown)
51 G. M. Kemp: Edinburgh, Sir Walter Scott Monument,
1840-6 (F. C. Inglis)
52 (A) A. W. N. Pugin: Cheadle, Staffordshire, St
Giles’s, 1841-6 (M. Whiffen)
52 (B) Sir G. G. Scott: Hamburg, Nikolaikirche, 1845-63
(Staatliche Landesbildstelle, Hamburg)
53 (A) Richard Upjohn: New York, Trinity Church, _c._
1844-6 (W. Andrews)
53 (B) Richard Upjohn: Utica, N.Y., City Hall, 1852-3 (H.
Lott)
54 Sir Charles Barry: London, Houses of Parliament,
1840-65 (A. F. Kersting)
55 (A) Salem, Mass., First Unitarian (North) Church,
1836-7 (Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem)
55 (B) F.-C. Gau and Théodore Ballu: Paris,
Sainte-Clotilde, 1846-57 (from _Paris dans sa
splendeur_)
56 E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc: Paris, block of flats, 28
Rue de Liège, 1846-8 (J. R. Johnson)
57 (A) Alexis de Chateauneuf and Fersenfeld: Hamburg,
Petrikirche, 1843-9
57 (B) G. A. Demmler and F. A. Stüler: Schwerin, Schloss,
1844-57 (Institut für Denkmalpflege, Schwerin)
58 (A) John Nash: Brighton, Royal Pavilion, Kitchen,
1818-21 (Brighton Corporation)
58 (B) Thomas Telford: Menai Strait, Menai Bridge,
1819-24 (W. Scott)
59 Thomas Telford: Craigellachie Bridge, 1815 (A.
Reiach)
60 (A) John A. Roebling: Niagara Falls, Suspension
Bridge, 1852 (Courtesy of Eastman House)
60 (B) Thomas Hopper: London, Carlton House,
Conservatory, 1811-12 (from Pyne, _Royal
Residences_, III)
61 Robert Stephenson and Francis Thompson: Menai
Strait, Britannia Bridge, 1845-50 (Hulton
Picture Library)
62 (A) Grisart & Froehlicher: Paris, Galeries du Commerce
et de l’Industrie, section, 1838 (from Normand,
_Paris Moderne_, II)
62 (B) Robert Stephenson and Francis Thompson: Derby,
Trijunct Railway Station, 1839-41 (from Russell,
_Nature on Stone_)
63 J. B. Bunning: London, Coal Exchange, 1846-9 (from
_Builder_, 29 Sept. 1849)
64 Sir Joseph Paxton and Fox & Henderson: London,
Crystal Palace, 1850-1 (from _Builder_, 4 Jan.
1851)
65 I. K. Brunel and Sir M. D. Wyatt: London,
Paddington Station, 1852-4 (from _Illustrated
London News_, 8 July 1854)
66 (A) Lewis Cubitt: London, King’s Cross Station, 1851-2
(British Railways)
66 (B) Karl Etzel: Vienna, Dianabad, 1841-3 (from
_Allgemeine Bauzeitung_, 1843)
67 (A) Decimus Burton and Richard Turner: Kew, Palm
Stove, 1845-7 (N.B.R.)
67 (B) James Bogardus; New York, Laing Stores, 1849 (B.
Abbott)
68 L.-T.-J. Visconti and H.-M. Lefuel: Paris, New
Louvre, 1852-7 (Giraudon)
69 H.-P.-F. Labrouste: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale,
Reading Room, 1862-8 (Chevojon)
70 (A) H.-J. Espérandieu: Marseilles, Palais Longchamps,
1862-9 (R. Viollet)
70 (B) J.-L.-C. Garnier: Paris, Opéra, 1861-74 (Édition
Alfa)
70 (C) Charles Rohault de Fleury and Henri Blondel:
Paris, Place de l’Opéra, 1858-64 (Chevojon)
71 J.-L.-C. Garnier: Paris, Opéra, Foyer, 1861-74
(Bulloz)
72 (A) J.-A.-E. Vaudremer: Paris,
Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge, 1864-70 (R. Viollet)
72 (B) J.-F. Duban: Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, 1860-2
(Giraudon)
73 (A) Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer: Vienna,
Burgtheater, 1874-88 (Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek)
73 (B) Theophil von Hansen: Vienna, Heinrichshof, 1861-3
(from a water-colour by Rudolf von Alt)
74 Vienna, Ringstrasse, begun 1858 (from a
water-colour by Rudolf von Alt)
75 (A) A.-F. Mortier: Paris, block of flats, 11 Rue de
Milan, _c._ 1860 (J. R. Johnson)
75 (B) Giuseppe Mengoni: Milan, Galleria Vittorio
Emmanuele, 1865-77 (Alinari)
76 (A) Gaetano Koch: Rome, Esedra, 1885 (Fotorapida
Terni)
76 (B) J.-A.-F.-A. Pellechet: Barnard Castle, Co. Durham,
Bowes Museum, 1869-75 (Copyright Country Life)
77 (A) Friedrich Hitzig: Berlin, Exchange, 1859-63 (F.
Stoedtner)
77 (B) Julius Raschdorf: Cologne, Opera House, 1870-2
(Courtesy of Rheinisches Museum, Cologne)
78 (A) Cuthbert Brodrick: Leeds, Town Hall, 1855-9
(N.B.R.)
78 (B) Sir Charles Barry: Halifax, Town Hall, 1860-2
(N.B.R.)
79 Cuthbert Brodrick: Scarborough, Grand Hotel,
1863-7 (Walkers Studios)
80 (A) John Giles: London, Langham Hotel, 1864-6 (Bedford
Lemere)
80 (B) London, 1-5 Grosvenor Place, begun 1867 (N.B.R.)
81 Joseph Poelaert: Brussels, Palace of Justice,
1866-83 (Archives Centrales Iconographiques,
Brussels)
82 (A) Thomas U. Walter: Washington, Capitol, Wings and
Dome, 1851-65; Central Block by William Thornton
and others, 1792-1828 (from _American
Architect_, 30 Jan. 1904)
82 (B) Arthur B. Mullet; Arthur Gilman consultant:
Washington, State, War and Navy Department
Building, 1871-5 (Horydczak)
83 (A) Sir M. D. Wyatt: London, Alford House, 1872
(Victoria and Albert Museum, Crown Copyright)
83 (B) Francis Fowke: London, Victoria and Albert Museum,
Court, begun 1866 (Victoria and Albert Museum,
Crown Copyright)
84 Georg von Dollmann: Schloss Linderhof, near
Oberammergau, 1870-86 (L. Aufsberg)
85 William Butterfield: London, All Saints’, Margaret
Street, interior, 1849-59 (S.W. Newbery)
86 (A) William Butterfield: London, All Saints’, Margaret
Street, Schools and Clergy House, 1849-59 (S.W.
Newbery)
86 (B) Deane & Woodward: Oxford, University Museum,
1855-9
87 William Butterfield: Baldersby St James,
Yorkshire, St James’s, 1856 (R. Cox)
88 William Burges: Hartford, Conn., project for
Trinity College, 1873 (from Pullan,
_Architectural Designs of William Burges_)
89 (A) Henry Clutton: Leamington, Warwickshire, St
Peter’s, 1861-5 (J. E. Duggins)
89 (B) James Brooks: London, St Saviour’s, Hoxton, 1865-7
(N.B.R.)
90 Sir G. G. Scott: London, Albert Memorial, 1863-72
(A. F. Kersting)
91 (A) J. P. Seddon: Aberystwyth, University College,
begun 1864 (N.B.R.)
91 (B) H. H. Richardson: Medford, Mass., Grace Church,
1867-8 (from _American Architect_, 8 Feb. 1890)
92 (A) E. W. Godwin: Congleton, Cheshire, Town Hall,
1864-7 (N.B.R.)
92 (B) G. F. Bodley: Pendlebury, Lancashire, St
Augustine’s, 1870-4 (N.B.R.)
93 (A) J. L. Pearson: London, St Augustine’s, Kilburn,
1870-80 (N.B.R.)
93 (B) Edmund E. Scott: Brighton, St Bartholomew’s,
completed 1875 (N.B.R.)
94 (A) R. Norman Shaw: Bingley, Yorkshire, Holy Trinity,
1866-7 (N.B.R.)
94 (B) G. E. Street: London, St James the Less, Thorndike
Street, 1858-61 (N.B.R.)
95 (A) Ware & Van Brunt: Cambridge, Mass., Memorial Hall,
1870-8 (J. K. Ufford)
95 (B) Frank Furness: Philadelphia, Provident Life and
Trust Company, 1879 (J. L. Dillon & Co.)
96 (A) Russell Sturgis: New Haven, Conn., Yale College,
Farnam Hall, 1869-70 (C. L. V. Meeks)
96 (B) Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Palau Güell, 1885-9
(Arxiu Mas)
97 (A) Fuller & Jones: Ottawa, Canada, Parliament House,
1859-67 (Courtesy of Public Archives of Canada)
97 (B) William Morris and Philip Webb: London, Victoria
and Albert Museum, Refreshment Room, 1867
(Victoria and Albert Museum, Crown copyright)
98 E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc: St-Denis, Seine,
Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée, 1864-7 (Archives
Photographiques—Paris)
99 (A) Heinrich von Ferstel: Vienna, Votivkirche, 1856-79
(P. Ledermann)
99 (B) Friedrich von Schmidt: Vienna, Fünfhaus Parish
Church, 1868-75 (Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek)
100 G. E. Street: Rome, St Paul’s American Church,
1873-6 (Alinari)
101 (A) E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc: Paris, block of flats, 15
Rue de Douai, c. 1860 (J. R. Johnson)
101 (B) P. J. H. Cuijpers: Amsterdam, Maria Magdalenakerk,
1887 (Lichtbeelden Instituut)
101 (C) P. J. H. Cuijpers: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1877-85
(J. G. van Agtmaal)
102 (A) Philip Webb: Smeaton Manor, Yorkshire, 1877-9 (O.
H. Wicksteed)
102 (B) R. Norman Shaw: Withyham, Sussex, Glen Andred,
1866-7 (Courtesy of F. Goodwin)
103 R. Norman Shaw: London, Old Swan House, 1876
(Bedford Lemere)
104 (A) R. Norman Shaw: London, Albert Hall Mansions, 1879
(N.B.R.)
104 (B) George & Peto: London, W. S. Gilbert house, 1882
(Bedford Lemere)
105 R. Norman Shaw: London, Fred White house, 1887
(Bedford Lemere)
106 (A) R. Norman Shaw: London, Holy Trinity, Latimer
Road, 1887-9 (N.B.R.)
106 (B) R. Norman Shaw: London, New Scotland Yard, 1887
(Bedford Lemere)
107 R. Norman Shaw: London, Piccadilly Hotel, 1905-8
(Bedford Lemere)
108 (A) H. H. Richardson: Boston, Trinity Church, 1873-7
(from Van Rensselaer, _Henry Hobson Richardson_,
1888)
108 (B) H. H. Richardson: Pittsburgh, Penna., Allegheny
County Jail, 1884-8
109 (A) Charles B. Atwood: Chicago, World’s Fair, Fine
Arts Building, 1892-3 (from _American
Architect_, 22 Oct. 1892)
109 (B) McKim, Mead & White: New York, Villard houses,
1883-5 (from _Monograph_, 1)
110 H. H. Richardson: Quincy, Mass., Crane Library,
1880-3 (W. Andrews)
111 McKim, Mead & White: Boston, Public Library,
1888-92 (W. Andrews)
112 (A) C. R. Cockerell: Liverpool, Bank Chambers, 1849
(J. R. Johnson)
112 (B) Alexander Parris: Boston, North Market Street,
designed 1823 (B. Abbott)
113 E. W. Godwin: Bristol, 104 Stokes Croft, _c._ 1862
(N.B.R.)
114 (A) Peter Ellis: Liverpool, Oriel Chambers, 1864-5
(N.B.R.)
114 (B) Lockwood & Mawson(?): Bradford, Yorkshire,
Kassapian’s Warehouse, _c._ 1862 (N.B.R.)
115 (A) George B. Post: New York, Western Union Building,
1873-5 (Courtesy of Museum of the City of New
York)
115 (B) D. H. Burnham & Co.: Chicago, Reliance Building,
1894 (Chicago Architectural Photographing Co.)
116 (A) H. H. Richardson: Hartford, Conn., Brown-Thompson
Department Store (Cheney Block), 1875-6
116 (B) H. H. Richardson: Chicago, Marshall Field
Wholesale Store, 1885-7 (Chicago Architectural
Photographing Co.)
117 (A) Adler & Sullivan: Chicago, Auditorium Building,
1887-9 (Chicago Architectural Photographing Co.)
117 (B) William Le B. Jenney: Chicago, Sears, Roebuck &
Co. (Leiter) Building, 1889-90 (Chicago
Architectural Photographing Co.)
118 Adler & Sullivan: St Louis, Wainwright Building,
1890-1 (Bill Hedrich, Hedrich-Blessing)
119 Adler & Sullivan: Buffalo, N.Y., Guaranty
Building, 1894-5 (Chicago Architectural
Photographing Co.)
120 Holabird & Roche; Louis H. Sullivan: Chicago,
19-20 South Michigan Avenue; Gage Building,
1898-9 (Chicago Architectural Photographing Co.)
121 Louis H. Sullivan: Chicago, Carson, Pirie & Scott
Department Store, 1899-1901, 1903-4 (Chicago
Architectural Photographing Co.)
122 (A) J. B. Papworth: ‘Cottage Orné’, 1818 (from _Rural
Residences_, plate XIII)
122 (B) William Butterfield: Coalpitheath,
Gloucestershire, St Saviour’s Vicarage, 1844-5
(N.B.R.)
123 R. Norman Shaw: nr Withyham, Sussex, Leyswood,
1868 (from _Building News_, 31 March 1871)
124 (A) Dudley Newton: Middletown, R.I., Sturtevant house,
1872 (W. K. Covell)
124 (B) H. H. Richardson: Cambridge, Mass., Stoughton
house, 1882-3 (from Sheldon, _Artistic Country
Seats_, 1)
125 (A) McKim, Mead & White: Elberon, N.J., H. Victor
Newcomb house, 1880-1 (from _Artistic Houses_,
2, Pt I)
125 (B) Bruce Price: Tuxedo Park, N.Y., Pierre Lorillard
house, 1885-6 (from Sheldon, _Artistic Country
Seats_, II)
126 McKim, Mead & White: Newport R.I., Isaac Bell, Jr,
house, 1881-2
127 McKim, Mead & White: Bristol, R.I., W. G. Low
house, 1887
128 (A) Frank Lloyd Wright: River Forest, Ill., W. H.
Winslow house, 1893
128 (B) Frank Lloyd Wright: River Forest, Ill., River
Forest Golf Club, 1898, 1901 (from _Ausgeführte
Bauten und Entwürfe_, 1910, pl. xi)
129 (A) C. F. A. Voysey: Hog’s Back, Surrey, Julian
Sturgis house, elevation, 1896 (Courtesy of
Royal Institute of British Architects)
129 (B) C. F. A. Voysey: Lake Windermere, Broadleys,
1898-9 (Courtesy of J. Brandon-Jones)
130 (A) Gustave Eiffel: Paris, Eiffel Tower, 1887-9 (N. D.
Giraudon)
130 (B) Baron Victor Horta: Brussels, Tassel house, 1892-3
131 (A) Baron Victor Horta: Brussels, Solvay house,
1895-1900 (Archives Centrales Iconographiques,
Brussels)
131 (B) Baron Victor Horta: Brussels, L’Innovation
Department Store, 1901 (F. Stoedtner)
132 (A) C. R. Mackintosh: Glasgow, School of Art, 1897-9
(T. & R. Annan)
132 (B) Baron Victor Horta: Brussels, Maison du Peuple,
interior, 1896-9 (F. Stoedtner)
133 Frantz Jourdain: Paris, Samaritaine Department
Store, 1905 (from _L’Architecte_, II, 1906,
plate X)
134 (A) Auguste Perret: Paris, block of flats, 119 Avenue
Wagram, 1902 (from _L’Architecte_, I, 1906,
plate XIV)
134 (B) C. Harrison Townsend: London, Whitechapel Art
Gallery, 1897-9 (from Muthesius, _Englische
Baukunst der Gegenwart_)
135 (A) C. R. Mackintosh: Glasgow, School of Art, 1907-8
(T. & R. Annan)
135 (B) Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Casa Milá, ground storey,
1905-7 (Arxiu Mas)
136 Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Casa Batlló, front,
1905-7 (Arxiu Mas)
137 (A) Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Casa Milá, 1905-7
(Soberanas Postales)
137 (B) Hector Guimard: Paris, Gare du Métropolitain,
Place Bastille, 1900 (R. Viollet)
138 (A) Otto Wagner: Vienna, Majolika Haus, _c._ 1898
(from _L’Architecte_, I, 1905)
138 (B) H. P. Berlage: London, Holland House, 1914 (from
Gratama, _Dr H. P. Berlage, Bouwmeester_)
139 (A) Auguste Perret: Paris, Garage Ponthieu, 1905-6 (F.
Stoedtner)
139 (B) Place de la Porte de Passy, 1930-2 (Chevojon)
140 (A) Auguste Perret: Le Havre, Place de l’Hôtel de
Ville, 1948-54 (Chevojon)
140 (B) Auguste Perret: Paris, Ministry of Marine, Avenue
Victor, 1929-30 (Chevojon)
141 Auguste Perret: Le Rainey, S.-et-O., Notre-Dame,
1922-3 (Chevojon)
142 (A) Frank Lloyd Wright: Kankakee, Ill., Warren Hickox
house, 1900
142 (B) Frank Lloyd Wright: Highland Park, Ill., W. W.
Willitts house, 1902 (Fuermann)
143 (A) Frank Lloyd Wright: Delavan Lake, Wis., C. S. Ross
house, 1902
143 (B) Frank Lloyd Wright: Oak Park, Ill., Unity Church,
1906 (Russo)
144 Frank Lloyd Wright: Pasadena, Cal., Mrs G. M.
Millard house, 1923 (W. Albert Martin)
145 (A) Frank Lloyd Wright: Falling Water, Pennsylvania,
1936-7 (Hedrich-Blessing Studio)
145 (B) Frank Lloyd Wright: Pleasantville, N.Y., Sol
Friedman house, 1948-9 (Ezra Stoller)
146 (A) Frank Lloyd Wright: Racine, Wisconsin, S. C.
Johnson and Sons, Administration Building and
Laboratory Tower, 1936-9 and 1946-9 (Ezra
Stoller)
146 (B) Bernard Maybeck: Berkeley, Cal., Christian Science
Church, 1910 (W. Andrews)
147 (A) Greene & Greene: Pasadena, Cal., D. B. Gamble
house, 1908-9 (W. Andrews)
147 (B) Irving Gill: Los Angeles, Walter Dodge house,
1915-16 (E. McCoy)
148 (A) Peter Behrens: Berlin, A.E.G. Small Motors
Factory, 1910 (F. Stoedtner)
148 (B) Peter Behrens: Hagen-Eppenhausen, Cuno and
Schröder houses, 1909-10 (F. Stoedtner)
149 (A) Peter Behrens: Berlin, A.E.G. Turbine Factory,
1909 (F. Stoedtner)
149 (B) Max Berg: Breslau, Jahrhunderthalle, 1910-12 (F.
Stoedtner)
150 H. P. Berlage: Amsterdam, Diamond Workers’ Union
Building, 1899-1900 (Lichtbeelden Instituut)
151 Adolf Loos: Vienna, Kärntner Bar, 1907 (Gerlach)
152 Bonatz & Scholer: Stuttgart, Railway Station,
1911-14, 1919-27 (Windstosser)
153 (A) Fritz Höger: Hamburg, Chilehaus, 1923 (Staatliche
Landesbildstelle, Hamburg)
153 (B) Erich Mendelsohn: Neubabelsberg, Einstein Tower,
1921 (F. Stoedtner)
154 (A) Josef Hoffmann: Brussels, Stoclet house, 1905-11
(Archives Centrales Iconographiques, Brussels)
154 (B) Otto Wagner: Vienna, Postal Savings Bank, 1904-6
(Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)
155 (A) Adolf Loos: Vienna, Gustav Scheu house, 1912 (from
Glück, _Adolf Loos_)
155 (B) Adolf Loos: Vienna, Leopold Langer flat, 1901
(from Glück, _Adolf Loos_)
156 (A) Piet Kramer: Amsterdam, De Dageraad housing
estate, 1918-23 (Lichtbeelden Instituut)
156 (B) Michael de Klerk: Amsterdam, Eigen Haard housing
estate, 1917 (Lichtbeelden Instituut)
157 (A) W. M. Dudok: Hilversum, Dr Bavinck School, 1921
(C. A. Deul)
157 (B) Saarinen & Saarinen: Minneapolis, Minn., Christ
Lutheran Church, 1949-50 (G. M. Ryan)
158 (A) Walter Gropius with Adolf Meyer: Project for
Chicago Tribune Tower, 1922 (W. Gropius)
158 (B) Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer:
Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Fagus Factory, 1911 (Museum
of Modern Art)
159 Le Corbusier: Poissy, S.-et-O., Savoye house
1929-30 (L. Hervé)
160 (A) Le Corbusier: Second project for Citrohan house,
1922 (from Le Corbusier, _Œuvre complète_, I)
160 (B) Le Corbusier: Garches, S.-et-O., Les Terrasses,
1927 (Museum of Modern Art)
161 (A) Walter Gropius: Dessau, Bauhaus, 1925-6 (Museum of
Modern Art)
161 (B) Walter Gropius: Dessau, City Employment Office,
1927-8 (Museum of Modern Art)
162 (A) Walter Gropius: Berlin, Siemensstadt housing
estate, 1929-30 (Museum of Modern Art)
162 (B) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Stuttgart, block of
flats, Weissenhof 1927 (Museum of Modern Art)
163 (A) Brinkman & van der Vlugt: Rotterdam, van Nelle
Factory, 1927 (E. M. van Ojen)
163 (B) J. J. P. Oud: Hook of Holland, housing estate,
1926-7 (Museum of Modern Art)
164 (A) J. J. P. Oud: Rotterdam, church, Kiefhoek housing
estate, 1928-30 (Museum of Modern Art)
164 (B) Gerrit Rietveld: Utrecht, Schroeder house, 1924
(F. Stoedtner)
165 (A) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona, German
Exhibition Pavilion, 1929 (F. Stoedtner)
165 (B) Le Corbusier: Paris, Swiss Hostel, Cité
Universitaire, 1931-2 (L. Hervé)
166 Le Corbusier: Marseilles, Unité d’Habitation,
1946-52 (Éditions de France)
167 Le Corbusier: Ronchamp, Hte-Saône,
Notre-Dame-du-Haut, 1950-4 (L. Hervé)
168 (A) Le Corbusier: Éveux-sur-L’Arbresle, Rhône,
Dominican monastery of La Tourette, 1957-61 (C.
Michael Pearson)
168 (B) Eero Saarinen: Warren, Mich., General Motors
Technical Institute, 1951-5 (Ezra Stoller)
169 Howe & Lescaze: Philadelphia, Philadelphia Savings
Fund Society Building, 1932 (Museum of Modern
Art)
170 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Chicago, Ill., blocks of
flats, 845-60 Lake Shore Drive, 1949-51 (Hube
Henry, Hedrich-Blessing)
171 Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and others (Le
Corbusier consultant): Rio de Janeiro, Ministry
of Education and Health, 1937-43 (G. E. Kidder
Smith)
172 (A) Giuseppe Terragni: Como, Casa del Fascio, 1932-6
(G. E. Kidder Smith)
172 (B) Tecton: London, Regent’s Park Zoo, Penguin Pool,
1933-5 (Museum of Modern Art)
173 (A) Martin Nyrop: Copenhagen, Town Hall, 1893-1902 (F.
R. Yerbury)
173 (B) Alvar Aalto: Säynatsälo, Municipal Buildings,
1951-3 (M. Quantrill)
174 (A) Ragnar Östberg: Stockholm, Town Hall, 1909-23
(Lindquist and Svandesson)
174 (B) Ragnar Östberg: Stockholm, Town Hall, 1909-23
(Lindquist and Svandesson)
175 (A) Sigfrid Ericson: Göteborg, Masthugg Church,
1910-14 (Courtesy of G. Paulsson)
175 (B) P. V. Jensen Klint: Copenhagen, Grundvig Church,
1913, 1921-6 (F. R. Yerbury)
176 (A) E. G. Asplund: Stockholm City Library, 1921-8 (F.
R. Yerbury)
176 (B) Edward Thomsen and G. B. Hagen: Gentofte Komune,
Øregaard School, 1923-4 (F. R. Yerbury)
177 (A) Cram & Ferguson: Princeton, N.J., Graduate
College, completed 1913 (E. Menzies)
177 (B) Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore: New York, Grand
Central Station, 1903-13 (New York Central
Railroad)
178 Cass Gilbert: New York, Woolworth Building, 1913
(J. H. Heffren)
179 McKim, Mead & White: New York, University Club,
1899-1900 (from _Monograph_, II)
180 Henry Bacon: Washington, Lincoln Memorial,
completed 1917 (Horydczak)
181 Sir Edwin Lutyens: Delhi, Viceroy’s House, 1920-31
(Copyright Country Life)
182 (A) Alvar Aalto: Muuratsälo, architect’s own house,
1953 (Kolmio)
182 (B) Sir Edwin Lutyens: Sonning, Deanery Gardens, 1901
(Copyright Country Life)
183 (A) Victor Laloux: Paris, Gare d’Orsay, 1898-1900 (F.
Stoedtner)
183 (B) Eugenio Montuori and others: Rome, Termini
Station, completed 1951 (Fototeca Centrale F.S.)
184 Carlos Lazo and others: Mexico City, University
City, begun _c._ 1950 (R. T. McKenna)
185 (A) Kay Fisker and Eske Kristensen: Copenhagen,
Kongegården Estate, 1955-6 (Strüwing)
185 (B) Eero Saarinen: New Haven, Conn., Ezra Stiles and
Samuel F. B. Morse College, 1960-2 (J. W.
Molitor)
186 (A) James Cubitt & Partners: Langleybury,
Hertfordshire, school, 1955-6 (Architectural
Design)
186 (B) London County Council Architect’s Office: London,
Loughborough Road housing estate, 1954-6
(Architectural Review)
187 (A) Kenzo Tange: Totsuka, Country Club, _c._ 1960 (Y.
Futagawa)
187 (B) Kunio Maekawa: Tokyo, Metropolitan Festival Hall,
1961 (Akio Kawasumi)
188 (A) Frank Lloyd Wright: New York, Guggenheim Museum,
and (1943-6), 1956-9 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)
(B)
189 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Gordon Bunshaft): New
York, Lever House, 1950-2 (Ezra Stoller)
190 (A) Philip C. Johnson: New Canaan, Conn., Boissonas
house, 1955-6 (Ezra Stoller)
190 (B) Eero Saarinen: Chantilly, Va., Dulles
International Airport, 1960-3 (B. Korab)
190 (C) Oscar Niemeyer: Pampulha, São Francisco, 1943 (M.
Gautherot)
191 Hentrich & Petschnigg: Düsseldorf, Thyssen Haus,
1958-60 (Arno Wrubel)
192 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson: New
York, Seagram Building, 1956-8 (A. Georges)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
_My_ Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration _appeared in
1929. It was an early attempt to relate the newest architecture of the
nineteen-twenties to that of the preceding century and a half. In the
thirty years that followed I have studied, in varying degrees of detail,
many aspects of the story of architecture in the last two hundred years,
from the ‘Romantic’ gardens of the mid eighteenth century to
Latin-American building of the mid twentieth. In the process debts of
gratitude have accumulated that can never be discharged, least of all
here. Moreover, immediately before writing this book I visited a dozen
countries in the New World, and during its composition in London—made
possible by a sabbatical leave from Smith College for the academic year
1955-6—I visited another dozen in the Old World. It would be manifestly
impossible even to list all those—first of all in England and America,
but also all the way from Athens to Bogotá—who assisted me in various
ways in the gathering of material. They will, I trust, understand and
accept this generalized expression of my thanks._
_Not least of the problems of preparing such a book as this is the
finding of photographs. The names of the photographers responsible for
the plates (or in a few cases those who obtained photographs for me) are
given in the list of plates. The material for the figures, mostly
redrawn for this book by P. J. Darvall, came largely from books and
drawings in the libraries of the Royal Institute of British Architects
and the Victoria and Albert Museum, to whose authorities my thanks are
due, as also for notable assistance of various other sorts. The
co-operation of the National Buildings Record, which was generously
ready to add to their so extensive files photographs newly taken for use
in this book, deserves specific mention here. In certain other cases I
am not quite sure whether photographs were taken especially for me or
not, but I must express gratitude in this connexion also to Professor
Frederick D. Nichols of the University of Virginia, to the Staatliche
Landesbildstelle of Hamburg, to the Institut für Denkmalpflege of
Schwerin, and to Professor Donald Egbert of Princeton University._
_The notes indicate a considerable number of the fellow scholars who
have assisted me in one way or another. But I would like to mention more
particularly the following, who were good enough to read chapters or
sections covering matters of which they had expert knowledge: John
Summerson, Dorothy Stroud, John Brandon-Jones, Fello Atkinson, Robin
Middleton, Turpin Bannister, Winston Weisman, James Grady, William
Jordy, and Reyner Banham, not to speak of the Editor of the Pelican
History of Art, whose contribution in a field especially his own was
naturally of the utmost value. Needless to say these friends bear no
responsibility for what appears here, but the importance of their
contribution will often be very apparent in the notes. Robert Rosenblum
did a very large part of the work of gathering the bibliography, a
notable service to the author of a book such as this, as well as
checking innumerable note references._
_Finally I must mention Mary Elkington, whose intelligent typing of
successive drafts of the manuscript made revision a pleasure._
_H. R. H._
_1958_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
_THE present edition is no drastic revision of the
original one. Only a paragraph or two has been omitted or
rewritten, and the one wholly new section is the Epilogue.
However, very many corrections and additions have been
made in detail, following suggestions made by reviewers
and including facts supplied by others, notably John
Jacobus, Robin Middleton, Pieter Singelenberg, John
Harris, Fritz Novotny, Malcolm Quantrill, Carroll Meeks,
and Kevin Dynan among a host of correspondents who have
kindly answered specific queries or volunteered relevant
information. No changes have been made in the Figures and
only about a dozen in the Plates, chiefly at the end where
it was possible to introduce the influential work of Aalto
and characteristic examples of late Japanese work by
reducing the Latin-American representation, not to speak
of important works by Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies
completed since the original edition was prepared. The
sources of the new photographs are indicated in the List
of Plates, but I must specially thank Messrs Hentrich and
Johnson, among the architects, for their assistance and
also J. M. Richards of the_ Architectural Review _from
whose files come the Japanese material and one of the
Aalto illustrations_.
_A certain number of new Notes (indicated by a letter after
the number) have been added and many were largely rewritten.
The Bibliography has been extended to include titles
posterior to the date of the original edition._
_H. R. H._
_1962_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
THE round numbers of chronology have no necessary significance
historically. Centuries as cultural entities often begin and end decades
before or after the hundred-year mark. The years around 1800, however,
do provide a significant break in the history of architecture, not so
much because of any major shift in style at that precise point as
because the Napoleonic Wars caused a general hiatus in building
production. The last major European style, the Baroque, had been all but
dissolved away in most of Europe. The beginnings of several differing
kinds of reaction against it—Academic in Italy, Rococo in France,
Palladian in England—go back as far as the first quarter of the century;
shortly after the mid century there came a more concerted stylistic
revolution.
1750 and 1790 the new style that is called ‘Romantic Classicism’[1] took
form, producing by the eighties its most remarkable projects, and even
before that some executed work of consequence in France and in England.
Thus the nineteenth century could inherit the tradition of a completed
architectural revolution, and at its very outset was in possession of a
style that had been fully mature for more than a decade. The most
effective reaction against the Baroque in the second, and even to some
extent the third, quarter of the eighteenth century had taken place in
England; the later architectural revolution that actually initiated
Romantic Classicism centred in France.
Yet Paris was not the original locus of the new style’s gestation but
rather Rome.[2] From the early sixteenth century Rome had provided the
international headquarters from which new ideas in the arts, by no means
necessarily originated there, were distributed to the Western world. To
Rome came generation after generation of young artists, connoisseurs,
and collectors to form their taste and to formulate their aesthetic
ideals. Some even settled there for life. From the time of Colbert the
French State maintained an academic establishment in Rome for the
post-graduate training of artists. Thus French hegemony in the arts of
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was based on a
tradition maintained and renewed at Rome. The nationals of other
countries came to Rome more informally, and were for the most part
supported by their own funds or by private patrons; only in the
seventies were young English architects of promise first awarded
travelling studentships by George III. In the fifties the number of
northern architects studying in Rome notably increased; some of them,
beginning with the Scot Robert Mylne (1734-1811) in 1758, won prizes in
the competitions held by the Roman Academy of St Luke.[3]
The initiation of Romantic Classicism was by no means solely in the
hands of architects. In the mid-century period of Roman gestation,
Winckelmann, Gavin Hamilton, and Piranesi—a German archaeologist, a
Scottish painter, and a Venetian etcher—played significant roles, as
well as various architects, some _pensionnaires_ of the French Academy,
others Britons studying on their own. Certain aspects of Romantic
Classicism (1720-78), not the projects in his _Prima parte di
architettura_ of 1743 or the plates of ruins in his _Antichità romane_
of 1748 but his fanciful Carceri dating from the mid 1740s. On the
theoretical side the _Essai sur l’architecture_ of M.-A. Laugier
(1713-70), which first appeared anonymously in 1751 with further
editions in 1752, 1753, and 1755, had something of real consequence to
contribute as a basic critique of the dying Baroque style. In simple
terms Laugier may be called both a Neo-Classicist and a Functionalist.
The bolder functionalist ideas of an Italian Franciscan Carlo Lodoli
(1690-1761) as presented by Francesco Algarotti in his _Lettere sopra
l’architettura_, beginning in 1742, and in his _Saggio sopra
l’architettura_ of 1756 were also influential. However, despite all the
new archaeological treatises inspired by the Roman milieu, of which the
first was the _Ruins of Palmyra_ published in 1753 by Robert Wood
(1717-71), and all the excavations undertaken at Herculaneum over the
years 1738-65 and those at Pompeii beginning a decade later, the first
architectural manifestations of Romantic Classicism did not occur on
Italian soil.
Two buildings begun in the late 1750s, one a very large church in France
completed only in 1790, the other a mere garden pavilion in England, may
be considered to announce the architectural revolution: Sainte-Geneviève
in Paris, desecrated and made a secular Panthéon in 1791 immediately
after its completion, was designed by J.-G. Soufflot (1713-80);[4] the
Doric Temple at Hagley Park in Worcestershire is by his exact
contemporary James Stuart (1713-88). The Panthéon remains one of the
most conspicuous eighteenth-century monuments of Paris; the Hagley
temple is familiar today only to specialists. Yet, historically,
Stuart’s importance is rather greater than Soufflot’s, even though his
production was almost negligible in quantity. Born and partly trained in
Lyons, Soufflot studied early in Rome and returned to Italy again in the
middle of the century. Like several of the French theorists of the day,
he had had a lively interest in Gothic construction from his Lyons days.
He owed his selection to design Sainte-Geneviève in 1755 to his
friendship with Louis XV’s Directeur Général des Bâtiments, the Marquis
de Marigny, brother of Mme de Pompadour, whom he had accompanied to
Italy in 1749 along with the influential critics C.-N. Cochin and the
Abbé Leblanc.
The Scottish architect James Stuart had also gone to Rome, and formed
there as early as 1748 the project of visiting Athens; by 1751 he was on
his way, accompanied by Nicholas Revett (_c._ 1721-1804), with whom he
proposed to produce an archaeological work on the _Antiquities of
Athens_. The publication of the first volume of this epoch-making book
was delayed until 1762. In the meantime, in 1758, the year Stuart
designed his Hagley temple, J.-D. Leroy (1724-1803) got ahead of him by
publishing _Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce_; but the
very pictorial and inaccurate plates in this had little practical effect
on architecture.
The significance of Stuart’s temple may be readily guessed; small though
it is, this fabrick was the first example of the re-use of the Greek
Doric order[5]—so barbarous, or at least so primitive, in appearance to
mid-eighteenth-century eyes—and the first edifice to attempt an
archaeological reconstruction of a Greek temple. By the fifties many
architects and critics were ready to accept the primacy of Greek over
Roman art, if not little or no knowledge of Greek architecture several
French writers before Laugier had praised it. J. J. Winckelmann also
recommended Greek rather than Roman models in his _Gedanken über die
Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke_ (Dresden, 1755) published just before
he settled in Rome.[6]
Out of Italian chauvinism Piranesi attacked the theory of Grecian
primacy in the arts; yet before his death he had prepared an impressive
and influential set of etchings of the Greek temples at Paestum which
his son Francesco published. In 1760, moreover, Piranesi decorated the
Caffè Inglese in Rome in an Egyptian mode. Eventually Greek precedent in
detail all but superseded Roman for over a generation; yet a real Greek
Revival, at best but one aspect of Romantic Classicism, did not mature
until after 1800. There was never a widespread Egyptian Revival,[7] but
Egyptian inspiration did play a real part in crystallizing the formal
ideals of Romantic Classicism; it also provided certain characteristic
architectural forms, such as the pyramid and the obelisk, and occasional
decorative details.
Soufflot’s vast cruciform Panthéon provides no such simple paradigm as
Stuart’s temple. No longer really Baroque, it is by no means thoroughly
Romantic Classical. Like most of the work of the leading British
architect of Soufflot’s generation, Robert Adam (1728-92),[8] the
Panthéon must rather be considered stylistically transitional. For
example, the purity of the temple portico at the front, in any case
Roman not Grecian, is diminished by the breaks at its corners. The tall,
hemispherical dome[9] over the crossing is even less antique in
character, owing its form to Wren’s St Paul’s rather than to the Roman
Pantheon, which was the favourite domical model for later Romantic
Classicists. In the interior, up to the entablatures, the columniation
is Classical enough and the structure entirely trabeated[10]—at least in
appearance (Plate 1). Above, the domes in the four arms are perhaps
Roman, but hardly the pendentives that carry them; these are, of course,
a Byzantine structural device revived in the fifteenth century by
Brunelleschi. Over the aisles the cutting away of the masonry and the
general statical approach, while not producing anything that _looks_
very Gothic, illustrate the results of Soufflot’s long-pursued study of
Gothic vaulting. Many aspects of nineteenth-century architectural
development were thus presaged by Soufflot here, as will become very
evident later (see Chapters 1-3, 6, and 7).[11]
The Panthéon was finally finished in the decade after Soufflot’s death
by his own pupil Maximilien Brébion (1716-_c._ 1792), J.-B. Rondelet
(1743-1829), a pupil of J.-F. Blondel, and Soufflot’s nephew (François,
?-_c._ 1802). Well before that, a whole generation of French architects
had developed a mode, similar to Adam’s in England, which is usually
called, despite its initiation long before Louis XV’s death in 1774, the
_style Louis XVI_. Whether or not this mode in its inception owed much
to English inspiration is still controversial. In any case it was widely
influential outside France from the seventies to the nineties, and in
those decades both French-born and French-trained designers were in
great demand all over Europe, except in England; and even in England
French craftsmen were employed. With that completely eighteenth-century
phase of architectural history this book cannot deal, even though most
of the architects who after 1800 had first made their reputation under
Louis XVI, or even earlier under Louis XV. The _style Louis XVI_ and the
English ‘Adam Style’ were over, except in remote provinces and colonial
dependencies, by 1800.
In various executed works of the decades preceding the French Revolution
it is possible to trace the gradual emergence of mature Romantic
Classicism in France, as also to some extent in the executed buildings
and, above all, the projects of the younger George Dance (1741-1825)[12]
in England. But it is in the extraordinary designs, dating from the
eighties, by two French architects a good deal younger than Soufflot
that the new ideals were most boldly and completely visualized. In the
last twenty-five years these two men, L.-E. Boullée (1728-99) and C.-N.
Ledoux (1736-1806), have increasingly been recognized as the first great
masters of Romantic Classical _design_ if not, in the fullest sense, the
first great Romantic Classical _architects_. Boullée built little and
few of his projects and none of the manuscript of his book on
architecture, both now preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, were
published—or at least not until modern times.[13] Yet they must have
been well known to his many pupils—including J.-N.-L. Durand, who was
the author of the most influential architectural treatise of the Empire
period, and doubtless to others as well (see Chapters 2 and 3).
Ledoux was from the first a very successful architect, working with
assurance and considerable versatility in the _style Louis XVI_ from the
late sixties, particularly for Mme du Barry. He became an academician
and _architecte du roi_ in 1773 and spent the next few years at Cassel
in Germany. His major executed works are in France, however, and belong
to the late seventies and eighties. These are the Besançon Theatre of
1775-84, the buildings of the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans near
there of 1775-9—he had been made _inspecteur_ of the establishment in
1771—and the _barrières_ or toll-houses of Paris, which were built in
1784-9 just before the Revolution. In this later work most of the major
qualities of his personal style, qualities carried to much greater
extremes in his projects, are readily recognizable; his earlier work was
of rather transitional character and not at all unlike what many other
French architects of his generation were producing.
The massive cube of the exterior of Ledoux’s Besançon Theatre, against
which an unpedimented Ionic portico is set, can already be found,
however, at his Château de Benouville begun in 1768; the later edifice
is nevertheless much more rigidly cubical and much plainer in the
treatment of the rare openings. In the interior Ledoux substituted for a
Baroque horseshoe with tiers of boxes a hemicycle[14] with rising banks
of seats and a continuous Greek Doric colonnade around the rear fronting
the gallery. The extant constructions at Arc-et-Senans are less
geometrical; instead of Greek orders there is much rustication and also
various Piranesian touches of visual drama. It was this commission which
set Ledoux to designing his ‘Ville Idéale de Chaux’; that was his
greatest achievement, even though it never came even to partial
execution, nor could perhaps have been expected to do so, so cosmic was
the basic concept.
The _barrières_ varied very widely in character; some were very
Classical, others in a modest Italianate vernacular; some were rather
Piranesian in their bold rustication, the Besançon Theatre. The most
significant, however, were notable for the crisp and rigid geometry of
their flat-surfaced masses. The extant Barrière de St Martin in the
Place de Stalingrad in the La Villette district of Paris consists of a
tall cylinder rising out of a very low, square block; this is
intersected by a cruciform element projecting as three pedimented
porticoes beyond the edges of the square (Plate 2A). Although the range
of Ledoux’s restricted detail here is not very great, it is varied to
the point of inconsistency all the same. The rather heavy piers of the
porticoes are square, with capitals simplified from the Grecian Doric;
yet around the cylinder extends an open arcade of Italian character
carried on delicate coupled columns.
Had Ledoux’s ideas been known only from his executed work, he would
probably not have been especially influential; certainly he would not
have attained with posterity the very high reputation that is his today.
Inactive at building after the Revolution—he was even imprisoned for a
while in the nineties—he concentrated on the publication of his designs
both executed and projected. His book _L’Architecture considérée sous le
rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation_ appeared in 1804, and
a second edition was published by Daniel Ramée (1806-87) in 1846-7. This
book has a long and fascinating text which is sociological as much as it
is architectural; but it is in its plates, both of executed work and
projects, that Ledoux’s originality can best be appreciated. By no means
all of his ideas, known before the Revolution to his pupils and
undoubtedly to many others as well, passed into the general repertory of
Romantic Classicism; some of the most extreme are hardly buildable. The
‘House for Rural Guards’ is a free-standing sphere, a form that he
utilized as space rather than mass in the interior of a project for a
Columbarium. For the ‘Coopery’, the coopers’ products dictated the
target-like shape (Plate 2B). The ‘House for the Directors of the Loue
River’ is also a cylinder set horizontally, but a much more massive one,
through which the whole flood of the river was to pour to the thorough
discomfort, one would imagine, of the inhabitants. Even where the forms
are more conventional, as in the project for the church of his ‘Ville
Idéale’ of Chaux—a purified version of Soufflot’s Panthéon: cruciform,
temple-porticoed, and with a Roman saucer dome—or for the bank there—a
peristylar rectangle with high, plain attic, flanked at the corners by
detached cubic lodges—the clarity and originality of his formal thinking
is very evident, and was apparently influential well before his book
actually appeared in 1804. Masses are of simple geometrical shapes,
discrete and boldly juxtaposed; walls are flat and as little broken as
possible, the few necessary openings mere rectangular holes. Minor
features are repeated without variation of rhythm in regular reiterative
patterns; the top surfaces of the masses, whether flat, sloping, or
rounded, are considered as bounding planes, not modelled plastically in
the Baroque way.[15]
Much of this is common to the projects of Boullée, more widely known
than Ledoux’s in the eighties because of his many pupils. The simple
geometrical forms, the plain surfaces, the reiterative handling of minor
features, all are even more conspicuous in his designs and generally
presented at a scale so grand as to approach megalomania (Plate 2C).
Boullée could be, and often was, more conventionally the Classical
Revivalist than Ledoux; he was also perhaps somewhat less bold in using
such shapes as the sphere cube and the pyramid. His inspiration was on
occasion medieval (of a very special South European ‘Castellated’
order), and he thereby laid the foundations for that more widely
eclectic use of the forms of the past which makes the Romantic Classical
a syncretic style, not a mere revival of Roman or Greek architecture.
Various projects of the eighties by younger men, such as Bernard Poyet
(1742-1824) and L.-J. Desprez (1743-1804), of whom we will hear again
later, were of very similar character.
Both Boullée and Ledoux, but particularly Ledoux, were interested in
symbolism. In that sense their architecture was not essentially
abstract, despite the extreme geometrical simplicity of their forms, but
in their own term _parlante_ or expressive and meaningful. So special
and personal is most of their symbolism, however, that even when quite
obvious, as with the ‘Coopery’, it was hardly viable for other
architects. When Ledoux gave to his _Oikema_ or ‘House of Sexual
Education’ an actual _plan_ of phallic outline (which would be wholly
unnoticeable except from the air) he epitomized the hermetic quality of
much of his architectural speech. It is understandable that, of the many
who accepted his architectural syntax, very few really attempted to
speak his language. Such symbolism belonged on the whole to an early
stage of Romantic Classicism; after 1800 architectural speech was
generally of a much less recondite order. Yet to each of the different
vocabularies employed by Romantic Classicists—Grecian, Egyptian,
Italian, Castellated, etc.—some sort of special meaning was commonly
attached. Thus a restricted and codified eclecticism provided, as it
were, the equivalent of a system of musical keys that could be chosen
according to a conventional code when designing different types of
buildings.
One cannot properly say that international Romantic Classicism derives
to any major degree from Ledoux and Boullée; one can only say that their
projects of the eighties epitomized most dramatically the final ending
of the Baroque and the crystallization of the style that succeeded it.
Many French architects of the generation of Poyet and Desprez, however,
such as J.-J. Ramée, Pompon, A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer, L.-P. Baltard, Belanger,
Grandjean de Montigny, Damesme, and Durand (to mention only those whose
names will recur later) came close to rivalling even the grandest
visions of Ledoux and Boullée in projects prepared in the nineties.[16]
After such exalted work on paper, the buildings actually executed by
this generation of Romantic Classicists often seem rather tame. So also
were the glorious social schemes of the political revolutionaries much
diluted by the functioning governments of Consulate and Empire before
and after 1800.
Only in England did the decades preceding the French Revolution produce
any development in architecture at all comparable in significance to
what was taking place then in France. But there also it is the projects
rather than the executed work of Dance—of which very little remains
except his early London church of All Hallows, London Wall, of
1765-7—that modern investigators have come to realize led most
definitely away from the transitional ‘Adam Style’ towards Romantic
Classicism. His Piranesian Newgate Prison, begun in 1769, was demolished
in 1902. By 1790, both in France and in England, the new ideas had taken
firm root, however, and other countries were not slow to accept the
mature style once it had been fully adumbrated.
The fact that the nineteenth century began with much of Europe under the
hegemony of a French Empire does not quite justify calling the
particular phase of Romantic Classicism with which the nineteenth
century opens _Empire_, although this is frequently done in most
European countries. Yet the prestige of Napoleon’s rule, and indeed its
actual extent, ensured around 1800 the continuance of that French
leadership in architecture which had started a century earlier under
Louis XIV. Beyond the boundaries of Napoleon’s realm and the lands of
his nominees and his allies, moreover, French émigrés carried the new
architectural ideas of the last years of the monarchy—for many of them
were revolutionaries in the arts, although like Ledoux politically
unacceptable to the leaders of the Revolution in France. Even in the
homeland of Napoleon’s principal opponents, the English, the prestige of
French taste, high in the eighties, hardly declined with the Napoleonic
wars. The mature Romantic Classicism of England in the last decade of
the old century and the first of the new is certainly full of French
ideas, even though it is not always clear exactly how they were
transmitted across the Channel in war-time.
If Romantic Classicism, the nearly universal style with which
nineteenth-century architecture began, was predominantly French in
origin and in its continuing ideals and standards, the same decades that
saw it reach maturity also saw the rise of another major movement in the
arts that was definitely English. The ‘Picturesque’, a critical concept
that had been increasing in authority for two generations in England,
received the dignity of a capital P in the 1790s. The term Romantic
Classicism is a twentieth-century historian’s invention, attempting by
its own contradictoriness to express the ambiguity of the dominant mode
of this period in the arts; the term Picturesque, on the other hand, was
most widely used and the concept most thoroughly examined just before
and just after 1800 (see Chapters 1 and 6).
To the twentieth century, on the whole, the aesthetic standards of
Romantic Classicism—or perhaps one should rather say the visual
results—have been widely acceptable. The results of the application of
Picturesque principles in architecture, on the other hand, have not been
so generally admired; indeed, until lately the more clearly and
unmistakably buildings realized Picturesque ideals, the less was usually
the esteem in which they were held by posterity. On the whole, in
architecture if not in landscape design, the twentieth century has
preferred to see the manifestations of the Picturesque around 1800 as
aberrations from a norm considered primarily to have been a ‘Classical
Revival’. As the adjectival aspect of the term Romantic Classicism makes
evident, however, the Classicism of the end of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth was not at all the same as that of
the High Renaissance, nor even that of the Academic Reaction of the
early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. Romantic Classicism
aimed not so much towards the ‘Beautiful’, in the sense of Aristotle and
the eighteenth-century aestheticians, as towards what had been
distinguished by Edmund Burke in 1756 as the ‘Sublime’.
Posterity has admired in the production of the first decades of the
nineteenth century a homogeneity of style which is in fact even more
illusory than that of earlier periods. Horrified by the chaos of later
nineteenth-century eclecticism, two twentieth-century have praised
architects and patrons of the years before and after 1800 for a
consistency that was by no means really theirs. In some ways, and not
unimportant ways, the history of architecture within the period covered
by this volume seems to come full circle so that the Austrian art
historian Emil Kaufmann could in 1933 write a book entitled _Von Ledoux
bis Le Corbusier_. Kaufmann did not live quite long enough to realize
how far from the spheres and cubes of the Ledolcian ideal the
revolutionary twentieth-century architect would move in these last years
(see Chapter 23). Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp, completed in 1955
after Kaufmann’s death, seems more in accord with extreme
eighteenth-century illustrations of the Picturesque than with
characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism (Plate 167). Yet in the
early works of the American Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1890s and those of
the German Mies van der Rohe twenty years later a filiation to early
nineteenth-century Classicism can be readily traced; that tradition
informed almost the entire production of the French Perret, a good deal
of that of the German Behrens, and even some of the best late work of
the Austrian Wagner (see Chapters 18-21).
Forgetting for the moment the Picturesque, one may profitably set down
here some of the characteristics that the aspirations and the
achievements of the architects of 1800 share, or seem to share, with
those of the architects of over a century later. The preference for
simple geometrical forms and for smooth, plain surfaces is common to
both, though the earlier men aimed at effects of unbroken mass and the
later ones rather at an expression of hollow volume. The protestations
of devotion to the ‘functional’ are similar, if as frequently
sophistical in the one case as in the other. The preferred isolation of
buildings in space is as evident in the ubiquitous temples of the early
nineteenth century as in the towering slabs of the mid twentieth.
Monochromy and even monotony in the use of homogeneous wall-surfacing
materials and the avoidance of detail in relief is balanced in both
periods by an emphasis on direct structural expression, whether the
structure be the posts and lintels of a masonry colonnade or the steel
or ferro-concrete members of a continuous space-cage. Finally,
impersonality and, perhaps even more notably, ‘internationality’ of
expression provided around 1800 a universalized sense of period rather
than the flavours of particular nations or regions, just as they have
done in the last forty years.
The full flood of Romantic Classicism came late, having been dammed so
long by the political and economic turmoil of the last years of the
eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth; it also continued
late, in some areas even beyond 1850. But dissatisfaction and revolt
also started early; it is not a unique stylistic paradox that the
greatest masters of Romantic Classicism were often those who were also
most ready to explore the alternative possibilities of the Picturesque
(see Chapter 6). The architectural production of the first half of the
nineteenth century cannot therefore be presented with any clarity in a
single chronological sequence. Parallel architectural events, even
strictly contemporary works by the same architect, must be set in their
proper places in at least two different sequences of development.
The building production of the early decades of the century already
divides only too easily under various stylistic headings. A Greek
Revival, a Gothic Revival, etc., have fact, these and other ‘revivals’
were but aspects either of the dominant Romantic Classical tide or of
the Picturesque countercurrent (see Chapters 1-5 and Chapter 6,
respectively). Only the story of the increasing exploitation of new
materials, notably iron and glass, reaching some sort of a culmination
around 1850, lay outside, though never quite isolated from, the realm of
the revivalistic modes (see Chapter 7).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART ONE
1800-1850
CHAPTER 1
ROMANTIC CLASSICISM AROUND 1800
DESPITE the drastically reduced production of the years just before and
after 1800, between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the
termination of Napoleon’s imperial career, there are prominent buildings
in many countries that provide fine examples of Romantic Classicism in
its early maturity; others, generally more modest in size, give evidence
of the vitality of the Picturesque at this time. Since England and
America were least directly affected by the French Revolution, however
much they were drawn into the wars that were its aftermath, they
produced more than their share, so to say, of executed work. French
architects before 1806 were mostly reduced to designing monuments
destined never to be built or to adapting old structures to new uses.
The greatest architect in active practice in the 1790s was Sir John
Soane (1753-1837), from 1788 Architect of the Bank of England. The
career of his master, the younger Dance, was in decline; he had made
what were perhaps his greatest contributions a good quarter of a century
earlier. Whatever Soane owed to Dance, and he evidently owed him a great
deal, the Bank[17] offered greater opportunities than the older man had
ever had. His interiors of the early nineties at the Bank leave the
world of academic Classicism completely behind (Plate 3). His extant
Lothbury façade of 1795, with the contiguous ‘Tivoli Corner’ of a decade
later—now modified almost beyond recognition—and even more the
demolished Waiting Room Court (Plate 4A) showed that his innovations in
this period were by no means restricted to interiors.
Soane’s style, consonant though it was in many ways with the general
ideals of Romantic Classicism, is a highly personal one. At the Bank,
however, he was not creating _de novo_ but committed to the piecemeal
reconstruction of an existing complex of buildings, and controlled as
well by very stringent technical requirements. Thus the grouping of the
offices about the Rotunda, like the plan of the Rotunda itself, goes
back to the work done by his predecessor Sir Robert Taylor (1714-88)
twenty years earlier; while the special need of the Bank for various
kinds of security made necessary both the avoidance of openings on the
exterior and a fireproof structural system within. The architectural
expression that Soane gave to his complex spaces in the offices which he
designed in 1791 and built in 1792-4 had very much the same abstract
qualities as those to which older masters of Romantic Classicism, such
as Ledoux and Dance, had already aspired in the preceding decades (Plate
3). The novel treatment of the smooth plaster surfaces of the light
vaults made of hollow terracotta pots, where he substituted linear
striations for the conventional membering of Classical design, was as
notable as the frank revelation of the delicate cast-iron framework of
his glazed lanterns (see Chapter 7). These interiors have particularly
appealed to twentieth-century taste, while Soane’s columnar confections
of this period generally appear somewhat pompous and banal.
The Rotunda of 1794-5 was grander and more Piranesian in effect; thus it
shared in the international tendency of this period towards megalomania.
So also the contemporary Lothbury façade, with its rare accents of
crisply profiled antae and its vast unbroken expanses of flat
rustication, is less personal to Soane and more in a mode that was
common to many Romantic Classical architects all over the Western world.
The original Tivoli Corner of 1805, however, was almost Baroque in its
plasticity, with a Roman not a Greek order, and a most remarkable piling
up of flat elements organized in three dimensions at the skyline that
could only be Soane’s.
On the other hand, the reduction of relief and the linear stylization of
the constituent elements of the Loggia in the Waiting Room Court of
1804, equally personal to Soane, illustrated an anti-Baroque tendency to
reduce to a minimum the sculptural aspect of architecture (Plate 4A).
Planes were emphasized rather than masses, and the character of the
detail was thoroughly renewed as well as the basic formulas of Classical
design that Soane had inherited. This was even more apparent in the New
Bank Buildings, a terrace of houses, begun in 1807, that once stood
across Prince’s Street. Except for the paired Ionic columns at the ends,
conventional Classical forms were avoided almost as completely as in the
Bank offices of the previous decade, and the smooth plane of the stucco
wall was broken only by incised linear detail.
Perhaps the most masterly example of this characteristically Soanic
treatment is still to be seen in the gateway and lodge of the country
house that he built at Tyringham in Buckinghamshire in 1792-7 (Plate
6A). There the simple mass is defined by flat surfaces bounded by plain
incised lines. The house itself is both less drastically novel and less
successful; various other Soane houses of these decades have more
character.
Summerson has claimed that Soane introduced all his important
innovations before 1800. However that may be, there is no major break in
his work at the end of the first decade of the century, nor did his
production then notably increase. It is therefore rather arbitrary to
cut off an account of his architecture at this point; but it is
necessary to do so if the importance of the Picturesque countercurrent
in these same years, not as yet of great consequence as an aspect of
Soane’s major works, is to be adequately emphasized. His concern with
varied lighting effects, however, if not necessarily Picturesque
technically, gave evidence of an intense Romanticism; more indubitably
Picturesque was his exaggerated interest in broken skylines.
While Soane’s work at the Bank was proceeding, in these years before and
after 1800, James Wyatt (1746-1813), capable of producing at Dodington
House in 1798-1808 a quite conventional example of Romantic Classicism,
was building in the years between 1796 and his death in 1813 for that
great Romantic William Beckford the largest of ‘Gothick’ garden
fabricks, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.[18] This was a landmark in the
rise of the Gothic Revival. In 1803 S. P. Cockerell (1754-1827),
otherwise far more consistently Classical than Wyatt, was erecting for
his brother, the Indian nabob Sir Charles Cockerell, a vast mansion in
Gloucestershire in an Indian mode. The design of Sezincote was based on
early sketches made by the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818)
and all its details were derived from the drawings Thomas Daniell
(1749-1840) had made in India fifteen years before and published in _The
Antiquities of India_ in 1800. The ‘Indian Revival’ (so to call it) had
little success; in these years only the stables built in 1805 by William
Porden (_c._ 1755-1822) for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton followed
Sezincote’s lead.
The Neo-Gothic of Fonthill, however, a mode that had roots extending
back into the second quarter of the eighteenth century, is illustrated
in a profusion of examples by Wyatt, Porden, and many others. None,
however, seems to have succeeded as well as Beckford and Wyatt at
Fonthill in achieving the ‘Sublime’ by mere dimension. The
characteristic Gothic country houses of this period were likely to be
elaborately Tudor, like Wyatt’s Ashridge begun in 1808 and Porden’s
Eaton Hall of 1803-12, or lumpily Castellated like Hawarden of 1804-9 by
Thomas Cundy I (1765-1825) and Eastnor of 1808-15 by Sir Robert Smirke
(1781-1867). The last, moreover, differs very little from Adam’s Culzean
of 1777-90.
Some Gothic churches were built in these decades, too, as others had
been ever since the 1750s. Such an example as Porden’s church at
Eccleston of 1809-13, while more recognizably Perpendicular, lacked the
brittle charm of the earlier ‘Gothick’ churches of the eighteenth
century.
The virtuoso of the Picturesque mode and, after Soane, the greatest
architectural figure of these years in England, was John Nash
(1752-1835). Working in partnership with Repton for several years at the
turn of the century, he turned out a spate of Picturesque houses, many
of them rather small, with various sorts of medieval detail: Killy Moon
in Ireland, built in 1803, is Norman; more usually they are Tudor or at
least Tudoresque: his own East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight, which
was begun in 1798, for example, or Luscombe in Devonshire, begun the
following year. The medieval detail was probably designed by the French
émigré Augustus (Auguste) Charles Pugin (1762-1832), whom Nash employed
at this time (see Chapter 6). It is rather for their asymmetrical
silhouettes and for the free plans that this asymmetry encouraged,
however, than for the stylistic plausibility of their detailing that
these houses are notable.
Finer than such ‘castles’ is Cronkhill, which Nash built in 1802 at
Atcham, Salop. Here the varied forms are all more or less Italianate,
and the whole was evidently inspired by the fabricks in the paintings of
Claude and the Poussins—literally an example of ‘picturesque’
architecture. Actually more characteristic of the Picturesque at this
time, however, is the Hamlet at Blaise Castle. There Nash repeated in
1811 a variety of cottage types that he had already used individually
elsewhere, arranging them in an irregular cluster (Plate 50A).
The Rustic Cottage mode, like so many aspects of the Picturesque in
architecture, had its origins in the fabricks designed to ornament
eighteenth-century gardens. But the mode had by now attained
considerable prestige thanks to the writings of the chief theorists of
the Picturesque,[19] Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) and Uvedale Price
(1747-1829). Their support was responsible also for the rising prestige
of the asymmetrical Castellated Mansion and the Italian Villa; indeed,
Payne Knight’s own Downton Castle in Shropshire of 1774-8 is both
Castellated and Italianate. The appearance of several prettily
illustrated books on cottages[20] in the nineties provided a variety of
models for emulation, and from the beginning of the new century the
Cottage mode was well established for gate lodges, dairies, and all
sorts of other minor constructions in the country.
For larger buildings a definite Greek Revival was now beginning to take
form within the general frame of Romantic Classicism. More young
architects were visiting Greece and, for those who could not, two
further volumes of Stuart and Revett’s _Antiquities of Athens_,
appearing in 1787 and in 1794, and the parallel _Ionian Antiquities_,
which began to be issued in 1769, provided many more models for
imitation than had been available earlier. The Greek Doric order had
first been introduced into England by Stuart himself in 1758 in the
Hagley Park temple, as has been mentioned earlier; a little later, in
1763, he used the Greek Ionic on Litchfield House which still stands at
15 St James’s Square in London. From the nineties, the Greek orders were
in fairly common use, as such a splendid group as the buildings of
Chester Castle, of 1793-1820 by Thomas Harrison (1744-1829), handsomely
illustrates. However, the handling of them was not as yet very
archaeological.
Summerson credits the attack made by the connoisseur Thomas Hope
(1770?-1831) in 1804 on Wyatt’s designs for Downing College, Cambridge,
with helping to establish a more rigid standard of correctness. However
that may be, the winning and partly executed design of 1806-11 for this
college by William Wilkins (1778-1839) well illustrates the new ideals.
Wilkins had made his own studies of Greek originals in Sicily and
Southern Italy, and was publishing them in the _Antiquities of Magna
Graecia_ at this very time (1807). The inherited concepts of medieval
college architecture, largely maintained through the earlier Georgian
period, were all but forgotten at Downing. The group was broken down
into free-standing blocks, each as much like a temple as was feasible,
and repeated Ionic porticoes provided almost the only architectural
features. There was no Soanic originality here, no Picturesque
eclecticism; perhaps unfortunately, however, this provided a codified
Grecian mode which almost anyone could apply from handbooks of the Greek
orders.
Wilkins was also responsible for the first[21] British example of a
giant columnar monument, the Nelson Pillar of 1808-9 in Dublin. This
134-foot Greek Doric column in Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, of
which the construction was supervised by Francis Johnston (1760-1829),
initiated a favourite theme of the period usually, and not incorrectly,
associated with Napoleon (see Chapter 3).
The Covent Garden Theatre in London was rebuilt in 1808-9 by Smirke.
This pupil of Soane had, like Wilkins, seen ancient Greek buildings with
his own eyes and generally aimed to imitate them very closely. His
theatre was somewhat less correct than the Cambridge college, but
despite the castles he had built it was Smirke rather than Wilkins who
carried forward the Grecian mode at its most rigid through four more
decades (see Chapter 4). Wilkins, however, at Grange Park in Hampshire
in 1809 had shown, as C.-E. de Beaumont (1757-1811) had done at a
country house called ‘Le Temple de Silence’ just before the Revolution
in France, how the accommodations of a fair-sized mansion could be
squeezed inside the temple form (admittedly with some violence to the
latter). Grange Park provided an early paradigm of a Grecian domestic
mode destined to be curiously popular at the fringes of the western
world in America, in Sweden, and in Russia, but very rarely employed in
more sophisticated regions (see Chapter 5). The house was much modified
by later enlargements of 1823-5 by S. P. Cockerell and of 1852 by his
son C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863).
Grecian design descended slowly to the world of the builders. The
relatively restricted urban house-building of the two decades before
Waterloo maintained a close resemblance to that of the 1780s. Russell
Square in London, built up by James Burton (1761-1837) in the first
decade of the new century, does not differ notably from Bedford Square
of twenty years earlier—probably by Thomas Leverton (1743-1824)—except
that the façades are smoother and plainer. But a still greater crispness
of finish could be, and increasingly was, obtained by covering terrace
houses—as for that matter most suburban villas also by this time—with
stucco. In this respect the work of some unknown designer in Euston
Square in London, which was built up at the same time as Russell Square,
may be happily contrasted with Burton’s (which has in any case been much
corrupted by the introduction around 1880 of terracotta door and window
casings).
In industrial construction, such as the warehouses by William Jessop at
the West India Docks, begun in 1799, and those by D. A. Alexander
(1768-1846) at the London Docks, begun in 1802, the grandeur and
simplicity characteristic of Romantic Classicism can be seen at their
best.[22] These warehouses also presage the importance of commercial
building in a world increasingly concerned with business (see Chapter
14).
During the years of the American Revolutionary War, 1776-83, years in
which Romantic Classicism was maturing in France and in England, North
Americans were not entirely cut off from the Old World. Not only did
many earlier cultural ties remain unbroken—while a surprising reverse
emigration of good painters from the New World to the Old occurred—but
new cultural ties with the French ally were established, and these were
maintained and reinforced by several émigrés of ability who arrived in
the 1790s. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), hitherto as confirmed a
Palladian as any English landowner of the mid eighteenth century, was
undoubtedly influenced by his friend Clérisseau when he based his
Virginia State Capitol[23] of 1785-96 at Richmond very closely on the
best preserved ancient Roman structure that he had seen in France, the
Maison Carrée at Nîmes, even though he used for the portico an Ionic
instead of a Corinthian order. In this first major public monument
initiated in the new republic Jefferson’s drastic aim of forcing all the
requirements of a fairly complex modern building inside the rigid mould
of a Roman temple was more consonant with the absolutism of the French
in this period than with the rather looser formal ideals of the English.
Jefferson was not able to impose so rigid a Classicism on the new
Federal capital of Washington at its start, despite the efforts of
various French and British engineers, architects, and amateurs who
participated in the competitions of 1792 for the President’s House
(White House) and for the Capitol and who worked on the latter during
its first decade of construction. The White House[24] as designed by the
Irish architect James Hoban (_c._ 1762-1831) was still quite in the
earlier eighteenth-century Anglo-Palladian manner, and Jefferson’s own
project was based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Neither the English
amateur William Thornton (1759-1828) and his professional assistant who
was also English, George Hadfield (_c._ 1764-1826), nor their French
associate É.-S. Hallet succeeded in giving the Capitol[25] a very
up-to-date character (Plate 82A). Yet it is these major edifices that
still occupy two of the focal points in the Washington city plan,[26]
which was prepared by the French engineer P.-C. L’Enfant (1754-1825)
before his dismissal from public service in 1792.
It was Benjamin H. Latrobe (1764-1820), an English-born architect of
German and English training, who finally brought to America just before
1800, and shortly to Washington, the highest professional standards of
the day and a complete Romantic Classical programme. Indeed, he almost
succeeded in making Romantic Classicism the official style in the United
States for all time; at least it remained so down to the Civil War in
the sixties, and a later revival lasted, as regards public architecture
in Washington, from the 1900s to the 1930s (see Chapter 24). A pupil of
S. P. Cockerell, Latrobe emigrated in 1796 and was soon assisting
Jefferson on the final completion of the Virginia State Capitol as well
as undertaking the construction of canals as an engineer. Not
inappropriately Latrobe’s first important American building, the Bank of
Pennsylvania begun in 1798, was also an Ionic temple, but with an order
that aspired to be Greek. This Philadelphia bank included a great
central hall whose saucer dome, visible externally, made it a more
complex and architectonic composition than the Richmond Capitol. The
flat lantern crowning the dome recalled, and may derive from, those over
Soane’s offices at the Bank of England. Characteristically, Latrobe at
this very same time was also building a country house, Sedgley, outside
Philadelphia, with ‘Gothick’ detailing. By 1803 he had taken charge of
the construction of the Capitol, nominally under Thornton, with whom he
had continual rows. Most of the early interiors there were his, notably
those in the south wing, fine examples of Romantic Classicism with
French as well as English overtones; moreover he was still in charge of
rebuilding them after the burning of the Capitol in 1814 down to his
forced resignation in 1817.
In 1805 Latrobe submitted alternative designs for the Catholic cathedral
in Baltimore. The Gothic design is one of the finest projects of the
‘Sublime’ or ‘High Romantic’ stage of the Gothic Revival; yet in its
vast bare walls, carefully ordered geometry, and dry detail it is also
consonant with some of the basic ideals of Romantic Classicism. The
Classical design that was preferred and eventually built is perhaps less
original; but internally, at least, this is one of the finest
ecclesiastical monuments of Romantic Classicism, combining a rather
Panthéon-like plan with segmental vaults of somewhat Soanic character
(Plate 5). The cathedral was largely completed by 1818. The portico,
though intended from the first, was added only in 1863, but the present
bulbous terminations of the western towers are not of Latrobe’s design.
Near by in Baltimore the Unitarian Church of 1807 is by a Frenchman,
Maximilien Godefroy (_c._ 1760-1833),[27] who was also responsible for
the first Neo-Gothic ecclesiastical structure of any consequence in
North America, the chapel of St Mary’s Seminary there, also of 1807. The
Unitarian Church is a monument which might well have risen in the Paris
of the 1790s had the French Deists been addicted to building churches.
The triple arch in the plain stuccoed front below the pediment comes
straight from Ledoux’s _barrières_; the interior, unhappily remodelled
in 1916, was originally a dome on pendentives of the purest geometrical
order. So also Godefroy’s Battle Monument of 1814 also in Baltimore,
with its Egyptian base, might easily have been erected in Paris to
honour some general prominent in Napoleon’s campaign on the Nile.[28]
Another Frenchman, J.-J. Ramée (1764-1842), active since the Revolution
in Hamburg and in Denmark, also came briefly to America. In 1813 he laid
out Union College[29] in Schenectady, N.Y., on a rather Ledolcian plan
and began its construction before he returned to Europe. His semicircle
of buildings still crowns the hill—although two only are original—and
Ramée here initiated a tradition of college architecture as remote from
that of earlier American colleges, with their free-standing buildings
set around a ‘campus’, as Wilkins’s Downing at Cambridge was from
earlier English colleges.
The French eventually departed leaving no line of descent; but Latrobe
had a pupil, the first professionally trained American in the field and,
like Latrobe, almost as much an engineer as an architect. By 1808 Robert
Mills (1781-1855) was supervising for Latrobe the new Bank of
Philadelphia, Gothic (or at least ‘Gothick’) where his earlier Bank of
Pennsylvania had been Grecian, and also building on his own the Sansom
Street Baptist Church, a competent but not distinguished essay in
Romantic Classicism. In the same year another Latrobe pupil, William
Strickland (1788-1854), designed for Philadelphia a Gothick Masonic
Hall; this was built in 1809-11, and later rebuilt, but according to the
original design, after a fire in 1819-20.
Far more successful than either of these, if now overshadowed by the
megalomaniac Classicism of the twentieth-century Philadelphia Museum of
Art by Horace Trumbauer and others on the hill above, are the waterworks
begun in 1811 on the banks of the Schuylkill. These are probably but not
certainly by Mills rather than by the engineer Frederick Graff, whose
name is signed to the drawings. These very utilitarian structures are
most characteristic of the beginnings of Romantic Classicism in America,
where Latrobe, Mills, and also Strickland were all three engineers as
well as architects. Moreover, it is evident that engineering
considerations often influenced their approach to architecture, just as
architectural considerations gave visual distinction to much of their
engineering. Thus they may be compared with engineers like Telford and
Rennie in England as well as with the English architects of their day.
In this so-called ‘Federal’ period, when Romantic Classicism centred in
the Middle Atlantic states thanks to Latrobe, Godefroy, Mills, and
Strickland, the leading architect outside this area, the Bostonian
Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844), was a late-comer to Romantic Classicism.
His great public monument of the 1790s, the Massachusetts State House in
Boston, had been designed originally as early as 1787-8, and even as
executed in 1795-8 it derived principally from the Somerset House in
London of Sir William Chambers (1726-96) and in one interior from Wyatt.
His Boston Court House of 1810 first showed evidence of a change in his
style, notably in its smooth ashlar walls of cold grey granite. That was
a local material destined to lend particular distinction to the
principal Romantic Classical buildings of Boston from this time forward
(see Chapter 5).
The Frenchmen who came to America at the end of the eighteenth century
or in the early 1800s (and shortly left again) could hardly import the
French architecture of those decades; on the one hand, they had all been
trained before the Revolution, from which most of them were in flight;
on the other hand—and more consequently—there was almost no later
architecture for them to reflect. Between 1789 and 1806 French building
was at a standstill. Architects were mostly busy, if at all, with the
decoration of various revolutionary fêtes and the accommodation of new
political agencies in old structures.
One major example of the accommodation of an older structure to a new
purpose deserves particular mention. In the years 1795-7 J.-P. de Gisors
(1755-1828), E.-C. Leconte (1762-1818), and the former’s brother
A.-J.-B.-G. de Gisors (1762-1835) built within the old Palais Bourbon
the Salle des Cinq Cents, the legislative chamber of the First Republic.
This hemicycle, at least as rebuilt along much the original lines by
Joly in 1828-33, still serves as the Chamber of Deputies of the Fourth
Republic. Such a chamber, so different in plan from the college-chapel
arrangement of the British House of Commons with facing benches for
Government and Opposition, is characteristically Romantic Classical in
form, but this form has unfortunately proved to be conducive to an
indefinite shading of multiple parties from right to left. The British
model, suited to two-party rule only, was rarely imitated; the French
one has been rather frequently, beginning with Latrobe’s House of
Representatives in the Washington Capitol. Leaving aside the apparent
political effect of the plan—not so notable in Washington as
elsewhere—Gisors’s chamber seems to have been respectable if not
especially distinguished. Covered with a segmental half dome and a
barrel vault, both top-lighted, the smooth though rather richly
decorated surfaces of the walls and the vaults made clear the
interesting geometrical form of the interior space. The prototype was
the lecture theatre of the École de Médecine in Paris erected in 1769-76
by Jacques Gondoin (1737-1818), one of the most advanced interiors of
its day.
There was some private building in the Paris of the 1790s and early
1800s before public building eventually revived at Napoleon’s fiat.
Typical and partly extant is the Rue des Colonnes, most probably by
N.-A.-J. Vestier (1765-1816), although sometimes attributed to Poyet,
who may have had some urbanistic control. This has an open arcade at the
base carried on Greek Doric columns, here very modestly scaled, and cold
flat walls above that are almost without any detailing whatever. This
Paris street, as much as the arcaded ones of medieval and Renaissance
Italy, may well have been the prototype for Napoleon’s first and
greatest urbanistic project, the work of his favourite architects
Charles Percier (1764-1838) and P.-F.-L. Fontaine (1762-1853). From his
acquisition of La Malmaison in 1799 he kept them busy remodelling the
interiors of his successive residences as First Consul and Emperor but
rarely gave them new buildings to erect. This extensive planning scheme
includes the Rue de Castiglione, running south out of the Place Vendôme,
the Rue and Place des Pyramides, and the Rue de Rivoli facing the
Tuileries Gardens. This last street was eventually extended to the east
well beyond the Louvre by Napoleon III. The opening of the Rue de
Castiglione was ordered in 1801; construction began the next year, and
the execution of the rest went on, with long interruptions, for more
than half a century.
Percier and Fontaine’s façades are characteristic of Romantic Classicism
in their coldness of detailing and their infinite repetition of the same
formula; but their Italianism, thin and dry though it is, recalls the
plates in _Maisons et palais de Rome moderne_, which the two architects
had published in 1798 before their professional star had risen very high
(Plate 6B). With Nash’s Cronkhill, although in a very different and even
opposed spirit, this scheme presages the international Renaissance
Revival of the second quarter of the century. The very effective high
curved roofs, filling out completely the ‘envelope’ allowed by the Paris
building code, were added in 1855; more conventional two-pitched
mansards were provided originally.
But the Empire mode, particularly as elaborated by Percier and Fontaine
in the service of the Emperor, was primarily a fashionable style for
interiors, and found perhaps its most characteristic expression in
furniture, usually of dark mahogany with much ornate decoration of a
character resembling gold embroidery on uniforms. Such flat decorative
work is also found carved on exteriors, not only in France but wherever
Napoleonic influence penetrated. Indeed in furniture and interior design
generally non-French work is often of the highest quality, especially
when executed for such clients as Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat at
Naples.
Yet the character of French leadership in the arts had changed since the
1780s. The architects at the end of the _ancien régime_ had been truly
revolutionary in their aesthetic and their social ideals. Napoleon’s
designers, almost like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Stalin’s in our
century, were flatterers and time-servers. Emulation of their work
abroad was chiefly a matter of following well-publicized fashion;
creative French influence still flowed, however, from men of the older
generation now so largely forgotten at home. Thus it was at this point
that Ledoux’s projects became generally available to others, thanks to
his book published in 1804 and dedicated to Napoleon’s Russian ally of
the moment, Alexander I.
Extensive building activity in Paris under Napoleon’s aegis began only
in 1806, but once it started there came a positive flood of projects in
conscious emulation of Louis XIV’s architectural campaigns. There was
also the expectation that this activity would absorb unemployment in the
building trades. But Napoleon, like later dictators who have initiated
vast building projects, actually bit off a great deal more than he could
chew. He was, however, more fortunate than Mussolini and Hitler in that
the regimes which succeeded his in the decades between the First Empire
and the Second were surprisingly willing to carry his unfinished
monuments to completion. Still later, his nephew Napoleon III emulated
him in an even more concerted programme of urbanism and monumental
construction carried out over nearly two decades in a very different
style—indeed in several (see Chapter 8).
The Colonne de la Grande Armée, replacing the statue of Louis XV at the
centre of the Place Vendôme, is a properly symbolic monument of its
epoch—first to be designed of the many giant columns that would arise
all across the Western world from Baltimore to Petersburg within the
next quarter century. Wilkins’s Nelson Pillar in Dublin, actually
completed before the Paris example, has already been mentioned. The
column in Paris is Trajanesque not Grecian, however, and was entirely
executed with the bronze of captured guns. It well represents the
Imperial Roman megalomania already evident in many projected memorials
of the 1790s. Gondoin, its architect, with whom was associated J.-B.
Lepère (1761-1844), provides a real link with the past, since his
already-mentioned École de Médecine was one of the earliest major
edifices in which Romantic Classical ideals were carried beyond the
transitional stage of Soufflot’s Panthéon.
Even before the Colonne Vendôme was finished in 1810, a smaller and
somewhat less typical monument, but equally Roman and also the first of
a considerable line, had been completed by Percier and Fontaine. The Arc
du Carrousel of 1806-8—once a gate to the Tuileries from the Place du
Carrousel, now unhappily floating in unconfined space—has much of the
daintiness and, in the use of coloured marbles, the polychromy of its
architects’ contemporary palace interiors. Indeed, the richness of the
detailing is far less characteristic of Empire taste in architecture
than are their façades near by in the Rue de Rivoli (Plate 6B); the Arc
du Carrousel must have provided a rather fussy pedestal for the superb
Grecian horses stolen from St Mark’s in Venice that were originally
mounted upon it.
Far more satisfactorily symbolic of imperial aspiration is the enormous
Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, which looks down the entire length of the
Champs Élysées today to overwhelm its brother arch even at that great
distance (Plate 7). J.-A. Raymond (1742-1811), a pupil of Leroy, first
received the commission; but with him was associated J.-F.-T. Chalgrin
(1739-1811), the master of the younger Gisors, who soon took over and
imposed his own astylar design. Chalgrin, like Gondoin, was an architect
already well established under the _ancien régime_. His major innovation
had been the reintroduction of the basilican plan[30] at
Saint-Philippe-du-Roule in Paris in the 1760s, henceforth one of the
favourite models for Romantic Classical churches in France and elsewhere
on the Continent. Like many of the monuments of that earlier period by
Chalgrin’s contemporaries, his Arc de l’Étoile reverts less to Roman
antiquity than to certain aspects of the architecture of Louis XIV. Even
its megalomaniac grandeur can be matched, relatively at least, in the
Porte St Denis in Paris built in the 1680s by François Blondel, and it
follows almost line for line the square proportions of that masterpiece.
The arch was slowly brought to completion after Chalgrin’s death, first
by his pupil L. Goust from 1811 to 1813 and from 1823 to 1830; then by
Goust’s assistant, J.-N. Huyot (1780-1840), advised by a commission that
included François Debret (1777-1850), Fontaine, and the younger Gisors;
and finally from 1832 to 1837 by G.-A. Blouet (1795-1853). It owes its
unmistakably nineteenth-century character partly to the crisp, hard
quality of its imposts and entablatures and partly to the great Romantic
figural reliefs executed in 1833 by Rude, Etex, and Cortot. These take
the place on the piers of the more conventional trophy-hung obelisks on
Blondel’s seventeenth-century arch. A certain post-Empire quality
derives from the plastic complexity of Blouet’s attic; but on the whole
the Arc de l’Étoile, if less original and less influential than
Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, is Chalgrin’s masterpiece and Napoleon’s finest
memorial.
The Place de la Concorde, projected by A.-J. Gabriel (1692-1782) at the
end of the Baroque Age, continued to lack, even after a half century and
more, appropriate monuments to terminate the cross axis. The building of
a big church at the head of the Rue Royale to close the vista between
Gabriel’s two colonnaded ranges on the north side of the square had
bogged down well before the Revolution; across the river the much
earlier Palais Bourbon, set at an angle, was even more awkward than
before, now that the roof of the Salle des Cinq Cents rose above it.
Since the amelioration of this southern terminal required only a tall
masking façade set at right angles to the axis, this was promptly
provided. Poyet in 1806-8 used the most obvious Romantic Classical
solution for such a problem, a high blank wall with a ten-columned
temple portico at its centre. The result is certainly an urbanistic
success, if without any particular intrinsic interest; the raising of
the portico above a high range of steps ensured, for example, its
visibility from the square across the bridge. The form of the pediment
was slightly modified and the sculpture by Cortot added in 1837-41.
In 1761 Pierre Contant d’Ivry (1698-1777) and, after his death, G.-M.
Couture (1732-99) had made successive projects for a church dedicated to
the Magdalen at the head of the Rue Royale, the latter already proposing
that it be surrounded by a Classical peristyle. This structure, which
was as yet barely begun, Napoleon now decided should be not a church but
a Temple de la Gloire—he reversed his decision in 1813 after the Battle
of Leipzig and the loss of Spain. For such a temple he understandably
preferred, in the competition held in 1806, neither the first nor the
second premiated design, both of church-like character, but one by
Pierre Vignon (1763-1828) that proposed the erection of an enormous
Corinthian temple on a high Roman podium. Inside, a series of square
bays covered with domes on pendentives supported by giant Corinthian
columns provided a structural solution technically Byzantine but as
imperially Roman in scale and detailing as the exterior.
Construction of the Madeleine, begun in 1807, dragged on interminably.
J.-J.-M. Huvé (1783-1852) succeeded Vignon as architect in 1828 and,
like the Arc de l’Étoile, the edifice was finally finished only under
Louis Philippe in 1845. The interior has a somewhat funereal solemnity,
more characteristic of the post-Napoleonic regimes than of the period of
its initiation. The rather obvious temple form of the exterior is
redeemed by the superb siting, the really grand scale, and the rich
pedimental sculpture by Lemaire. Like Chalgrin’s arch, Vignon’s
Madeleine has continued to provide a major monumental nexus in the
urbanism of Paris ever since.
Also proposed in 1806 but not initiated until 1808 was the Bourse by
A.-T. Brongniart (1739-1813), another architect who had, like Gondoin
and Chalgrin, made his mark long before the Revolution (Plate 8B). Again
a free-standing peripteral structure like the Madeleine, the Bourse has
suffered somewhat from its enlargement in 1902-3 by J.-B.-F. Cavel (_c._
1844-1905) and H.-T.-E. Eustache (1861-?). Nearly square originally and
unpedimented—and also set much closer to the ground—it must always have
lacked the monumental presence of the Madeleine. But the interior with
its ranges of arcades, derived almost as directly from a Louis XIV
monument—in this case the court of the Invalides by Libéral Bruant—as
Chalgrin’s arch was from that of Blondel, is very characteristic of the
sort of reiterative composition generally favoured by Romantic
Classicism. L.-H. Lebas (1782-1867) was associated with the elderly
Brongniart from the start, and after Brongniart’s death the building was
finished in 1815 by E.-E. de Labarre (1764-1833). Labarre was
responsible also for the Colonne de la Grande Armée at Boulogne; this
was proposed in 1804 and begun in 1810, but, like so many Napoleonic
monuments, not finished until Louis Philippe took up its construction
again in 1833. It was finally completed by Marquise in 1844.
In 1799 a fire made it necessary to rebuild the Théâtre de l’Odéon; but
the original design of M.-J. Peyre (1730-88) and Charles de Wailly
(1729-98), dating back to 1779, was repeated in 1807 with little change,
as was also the case in 1819 when it was rebuilt again after another
fire. This provides excellent evidence of the continuity of Romantic
Classical style in France before and after the Revolution (see Chapter
3).
Napoleon had in mind the erection of various less monumental and more
utilitarian structures than the Bourse and the Odéon; some of these were
started, and one or two even finished, before the Empire came to an end.
Behind one section of the façades in the Rue de Rivoli an enormous and
rather dull General Post Office was begun in 1810 and eventually
completed to serve as the Ministry of Finance under Charles X in 1827.
Another ministry (Foreign Affairs) on the Quai d’Orsay was designed in
1810 by J.-C. Bonnard (1765-1818) and even begun in 1814; this was
eventually carried to completion by Bonnard’s pupil Jacques Lacornée
(1779-1856) in 1821-35. With its rich ordonnance of columns and arches,
Bonnard’s façade had an almost High Renaissance air, or so it would
appear from extant views of a structure long ago destroyed.
The Marché St Martin of 1811-16 by A.-M. Peyre (1770-1843), the Marché
des Carmes of 1813 by A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer (1756-1846), and the Marché St
Germain of 1816-25 by J.-B. Blondel (1764-1825), with their clerestory
lighting and open timber roofs, are typical of the more practical side
of Romantic Classicism.[31] The simple masonry vocabulary of these
Parisian markets, so straightforward and without Antique pretension, was
considered to be Italian (see Chapter 2).
The Napoleonic building flurry barely reached the provinces before its
short course was over. The theatre in Dijon, begun about 1805 by Jacques
Célérier (1742-1814), may be mentioned; but such plain square blocks
with frontal porticoes could have been, and were, built in almost
precisely the same form thirty years before—for example Ledoux’s theatre
at Besançon of 1775-84. At Pontivy in Brittany, then called
Napoléonville, the younger Gisors built a Préfecture in 1809 and a
Palace of Justice with associated prisons two years later. A rather dull
church, Saint-Vincent at Mâcon, repeating a model that had been new at
Saint-Philippe-du-Roule forty years earlier, was also erected by him in
1810. The pair of front towers was a novelty suggested by an earlier
project of Lebas.
It is quite characteristic of this period, so ready (as the French have
been ever since) to employ elderly architects and so content with
stylistic innovations that dated from before the Revolution, that
Mathurin Crucy (1749-1826) rebuilt in 1808-12 the theatre in Nantes—very
like that at Dijon—in exactly the same form as it had originally been
designed by him in 1784-8; while he also finished in 1809-12 the Bourse
and Tribunal de Commerce there which he had begun in 1791, just after
the Revolution started, with no change in the original design. The
setting of his theatre in the Place Graslin provided by continuous
ranges of five-storey houses is presumably contemporary; despite the
rather high roofs, the façades are notably crisp and smooth. The
rusticated arcuation of the lower storeys might make plausible a date in
the 1780s, but the rather thin and geometrically detailed iron balcony
railings suggest rather the first or second decade of the new century,
when the theatre was rebuilt.
If the imperial effort in France barely extended outside Paris except
for the interior alterations that Percier and Fontaine carried out in
the royal châteaux at Versailles, Compiègne, Saint-Cloud, and
Fontainebleau—major examples of Empire decoration but not of
architecture—the emperor and his nominees left their mark on most of the
great cities of continental Europe. The Palazzo Serbelloni in the Corso
Venezia, where Napoleon stayed in Milan, had been built by Simone
Cantoni (1736-1818) in 1794. Similar to French work of the 1780s, it
would probably have impressed the Emperor as still quite up-to-date. He
ordered in 1806 the laying out in Milan of the Forum Bonaparte,
according to the designs of Giannantonio Antolini (1754-1842), and the
erection of a conventionally Roman triumphal arch, the work of Luigi
Cagnola (1762-1832?), which was finally completed in 1838.
In Rome the development of the Piazza del Popolo, like the Forum
Bonaparte a work of urbanism rather than of architecture, was based by
Giuseppe Valadier (1762-1859), an Italian despite his French name and
ancestry, on a project he had made as early as 1794. This project was
modified by him under the Empire to incorporate ‘corrections’ by the
younger Gisors and L.-M. Berthault (1771?-1823). Execution of the
project actually began only in 1813 after Pope Pius VII returned from
his Napoleonic captivity; Valadier carried it forward to ultimate
completion in 1831. Valadier’s Roman church work, such as his new façade
for San Pantaleone of 1806, just off the present-day Corso Vittorio
Emanuele, is mostly too dull to mention; his domestic work was somewhat
more interesting, but with little personal or even Italian flavour.
In Naples Leconte, who had worked with the two Gisors on the Salle des
Cinq Cents in Paris, remodelled the San Carlo opera house in 1809 for
Murat—it was, however, refronted in 1810-12 and rebuilt in 1816-17 (see
Chapter 3). In association with Antonio de Simone, Leconte also
decorated rooms in the Bourbon Palace at Caserta,[32] originally built
by Vanvitelli in 1752-74, for this Napoleonic brother-in-law. But the
finest Empire things in the area were the Sala di Marte and the Sala di
Astrea there, which de Simone, working alone, had begun to decorate
slightly earlier in 1807 for Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte (Plate
25). As with so many architectural projects of the brief period of the
Empire, it was left to a returning legitimate sovereign, in this case
Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, to finish the job. Unlike the greater
part of Percier and Fontaine’s work in the French palaces, these rooms
at Caserta are interior architecture, not just interior decoration, and
fully worthy in their scale and their sumptuous materials of the
magnificent spaces, created almost half a century earlier by Vanvitelli,
which they occupy. This is the more remarkable as de Simone was really a
decorator not an architect.
The Napoleonic emendation of the Piazza San Marco in Venice calls for
little comment. There Sansovino’s church of San Zimignan at the end was
removed in 1807 and replaced with a structure by G. M. Solis (1745-1823)
more consonant with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Procurazie by
Buon and by Scamozzi along the sides. Solis’s emendation finally
completed, and not unworthily, this most magnificent piece of urbanism
in the form we now know it. La Fenice, the Venice opera-house, had been
rebuilt by Giannantonio Selva (1751-1819) in 1786-92; of his work,
however, only the rather dull façade remains. The exquisite Neo-Rococo
interior is, rather surprisingly, of the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, being by the brothers Tommaso and G. B. Meduna
(1810-?), who restored the theatre after a fire in 1836.
Ever since the fifteenth century Italian architects had worked much
abroad, generally bringing with them the latest stylistic developments.
Now that day was largely over; France, England, and very soon Germany
were exporting taste as Italy had done for so many previous centuries.
After the Second World War her position as architectural mentor began,
at least, to revive again (see Chapter 25).
The employment of foreign architects by Russian Tsars was a
well-established tradition by the late eighteenth century;[33] most of
them had been Italians, but one, Charles Cameron (_c._ 1714-1812), who
represents like Adam the transition from Academic to Romantic
Classicism, was Scottish.[34] There had also been a French designer of
the most original order working in Russia early in the eighteenth
century, Nicholas Pineau (1684-1754); he even formed his mature style
there, initiating the ‘Pittoresque’ phase of the Rococo well before he
returned to France. Half a century later Catherine the Great acquired
the greater part of the drawings of Clérisseau, friend and mentor of
Adam and also of Jefferson. Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, was so
esteemed as a liberal ruler in what had once been the most advanced of
French architectural circles that Ledoux, long left behind as a builder
by Revolution and Empire, dedicated to him his book on architecture in
1804, as has already been noted.
Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801 he called on a less
distinguished French architect, Thomas de Thomon (1754-1813), to design
the Petersburg Bourse[35] for him; this structure, built in 1804-16, not
Brongniart’s slightly later Bourse in Paris, is the great, indeed almost
the prime, monument of Romantic Classicism around 1800 (Plate
#8A:pl008A). The blank pediment, rising from behind a colonnade, the
great segmental lunette lighting the interior, the flanking rostral
columns, the smooth stucco so crisply painted, all establish this as a
perfect exemplar of this period, even though every idea in it can be
found in projects, if not in executed work, by Ledoux and Boullée dating
from before the Revolution. An even more precise prototype is provided
by a project for a ‘Bourse Maritime’ by Pompon that won a second Grand
Prix de Rome in 1798; this was not published until 1806, after Thomon
had begun his Bourse, but he was probably familiar with it all the same.
Not only is the Bourse exemplary in itself; Petersburg—already a century
old and with many vast Baroque palaces to its credit—rather than the
newly founded city of Washington on the other side of the western world,
offers the finest urban entity of this brief period and of the following
decades during which Alexander and his brother Nicholas I continued for
some thirty years major campaigns of construction along Romantic
Classical lines.
Thomon’s chief Russian rival, Nikiforovich Voronikhin (1760-1814), was
French-trained, a pupil of de Wailly. His Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg
of 1801-11 is still rather Baroque in its obvious reminiscences of St
Peter’s in Rome. But the Academy of Mines, which he began ten years
later, although somewhat heavy-handed in the way Romantic Classicism
tended to be, away from the great cultural centres, is almost as
exemplary as Thomon’s Bourse. More characteristically Russian in its
incredible extension and the great variety of its silhouette is the
Admiralty[36] of 1806-15 by Adrian Dimitrievich Zakharov (1761-1811).
But the end façades successfully enlarged to monumental scale the theme
of the arched entrance to the pre-revolutionary Hôtel de Salm in Paris
by Pierre Rousseau (1751-1810). Altogether the Admiralty exceeded in
quality as well as in scale almost everything that Napoleon commanded to
be built in France, except perhaps the Arc de l’Étoile.
Thus Romantic Classicism before Waterloo had major representatives all
the way from Latrobe and Mills in America, the one a foreigner, the
other a native, to Thomon and his two native rivals in Russia; while the
work of Leconte in Naples could once be matched by that done by Ramée in
Hamburg and Denmark before he went to America and by the projects, at
least, of Desprez in Sweden (see below). Other Frenchmen were working
throughout Napoleon’s realm and outside it as well; but the most
distinguished architect of this period hitherto unmentioned was a Dane,
C. F. Hansen (1756-1845). The design of his Palace of Justice of 1805-15
in the Nytorv in Copenhagen, with its associated gaol, derives from the
most advanced projects made by Frenchmen in the earlier years of
Romantic Classicism before 1800. The gaol and the arches of its
courtyard are more definitely Romantic than anything executed in France
under Louis XVI, for they specifically recall the ‘Prisons’ of Piranesi,
those strange architectural dreams in which the Baroque seems to become
the Romantic before one’s very eyes. The gaol also resembles a prison
designed for Aix by Ledoux and owes a certain medieval flavour, one must
presume, to Hansen’s first- or second-hand knowledge of the projects of
Boullée.
Still finer, because more homogeneous in conception if less pictorially
Romantic, is the principal church in Copenhagen, the Vor Frue Kirke in
the Nørregade, designed in 1808-10 by Hansen and built over the years
1811-29. The severely plain tower above the Greek Doric portico at the
front illustrates the more primitivistic and Italianate aspects of
Romantic Classical theory—more precisely it might seem to derive from
the tower of a project for a slaughterhouse by F.-J. Belanger
(1744-1818),[37] a pupil of Leroy. The interior, eventually furnished
with statues of Christ and the Twelve Apostles by one of the greatest
Romantic Classical sculptors, the Danish Thorwaldsen, raises its ranges
of Greek Doric columns to gallery level above a smooth arcuated base
(Plate 4B). These carry a coffered Roman barrel vault in a way that
follows quite closely, although with some change in the proportions,
Boullée’s project for the Bibliothèque Royale. Not the least successful
and original feature of the exterior is the plain half-cylinder of the
half-domed apse broken only by a portal of almost Egyptian simplicity.
But in Copenhagen, with its old tradition of building in brick, the
characteristic Romantic Classical surfaces of smooth stucco seem alien
and the curious pinky-brown that Hansen’s buildings are painted is
certainly a little gloomy today.
In Sweden the Rome-trained French architect Desprez, whose projects of
the 1780s have been mentioned, was largely occupied not with building
but with theatre settings; however, there is at least the excellent
Botanical Institute that he built in Uppsala, designed in 1791 and
completed in 1807, with its characteristic Greek Doric portico and plain
wall surfaces. More notable was his grandiose project, also of 1791, for
the Haga Slott in the form of a very long peripteral temple with an
octastyle pedimented portico projecting in the middle of the side. But
Sweden saw no such monumental example of Romantic Classicism carried to
execution. Typical of actual production is the country house at
Stjamsund built in 1801 by C. F. Sundahl (1754-1831); this is more
English than French in character, indeed with its plain rectangular mass
and central portico almost literally Anglo-Palladian.
Harassed and recurrently conquered or _gleichgeschaltet_ though most of
the German states were in the Napoleonic Wars (while Sweden eventually
received a Napoleonic marshal as sovereign through the testament of her
legitimate ruler) there was much more building altogether in these years
of the turn of the century in Germany than in Sweden, or indeed in
France, much of it of high quality. The frontispiece to Romantic
Classicism in Germany is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, built in
1789-93 by K. G. Langhans (1733-1808). Still somewhat attenuated and
un-Grecian in its proportions, this is the first of the Doric ceremonial
gateways that were to be so characteristic of Romantic Classicism
everywhere and also one of the most complex and original in composition.
More ponderous and provincial is Langhans’s Potsdam theatre of 1795; but
the Stadttheater at Danzig of 1798-1801 by Held, the City Architect, a
cube with a Doric temple portico and a low saucer dome, follows a more
Ledolcian paradigm.
David Gilly (1748-1808) was a more advanced Berlin architect than the
elderly Langhans; but his best work of these years is the Viewegsches
Haus in Brunswick of 1801-5 with its smooth stucco wall-planes, boldly
incised ornament, and Greek Doric porch. More elegantly French is
another Brunswick house of this period, the free-standing Villa Holland
of 1805 by P. J. Krahe (1758-1840).
Gilly would have been overshadowed by his son Friedrich (1771-1800) had
the latter lived, or so one must judge, not from his modest Mölter house
in the Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin of 1799, but from certain major
projects. One, of 1797, is for a monument to Frederick the Great which
was widely and deeply influential for many years to come; another, of
1800, is for a Prussian National Theatre, improving upon Ledoux’s at
Besançon as regards the interior and very original in its external
massing. The monument raised a Greek Doric temple on a tremendous
substructure of the most abstract geometrical character, surrounded it
with obelisks, and set the whole in a vast open space, unconfined but—as
it were—defined by subsidiary structures of very fresh and varied design
(Plate 9A). The handsome gateway to the square seems to provide evidence
of Gilly’s familiarity with such a highly personal work of Soane as his
entrance arch at Tyringham (Plate 6A); however, the general tone of
somewhat funereal grandeur recalls rather the monumental projects of
Ledoux, Boullée, and the younger men of France who designed so much and
built so little in this decade. Other contemporary Berlin architects,
such as Heinrich Gentz (1766-1801), who built the old Mint in 1798-1800,
and Friedrich Becherer (1746-1823), who built the Exchange in 1801,
while up-to-date stylistically, were much less accomplished than
Friedrich Gilly. His artistic heir was his fellow pupil Schinkel, whose
architectural career really began in 1816 (see Chapter 2).
[Illustration:
Figure 1. Friedrich Weinbrenner: Karlsruhe, Marktplatz, 1804-24, plan
]
The Baden architect Friedrich Weinbrenner (1766-1826) was already active
in Strasbourg in the 1790s, and his monument of 1800 to General Desaix
on the Île des Épis, Bas-Rhin, is so French in every way that it
properly finds a place in the official publication by Gourlier and
others of the public works of France in these years. Returning to
Karlsruhe, Weinbrenner began perhaps the most productive architectural
career of any German of his generation, transforming the Baden capital
into a Romantic Classical city somewhat less monumental, but more
coherently exemplary, than Petersburg. His own house there dated from
1801 and his Ettlinger Gate from 1803. In 1804 he began work on the
Marktplatz there, basing himself, however, on earlier projects that he
had made in 1790 and in 1797 (Plate 10A). A Baroque scheme exists on
paper for this square, closing it in with continuous façades and curving
them round the ends. Weinbrenner’s characteristically Romantic Classical
approach to the design of a square is quite different, similar to if
somewhat less open than Friedrich Gilly’s intended setting for the
Frederick the Great Monument (Figure 1). Two balancing but not identical
buildings, each more or less isolated, face each other across the centre
of the oblong space. The other less important structures appear as
separate blocks. Their relative geometrical purity is underlined by the
even purer form of the plain pyramidal monument erected in the centre in
1823. Such had for some time provided favourite decorations in Romantic
gardens, but this was the first to be used as a focal accent in place of
an arch, a column, or an obelisk. The City Hall on one side, with the
associated Lyceum, was begun in 1804 and completed some twenty years
later. The temple-like Evangelical Church which faces the City Hall was
built in 1807-16. Something of the grand scale of the Corinthian portico
on the front of the church is carried over into the interior, where two
tiers of galleries run along the sides behind giant Corinthian nave
colonnades. In the circular Rondellplatz, punctuated eventually by an
obelisk in the centre, there rose in 1805-13 Weinbrenner’s
Markgräfliches Palais, its portico set against the concave quadrant of
the front. His domed Catholic church of 1808-17 was unfortunately
entirely rebuilt in 1880-3.
Similar to Weinbrenner’s Rondellplatz is the Karolinenplatz in Munich,
laid out by Karl von Fischer (1782-1820) in 1808. But this was
originally even more Romantic Classical in disposition, since the
individual houses were all discrete blocks set in the segments between
the entering streets. The 106-foot obelisk in the centre here was
erected in 1833 by Leo von Klenze (1784-1864). Fischer’s National
Theatre in the Max-Josephsplatz in Munich, projected in 1810 and built
in 1811-18—and later rebuilt by Klenze according to the original design
after a fire in 1823—is a quite conventional monument of its day
dominated by a great temple portico. Though not very crisp in its
proportions, this theatre has real presence, particularly in relation to
the less boldly scaled Renaissance Revival buildings by Klenze, the
Königsbau of 1826 and the Hauptpostamt of ten years later, which flank
it on the sides of the square.
Not to extend unduly this catalogue of German work of the very opening
years of the nineteenth century, one may conclude with mention of the
Women’s Prison in Würzburg by Peter Speeth (1772-1831) built in 1809-10.
In this, much of the boldness of design of the French prison projects of
Ledoux and Boullée was happily realized, if at a rather modest scale
(Plate 17B). Speeth later proceeded to Russia, but what he did there is
a mystery.
Austrian production was rather limited and on the whole undistinguished
in this period. The extant façade by Franz Jäger (1743-1809) of the
Theater an der Wien of 1797-1801 off the Linke Wienzeile in Vienna has a
delicacy that is more _style Louis XVI_ than Romantic Classical. Neither
the Palais Rasumofsky at 23-25 Rasumofskygasse in Vienna of 1806-7,
built by Louis Joseph von Montoyer (_c._ 1749-1811) for Beethoven’s
patron, nor his Albertina of 1800-4 on the Augustinerbastei has much
character. There is equally little to be said for the Palais Palffy of
1809 at 3 Wallnerstrasse by the other leading Viennese architect of the
day, Karl von Moreau (1758-1841). Despite his French name, Montoyer was
a Hapsburg subject from the Walloon provinces; Moreau’s origin is
uncertain, but he is reputed to have been trained, if not born, in
France. If he was not French, Austria would be one of the few countries
where no French architect worked in this period.
A certain sort of primacy must certainly be given to France in this
period, although less definitely than in the decades 1750-90, because
the French became the educators of the world in architecture and the
codifiers of style once a new post-Baroque style had been created. Among
Napoleon’s new institutional establishments was the École Polytechnique.
Here architecture was taught by Durand, a pupil of Boullée, under the
Empire and the following Restoration. His _Précis des leçons_ became a
sort of Bible of later Romantic Classicism throughout his lifetime and
even beyond. Above all in Germany, the instruction of Durand provided
the link between the innovations of the creative decades before the
Revolution in France and a new generation of architects who matured just
in time to take over the building activities of the kingdoms which rose
from the ruins of Napoleon’s empire. We may well precede any description
of the achievements of Romantic Classicism after 1810 with some
consideration of Durand’s treatise.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 2
THE DOCTRINE OF J.-N.-L. DURAND AND ITS APPLICATION IN NORTHERN EUROPE
FROM the time of Louis XIV France had been unique in possessing a highly
organized system of architectural education. Under the aegis of the
Académie, students were prepared for professional practice in a way all
but unknown elsewhere. To crown their formal training came the
opportunity, determined by competition, for the ablest to spend several
years of further study as _pensionnaires_ in Rome. The revolutionary
years of the 1790s disrupted temporarily the French pattern of
architectural education and recurrent wars cut off access to Rome. The
Empire, however, early re-established the pattern of higher professional
education with only slight and nominal differences. From 1806 on,
moreover, the competition projects for the Prix de Rome, including those
from as far back as 1791, were handsomely published in a series of
volumes.[38] Thus the whole international world of architecture could
henceforth have ready access to the visual results of official French
training in architecture, if not to the actual discipline of the
Parisian ateliers.
Napoleon, as an ex-ordnance officer, felt more sympathy with engineers
than with architects; hence he established a new École Polytechnique,
where architecture was included in the curriculum along with various
sciences and technics. J.-N.-L. Durand (1760-1834), the new school’s
professor of architecture, published his _Précis des leçons
d’architecture données à l’École Polytechnique_ in two volumes in
1802-5, thus making a fairly complete presentation of the content of
French architectural education generally available.[39] Recurrent issues
of this work down to 1840, of which at least one appeared outside
France—in Belgium—allowed this popular treatise to become a sort of
bible of Romantic Classicism that retained international authority for a
generation and more.
Durand was a pupil of Boullée; but both the text and the plates of his
book indicate his capacity for synthesizing and systematizing the
diverse strands of theory and practice that had developed in France in
the previous forty years. Because of his temperament and background, and
_a fortiori_ because he was teaching not in an art academy but in a
technical school, Durand is doubtless to be classed within his
generation as a proponent of structural rationalism. But he was a much
more eclectic one than Soufflot’s disciple Rondelet, from 1795 professor
at the École Centrale des Travaux Publics and author of the major
treatise on building construction of the period.[40] Durand’s lessons
incorporated many other aspects of Romantic Classicism, from the pure
Classical Revivalism of one wing of the academic world to an eclectic
interest in Renaissance and even, like his master Boullée, in certain
medieval modes; only the recondite symbolism of Ledoux is absent. In
general, one feels in Durand’s case, as always with the second
generation of an artistic movement, some loss of intensity at various
points where the awkward edges of opposed sources of inspiration were
clipped to allow their coherent codification.
After a theoretical introduction concerning the goal of architecture,
its structural means, and the general principles to be derived
therefrom, Durand deals as a convinced ‘constructor’ with various
materials and their proper employment before treating of specific forms
and their combination. Only in the second part of his work, concerned
with ways of combining architectural elements, do the visual results of
his theories become fully evident. There he presents in plan and in
elevation various structural systems from trabeated colonnades of Greek
and Roman inspiration to arcuated and vaulted forms of Renaissance or
even round-arched medieval character. Among his specific examples,
‘vertical combinations’ of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century elements
outnumber the strictly Classical paradigms (Figure 2); whole plates,
moreover, are given to schemes that are not only generically Italianate,
but of Early Christian, Romanesque, or even Gothic, rather than
Renaissance, inspiration. Common to most of his examples is the
insistent repetition of elements, both horizontally and vertically, and
most characteristic is his interest in the varied skylines that central
and corner towers can provide, as also in the incorporation of voids in
architectural compositions in the form of loggias and pergolas. More
monumental façades fronted by temple porticoes are in a minority,
although colonnades are frequent enough in his presentation of such
specific features as porches, vestibules, halls, galleries, and central
spaces. Here are to be found most of the detailed formulas—almost all
derived from Boullée and from the Grand Prix projects of the previous
decade—which the next generation of architects would follow again and
again throughout most of the western world.
[Illustration:
Figure 2. J.-N.-L. Durand: ‘Vertical Combinations’ (from _Précis des
leçons_, 1805)
]
In his second volume Durand turns from a consideration of architecture
in terms of structural elements to a notably systematic presentation of
buildings in terms of their varying functions. First he deals with
urbanistic features, including not only bridges, streets, and squares,
but also such supposedly essential elements of the ideal classicizing
city as triumphal arches and tombs. A second section considers temples
(not churches, it is amusing to note), palaces, treasuries, law courts,
town halls, colleges, libraries, museums, observatories, lighthouses,
markets, exchanges, custom houses, exhibition buildings, theatres,
baths, hospitals, prisons, and barracks. Here were all the individual
structures of the model Napoleonic city, of which Napoleon had time to
build so few but of which the next decades in France and abroad were to
see so many executed by Durand’s pupils and other emulators of his
ideals.
For less representational edifices, from town halls and markets to
prisons and barracks, Durand’s utilitarianism led him to substitute for
colonnades and domes plain walls broken by ranges of arcuated openings,
sometimes of _quattrocento_ or Roman-aqueduct character but as often of
vaguely medieval inspiration. For nearly a half century such paradigms
were very frequently followed, not only in France but even more in other
countries, as Classicism continued to grow more Romantic.
Nor were the designs for houses that Durand provided in the final
section of his book entirely uninfluential.[41] However, there were
fewer of these, and the inspiration of far more executed work of the
next forty or fifty years can be traced to his paradigms for public
monuments than to his prescriptions for private dwellings. Indeed,
Romantic Classicism is a predominantly public style, and its
utilitarianism is of the State rather than of the private individual.
However, the opposing current of the Picturesque, reflected in Durand’s
book only in his concern for the ‘employment of the objects of nature in
the composition of edifices’ (by which he meant hardly more than
Italianate fountains and even more Italianate vine-hung loggias),
provided amply for the individual (see Chapter 6).
It might seem natural to continue from this discussion of Durand’s
treatise with some account of the executed architecture of France during
the final years of the Empire after 1810, under the last Bourbons, and
under Louis Philippe. Actually, however, the most concrete examples of
Durand’s influence, and certainly the finest Durandesque monuments, are
to be found not in France but in Germany and Denmark.
By the time of Napoleon, French influence on German architecture was a
very old story. More and more French architects were employed by German
princes as the eighteenth century proceeded, and by 1800 there were few
German centres without examples of their work. As we have seen in the
previous chapter, moreover, the work of various German architects in the
1790s and the early 1800s, whether or not they had actually studied or
even travelled in France, showed their devotion to the early ideals of
Romantic Classicism. Such men as K. G. Langhans and David Gilly in
Berlin, Fischer in Munich, or Weinbrenner in Karlsruhe had no Napoleon
to employ them; but they were happier than his architects in seeing
their major works brought to relatively early completion. At Karlsruhe
Weinbrenner’s comprehensive projects for the new quarters of the town
continued to go forward down to his death in 1826. By that time his City
Hall had finally been finished, and street after street of modest houses
filled out the pattern of a coherent Romantic Classical city.
The Karlsruhe Marktplatz stands as one of the happiest ensembles of the
early nineteenth century, happy not alone because Weinbrenner, who first
conceived it, was able to carry it to final completion before
architectural fashions had begun to change, but even more because that
first conception dated back to the most vigorous period of the
architectural revolution in Germany and was not notably diluted by the
more pedestrian standards of later days (Plate 10A). In detail, perhaps,
the original designs for the individual buildings were bolder; but the
ideal of a public square, not walled in in the Baroque way but defined
by discrete blocks, balanced but not identical, and focused by the
eye-catching diagonals of the central pyramid, a geometric shape as pure
as the cube or the sphere yet also an established formal symbol and a
subtle memory of the Egyptian past, was fully realized (Figure 1).
Outside the Marktplatz, except perhaps in the Rondellplatz with its
central obelisk, Weinbrenner’s work is more provincial though in a very
distinguished way. Here and there, moreover, a pointed arch or a touch
of asymmetry showed his early response to the contemporary currents of
the Picturesque.
Weinbrenner’s death in 1826 and the succession as State architect of
Baden of his pupil Heinrich Hübsch (1795-1863) provides a natural break
in the Romantic Classical story at just that point when the rise of new
ideals began to make the more Classical side of Romantic Classicism out
of date—in 1828 Hübsch himself published a characteristic essay, _In
welchem Styl sollen wir bauen?_, a question to which the answers were
increasingly various, and rarely the Classical style. Elsewhere in
Germany, and notably in Bavaria, where the Wittelsbachs, raised to
kingship while in alliance with Napoleon, were also the most culturally
ambitious rulers of a post-Napoleonic state, there is no such sharp
break. Leo von Klenze, born in 1784 in Hildesheim, lived until 1864; his
Munich Propylaeon, completed only the year before his death and begun as
late as 1846, is by no means the least Grecian of his works. Klenze (he
was ennobled by his royal patron) had studied in Paris under the Empire
not only under Durand at the École Polytechnique but also with Percier.
In 1805 he had visited the other two main sources of up-to-date
architectural inspiration, Italy with its Classical ruins and its
Renaissance palaces, and England with its own early version of Romantic
Classicism and its various illustrations of the Picturesque. In 1808
Napoleon’s brother Jerome, then King of Westphalia, who was already
employing A.-H.-V. Grandjean de Montigny (1776-1850), had made the
twenty-four-year-old Paris-trained German his court architect; in 1814
Maximilian I called him to Munich.
In 1816 Klenze began his first major construction, the Munich
Glyptothek, a characteristic and externally somewhat dull sculpture
gallery. This is dominated in the established French way by a tall
temple portico in the centre, and the blank walls at either side are
relieved, none too happily, by aedicular niches. But if the exterior
(which survived the blitz) is conventional enough the interiors,
completed in 1830 and originally filled—among other magnificent
antiquities—with the sculpture from the temple at Aegina as repaired and
installed by Thorwaldsen, made it one of the finest productions of the
great early age of museum-building as long as they existed (Plate 9B).
The plan, with a range of top-lit galleries around a court, was
generically Durandesque in its square modularity; the sections followed
almost line for line one of Durand’s paradigms for art galleries (Figure
3). The sumptuous decoration of the vaults and the superb sculpture so
handsomely arranged by Thorwaldsen provided a mixture of periods—real
fifth-century Greek and Empire—distressing to purists but wonderfully
symptomatic of the ideals of the age.
The Glyptothek was the first building erected in the Königsplatz, a very
typical Romantic Classical urbanistic entity. Faced by an even more
completely columniated picture gallery, built by G. F. Ziebland
(1800-73) in 1838-48, with Klenze’s Propylaeon of 1846-63 forming the
far side of the square, the Königsplatz has all the coldness and
barrenness which Weinbrenner happily avoided in his Marktplatz; by the
time of its completion this must have seemed very out of date, not least
to Klenze himself. But as the Propylaeon indicates, Klenze never
eschewed trabeated Classicism, however much his best later work belongs
to—indeed to a considerable extent actually initiates—the Renaissance
Revival.
[Illustration:
Figure 3. J.-N.-L. Durand: ‘Galleries’ (from _Précis des leçons_,
1805)
]
His Walhalla[42] near Regensburg, built in 1831-42 but based on designs
prepared a decade or more earlier, is the most grandly sited of all the
copies of Greek and Roman temples which succeeded in the first half of
the nineteenth century Jefferson’s initial large-scale example at
Richmond, Virginia. Like the finest ancient Greek temples, it is raised
high on a hill—that is actually what is most truly Classical about it,
as it is also, paradoxically, what may today seem most specifically
Romantic (Plate 16A). But the tremendous substructure of staircases and
terraces, derived from Friedrich Gilly’s project for the monument to
Frederick the Great (Plate 9A), could belong to no other period than
this.
In the thirties Klenze, who had already visited Greece in 1823-4 before
the establishment of a Wittelsbach monarchy gave employment to Bavarian
architects there, was called to Petersburg. There, in 1839-49, rose his
Hermitage Museum. The elaborate detailing of this, however Grecian it
may be in intention, reflects the growing taste for elaboration in the
second quarter of the century as his other Classical works do not. Still
later, though not as late as the Propylaeon, is the Munich Ruhmeshalle
of 1843-53, a U-shaped Doric stoa which provides in the Hellenistic way
a setting for a giant statue of Bavaria by Schwanthaler. This is dull,
and still in the old-established Grecian mode of the earlier years of
the century. More characteristically, however, Klenze left all that
behind him even before 1825, when Maximilian I was succeeded by Ludwig
I.
Museums are the most typical monuments of Romantic Classicism, as a
whole range of them[43] from the Museo Pio-Clementino by Michelangelo
Simonetti (1724-81) at the Vatican in Rome of 1769-74 down at least to
the Neuere Pinakothek in Munich of 1846-53 by August von Voit (1801-71)
sufficiently illustrate. The two most purely Grecian examples, Smirke’s
British Museum in London (Plate 33) and Schinkel’s Neues (later Altes)
Museum in Berlin (Plate 13), were not yet designed when Klenze first
turned his attention in the years 1822-5 to planning a gallery for
paintings at Munich. Begun in 1826 and completed in 1833, the Pinakothek
(later Ältere Pinakothek) might be considered the earliest monumental
example of revived High Renaissance design. Yet there is little about it
that cannot be matched in published French Grand Prix projects or in the
plates of Durand; Bonnard’s ministry on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris,
moreover, must have been rather similar. The Pinakothek was largely
destroyed in the Second World War, but has now been rebuilt according to
Klenze’s original design, except for the ceiling decorations.
Another building by Klenze, the Königsbau section of the Royal palace in
Munich, fronting on the Max-Josephplatz at right angles to Fischer’s
theatre, is a more attractive early example of the Renaissance Revival.
Begun in the same year 1826 as the Ältere Pinakothek, it was completed
in 1833. The façade follows closely that of the Pitti Palace as extended
in the seventeenth century, but carries the pilasters of Alberti’s
Rucellai Palace, and in designing it Klenze must have drawn heavily on
the _Architecture toscane_ of Grandjean de Montigny.[44] The planning
inside is curiously free and asymmetrical considering the total
regularity of the fenestration, but then little trace of the original
Pitti plan had survived to be followed by an imitator.
In 1836 Klenze completed this square, so characteristic a product of two
generations of Romantic Classicism, by facing the eighteenth-century
Palais Törring on the other side from the Königsbau with a
_quattrocento_ arcade in order to provide a monumental and harmonious
Central Post Office. Another earlier square, the Odeonsplatz, with
Klenze’s Leuchtenberg Palais of 1819, his matching Odeon completed in
1828, and a range of shops of 1822, also by him, on the other side of
the Ludwigstrasse, has almost as much Italian Renaissance feeling but is
less derivatively Tuscan. It follows rather the work of his master
Percier in Paris under the Empire.
The increasing eclecticism of Romantic Classical architects is well
illustrated by the fact that the Court Church[45] attached to the palace
at the rear was built by Klenze in the same years as the Königsbau,
1826-37. This is covered by a series of domes on pendentives, derived
presumably from the Madeleine in Paris but detailed to suggest, as
Vignon’s do not, the ultimately Byzantine origin of the structural form;
the immediate prototype, however, was probably one of Schinkel’s
projects for the Werder Church in Berlin (see below).
In the creation of the principal street of Ludwigian Munich, the
Ludwigstrasse, a rival of Klenze’s, Friedrich von Gärtner (1792-1847),
like Klenze ennobled by his sovereign, played a more important role.
Born in Coblenz, Gärtner studied first at the Munich Academy, where he
was later to be professor of architecture and, from 1841, director.
After his studies in Munich, he travelled in France, Italy, Holland, and
England, although he had no formal foreign training such as Klenze’s.
Gärtner’s first major work, destined by its tall twin towers to dominate
the long and rather monotonous perspective of the Ludwigstrasse, was the
Ludwigskirche built in 1829-40 (Plate 10B). If Klenze’s Court Church was
Byzantinesque, Gärtner’s church was Romanesquoid, though still in a
rather Durandesque way. Even more Durandesque, and very much finer, is
the long façade of Gärtner’s State Library next door, which was built in
1831-40 (Plate 10B). Here the tawny tones of the brick and terracotta,
as much as the slightly medievalizing detail of the arcuated front, give
evidence of the Romantic rejection of the monochromy typical of the
Greek Revival. But if this façade is warm in colour it could hardly be
colder in design, throwing into happy relief the richer _ordonnance_ of
Klenze’s nearby War Office of 1824-6 with its rusticated arches and low
wings (Figure 4).
[Illustration:
Figure 4. Leo von Klenze: Munich, War Office, 1824-6, elevation
]
Rounding out the Ludwigstrasse are many other consonant structures. By
Klenze is the Herzog Max Palais of 1826-30 on the right; by Gärtner the
Blindeninstitut of 1834-8, farther down opposite the Ludwigskirche, and
the University of 1834-40 together with the Max Joseph Stift that
complete the terminal square. There stands also the inharmoniously Roman
Siegestor of 1843-50 which is, rather surprisingly, also by Gärtner. Far
more appropriate, if equally unoriginal, is his Feldherrenhalle of
1841-4 at the other end of the street above the Odeonsplatz, a close
copy of the fourteenth-century Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The whole
area constitutes what is perhaps the finest, or at least the most
coherent, range of streets and squares of the later and more eclectic
phase of Romantic Classicism. This exceeds in extent, though not in
quality, Weinbrenner’s Marktplatz in Karlsruhe of the preceding quarter
century. This brilliant Munich period came to an end on Ludwig I’s
abdication in 1848; his successor Maximilian II’s attempt to find a ‘new
style’ for his Maximilianstrasse in the next decade was a dismal fiasco,
for this ‘new style’ as applied by Friedrich Bürklein (1813-73), a pupil
of Gärtner, in building up the new street in 1852-9 proved to be merely
a fussy and muddled approach to the English Perpendicular, already
employed with more success by Bürklein’s master.
Before his death, the year before Maximilian II’s accession, Gärtner had
all but completed the Wittelsbach Palace. This he had begun in 1843
using a very Durandesque version of English Tudor executed in red brick.
Red brick also characterizes another example of contemporary
eclecticism, the Bonifazius Basilika of 1835-40 by Ziebland. This was
designed, as its name implies, in a Romantic Classical version of the
Early Christian; but it is much less Roman in detail than the great
French and Italian churches of the period of this generic basilican
order (see Chapter 3).
Most of these variant aspects of later Romantic Classicism in Munich,
whether Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Italian Gothic, or
_quattrocento_ in inspiration, are also examples of what was called at
this time in Germany the _Rundbogenstil_.[46] A large and prominent
example in Munich, late enough to illustrate how this special mode of
Romantic Classicism deteriorated after the mid century, was Bürklein’s
railway station built in 1857-60. The whole station has now been largely
but not entirely destroyed by bombing; originally it had a handsome shed
with very heavy arched principals of timber.
Although the mode may be readily paralleled in other North European
countries, the _Rundbogenstil_ is peculiarly German. It was, indeed, the
favourite mode of the thirties and forties in most German states;
certainly it is comparable in local importance to the mature Gothic
Revival of these decades in England as the German Neo-Gothic is not (see
Chapter 6). Deriving from the more utilitarian arcuated models provided
by Durand (and ultimately from the projects of his master Boullée and
other French architects of the 1780s), the _Rundbogenstil_ is still a
phase of Romantic Classicism even if in it the Romantic element has
risen close to dominance. But in its rigidity of composition, repetition
of identical elements, and emphasis on direct structural expression it
is wholly in the line of the earlier and more Classical rationalism.
The changing taste of these decades usually demanded ever more and
busier detail. Rivalry with the archaeological pretensions of the Greek
Revival, moreover, called for a certain parade of stylistic erudition.
But the archaeological sources drawn upon were very various and to
varying degrees effectively documented. From the Early Christian to the
_quattrocento_, most of them were more or less Italianate. However,
there were some architects who succeeded—like Gärtner at the Wittelsbach
Palace—in using pointed-arched precedent in a characteristically
_Rundbogenstil_ way; others elaborated their detail with real
originality rather than adhering closely to any past precedent at all.
On its _quattrocento_ side the _Rundbogenstil_ was perhaps most notably
represented in Germany by the Johanneum in Hamburg of 1836-9 (completely
destroyed in the Second World War), a large building surrounding three
sides of a court and incorporating two schools and a library (Plate
11B). This was by C. L. Wimmel (1786-1845), like Hübsch a pupil of
Weinbrenner, and F. G. J. Forsmann (1795-1878). This particular
_Rundbogenstil_ work can also be classified as belonging, like Klenze’s
Königsbau, to the international Renaissance Revival of which Hamburg was
rather a centre. For example, the extant Exchange there of 1836-41 by
these same architects is of richer and more High Renaissance character
and not at all _Rundbogenstil_.
Many houses in Hamburg built by Gottfried Semper (1803-79), Alexis de
Chateauneuf (1799-1853), who had studied in Paris, and others in the
forties were of elegant Early Renaissance design—one by the former even
having _sgraffiti_ on the walls—more like Klenze’s row of shops in the
Odeonsplatz. The Rücker-Jenisch house of 1845 by the Swiss-born Auguste
de Meuron (1813-98), a pupil of the same French architect, A.-F.-R.
Leclerc, as de Chateauneuf, was certainly not _Rundbogenstil_ but rather
a version of the Travellers’ Club in London. Thus it followed, in this
anglicizing city, an epoch-making model by Charles Barry that dates from
fifteen years earlier (see Chapter 4). However, de Chateauneuf’s Alster
Arcade beside the waters of the Kleine Alster and his red brick Alte
Post (now the Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv) of 1845-7 in the Poststrasse are
both prominent and excellent examples of the _Rundbogenstil_ of this
period in Hamburg, the latter being slightly Gothic in its detailing.
The work of Hübsch, Weinbrenner’s successor as State architect in Baden,
despite his very serious archaeological study of Early Christian and
Romanesque architecture,[47] falls somewhere between Gärtner’s
Ludwigskirche and Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika without achieving
either the crisply Durandesque quality of the one or the relative
archaeological plausibility of the other. In his civil buildings, such
as the very simple Ministry of Finance designed in 1827 and built in
1829-33, the more ornate Technische Hochschule of 1832-6, the Art
Gallery of 1840-9, and the Theatre of 1851-3, all in Karlsruhe, very
considerable originality of composition was more and more confused as he
grew older by the fussy elaboration of the terracotta ornamentation.
In his later work Hübsch frequently used not the round but the segmental
arch—a highly rational form with brick masonry—and was usually somewhat
happier than the Bavarians in handling the tawny tonalities of brick and
terracotta which so generally replaced the pale monochromy of the Greek
Revival in the thirties and forties. A minor but especially fine example
of his most personal manner is the Trinkhalle of 1840 at Baden-Baden
(Plate 11A), rather better suited in its festive spirit to a
watering-place than the Classical severity of Weinbrenner’s Kurhaus
there of 1821-3. Hübsch’s churches are naturally more archaeological in
character and definitely more Romanesquoid than _Rundbogenstil_. Those
at Freiburg (1829-38), Bulach (1834-7), and Rottenburg (1834) are
typical. The _Rundbogenstil_ railway stations of another Baden
architect, Friedrich Eisenlohr (1804-55), at Karlsruhe (1842) and
Freiburg precede Bürklein’s in Munich in date and are rather superior to
it.
The _Rundbogenstil_ was particularly dominant in the southern German
states, overflowing also into Switzerland, where the Federal Palace in
Berne, built in 1851-7 by Friedrich Studer (1817-70), is a particularly
extensive and nobly sited example. It was, however, in Prussia in the
north of Germany that the greatest architect who worked in this mode was
active, and he owes his reputation largely to his Grecian work.
Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, the only architect of the first half of the
nineteenth century who can be compared in stature with the English
Soane, was the great international master of two successive phases of
Romantic Classicism, first of the programmatic Greek Revival, with which
the post-Napoleonic period began almost everywhere in the second decade
of the century, and then of the more eclectic phase that followed. Born
in 1781, a generation later than Soane, Schinkel’s serious architectural
production began only in 1816. His relatively early death in 1841
truncated his career; but his pupils and his spirit dominated Prussian,
and indeed most of German, architecture for another score of years and
more.
Somewhat as the long-lived Titian stood to the short-lived Giorgione
stood Schinkel in relation to his near-contemporary and associate
Friedrich Gilly, whose projects have already been mentioned (Plate 9A).
Indeed, Schinkel showed almost as great a capacity to absorb and
continue the revolutionary architectural ideals of the 1780s in France
as Gilly—more, certainly, than most of the foreigners who visited Paris
during the unproductive years following the Revolution, or even those
who stayed on to study there.
Schinkel, however, soon to be one of the most architectonic of
architects, made his earliest mark not with architectural projects but,
like Inigo Jones in England before him, as a designer of theatre sets.
Down to 1815 he executed no buildings of any consequence; but in his
paintings of these years, even more perhaps than in his stage sets, he
established himself as a High Romantic artist of real distinction. At
their best these follow in quality very closely after the master works
of German Romantic landscape by Caspar David Friedrich.
Characteristically, buildings play an important part in Schinkel’s
pictures, and vast Gothic constructions in the ‘Sublime’ spirit of
Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey are actually more frequent than Grecian or
Italianate fabricks.
[Illustration:
Figure 5. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: project for Neue Wache, Berlin,
1816
]
But if Gothic projects form a more important part of his production on
canvas, and also on paper, in the first decades of the century than is
the case with any other architect of the period, even in England,
Schinkel made his formal architectural debut as a Grecian and a
rationalist. Named by Frederick William III State architect in 1815, his
project of the next year for the Neue Wache (Figure 5), Unter den
Linden, facing Frederick the Great’s opera house, is especially notable
in the use of square piers—a Ledolcian extreme of rationalist
simplification—beneath the Grecian pediment. His intense Romanticism
also reveals itself in the heads of Pergamenian extravagance that writhe
forth from the frieze above. Not surprisingly, in the building as
executed, and happily still extant, Greek Doric columns replace the
square piers. But the broad plain members that frame the cubic mass
behind and, above all, the superb proportions of the whole reveal a
surer hand than any other architect of the day in Germany possessed. The
contrast with Klenze’s Glyptothek, begun the same year, is notable.
Schinkel’s Berlin Cathedral, as rebuilt in 1817-22 beside the Baroque
Schloss of Andreas Schlüter, was a modest work and none too successful;
its replacement in 1894-1905 by the enormous Neo-Baroque structure of
Julius Raschdorf was no great loss.
There followed after the Cathedral a work of much greater scale, the
Berlin Schauspielhaus, designed in 1818 and built in 1819-21 (Plate 12).
Here the complexity of the mass diminishes somewhat the clarity of the
geometrical order in the separate parts; but Schinkel’s rationalistic
handling of Grecian elements is nowhere better seen than in the
articulation of the attic by means of a ‘pilastrade’ of small antae or
the reticulated organization of the walls of the side wings. The
interior of the auditorium boldly combines very simple and heavily
scaled wall elements with very delicately designed iron supports for the
ranges of boxes and galleries.
Characteristic of the many-sidedness of Schinkel’s talent, if very much
smaller and intrinsically less happy, is the War Memorial, also of
1819-21, on the Kreuzberg in Berlin. This is a Gothic shrine of the most
lacy and linear design, 111 feet high and entirely executed in cast
iron.
The Singakademie in Berlin of 1822 and a large house in Charlottenburg
for the banker Behrend, on the other hand, are very accomplished
exercises in a rigidly Classical mode such as his French contemporaries
were currently essaying with markedly less elegance of proportion. The
Zivilcasino in Potsdam, begun the next year, where an awkward site
forced—or perhaps merely justified—an asymmetrical juxtaposition of the
parts, illustrated an aspect of Schinkel’s talent that is particularly
significant to his twentieth-century admirers: the imposition of
coherent geometrical order upon an edifice markedly irregular in its
massing. This was something the English were only playing at in these
years when they designed Picturesque Italian Villas such as Nash’s
Cronkhill or loosely composed Castellated Mansions such as Gwrych (Plate
49).
It is characteristic of Romantic Classicism that Schinkel’s
masterpiece—and, with Soane’s later Bank interiors, the masterpiece of
the period—should be a museum. The Altes Museum, designed in 1823 and
built in 1824-8, faces the Schloss across the Lustgarten, to which
Schinkel’s just completed Schlossbrücke gave a dignified new approach.
The Museum quite outranked his rather undistinguished cathedral; yet at
first glance it may seem one of the least original and most tamely
archaeological of Romantic Classical buildings (Plate 13). Substituting
for the paradigm of the pedimented peripteral temple that of the stoa,
Schinkel evidently counted on the prestige of a giant Grecian order to
impress his contemporaries, quite as Brongniart had done at the Paris
Bourse (Plate 8B). But the Museum retains the admiration of a twentieth
century usually bored, and even shocked, by such stylophily because of
the extraordinary logic and elegance of its total organization.
The frontal plane of superbly detailed Ionic columns is not weak at the
corners, as colonnades seen against the light generally are, for here
spur walls ending in antae firmly enframe the long, unbroken range. And
if this frontal columnar plane is unbroken—and also seems to deny by its
giant scale the fact that this is a two-storey structure—within the dark
of the portico, made darker and more Romantic by a richly coloured mural
designed by Schinkel and executed under the direction of Peter
Cornelius, one soon becomes aware of a recessed oblong where a double
flight of stairs leads to the upper storey. Moreover, lest this façade
be read, like a stoa, as no more than a portico, there rises over the
centre, still farther to the rear, a rectangular attic.
[Illustration:
Figure 6. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Berlin, Altes Museum, 1824-8
section
]
It is characteristic of the purism of Schinkel’s approach, a purism not
archaeological but visual, that this attic masks externally a
Durandesque central domed space (Figure 6). Such circular central
spaces, so recurrent in Romantic Classical planning, had been a
favourite setting for classical sculpture, the principal treasure of
most art collections of this period, ever since the Museo Pio-Clementino
was built at the Vatican. None is finer than this in the proportional
relationship of interior colonnade, plain wall above, and coffered dome
with oculus. Most, indeed, are but feeble copies of the Roman Pantheon;
this exceeds in distinction, if not in scale, its ancient original.
But the Museum, unlike the Munich Glyptothek, had to have picture
galleries as well as sculpture halls; and Schinkel’s organization of
these, so much less palatial than Klenze’s in his Pinakothek, is a
technical triumph of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism.
Screens at right angles to the windows, and thus free from glare,
provided the greater part of the hanging space, a premonition almost of
the movable screens of mid-twentieth-century art galleries (Figure 6).
The external treatment of the rear walls of the Museum, moreover,
achieved a clarity of mathematical organization and a subtlety of
structural expression in the detailing which was also hardly equalled
before the mid twentieth century. Tall windows in two even ranges
express clearly the two storeys of galleries behind; the stuccoed walls
between delicately suggest by their flat rustication—so like that Soane
used on the Bank of England—the scale of fine ashlar masonry. But the
giant order of the front is also clearly echoed in the flat corner antae
just short of which the string-course between the storeys and the
rustication of the walls are stopped. A prototype of such detailing can
be seen in the Athenian Propylaea, no doubt familiar to Schinkel through
publications; a derivation—or at least a superb twentieth-century
parallel—is the way Mies van der Rohe handles the juxtaposition of steel
stanchions and brick infilling in his buildings erected for the Illinois
Institute of Technology in Chicago in the last fifteen years (see
Chapter 20).
The rapid deterioration of rationalist Grecian standards, which followed
within a few decades even in the hands of Schinkel’s ablest pupils, is
to be noted in the Neues Museum, built in 1843-55 by F. A. Stüler
(1800-65) behind the Altes Museum. It is even more evident in the
contiguous Nationalgalerie, also by Stüler but based on a sketch by
Frederick William IV. This temple stands on a very high substructure in
an awkward perversion of the theme of Gilly’s monument to Frederick the
Great and Klenze’s Walhalla. It was finished only in 1876 by which time,
even in Germany, Romantic Classicism was completely dead (see Chapter
9).
Behind his museum Schinkel himself had built in 1828-32, along the banks
of the Kupfergraben, the Packhofgebäude. This range of utilitarian
structures was definitely consonant, towards the Museum, with the
Grecian rationalism of its rear façade. But for the warehouses at the
remote end of the group Schinkel used a rather direct transcription of
Durand’s paradigm for an arcuated market.[48] Here, at almost precisely
the same time as at Gärtner’s State Library in Munich and Hübsch’s
Ministry of Finance in Karlsruhe, the _Rundbogenstil_ makes an early
appearance as an alternative to the trabeated Grecian. In comparably
utilitarian works of a few years earlier, the Military Prison in Berlin
begun in 1825 and the lighthouse at Arkona of the same date, Schinkel
had already used dark brickwork unstuccoed, but with square rather than
arched openings; while on his long-demolished Hamburg Opera House, begun
also in 1825 and completed in 1827, there were arched openings
throughout of a somewhat High Renaissance order but far more severely
treated than by Klenze on his Munich Pinakothek.
To the year 1825 belongs too the beginning of the Werder Church in
Berlin, Gothic in its vaults, as also in its detail, and executed in
brick and terracotta. Less just in its scaling than his earlier Gothic
monument of cast iron, this church as executed makes one regret that
Schinkel’s domed project of 1822, derived either from Vignon’s interior
of the Madeleine in Paris or from one of Durand’s paradigms, was not
executed.
In 1826 began Schinkel’s extensive and varied work for the Royal family
at Potsdam,[49] the town destined to be the richest centre of later
Prussian Romantic Classicism. Here he worked in close association with
the heir to the throne who was later, after 1840, king as Frederick
William IV. This romantic and talented prince—who actually wished he
were an architect rather than a ruler—frequently provided Schinkel and,
after his death, Schinkel’s pupils with sketches from which as we have
seen in the case of the Nationalgalerie) various executed buildings were
elaborated with more or less success. One of the great amateurs, his was
a very late example of direct Royal intervention in architecture. Some
of the modulation of Schinkel’s style towards the Picturesque—still more
evident in the work at Potsdam of his ablest pupil Ludwig Persius
(1803-45)—may be credited to this princely patron.
In Berlin, in the later twenties, Schinkel was also remodelling and
redecorating palaces for Frederick William’s brothers, major works in
scale but rather limited in architectural interest.[50] More
characteristic of Schinkel’s best Grecian manner is the somewhat later
palace for Prince William built in 1834-5 by the younger Langhans (K.
F., 1781-1869). This architect’s still later theatre at Breslau, begun
in 1843, is worth mention at this point and also the old Russian Embassy
of 1840-1 in Berlin by Eduard Knoblauch (1801-65), but Schinkel’s
comparable work is fifteen years earlier.
At Potsdam, even though much of what he did there also consisted of
enlarging earlier buildings, Schinkel was freer than in Berlin.
Collaboration with the gardener P. J. Lenné (1789-1866), who provided
superb naturalistic settings in the tradition of the English garden, may
have encouraged a looser and less Classical sort of composition. In many
views, Charlottenhof with its dominating Greek Doric portico, remodelled
from 1826 on as the residence of the Crown Prince, may appear a
sufficiently conventional Greek Revival country house. But if one
considers the planning of the house and its close relation to the raised
terrace, and also the relation to the solid block of the open
pergola—’an object of nature’ in Durand’s special sense—one sees that
here, as earlier at the Zivilcasino, but from no necessity enforced by
the site, Schinkel sought to apply the most stringent sort of
geometrical order to an asymmetrical composition. For this, of course,
the Erechtheum and to some extent the Propylaea on the Akropolis, those
two fifth-century Greek examples of Romantic Classicism, provided
precedents. At Schloss Glienecke near by, also begun in 1826 for another
Prussian prince, Karl, whose palace in Berlin he was remodelling too,
the Athenian derivation is very patent in the later belvedere of 1837
based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. But it is the asymmetrical
massing of carefully organized elements here that reveals the extent to
which Schinkel was able to absorb and actually to synthesize with the
discipline of Romantic Classicism one of the major formal innovations of
the Picturesque. The bold off-centre location of the tower actually
makes of this a sort of Italian Villa in the Cronkhill sense.
In the enlargement of the medieval Kolberg Town Hall in Pomerania, begun
in 1829, Schinkel employed secular Late Gothic in a version as stiff and
mechanical as that of Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace a decade later. A
remarkable centrally-planned Hunting Lodge, built for Prince Radziwill
at Ostrowo in 1827, on the other hand, illustrated a bold attempt to
apply the principles of Durandesque structural rationalism to building
in timber; the result is very different indeed from the contemporary
American, Russian, and Swedish houses of wood that were designed as
copies of marble temples.
In 1828 a series of designs for churches in the new suburbs of Berlin,
several of them executed in reduced form in the early thirties, showed a
drastic shift away from Classical models—still sometimes offered as
alternatives and actually executed in two cases—towards the creation of
a very personal sort of _Rundbogenstil_. All intended to be of brick
with terracotta trim, these were less successful than the house he built
of the same materials for the brick and terracotta manufacturer Feilner
in Berlin in 1829. In its perfect regularity and rigid trabeation this
recalled the rear of the Museum (Figure 7). But the employment of
delicate arabesque reliefs in the jambs of the openings, quite in the
_quattrocento_ way, illustrated rather more agreeably than the church
projects the characteristic modulation in these years away from Grecian
and towards Italianate models.
[Illustration:
Figure 7. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Berlin, Feilner House, 1829,
elevation
]
The happiest and most informal example of this modulation is to be seen
in the Court Gardener’s House on the Charlottenhof estate of 1829-31
(Plate 14A). The closely associated Tea House and Roman Bath of 1833-4
loosely enclose the square rear garden at the junction of two canals. As
the plan of the house itself clearly reveals, this was not a new
construction but a remodelling, or encasing, of an earlier gardener’s
house; but more important to the total effect than the original solid
block is the skilful disposition of the clearly defined voids in the
three-dimensional composition, voids which include pergolas of varying
height, loggias, and even an open attic below the main roof.
On the one hand, the inspiration for this must have come from Durand’s
illustrations of the ‘employment of the objects of nature’ or perhaps
from other French works[51] more specifically dealing with Italian
buildings in the countryside. On the other hand, rather more than most
English Italian Villas in the line of Nash’s Cronkhill, this seems to be
based on some real knowledge of Italian rural, not to say rustic,
building. But visually, as at Cronkhill and at Glienecke, the pivot of
the whole composition is the tower around which the various elements,
solid and hollow, are as carefully organized as in a piece of
twentieth-century Neoplasticist sculpture. This Gardener’s House is as
much the international masterwork of the asymmetrically-towered Italian
Villa mode, one of the more modest yet extremely significant innovations
of the first half of the nineteenth century, as is the Altes Museum of
formal Grecian Classicism.
At Potsdam and near by Schinkel’s pupil Persius, before his untimely
death only four years after Schinkel’s, produced many other compositions
of this order, often by remodelling eighteenth-century buildings.[52]
Two of the finest are the Pheasantry, which is specifically a towered
Italian Villa, and the group that includes the Friedenskirche, carried
out by others from Persius’s designs in 1845-8 (Plate 15). In this
latter group the principal feature is a close copy of an Early Christian
basilica, even to the inclusion of a real medieval apse mosaic brought
from Murano; yet compositionally the group is a masterpiece of the
classically ordered Picturesque, rivalling Schinkel’s Gardener’s House
in subtlety and elegance. Even more personal to Persius is the delicacy
of detailing and the unusual external arcade of his earlier
Heilandskirche of 1841-3, with its graceful detached campanile, by the
lakeside at nearby Sakrow.
Also notable are his steam-engine houses, particularly that for Schloss
Babelsberg. The inclusion of medieval and even Islamic detail indicates
the increasing eclecticism of taste around 1840; yet the disparate
elements are so scaled and ordered as to compose into an asymmetrical
pattern of Italian Villa character in which the minaret-like chimney
provides the dominant vertical accent. Less Picturesque is the
Orangerieschloss, based on a sketch by Frederick William IV and executed
after Persius’s death by A. Hesse.
Schinkel’s big Potsdam church, the Nikolaikirche, designed in 1829 and
built up to the base of the dome in the years 1830-7, stood right in the
town, not in the park like his work for the princes, and is a wholly
formal monument. It was planned as a hemisphere above a cube in the most
geometrical mode of Romantic Classicism. As in the case of Soufflot’s
dome of the Panthéon, this was undoubtedly influenced by Wren’s St
Paul’s in London which Schinkel had seen on an English voyage in 1826.
Unfortunately Persius had later to add corner towers, almost like the
minaret chimney of his Babelsberg engine house, in order to load the
pendentives when he completed the church in 1842-50. These irrelevant
features quite denature Schinkel’s formal intention. The interior,
however, is superior to those in most of the centrally planned churches
of this period in various countries that were based on the Roman
Pantheon.
Schinkel did not have such opportunities of building whole squares and
streets as did his Baden and his Bavarian contemporaries. For all his
efforts, the Berlin Lustgarten was probably never very satisfactory
urbanistically because of the inadequate focus that was provided by his
modest cathedral beside the massive Baroque Schloss and the awkward
shift in the axis where the Schlossbrücke enters from Unter den Linden.
At the other end of Unter den Linden the Pariser Platz inside K. G.
Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate shows little evidence of Schinkel’s intended
regularization of the surrounding buildings. All that he was actually
able to carry out there was the Palais Redern of 1832-3 (in fact a
remodelling), and this was demolished in 1906 to make way for the Adlon
Hotel.
The façades of the Palais Redern gave a _quattrocento_ Florentine
impression because of their relatively bold over-all rustication; only
the large openings were arcuated, however, the ordinary windows being
lintel-topped. Significant of Schinkel’s new interest in asymmetrical
order was the disposition of the four arched openings; these were
balanced in relation to the corner of Unter den Linden but unbalanced in
relation to either façade alone; the other windows were quite regularly
spaced.
If Schinkel seems to have adopted here a version of the Renaissance
Revival—as, for that matter, he had already done much earlier in his
somewhat similar remodelling of the Berlin City Hall in 1817—at the Neue
Tor, also of 1832, he provided two gatehouses which were in a sort of
_Rundbogenstil_ Tudor comparable to Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace of
fifteen years later. His trip to England[53] had fascinated him with
English architecture, old and new; there he had noted everything with
intelligent interest—from medieval castles to the towering new cotton
mills near Manchester with their internal skeletons of iron. He had no
occasion, however, to make large-scale use of iron construction, though
there is little doubt that had he lived on through the forties he would
have done so with both technical and aesthetic mastery.
At Schloss Babelsberg,[54] built for the rather tasteless brother of his
own particular patron, later the Emperor William I, he essayed an
English sort of castle, admittedly more in the contemporary Picturesque
mode of the new Castellated Mansions of Nash and Wyatt than like any
real medieval one. This was designed in 1834 and begun in 1835. Persius
took it over on Schinkel’s death, redesigning one of the principal
towers, and it was finally finished after Persius’s death by Heinrich
Strack (1805-80) in 1849. Though certainly not inferior to Smirke’s
Eastnor or Cundy’s Hawarden, if without the lovely site and the richly
organic composition of Busby’s Gwrych, Babelsberg is better appreciated
in Schinkel’s or Persius’s drawings than in actuality. Schloss Kamenz, a
rather Tudoresque remodelling of an earlier structure which Schinkel
undertook in 1838, is more typical but no more successful.
Although playing but a very minor part in Schinkel’s own production, his
exercises in the Chalet mode should at least be mentioned. Not only do
these illustrate the very wide range of his own eclectic inspiration,
considerably wider than that of Durand and the French of the previous
generation, they also represent one of the peripheral aspects of his
achievement which his pupils, and German architects of the mid century
generally, delighted to exploit. The happiest work of his followers,
however, continued rather the Italian Villa line of Glienecke and the
Court Gardener’s House, a line in which Persius at least all but
equalled his master.
The Grecian work of Schinkel’s imitators and emulators tended to be
overdecorated and lacking in geometrical order while their
_Rundbogenstil_ is in general awkwardly proportioned and incoherently
ornamented (see Chapter 9). Outside Prussia, such Hamburg architects as
Wimmel & Forsmann and de Chateauneuf illustrate better than other North
Germans the real possibilities of the _Rundbogenstil_. De Chateauneuf
had something of an international reputation, moreover, after winning
the second prize in the competition held in 1839-40 for the Royal
Exchange in London. His design for that was based on the Loggia dei
Lanzi, and may well have provided the suggestion for Gärtner’s
Feldherrenhalle in Munich begun the next year.
It is impossible and unnecessary to follow Romantic Classicism to all
the other German centres. At Darmstadt the Classical Ludwigskirche of
1822-7 by Georg Moller (1784-1852),[55] a pupil of Weinbrenner, is a
handsome circular edifice with an internal colonnade below the dome.
Thus it is rather like the ‘central space’ in Schinkel’s Museum, but
more broadly proportioned. A boldly arched entrance of almost Ledolcian
character is set against the external circumference of blank wall rather
than the more usual temple portico. The Artillery Barracks at Darmstadt
of 1825-7 by Moller’s pupil Franz Heger (1792-1836) provided a notably
early example of the _Rundbogenstil_. Comparable was August Busse’s
Castellated Zellengefängnis in Berlin of 1842-9, the first German
example of a penitentiary radially planned and with individual cells
(see Chapter 5). Stüler’s destroyed Trinitatiskirche in Cologne, a
Persius-like Early Christian basilica completed in 1860, was much finer
than his Berlin churches (see Chapter 9).
Also _Rundbogenstil_, but of a more medievalizing order, was Semper’s
Synagogue of 1838-41 in Dresden. Its centralized massing is
uncharacteristically plastic. His Palais Oppenheim there of 1845-8 at
9-11 An der Bürgerwiese, based on Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace, was a
handsome and very ‘correct’ example of the international Renaissance
Revival to be compared, like de Meuron’s house in Hamburg, with Barry’s
London clubhouses. The Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden was Gothic,
however, providing further evidence of Semper’s rather directionless
eclecticism at this time.
[Illustration:
Figure 8. Gottfried Semper: Dresden, Opera House (first), 1837-41,
plan
]
His principal works of this period were the first Opera House[56] in
Dresden of 1837-41, where Wagner’s early triumphs took place, burnt and
rebuilt by Semper later, and the nearby Art Gallery of 1847-54 which
completed so unhappily the circuit of the marvellous Rococo Zwinger by
Daniel Pöppelmann. The one was a rather festive, the other a rather
solemn example of the Renaissance Revival; both are more notable for
their planning and their general organization than for any visual
distinction (Figure 8). The Opera House in Hanover, built by G. L. F.
Laves (1789-1864) in 1845-52, is less original in plan but more sober,
even a bit Schinkelesque, in design (Plate 14B). Its interior has been
completely done over since it was bombed in the Second World War.
The historian tends always to press forward, forcing rather than
retarding the pace of development in his written account. Klenze’s
Propylaeon, however, has already provided evidence of the late
continuance of Grecian ideals in the German States; in Stuttgart the
Königsbau of 1857-60 by C. F. Leins (1814-92), a pupil in Paris of Henri
Labrouste, provides a worthier example, although this was actually begun
twenty years earlier by J. M. Knapp (1793-1861). In Vienna, as late as
1873, the Parliament House of Theophil von Hansen (1813-91) provides a
gargantuan example of what the French had first aspired to build almost
a century earlier. Ambiguous in its massing, if still very elegant in
its Grecian detail, this contrasts markedly with Hansen’s other Viennese
work of the third quarter of the century which is generally of High
Renaissance design (see Chapter 8).
This Copenhagen-born and trained architect knew Greece at first hand,
for he and his brother H. C. Hansen (1803-83) worked in Athens for some
years for the Wittelsbachs and the Danish dynasty that succeeded them.
Along University Street in Athens a conspicuous range of porticoed
structures is theirs. The University, built in 1837-42, is by the elder
brother; the Academy, built in 1859-87, was designed by Theophil and
executed by his pupil Ernst Ziller; the National Library was also
designed by Theophil in 1860 and completed in 1892. Conventional essays
in the international Greek Revival mode, here made somewhat ironical by
their proximity to the great fifth-century ruins, these lack the
elegance and refinement of Theophil’s Palais Dimitriou of 1842-3 (lately
destroyed by the enlargement of the Grande Bretagne Hotel towards
Syndagma Square) as also the more than Schinkelesque restraint of the
earliest Romantic Classical building in Greece. This is Gärtner’s gaunt
but distinguished Old Palace,[57] designed in 1835-6 for Otho of
Wittelsbach immediately after his assumption of the Greek throne and
built in 1837-41 (Plate 17A).
The Old Palace and its neighbour the Grande Bretagne still dominate the
centre of modern Athens. The palace, in its regularity, its austerity,
and its geometrical clarity of design, is a finer archetype of the most
rigid Romantic Classical ideals than anything Gärtner built in Munich;
indeed, perhaps those ideals were nowhere else ever followed so
drastically at monumental scale except in Denmark. One may even wonder
irreverently if the fifth century had many civil buildings that were so
pure and so calm!
Gärtner and the Hansens set the pace for a local Greek Revival
vernacular of a rather North European order. In its detail this
vernacular sometimes exceeds in delicacy that of the later centuries of
antiquity, as illustrated here in the Stoa of Attalos in the Agora—at
least as that has lately been reconstructed—or the Arch of Hadrian. Not
all of the new construction was Grecian, however: Klenze’s Roman
Catholic Cathedral (Aghios Dionysios) in University Street is a basilica
with Renaissance detail, built in 1854-63; the modest English Church of
1840-3 is rather feebly Gothic and reputedly based on a design provided
by C. R. Cockerell that was much modified in execution.
Of the leading Greek architects of the period, Lyssander Kaftanzoglou
(1812-85), Stamathios Kleanthis (1802-62), and Panajiotis Kalkos
(1800?-1870?), only Kleanthis was German-trained. This talented pupil of
Schinkel followed his master’s Italianate rather than his Grecian line,
and the house he built in 1840 for the Duchesse de Plaisance on Kiffisia
Avenue (now the Byzantine Museum) is a distinguished example of a
Durandesque Italian villa, with simple arcading front and rear and low
corner towers. Kaftanzoglou, trained at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris
and in Milan, was somewhat less able; but the large quadrangular Grecian
structure that he designed in the fifties and built in 1862-80 to house
the Polytechneion in Patissia Street more than rivals the academic
buildings by the Hansens in University Street in the careful ordering of
its parts and the correct elegance of its details. Of Kalkos’s work
little remains in good condition today.
The new capital of remote Greece possesses more, and on the whole more
impressive, Romantic Classical buildings than do Vienna and Budapest,
capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In them ambitious urbanistic
projects were initiated only later after the accession of Francis Joseph
in 1848. The Theseus Temple in the Volksgarten in Vienna of 1821-3 by
Peter von Nobile (1774-1854),[58] a Swiss who had made his reputation in
Trieste, is hardly more than a large Grecian garden ornament
conscientiously copying the fifth-century Hephaisteion in Athens line
for line. His nearby Burgtor, begun the following year, is much worthier
in its heavy, almost Sanmichelian, way. More characteristic, however, is
the work of Joseph Kornhäusel (1782-1860) and of Paul Sprenger
(1798-1854).
Kornhäusel’s Schottenhof, opening off the Schottengasse, is a housing
development built in 1826-32 in collaboration with Joseph Adelpodinger
(1778-1849). This is of extraordinary extent and arranged very regularly
around several large internal courts. The smooth stucco walls,
restricted ornamentation, and regular fenestration, brought out to the
wall surface by double windows, can be matched in many streets of the
city that were built up in these decades. Behind such a façade in the
Seitenstettengasse lies Kornhäusel’s elegant but rather modest Synagogue
of 1825-6. This has an elliptical dome and an internal colonnade that
carries a narrow gallery. Much richer is his rectangular main hall of
1823-4 in the Albertina; as has been noted, this palace had already been
enlarged in 1801-4 in Romantic Classical style by Montoyer. Kornhäusel’s
hall is finished in mirror and in pale yellow and pale mauve scagliola
with chalk-white Grecian details and sandstone statues of the Muses by
J. Klieber.
With Kornhäusel all is classical; Sprenger, on the other hand, employed
a rather tight version of the _Rundbogenstil_, more Renaissance than
medievalizing, for his considerably later Mint of 1835-7 in the Heumarkt
in Vienna. More original, and with charming arched window-frames of
terracotta in delicate floral bands, is his Landeshauptmannschaft of
1846-8 at 11 Herrengasse. This contrasts happily with the Diet of Lower
Austria, projected in 1832-3 and built in 1837-44 by Luigi Pichl
(1782-1856), next door at No. 13, a rather heavy and conventional
example of Romantic Classicism; so also does No. 17, a very simple block
originally built by Moreau for the Austro-Hungarian Bank in 1821-3. The
later bank building across the Herrengasse at No. 14, built by Heinrich
von Ferstel (1828-83) in 1856-60, well illustrates the modulation of the
_Rundbogenstil_ here, as in Germany, towards richer and more Gothicizing
forms after the mid century. The glass-roofed passage extending through
this to the Freyung is still very attractive, despite its shabby
condition, and worthy of comparison with other extant examples of
passages elsewhere in the Old and New Worlds (see Chapters 3, 5, and 8).
The great nineteenth-century Viennese building campaign of Francis
Joseph began in 1849 with the initiation of the Arsenal. There the outer
ranges (now mostly destroyed by bombing) were completed in 1855 from
designs by Edward Van der Nüll (1812-65), a pupil of Nobile and
Sprenger, and his partner August Siccard von Siccardsburg (1813-68). The
Army Museum of 1850-6 is by Ludwig Foerster (1797-1863) and Theophil von
Hansen (who had married Forster’s daughter after moving from Athens to
Vienna), and the chapel of 1853-5 is by Karl Rosner (1804-59). These are
all in slightly varying _Rundbogenstil_ modes, and they show, like
Ferstel’s bank, the changed taste of the mid century, most notably in
their rather violent brick polychromy (see Chapter 8).
In Budapest the National Museum of 1837-44 by Michael Pollák (1773-1855)
is a vast rectangle fronted in the conventional way by an octostyle
Corinthian portico and with a somewhat Schinkel-like severity of
treatment on the side wings. This is another major example of the
museums which were such characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism
everywhere. Among many other large and typical public monuments designed
by Pollák, the Kommitat Building may be mentioned as of comparable size
and dignity to his museum.
If first Greece and then Austria employed Danish Hansens in the forties
and fifties, the earlier Romantic Classical tradition of C. F. Hansen,
who in any case lived on until 1845, was still better maintained at home
by his pupil M. G. B. Bindesbøll (1800-56). Where C. F. Hansen’s
inspiration was Roman and Parisian, Bindesbøll’s seems rather to have
been German, as was common in his generation. Certainly his masterpiece,
again a museum and indeed a museum of sculpture, out-Schinkels Schinkel.
The Thorvaldsens Museum[59] in Copenhagen was built in 1839-48 to house
the sculpture and the collections of the thoroughly Romanized Bertil
Thorwaldsen, which he had determined in 1837 to present to his native
country. The mode, of course, is Greek but completely astylar like the
rear of Schinkel’s Berlin Museum; the general impression, particularly
of the court with Thorvaldsen’s tomb in its centre, is surprisingly
Egyptian (Plate 16B). The mathematical severity of the architectural
design is warmed by the murals on the walls, once largely washed away
but now all renewed; they romanticize thoroughly its rigid geometrical
forms. Even the purely architectural elements, moreover, were once
polychromed, if the present restoration of the colour is correct.
The murals on the exterior of the museum were designed in 1847-8 and
executed in 1850 by Jørgen Sonne in a sort of coloured plaster intarsia
with heavy black outlines. Developing a happy idea of Bindesbøll’s,
these tell rather realistically the story of the transport of the
sculpture from Rome to Copenhagen. The foliate work on the court walls
was carried out by H. C. From in 1844—laurel-trees, oaks, and palms. In
the interiors, where Thorwaldsen disposed his own sculptures somewhat
less formally than he had the Aegina sculptures in the Munich
Glyptothek, the intricate and brightly coloured decoration of the barrel
vaults is in that Pompeian mode which had been a part of the Romantic
Classical tradition ever since the time of Clérisseau and Adam. This
provides a happy contrast to so much Neo-Classic white marble statuary
set against plain walls painted in strong flat colours. The finest of
these ceilings have no modern rivals, even in Adam’s eighteenth-century
work, for the precise geometrical organization of the panels and the
delicate refinement of the very low plaster reliefs. Bolder and wholly
abstract are the floors of tile mosaic arranged in a bewildering variety
of patterns, some imitated from Roman models but more of them so
original in design that they suggest ‘hardedge’ paintings of the 1960s.
In his few other executed works and projects Bindesbøll showed himself
considerably less Classical and Schinkelesque than in this museum;
perhaps the museum reflects Thorvaldsen’s taste as much or more than his
own. Tending, like other Danes of his generation, towards the
_Rundbogenstil_ in his urban buildings, for his country houses he
arrived at a very direct and logical rural mode in which rustic
materials and asymmetrical compositions were controlled by a Romantic
Classical sense of order and decorum. If, on the one hand, his interest
in bold structural polychromy in the fifties parallels that of the
English Butterfield, his domestic mode forecasts that of the English
Webb (see Chapters 10 and 12). Bindesbøll’s production was small indeed,
but at least the very simple _Rundbogenstil_ Agricultural School of
1856-8 at 13 Bulowsvej in Copenhagen, executed after his death, deserves
specific mention here.
J. D. Herholdt (1818-1902), living almost half a century longer than
Bindesbøll, was naturally more productive. He was also a master of the
_Rundbogenstil_ hardly rivalled in his generation even by the ablest
Germans. Late as is his National Bank at 17 Holmens Kanal in
Copenhagen—1866-70—this is one of the finest examples anywhere of the
more Tuscan sort of _Rundbogenstil_. His University Library of 1857-61
in the Frue Plads is less suave in design but much more original in its
brick detailing. As late as the eighties he maintained the Romantic
Classical discipline in his Italian Gothic Raadhus at Odense of 1880-3
as well as carrying out many tactful restorations of Romanesque
churches. Of his fine Copenhagen Station of 1863-4 the wooden shed now
serves on another site as a sports hall.
G. F. Hetsch (1830-1903) also continued the Romantic Classical line,
most happily perhaps in his Sankt Ansgarskirke of 1841-2, the Roman
Catholic church in the Bredgade in Copenhagen. Ferdinand Meldahl
(1827-1908), although capable of very disciplined Early Renaissance
design in his office building at 23 Havnegade in Copenhagen of 1864, led
Danish architecture away from Romantic Classicism and the
_Rundbogenstil_ towards a rather Second Empire sort of eclecticism after
he became professor at the Copenhagen Academy in 1864 and its director
in 1873 (see Chapter 8).
With its great individual monuments by C. F. Hansen and Bindesbøll and
its streets of fine houses in the Romantic Classical vernacular,
Copenhagen provides today a more attractive picture of the production of
this period than almost any other city. Norway, at this time less
prosperous than Denmark, has work by Schinkel himself. At least the
designs for the buildings of the University at Christiania, erected in
1841-51 by C. H. Grosch (1801-65), a pupil of C. F. Hansen and of
Hetsch, were revised by Schinkel just before his death, and the handling
of the walls is certainly quite characteristic of his work in the
clarity and logic of their articulation.
In Sweden, where the dominant influences in the early nineteenth century
were first French and then German as in Denmark, there was no comparably
brilliant development of Romantic Classicism. Rosendal, a country house
built in 1823-5 by Fredrik Blom (1781-1851), is a pleasant and very
discreet edifice that might well be by almost any French architect of
Blom’s generation. His Skeppsholm Church in Stockholm of 1824-42,
circular within and octagonal without, is a typical but not especially
distinguished work of its period. More characteristic are the modest
wooden houses with Grecian detail. These are similar to, but in their
naive ‘correctness’ less extreme than, the temple houses of Russia and
the United States. Their board-and-batten walls might, paradoxically,
have inspired one aspect of Downing’s anti-Grecian campaign in America
in the forties (see Chapter 15).
In 1850 Stüler was called to Stockholm from Berlin to design the
National Museum. Eventually completed in 1865, this is in a richer
Venetian Renaissance mode than he usually employed at home. Such more
definitely Romantic modes were generally exploited by native architects
only much later. For example, the Sodra Theatre of 1858-9 in Stockholm
by J. F. Åbom (1817-1900) is still quite a restrained example of the
revived High Renaissance; while so excellent a specimen of the more
Tuscan sort of _Rundbogenstil_ as the Skandias Building in Stockholm by
P. M. R. Isaeus (1841-90) and C. Sundahl dates from 1886-9, but must be
compared with German work of at least a generation earlier.
Holland has even less of distinction to offer in this period than
Sweden.[60] Yet the Lutheran Round Church on the Singel in Amsterdam, as
it was rebuilt after a fire in 1826 by Jan de Greef (1784-1834) and T.
F. Suys (1783-1861), a pupil of Percier, lends a distinctly Venetian air
to the local scene with its great dome, despite the admirably Dutch
quality of its fine brickwork. The original church was built in 1668-77
by Adriaen Dortsmann, and doubtless the peculiar plan, with main
entrance under the pulpit and double galleries at the rear outside the
main rotunda, derives from the older building.
The monumentally Classical Haarlemer Poort of 1840 in Amsterdam by J. D.
Zocher (1790-1870) may also be mentioned, as it is nearly unique in
Holland. This has the stuccoed walls that, in Holland as elsewhere,
generally replaced exposed brickwork under the influence of
international Romantic Classicism. The Academy of Fine Arts in The
Hague, built by Z. Reijers in 1839 and demolished in 1933, dominated by
an Ionic portico of stone, might well have risen in any French
provincial city of the day. Very similar, except that the portico is
Corinthian, is the Palace of Justice in Leeuwarden built in 1846-52 by
T. A. Romein (1811-81). Handsome also, but like the Hague Academy less
autochthonous in character than the Round Church, is the long stone
façade beside the Rokin of the Nederlandsche Bank in the Turfmarkt
(1860) by Willem Anthony Froger. On the whole, Holland is the exception
that proves the rule. Almost alone in Northern Europe Dutch architects
failed, in general, to accept Romantic Classicism as it was adumbrated
most notably in the treatise of Durand; while local conditions, in any
case, reduced monumental architectural production to a minimum in the
decades between Waterloo and the mid century.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 3
FRANCE AND THE REST OF THE CONTINENT
BEFORE considering English architecture in the years between Waterloo
and the Great Exhibition, it will be well to turn to that of France. The
drama of the supersession of a supposedly purely Classical school in
painting by a purely Romantic one, the contrast between such giants as
Ingres on the one hand and Delacroix on the other, cannot be matched in
the tame course of French architecture in this period; only very rarely
was the accomplishment of these great painters or of half a dozen
others, ranging from Géricault and Bonington to Corot and Daumier,
equalled in quality by a Henri Labrouste or a Duban. Although the art of
Ingres is in many ways parallel to Romantic Classicism in architecture,
no French architect of this generation really approaches him at all
closely in stature, although he numbered several among his close
friends. Still less is there among architects any rebellious Romantic of
the distinction of Delacroix or any ‘independent’ comparable to Corot.
The Empire left a vast heritage of unfinished monuments. It is properly
to the credit of the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe that these were
brought to completion a generation after their initiation; but all the
credit for them has in fact generally accrued to Napoleon himself. The
intervening Restoration of the returned Bourbons, tired, reactionary and
bigoted, gave its support largely to the construction of religious
buildings. Appropriately, the first important new commission under Louis
XVIII was for the Chapelle Expiatoire in memory of his brother Louis XVI
and Marie Antoinette. This chapel with its raised tomb-flanked
forecourt, lying between the Rue Pasquier and the Rue d’Anjou off the
Boulevard Haussmann, was begun in 1816 and completed in 1824 (Plate
18A). Somewhat less appropriately, it was Napoleon’s favourite architect
Fontaine—his partner Percier had by this time retired—who received the
commission. But the character of the project and of the regime led him
to modulate his earlier imperial style from the festive and the
triumphal towards the solemn and the funereal. Not an unworthy example
of Romantic Classicism, this nevertheless lacks the crispness and
clarity of the best contemporary German work. Nor does it much recall—as
it well might have done—either the delicacy of the _style Louis XVI_ or
the ‘Sublime’ grandeur of the many projects for monumental cenotaphs
designed by the previous generation of architects and by those of
Fontaine’s own generation in their youth.
To restore the strength of the church, as the piety of the later
Bourbons demanded, priests had to be trained in quantity. The next
significant work undertaken in Paris after the Chapelle Expiatoire was
the Séminaire Saint-Sulpice in the Place St Sulpice by É.-H. Godde
(1781-1869); this was begun in 1820 and completed in 1838. So flat and
cold are its façades that the observer may readily fail to note that the
design somewhat approaches, perhaps unconsciously, the _quattrocento_
Florentine. However, it quite lacks the archaeological character of
Klenze’s Königsbau in Munich, designed only a few years later, or the
vigour and assurance of Wimmel & Forsmann’s Johanneum in Hamburg. In
fact, of course, it derives almost directly from Durand and not from any
careful study of Grandjean de Montigny’s _Architecture toscane_.
Somewhat more definitely Early Renaissance in detail are the Baths at
Mont d’Or, built by L.-C.-F. Ledru (1771-1861), a pupil of Durand, in
1822, and the Barracks in the Rue Mouffetard in Paris as extended in
1827 by Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75). Both exploit a rusticated
Tuscan mode somewhat as Klenze was doing in Munich, but much less
archaeologically.
Shortly after the Séminaire, Godde undertook several Paris churches.
Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou in the Rue St Dominique of 1822-3 replaced
a church destroyed in the Revolution. Finer and considerably larger is
Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrament in the Rue de Turenne, built in 1823-35.
Both are barrel-vaulted basilicas in the tradition of Chalgrin’s
Saint-Philippe-du-Roule; the latter is rather elegant in its dry
severity, the former confused by various later additions behind the
altar. Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle of 1823-30 is smaller and more
modest, as are also two nearly contemporary Paris churches by A.-I.
Molinos (1795-1850), Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Neuilly of 1827-31 and
Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles in the Place du Dr Félix Lobligeois in
Paris of 1828-9. All these churches lack externally the Grecian grandeur
of scale of the London churches of the period built by the Inwoods and
others (see Chapter 4), but the basilican plan provides interiors that
are considerably more interesting than the galleried halls with which
most English architects were satisfied at this time. Of course, such a
highly original interior as that of Soane’s St Peter’s, Walworth, of
1822 is in a different class altogether.
A much larger and more prominent church than any of Godde’s or Molinos’s
is Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in the Rue de Chateaudun, one of the few really
distinguished products of this dull period. It was the result of a
competition held in 1822 which was won by Lebas, Brongniart’s
collaborator on the Bourse (Plate 18B). This five-aisled edifice was
built at very great expense in 1823-36 and sumptuously decorated with
murals that added as much as a sixth to the total cost. The basic model
is again the Early Christian basilica but here interpreted in thoroughly
Classical terms, with a tall temple portico rivalling those of London at
the front and no vaults or arches except at the east end. Evidence of a
certain eclecticism is the rich coffering of the ceiling in panels
alternately square and cruciform; so also is the introduction of a domed
chancel before the apse. Both features are certainly of _cinquecento_
inspiration.
To modern eyes, attuned to the late fifth-and sixth-century basilicas
of Ravenna, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette certainly has a far less Early
Christian air than Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika in Munich of the
next decade; but doubtless the great Imperial basilicas of Rome of the
fourth and early fifth centuries, notably Santa Maria Maggiore with
its trabeated nave colonnade, were originally something like it. In
any case, Lebas’s church is a highly typical monument of Romantic
Classicism and a major one. In France, as elsewhere, the accepted
range of precedent now extended well beyond Greek and Roman antiquity
to include Italian models of fifth- and of sixteenth-century date, if
very little from the centuries between. Even before the construction
of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the Belgian-born P.-J. Sandrié and Jacob
Silveyra (1785-?) in building a big Parisian synagogue in the Rue
Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth in 1819-20 had also followed rather closely the
basilican formula.
The most important Parisian church of the second quarter of the century,
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul off the Rue Lafayette, is also a five-aisled
classical basilica (Plate 19). This was begun in 1824 by Lepère, but
work was soon suspended. When it was carried to completion in 1831-44
Lepère’s son-in-law J.-I. Hittorff (1792-1867) took over, and he has
generally received credit for the whole job. In utilizing a rising site,
which required terraces and flights of steps in front, and in providing
two towers, Lepère and Hittorff gave their church more prominence and a
richer, if rather clumsily organized, three-dimensional interest.[61]
Hittorff’s archaeological studies in Sicily had made him an enthusiast
for architectural polychromy, and to contemporaries the great novelty
about Saint-Vincent-de-Paul was the proposal to use enamelled lava
plaques on the exterior.[62]
The French did not, like the Germans, turn to the use of tawny brick and
terracotta in the second quarter of the century; but the interest of
Hittorff and his generation in applied polychromy relates their work a
little to that of the Romantic colourists in painting.[63] Unfortunately
almost none of this polychromy remains visible now; and so the shift
away from the monochromy that is characteristic everywhere of Romantic
Classicism down to this period is less evident in France than in other
countries.
Especially fine is the open timber roof of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul,
although in fact only a part of the actual construction is exposed;
while the fact that the colonnaded apse is wide enough to include the
inner aisles as well as the nave gives a quite unprecedented spatial
interest to the east end. Moreover, in this interior Hittorff achieved a
rich warmth of tone quite different from the coldness of Godde’s and
Molinos’s churches of the twenties. His Cirque des Champs Élysées of
1839-41 and Cirque d’Hiver of 1852 were even more brilliantly
polychromatic both inside and out. But the most conspicuous extant works
of Hittorff, the Gare du Nord of 1861-5, the Second Empire façades
surrounding the Place de l’Étoile, and the decoration of the Place de la
Concorde and the Champs Élysées with fountains and other features under
the July Monarchy, provide today little evidence[64] of this aspect of
his talent once so notable to contemporaries at home and abroad.
Especially happy is the siting of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on the upper
side of the new polygonal Place Charles X (now Place Lafayette), of
which the other sides were filled in the twenties with consonant houses
by A.-F.-R. Leclerc (1785-1853),[65] a pupil of both Durand and Percier,
and A.-J. Pellechet (1789-1871). Less characteristic of Romantic
Classical urbanism than the squares and streets of Karlsruhe and Munich,
this nevertheless well illustrates the dignity and the regularity of the
houses then rising in the new quarters of Paris. The very considerable
new quarter in Mulhouse, which was laid out and built up in 1826-8 by
J.-G. Stotz (1799-?), a pupil of Leclerc, and A.-J.-F. Fries (1800-59),
a pupil of Huyot, is more properly comparable with Karlsruhe.
Most of the new churches in the suburbs of Paris and the French
provinces followed basilican models. The parish church of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which was brought at last to completion in 1823-7
by A.-J. Malpièce (1789-1864) and his partner A.-J. Moutier (1791-1874),
a pupil of Percier, following the original designs of M.-M. Potain
(1713-96) of the 1760s, is much more modest and somewhat less Roman. In
Marseilles the younger M.-R. Penchaud (1772-1832), who designed in 1812
and built in 1827-32 the Palais de Justice at Aix on Ledoux’s earlier
foundations, erected in 1824 a large Roman basilica for the local
Protestants, doubtless with some conscious reference to Salomon de
Brosse’s seventeenth-century Protestant Temple at Charenton of two
hundred years earlier. By exception, however, the Protestant Temple at
Orléans by F.-N. Pagot (1780-1844), a pupil of Labarre, which was built
in 1836, is a plain cylinder in plan. Saint-Lazare in Marseilles, built
by P.-X. Coste (1787-1879) and Vincent Barral (1800-54) in 1833-7,
followed Notre-Dame-de-Lorette even more closely than does Penchaud’s
Protestant church.
In the more modest parish church of Vincennes outside Paris, which rose
in 1826-30, the very last years of the Restoration, J.-B.-C. Lesueur
(1794-1883) was already using a rather Brunelleschian sort of detail
that is not without a certain cool elegance. More definitely of the
Renaissance Revival is Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe, the parish church
of La Villette in the Rue de Crimée in Paris built by P.-E. Lequeux
(1806-73) much later, in 1841-4. It is one of half a dozen that Lequeux
began in the forties, in addition to designing the town halls of this
and several other quarters of Paris. Lequeux employed definitely
_quattrocento_ detail somewhat more lavishly than Lesueur had done at
Vincennes, and produced at La Villette one of the most satisfactory
French churches of the Louis Philippe epoch. In building a small Norman
church at Pollet near Dieppe in 1844-9, Louis Lenormand (1801-62), a
pupil of his uncle Huvé, used Early Renaissance detail of a more French
sort that may not improperly be called _François I._ Such detail was
highly exceptional in ecclesiastical architecture even as late as the
forties.
The housing of public services, initiated so actively by Napoleon,
continued at a much reduced pace under Louis XVIII and Charles X. The
Paris Custom House of 1827 by L.-A. Lusson (1790-1864), a pupil of
Percier, with its great arched entrance rising from the ground and its
similar transverse arches inside, was later transformed—three bays of
it, at least—into a Protestant church by one of Lebas’s pupils, the
German-born F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), for Louis Philippe’s German relatives
in 1843. A similar reflection of Durand’s utilitarian models may be seen
in the vast Government Warehouse at Lyons, begun in 1828 by L.-P.
Baltard (1764-1846), Lequeux’s master, who had worked when very young
with Ledoux on the Paris _barrières_. This contrasts notably in its
consistent arcuation with the belated giant Corinthian colonnade that
fronts Baltard’s Palace of Justice there, built in 1836-42, and
parallels fairly closely the contemporary warehouses Schinkel was
building in Berlin. More characteristic of the rather mixed official
mode of the period is the Custom House of 1835-42 at Rouen by C.-E.
Isabelle (1800-80), a pupil of Leclerc. This is of interest chiefly for
the tremendous rusticated arch of the entrance, which quite overpowers
the rest of the _palazzo_-like façade.
For educational institutions most new construction was subsidiary to
existing buildings. At the École Polytechnique, A.-M. Renié (_c._
1790-1855), a pupil of Percier and Vaudoyer, provided in 1828 a new
arcuated and rusticated entrance hardly worthy of the school where
Durand was now teaching a second generation of architects. P.-M.
Letarouilly (1795-1855) made in 1831-42 additions that are less
unworthy, but hardly more interesting, to Chalgrin’s Collège de France,
built originally in the 1770s. But his great contribution, of course,
was the _Édifices de Rome moderne_—the first volume of which appeared in
1840. Finally completed with the publication of the third volume in
1857, this was the bible of the later Renaissance Revival in France as
of several generations of academic architects throughout the rest of the
world. The École Normale Supérieure by the youngest Gisors (H.-A.-G. de,
1796-1866), a pupil of Percier, is a large, wholly new building of
1841-7; this looks forward to the Second Empire a little in its high
mansard roof and seventeenth-century detailing, extremely dry and sparse
though that is (see Chapter 8).
Private construction was for the most part very dull, whether in city,
suburb, or country. As an example of the country houses that were built
in some quantity, a typical project of 1830 for one by Hittorff may be
illustrated (Figure 9). With its careful if rather uninteresting
proportions, its rigid rectangularity, and the stiff chains of
rustication that provide its sole embellishment, however, this rises
somewhat above the general level of achievement of the period.
The _François I_ character of the detailing of Lenormand’s Pollet church
has been mentioned. In domestic architecture such national Renaissance
precedent had rather greater success even if nothing very novel or
original developed from it. In 1825 L.-M.-D. Biet (1785-1856), a pupil
of Percier, brought to Paris the court façade of an early
sixteenth-century house from Moret and applied it to a _hôtel
particulier_—always called with no justification the ‘Maison de François
I’—in a new residential area of Paris. This house shortly gave the name
‘François I’ to the entire quarter between the Champs Élysées and the
Seine. The barrenness and brittleness of Biet’s own elevations were more
of a tribute to his respect for the old work than to his creative
ability.
[Illustration:
Figure 9. J.-I. Hittorff: Project for country house for Comte de W.,
1830, elevation
]
Within the next few years houses built by such architects as L.-T.-J.
Visconti (1791-1853), another pupil of Percier, and Famin tended to grow
ever richer. In 1835 P.-C. Dusillion (1804-60), an architect otherwise
more active abroad than at home, used _François I_ detail with the
lushest profusion on a house at 14 Rue Vaneau. The façade rather
resembles an interior of the so-called _style troubadour_ turned inside
out. Much the same may be said for the block of flats built by Édouard
Renaud (1808-86), a pupil of Leroy, at 5 Place St Georges in 1841. But
this was rather an exception to the severity and regularity of Parisian
street architecture under the Restoration. This was generally
maintained, moreover, under the July Monarchy for blocks of flats, even
by men like Visconti and Lesueur whose private houses were often very
rich indeed.
Two country houses of 1840 make a more extensive and plausible use of
_François I_ features. One is the Château de St Martin, near St Paulzo
in the Nièvre, built by Édouard Lussy (1788-1868), a pupil of Percier;
this is elaborately picturesque in silhouette but still rigidly
symmetrical. Another by J.-B.-P. Canissié (1799-1877), a pupil of
Hittorff, at Draveil, S.-et-O., is somewhat irregular both in plan and
in composition. But the _style François I_ in the France of the second
quarter of the nineteenth century had neither the general acceptance nor
even the vitality—at that relatively low—of the revived ‘Jacobethan’ in
contemporary England.
Even where a major sixteenth-century monument had to be restored and
enlarged, as was the case with the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, the
architects Godde and Lesueur were at some pains to regularize and
chasten the unclassical vagaries of Boccador’s original design (Plate
22A). Most of the work by Lesueur was done after 1837; from 1853 Victor
Baltard (1805-74), son of L.-P. Baltard, carried on; then the whole had
to be rebuilt after it was burned under the Commune. The present rather
similar edifice by Théodore Ballu (1817-74), a pupil of Lebas, was begun
only in 1874, the year of his death, and eventually completed by his
partner P.-J.-E. Deperthes (1833-98). Except for the high French roofs,
looking forward like those by Gisors on the École Normale to the next
period, the general effect of Lesueur’s work here was very Italianate.
A somewhat similar character can be seen in a few wholly new structures
of more or less _François I_ inspiration, for example the Museum and
Library at Le Havre built by C.-L.-F. Brunet-Debaines (1801-62), a pupil
of Vaudoyer and Lebas, in 1845. In such a major commercial work of this
period as the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie in the Boulevard
Bonne-Nouvelle, built by J.-L.-V. Grisart (1797-1877), a pupil of Huyot,
and C.-M.-A. Froehlicher in 1838, it is hard to say whether the
continuous arcading derived from French or from Italian
sixteenth-century precedent. The iron-and-glass interiors were of more
interest (see Chapter 7).
There has seemed no need to emphasize thus far, as regards its effect on
architecture, the change of regime that took place in 1830, even though
that date in the other arts of France is sometimes thought to mark the
triumph of _romantisme de la lettre_ over earlier Neo-Classicism. No
such triumph took place in architecture, although it is evident that
sources of inspiration other than the Antique were rather more
frequently utilized after 1830 than before, if to nothing like the same
extent as in Germany. Yet thanks to Victor Hugo and Guizot, Gothicism
had by now acquired a less reactionary connotation than under the last
Bourbons and was receiving the support, up to a point, of the July
Monarchy (see Chapter 6).
For political reasons Louis Philippe desired especially to emphasize the
continuity of his liberal monarchy with the more liberal aspects of the
Empire and to reclaim for France the Napoleonic glories that the
Restoration had denigrated. So Napoleon’s ashes were brought back to the
Invalides, where Visconti, hitherto chiefly active in the domestic
field, prepared in 1842 a setting for them as funereal as the Chapelle
Expiatoire but more sumptuous in its use of coloured marbles. Napoleon’s
Temple de la Gloire (the Madeleine) and his Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile
were finally brought to completion, the one by Huvé in 1845, the other
by Blouet in 1837, as has already been noted. Several new monuments,
very much of the Empire type, were also erected in Paris.
Where Napoleon’s Elephant Monument was to have marked the site of the
Bastille, J.-A. Alavoine (1778-1834), and after his death L.-J. Duc
(1802-79), a pupil of Percier, erected in 1831-40 the gigantic Colonne
de Juillet, rather less Imperial Roman and more French Empire than
Napoleon’s Colonne Vendôme, but like that all of metal. In the centre of
the Place de la Concorde there rose, with echoes of Napoleon’s Egyptian
campaign (and less relevantly of Sixtine Rome), a real obelisk presented
to Louis Philippe by the Khedive in 1833; thereafter, Hittorff
ornamented in 1836-40 the square, the Champs Élysées, the Place de
l’Étoile, and the Avenue de la Grande Armée with big fountains, lamp
standards, and other pieces of elaborate urbanistic furniture.
While the Empire embellishment of Paris was thus finished up or
complemented, the July Monarchy also developed a fantastically extensive
activity in the construction of hospitals, prisons, and other such
utilitarian structures. Vast and plain, these could hardly be duller in
the eyes of posterity. Yet they derive quite directly from Durand’s
admirable paradigms for such structures and more remotely from the
social, if not the aesthetic, aspirations of such men of high talent as
Ledoux and Boullée, who initiated Romantic Classicism before the
Revolution. If a funerary edifice—the Chapelle Expiatoire—best
epitomizes the architecture of the Restoration, some enormous public
institution is the contemporary, if inappropriate, architectural
equivalent of the Romantic arts of Delacroix and Berlioz in the thirties
and forties! Very conspicuous, and quite characteristic of these as a
class, is the Hôtel Dieu, beside Notre-Dame in Paris, although this was
actually built[66] very much later, in 1864-78, by A.-N. Diet (1827-90).
It is the only one that can be readily seen without being jailed or
certified; but most of them were amply presented in contemporary
publications.
Penchaud, whose Marseilles Protestant church has already been mentioned,
was one of the ablest and most productive provincial architects of the
Restoration and Louis Philippe periods. His lazaret at Marseilles, built
in 1822-6, is more Ledoux-like than the Aix Palace of Justice that he
erected on Ledoux’s foundations and considerably more original than his
triumphal arch of 1823-32 at Marseilles, called the Porte d’Aix. On this
arch, however, the liveliness of the relief sculpture provides something
of the same Romantic _élan_ as that of Rude on the Arc de
l’Étoile—Rude’s work dates, of course, from the Louis Philippe period.
The Marseilles arch continues the Roman ideals of the Empire; the more
significant lazaret revives the social and utilitarian ideals of the
preceding Revolutionary period.
In Paris Lebas’s Petite Roquette Prison for young criminals, in the Rue
de la Roquette, designed in 1825 and executed with some modification of
the original project in 1831-6, hardly rivals his great church in
interest; but the polygonal plan with machicolated round towers at the
corners recalls both the special medievalism of Boullée and the Millbank
Penitentiary[67] in London of 1812-21 which Lebas had actually visited.
Of more historical significance was the no longer extant Prison de la
Nouvelle Force (or Mazas) commissioned in 1836 and built in 1843-50 by
E.-J. Gilbert (1793-1874), a pupil first of Durand at the École
Polytechnique and then of Vignon, the recognized leader in this field
under Louis Philippe. Its radial cellular planning showed, like Barry’s
Pentonville Prison of 1841-2 in London, the significant influence abroad
of the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia built by John Haviland
(1792-1852) in 1823-35. This plan was made known to Europeans by two
reports on American prisons, one by William Crawford, published in
London in 1834, and another by F.-A. Demetz and Blouet, published in
Paris in 1837. On this prison J.-F.-J. Lecointe (1783-1858) was
associated with Gilbert.
Much larger is Gilbert’s Charenton Lunatic Asylum of 1838-45 at St
Maurice outside Paris, which he designed and built alone. The vast and
orderly grid of this institution provides a community that is almost of
the order of a complete town. The innumerable bare and regular ranges of
wards are dominated by the temple portico of the centrally placed
chapel, an ecclesiastical monument of some distinction that is
unfortunately inaccessible to visitors. Such work, often as extensive in
the provinces as near the capital, was much admired and studied by
foreigners even quite late in the century. To the French, moreover, it
carried a special prestige; the line of descent was direct from Boullée
to Durand and from Durand to Gilbert and his provincial rivals, such as
the brothers Douillard (L.-P., 1790-1869; L.-C., 1795-1878, a pupil of
Crucy), who were responsible for the Hospice Général (Saint-Jacques) at
Nantes built in 1832-6 (Plate 20). In the estimation of contemporaries,
this was one of the two main lines of development in this period,
balancing socially and intellectually the more aesthetic programme of
polychromatic romanticization pursued by Hittorff, Henri Labrouste, and
Duban.
Representational public buildings, although usually much less plain in
design, are likely to be even more heavy-handed than the prisons and
lunatic asylums. Their architects’ strictly functional approach was
capable of achieving a rather bleak sort of distinction which should
have been sympathetic to the twentieth century had they been better
known. The Palace of Justice at Tours of 1840-50 by Charles
Jacquemin-Belisle (1815-69), with its unpedimented Roman Doric portico,
is typical enough of a very considerable number of large and prominent
civic structures. Lequeux’s Paris town halls in the outlying
_arrondissements_ are just as dry but less monumentally Classical.
Happily there are a few finer public buildings, mostly in Paris,
structures not least interesting for their bold use of metal and glass.
Among early railway stations only the Gare Montparnasse of 1848-52 by
V.-B. Lenoir (1805-63) and the engineer Eugène Flachat (1802-73) and the
Gare de Strasbourg (Gare de l’Est) of 1847-52 by F.-A. Duquesney
(1790-1849), a pupil of Percier, still stand in Paris. The Gare de
l’Est, with its vast central lunette expressing clearly the
iron-and-glass arched train-shed, is a most notable early station. The
detailing, of a somewhat High Renaissance—at least not Greek or
Roman—order, is pleasant but undistinguished (Plate 22B). This detailing
has been effectively maintained in the modern doubling of the front of
the station. The original shed by the engineer Sérinet was long ago
replaced.
The other great Parisian structure of the forties in whose construction
the visible use of iron played a prominent part, the Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève in the Place du Panthéon, is especially distinguished
for the originality and elegance of its detailing, even more as regards
that of the masonry of the exterior than of the ironwork within (Plate
21). Henri-P.-F. Labrouste (1801-75), a pupil of Lebas and Vaudoyer, who
designed this library in 1839 and built it in 1843-50, is the one French
architect of the age whose name can be mentioned—though a little
diffidently—with those of the great architects of the earlier decades of
the century outside France, Soane and Schinkel, even if his
contemporaries usually gave precedence to Gilbert or to Hittorff. Yet
Labrouste hardly ranks for quality with a Dane of his own generation
such as Bindesbøll, although his library is much more advanced both
stylistically and technically than the contemporary Thorwaldsen Museum
in Copenhagen.
Everywhere except in England this was a period, like the first quarter
of the century, in which official architecture exceeded private in
interest. Moreover, the priority that the erection of monuments of
public utility, from markets and prisons to art galleries and libraries,
received over the building of churches and palaces gave significant
evidence of the rise of a new pattern of bourgeois culture. It is
therefore quite appropriate that this library of Henri Labrouste’s
should be the finest structure of the forties in France. The
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève is also one of the few buildings of the
second quarter century anywhere in the world that has been almost
universally admired ever since its completion, if successively for a
variety of different reasons. The façade of the library, often ignored
by those praising the visible iron structure of the interior (Figure
14), outranks in distinction almost all other contemporary examples of
the Renaissance Revival anywhere in the world; but it is worth noting
that the flanking administrative block and the Collège Sainte-Barbe also
offer a premonition of the next period in their prominent mansard roofs.
(Henri’s brother F.-M.-T. Labrouste (1799-1855) supervised the
construction of the college.) The façade of Henri’s administrative block
is a composition of real originality and exquisite co-ordination of
parts to which the term Renaissance Revival need hardly be applied; this
is what _style Louis Philippe_ really means, or ought at least to mean.
By Charles X’s time the Salle des Cinq Cents at the Palais Bourbon,
erected by the two older Gisors and Leconte in the 1790s, was in such a
bad state that it was necessary to rebuild it, adding at the same time a
library. J.-J.-B. de Joly (1788-1865) in 1828-33 followed closely the
original design; but behind the scenes, as it were, he used a great deal
of iron to ensure a lasting structure. He also embellished the walls
with a richly coloured sheathing of French marbles and, in the library,
with murals by Delacroix. With less originality, but with respect for a
major monument of the seventeenth century, H.-A.-G. de Gisors much
enlarged the Luxembourg for Louis Philippe in 1834-41, repeating Salomon
de Brosse’s original garden façade, in order to accommodate a new
chamber for the House of Peers. His chamber followed closely the earlier
one there of 1798 by Chalgrin; the new chapel which he also provided at
the Luxembourg has even more of the colouristic richness demanded by
advanced taste in this period. The Luxembourg Orangery, later the
Luxembourg Museum, which was built by Gisors in 1840 in an early
seventeenth-century mode, used brick for the walls with only the
dressings of stone, a rare instance of such external bichromy in the
Paris of its day despite the lively interest in the employment of colour
in architecture.
The present Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay was built in 1846-56 by
Jacques Lacornée (1779-1856), who had completed in 1821-35 his master
Bonnard’s earlier Ministry near by that was begun for Napoleon in 1814.
Superimposed arch orders produce a rich and rather Venetian version of
the Renaissance Revival not unrelated to the treatment of the somewhat
exceptional Empire building on which he had worked. Duc began to plan
the restoration and enlargement of the Palace of Justice in Paris as
early as 1840, but the handsomest and most conspicuous portions of this
elaborate complex date from the Second Empire. J.-F. Duban (1797-1870)
started the restoration of the old Louvre, over which a hot controversy
soon ensued, in 1848; the New Louvre, begun by Visconti in 1852 and
carried forward after his death in 1853 by Lefuel, would be the prime
monument of the succeeding period (see Chapter 8). Duban’s capacities in
this period—he did his best work rather later (Plate 72B)—are better
appreciated in the building for the École des Beaux Arts he completed in
1838 and in the elegant Early Italian Renaissance design of the Hôtel de
Pourtalès of 1836 in the Rue Tronchet, perhaps the finest Paris mansion
of its day.
However, it was not with such _hôtels particuliers_ but with _maisons de
rapport_, that is, blocks of flats, that the streets of Paris, like
those of Berlin and Vienna, were mostly built up in these decades.
Earlier ones, such as those in the Place de la Bourse, are very
carefully composed yet almost devoid of prominent architectural features
(Plate 27C). In the later thirties and above all the forties, however,
the detail grew richer and more eclectic, while the façades were in
general much less neatly composed. Not only were rich Italian or French
Renaissance features popular but exotic oriental ornament was more than
occasionally used. The planning became more complex and elastic also;
but both in exterior design and in interior organization the type
remained firmly rooted in late-eighteenth-century tradition. The Paris
streets of the first half of the nineteenth century have a notable
consistency of scale and character, since the cornice lines, and even
the shapes of the high roofs, were controlled by a well-enforced
building code and their eclecticism of style is little more than a
matter of detail.
More than in other countries in this period, the major virtues of French
architecture lay in the placid continuance of well-established lines.
Traditions were being slowly eroded, but there was very little of that
urgent desire to overturn the immediate past which coloured so
significantly much English production of the thirties and forties. Nor
was there the German capacity in this period for carrying over into
medievalizing modes the basic discipline of established Romantic
Classicism. Not surprisingly, French leadership in architecture,
established under Louis XIV and renewed under Napoleon, was largely
lost; it came back, however, with the Second Empire (see Chapters 8 and
9). All the same, architectural controversy flourished at home in these
decades.
Quite naturally, French influence still remained largely dominant in
contiguous Belgium and much of Switzerland. If Studer’s work in Berne
falls under the German rubric of _Rundbogenstil_, in French-speaking
Lausanne and Neuchâtel important commissions went to Frenchmen. An
Asylum for the former city was designed by Henri Labrouste in 1837-8;
another in the latter town, built a few years later, is by P.-F.-N.
Philippon (1784-1866), a pupil of J.-J. Ramée who had also worked with
Brongniart. Both are characteristically respectable examples of _Louis
Philippe_ work. Labrouste also designed a prison for Alessandria in
Italy in 1840.
In Belgium, under Dutch rule from the fall of Napoleon down to 1830, the
Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, begun in 1819 by the French architect
L.-E.-A. Damesme (1757-1822), who had once worked on the Paris
_barrières_ with Ledoux, and completed by E.-J. Bonnevie (1783-1835), is
a large but typical example of the theatres built in the French
provinces by architects of the previous generation. It was not improved
by an enlargement and remodelling of 1856, but the original temple
portico is noble in scale and handsomely detailed. Characteristically,
Damesme also built the Brussels prison. When a new generation of Belgian
architects appeared led by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79), who had studied
with Huyot, more international influences were evident. For example,
Poelaert’s fine early school of 1852 in the Rue de Schaerbeek in
Brussels shows little of Huyot but a good deal of Schinkel in its
rationalistic handling of Grecian forms. Poelaert’s boldness here, which
even suggests that of Alexander Thomson in his Glasgow work of this
decade and the next, prepares one a little for his later Palace of
Justice designed in the sixties (see Chapter 8).
The long pre-eminence of Italy in the arts came to an end even before
the end of the old regime. Architects still flocked there, finding in
each generation new sources of inspiration as first Renaissance palaces
and then medieval churches succeeded Roman ruins as the preferred quarry
of travellers of taste. But not after Piranesi was there an Italian
architect with real international influence. At the opening of the new
century doctrine flowed from Paris, not from Rome; increasingly,
moreover, architects turned to England and Germany for still fresher
ideas and ideals.
Only a few Italian cities were notably ornamented in this period; on the
other hand, none were blighted, and much ordinary building hardly even
bears clear indications of its date. The characteristic and prominent
productions of the period are, however, quite up to the highest
international standards. They have thus far been underestimated, not
least by the Italians themselves, partly because they are so much
overshadowed in interest by earlier work, partly because they carry in
Italy for the first time since the Gothic the onus—not entirely
justified—of following a foreign lead.
The Pope, like other legitimate sovereigns who returned to power after
Napoleon’s fall, carried out existing projects, notably those for the
Piazza del Popolo as planned by Valadier. He also initiated in 1817 the
building of a new wing for the sculpture museum at the Vatican, the
Braccio Nuovo by Raffaelle Stern (1774-1820). Completed in 1821, this is
one of the finest of the many galleries in the line of descent from
Simonetti’s Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican of which the first half
of the nineteenth century saw so many (Plate 24). Taller and less
ornately embellished than Klenze’s galleries in the Munich Glyptothek,
and with rather stronger spatial articulation, this is none the less
well within the Romantic Classical tradition as it had been established
by the previous generation of French architects.
The principal architectural activity of the post-Napoleonic years in
Rome and, indeed, of the whole later period of papal rule was the
reconstruction after a fire of the great fifth-century basilica of San
Paolo fuori-le-mura. Begun by Pasquale Belli (1752-1833) in 1825, with
whom were associated the younger Pietro Camporesi (1792-1873) and F. J.
Bosio (1768-1845), the supervision was taken over after Belli’s death in
1833 by Luigi Poletti (1792-1869), who completed the job in 1856.
Following closely the august original in its dimensions and proportions,
San Paolo has a truly Roman Imperial scale; but the hardness of the
materials, the polish of their surfaces, and the cold precision of their
handling recalls rather the contemporary Paris churches of Lebas and
Hittorff without matching their relatively rich colour. A more modest
Roman monument of this period in a conspicuous location is the Teatro
Argentina by Camporesi.
The Teatro Carlo Felice in the Piazza de Ferrari in Genoa, built by C.
F. Barabino (1768-1835) in 1827, is a more advanced and distinguished
Romantic Classical structure of considerable originality, now badly
damaged by bombing. Barabino was also responsible for designing the
Camposanto di Staglieno at Genoa with its Pantheon-like chapel and its
endless colonnades. Begun in 1835, this project was carried to
completion by G. B. Rezasco (1799-1872).
Naples[68] has more interesting monuments of this period to offer than
Rome or Genoa. Yet San Francesco di Paola, which was built from designs
by Pietro Bianchi (1787-1849) in 1816-24 in resolution of a vow of
Ferdinand I, can hardly be considered much more original than San Paolo
(Plate 26A). The interior is another of the innumerable copies of the
Pantheon that were erected all over Europe and America in this period;
but the Berninian quadrant colonnades in front are better handled than
at Voronikhin’s Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg. The great saucer dome,
moreover, is rather happily echoed in the two smaller domes on either
side; they serve also to tie together the side colonnades and the
pedimented portico. Above all, this church is most effective
urbanistically. The colonnades enclose the square north of the Royal
Palace in a quite Baroque way; while the church as a whole, because of
the giant scale of its parts and its cleanly sculptural composition,
stands as a discrete object in the best Romantic Classical way against
the higher portion of the city that rises behind. Less happy in the city
picture is the front of the San Carlo opera house, carried out a little
earlier in 1810-12 by Antonio Niccolini (1772-1850), who also
redecorated the interior in 1816-17 and again in 1841-4. This has
adequate open space only at the sides; and the curiously high-waisted
façade, in any case rather underscaled in its parts, must be seen in a
perspective sharper than is becoming to most post-Baroque monuments
(Plate 23B).
The throne room in the palace at nearby Caserta, decorated for Ferdinand
II by Gaetano Genovese (1795-1860) in 1839-45, is a surprisingly worthy
late pendant to de Simone’s contiguous interiors of more than a
generation earlier, very rich indeed in its gold-and-white decoration,
but superbly ordered. Genovese also carried out an extensive and tactful
remodelling and enlargement of the Royal Palace in Naples in 1837-44,
most notably the regularization of the long façade above the quay.
No other Italian city provides quite such prominent examples of
individual Romantic Classical monuments as do Rome and Naples. The
setting of San Carlo in Milan, built by Carlo Amati (1776-1852) in
1844-7, a rectangular recession from the line of the present-day Corso
Matteotti, provides no such build-up for its Pantheon-like dome as does
Bianchi’s San Francesco. The giant granite colonnades at the base of the
contiguous blocks do, however, continue effectively the pedimented
portico on either side of the little _piazza_. Only at Turin, almost
more French than Italian always, were great squares and wide, arcaded
streets carried out in this period, but without focal monuments of any
particular distinction. These squares and streets vie with Percier and
Fontaine’s in Paris, yet they also continue a local seventeenth-century
tradition that was to remain alive down into the Fascist period.
The expiatory church in Turin, which paralleled in motivation Ferdinand
I’s in Naples, the Gran Madre di Dio, was proposed in 1814 and built on
the farther bank of the Po by Ferdinando Bonsignore (1767-1843) in
1818-31 to celebrate the departure of the French and the return of the
House of Savoy to its capital (Plate 26B). This is a far duller and less
original example of a modern structure based directly on the Pantheon
than is the Tempio Canoviano of 1819-20 at Possagno.[69] For this the
great Romantic Classical sculptor of Italy, Thorvaldsen’s rival Antonio
Canova, was the client and apparently also the designer.
It is not Bonsignore’s church that is notable in the Turin scene but the
vast Piazza Vittorio Veneto opposite, laid out by Giuseppe Frizzi
(1797-1831) in 1818 and later surrounded by fine ranges of arcaded
buildings mostly carried out between 1825 and 1830 (Plate 26B). At the
upper end of this tremendous square two quadrants draw in to meet the
arcaded Via Po. Characteristically, the arcades here are supported on
compound piers based on those in the seventeenth-century Piazza San
Carlo but simplified and sharpened now to conform to Romantic Classical
standards. Also a typical Turin feature, but new in this period, was the
syncopation of the handsome iron balconies of the upper storeys. This
theme marks most of the houses in the quarter contiguous to this square,
a quarter built up over the next generation in a remarkably elegant and
consistent way more than rivalling the contemporary districts of Paris
or Vienna.
The other principal square of this period, on the farther side of the
new quarter and at the outer end of the present-day Via Roma, is the
Piazza Carlo Felice. This was laid out by the engineer Lombardi and by
Frizzi in 1823, and has façades by Carlo Promis (1808-73) that also
extend on both sides of the square along the broad Corso Vittorio
Emmanuele II. Continuous arcades cross the street ends, as in the Piazza
Vittorio Veneto, and the balconies are syncopated. The fine big trees in
the square and along the Corso are a happy addition to the urban scene
quite uncharacteristic of the rest of Italy.
The inner end of the Piazza Carlo Felice is not curved but
semi-octagonal. Originally the outer end was open and defined only by
rows of trees; later, in 1866-8, the handsome Porta Nuova Railway
Station was built there by the engineer Alessandro Mazzuchetti (1824-94)
and the architect Carlo Ceppi (1829-1921). Now this terminates the long
central axis of the city which extends from the Royal Palace through the
Piazza Castello, the Piazza San Carlo, and down the Via Roma to the
Piazza Carlo Felice.
Turin has other monumental edifices of this period besides the Gran
Madre di Dio. There are, for example, two later churches in the new
quarter, San Massimo and the Sacramentine; the latter, by Alfonso Dupuy,
was built in 1846-50 from a design of 1843, with later portico by Ceppi;
the former in 1845-54 by Carlo Sada (1809-73). Both are domed, but less
Pantheon-like than the Gran Madre. They lack, unfortunately, the
elegance and delicacy of scale of the houses of the period in the
streets that surround them.
Milan owes less than Turin to the architectural activity of this period.
The present decoration of the interior of the opera-house, La Scala,
which was built by Giuseppe Piermarini (1734-1808) in 1776-8, dates from
1830 and is by Alessandro Sanquirico (1774-1849). This is quite similar
in the sumptuousness of its white-and-gold ornamentation to Genovese’s
later throne room at Caserta. The square gatehouses at the Porta
Venezia, built in 1826 by Rodolfo Vantini (1791-1856), are boldly scaled
and effectively paired. The Palazzo Rocca-Saporiti of 1812 by Giovanni
Perego (1776-1817) in the Corso Venezia with its raised colonnade rivals
in interest Cantoni’s better-known Palazzo Serbelloni of the 1790s near
by. The much smaller and considerably later Palazzo Lucini of 1831 in
the Via Monte di Pietà by Ferdinando Crivelli (1810-55) is so expert an
example of High Renaissance design that it can readily be taken for real
_cinquecento_ work. Paradoxically, such an extremely literate specimen
of the Renaissance Revival is far less characteristic of Italy in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century than of England or Germany.
More typical of Italian taste in the thirties and forties are the
buildings facing the flank of La Scala across the Via Verdi with their
complex rhythm of fenestration and their very rich but still vaguely
Grecian ornamentation. Eventually the Italians did, however, take up
occasionally the Renaissance version of the international
_Rundbogenstil_, and none too happily. For example, the Casa di
Risparmio (known vulgarly as the Ca’ de Sass), built by Giuseppe
Balzaretti (1801-74) in 1872 across the street from the refined and
discreet Palazzo Lucini, is a stonier example of Tuscan rustication—as
its nickname suggests—than was ever produced by the Northern Europeans
who first revived the mode half a century earlier.
A charming ornament to a smaller city is the Caffè Pedrocchi[70] in
Padua of 1816-31 by Giuseppe Jappelli (1783-1852), a pupil of Selva, and
Antonio Gradenigo (1806-84). Delicate in scale, interestingly varied in
the handling of solids and voids, and most urbane in the discretion of
its carefully placed ornamentation, this is certainly the handsomest
nineteenth-century café in the world and about the finest Romantic
Classical edifice in Italy (Plate 23A). Exceptional in this period in
the Latin world is the Neo-Gothic wing known as Il Pedrocchino attached
to the café, designed by Jappelli and for the same client; this was
completed in 1837.
Trieste in this period, like the cities of Lombardy and the Veneto, is
more Italian than Austrian architecturally. As a result it outshines
Vienna in the extent and the quality of its early nineteenth-century
construction. The new buildings were largely concentrated around the
Canal Grande, a rectangular lagoon extending inland from the Riva Tre
Novembre. At the head of this rises Sant’ Antonio di Padova, built by
Nobile in 1826-49, long after this former Trieste City Architect had
been called to Vienna as head of the architecture section of the
Akademie there. Occupying a position somewhat similar to that of the
Gran Madre di Dio in Turin, Nobile’s church is considerably more
interesting, particularly as regards the generous spatial organization
of the interior. The Canal Grande is flanked by contemporary palaces
that are harmonious with one another in scale but quite varied in
detail. The largest and finest, facing the sea on the left, is the
Palazzo Carciotti. This was completed in 1806 by Matthäus Pertsch, a
Milan-trained architect who had provided in 1798 the façade of the
Teatro Verdi here in Trieste. With its raised portico and small dome,
the Palazzo Carciotti is one of the most prominent and successful
Italian buildings of the opening years of the century.
At the other side of the Latin world, the Iberian peninsula participated
rather less than the Italian in the advanced architectural movements of
the first half of the century. In Madrid the Obelisk of the 2nd of May,
built by Isidro Gonzalez Velasquez (1764/5-?) in 1822-40, and the
Obelisk of La Castellana (1883), by Francisco Javier de Mariateguí, are
rather modest specimens of a widely popular sort of erection compared to
Smirke’s gigantic Wellington Testimonial in Dublin or Mills’s Washington
Monument. The Palace of the Congress of 1843-50 by Narciso Pascual y
Coloner (1808-70) is a dull example of that nineteenth-century
Classicism that hardly deserves the qualification ‘Romantic’.
Italians, little employed elsewhere out of their own country in this
period, provided the principal new public edifices of Lisbon. F. X.
Fabri (?-1807) built the Palace of Arzuda, begun in 1802, and Fortunato
Lodi (1806-?) the Garret Theatre more than a generation later in 1842-6;
both are as uninspired as the contemporary monuments of Madrid. As late
as 1867-75 the Municipal Chamber of Lisbon by the local architect
Domingos Ponente da Silva (1836-1901) maintained the Classical mode at
its most conventional. Already, with the establishment of the Braganza
headquarters in Rio de Janeiro early in the century, Portuguese vitality
was passing to the New World (see Chapter 5). Yet if Lisbon has no
individual Romantic Classical monuments of much interest, the lower
city, extending from the Praça do Commercio to O Rocio, is a splendid
example of late-eighteenth-century urbanism, initiated after the
earthquake of 1755 by Eugenio dos Santos de Carvalho (1711-60).
In the eighteenth century Petersburg owed its grandeur as a Baroque city
largely to the work of imported Italian architects; but with the rise of
French and English influence in the later decades of the old century and
the first of the new the day of the Italians was over, there as
elsewhere (see Chapter 1). Alexander I’s aspirations, after as well as
before Waterloo, were wholly French, not Italian. The Committee for
Construction and Hydraulic Works, indeed, which Alexander set up in 1816
to pass the designs of all public and private buildings in his capital,
had a French military engineer, General Béthencourt, as its chairman.
Yet the principal architect of the post-Napoleonic decades, Karl
Ivanovich Rossi (1775-1849), although he had an Italian family name and
was of Italian origin, was Russian-born and Russian-trained. Rossi’s
General Staff Arches of 1819-29 and the vast hemicycle of which they are
the centre continue happily the urbanistic tradition of the older
generation; but the detail is Roman not Greek, and the taste altogether
coarser and more provincial than that of Thomon and Zakharov (Plate
27B). This is even more true of his Alexandra Theatre of 1827-32 and his
Senate and Synod of 1829-34.
August Augustovich Monferran (1786-1858), to whom was assigned the
building of St Isaac’s Cathedral[71] in 1817, a vast pile that he
completed only in 1857 (Plate 27A), was French, despite the Russian form
in which his name is here given, and actually a pupil of Percier. In his
youth he had worked under Vignon on the Madeleine, moreover. Monferran
lacked, like most of his own generation who remained in France, both the
originality and the finesse of the earlier generation, just as Nicholas
I lacked the taste of his brother Alexander I. A wealth of sumptuous
materials, granites and marbles, marks this church, however, and the
dome is of some importance in technical history because it is entirely
framed in iron (see Chapter 7).
Another typical monument in the Napoleonic tradition rose also from
Monferran’s designs, the Alexander Column of 1829 in the Winter Palace
Square (Plate 27B). This may well be the largest granite monolith in the
world—a typically Russian claim—but it quite lacks the elegance of
Alavoine’s still later Colonne de Juillet in Paris or the scale of
Mills’s Washington Monument. The Triumphal Gate of 1833 by Vasili
Petrovich Stasov (1769-1848) is a trabeated Greek Doric propylaeon,
somewhat comparable to Nobile’s Burgtor in Vienna; more significant is
the fact that, like the July Column in Paris and Monferran’s great dome,
not to speak of a curious Egyptian suspension bridge of this period in
Petersburg, this structure is all of metal.
In 1840 the authority of the Committee of 1816 was terminated and in
Petersburg, as so generally elsewhere in Europe, coherent urbanistic
control came to an end. The great architectural period there was over as
Moscow, with its nationalistic traditions, came more to the fore.
Characteristically, the most important new church of the second quarter
of the century, the Cathedral of the Redeemer of 1839-83, was built in
the older capital and is the first major Russian example of
Neo-Byzantine. One is not surprised to find that Konstantin Andreevich
Ton (1794-1881), its architect, was German not French; for in a sense
this represents a rather clumsy local variant of the German
_Rundbogenstil_, continuing the particular eclectic line initiated by
Klenze in his Munich Court Church more than a decade earlier.
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CHAPTER 4
GREAT BRITAIN
IN English terminology, the most productive period of Nash and Soane,
the two greatest Romantic Classical architects of England, extending
from 1810 down to the thirties, is loosely referred to as ‘Regency’, and
the rest of the first half of the century as ‘Early Victorian’. Neither
term has much more specific meaning in an international frame of
reference than does ‘Restoration’ or ‘Louis Philippe’ in France, not to
speak of ‘Biedermeier’, which is sometimes used for this period in
Germany and Austria. ‘Regency’ production includes the characteristic
monuments of mature Romantic Classicism in England and also much work
that makes manifest the Picturesque point of view. Early Victorian
production illustrates the modulation of Romantic Classicism into the
Renaissance Revival, and includes as well the most doctrinaire phase of
the Gothic Revival (see Chapter 6).
Although current researches are somewhat amending the picture, it is
accepted that private architecture has generally been more significant
in England than public architecture. This was least true in the first
three decades of the nineteenth century. Soane had been Architect to the
Bank of England, in effect if not in fact an important branch of the
State, from 1788. Nash succeeded Wyatt in the office of
Surveyor-General—although he was only given the title of Deputy—in 1813.
And in 1815 Soane, Nash, and Smirke, undoubtedly the three leading
architects of their day if one excepts Wilkins, became the members of a
new board set up by the national Office of Works, which was at a peak of
its authority and activity immediately after Napoleon’s downfall. Soane
and Smirke, though not personal favourites of George IV, were knighted,
like several of their German contemporaries. The principal building
project of the day, the laying out and the construction of Regent Street
and Regent’s Park, the latter on Crown land, had the fullest personal
support of George IV, first as Regent and after 1820 as King.
Yet Soane’s most important work between 1810 and 1818 was private,
except for what he built as Architect to the Chelsea Hospital, and, in
the case of his house and his family tomb, wholly personal. All that
remains of consequence of his work at the Chelsea Hospital, the stables
of 1814-17, might as well be private, for this is no great monument with
columned portico and Pantheon-dome such as preoccupied most architects
of Soane’s generation and status abroad (Plate 28A). Rigidly astylar,
boldly arcuated, and executed in common yellowish London stock bricks,
with no more deference to the purplish walling bricks and bright
orange-red rubbed dressings of Wren’s earlier buildings at the Hospital
than to his English Baroque style, this is as utilitarian as any project
of Durand’s. Moreover, in its very simple detailing this reflects, and
quite consciously, something of that primitivistic aspect of
international Romantic Classical theory deriving from the theories of
Soane’s favourite critical author, Laugier. Above all, in the
proportioning and in the organization of the arcuated elements, the
design of the stables is personal almost to the point of perversity. It
is far more comprehensible to the abstract tastes of the twentieth
century than in accordance with the ideals most widely accepted in the
England of Soane’s own day.
Soane’s Dulwich Gallery of 1811-14, outside London, is likewise built of
common brick and has similarly primitivistic detailing. This structure
is most characteristic of its period in being a museum, indeed it is the
earliest nineteenth-century example; but it could hardly be more
different from the line of sculpture galleries that runs from Klenze’s
Glyptothek in Munich through Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum in
Copenhagen. Nor does it much resemble the picture galleries of the
period running from those in Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin through
Klenze’s Ältere Pinakothek in Munich to Voit’s Neuere Pinakothek, also
in Munich. It is least unlike the last of these, although that was
designed forty years later; this similarity may help to suggest how
confusingly advanced in style Soane, eldest of the leading architects of
the post-Napoleonic decades, remained even in middle and old age.
But Soane’s _Rundbogenstil_—so to apply this term out of its German
context, as one might do even more properly to the Chelsea Hospital
stables—is a round-arched style with a difference. There are neither
medieval nor _quattrocento_ Italian overtones here. While Soane’s
approach was creatively personal in the detailing as well as in the
over-all organization, that approach seems most closely parallel to
Durand’s rationalism, particularly in the technical skill with which the
monitor-lighting was handled. The centrepiece of the Gallery is a
mausoleum in which Soane’s virtuosity in three-dimensional
composition—an interest that sets him well apart from most of his
generation on the Continent—and also at abstract linear ornamentation,
produced here by plain incisions in the stone slabs of the lantern,
reaches something of a climax.
Even more of such ornamentation is to be seen on the family tomb in St
Pancras churchyard of 1816 as also, though much more chastely handled,
on the façade of his own house[72] of 1812-13 at 13 Lincoln’s Inn
Fields. The interiors of this house are full of spatial exercises, many
of them miniscule in scale, which Soane developed later in various
public structures. It may suffice here to mention the small
breakfast-room with its very shallow dome, its varied and ingenious
effects of indirect lighting, and its characteristic decoration by means
of incised linear patterns and convex mirrors.
In 1818 there began for Soane a new spate of public activity that
continued down to 1823. A series of offices at the Bank of England[73]
now carried further the spatial and decorative innovations of the
interiors of the 1790s. Whether or not these were finer is a matter of
taste; but the continuous arched forms without imposts, the smoother
surfaces, and the very abstract linear decoration certainly represent a
more advanced stage of Soane’s personal style (Plate 28B). Under the Act
for Building New Churches of 1818, which generated great activity in the
ecclesiastical field, Soane was one of the guiding architects; he built,
however, only three churches for the Commission that was set up by the
Act. St Peter’s, Walworth, in South London, of 1823-5 is both elegant
and ingenious in the way the galleries are incorporated into the
internal architectural organization rather than treated as mere
afterthought. The other two are less successful.
Almost all the other churches built under the Act, or by other means, in
these years were rather conventionally Grecian, that is if sufficient
funds were available; otherwise they were what is called ‘Commissioners’
Gothic’ (see Chapter 6). The contrast that the former provide with the
Walworth church helps to emphasize the highly personal character of
Soane’s achievement even in his least esteemed work. St Peter’s was
evidently designed from the inside out, and owes almost nothing to the
architecture of any period of the past. The type-church of the age in
England, however, comparable in historical significance to Lebas’s
slightly later Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris, is St Pancras of 1818-22
in the Euston Road in London built by William Inwood (_c._ 1771-1843)
and his son (H. W., 1794-1843). Very evidently this was designed from
the outside in, for its features are derived from the Erechtheum, a
monument which the younger Inwood actually went to Athens to measure
after the church had been begun.[74]
English tradition required a lantern above the temple portico at the
front, and so the Inwoods devised a sort of Gibbsian tower for St
Pancras out of elements borrowed from the Athenian Tower of the Winds.
Urbane yet rather barren, the interior lacks even the tepid religious
feeling of the French basilicas of the day. The architects, and
contemporaries generally, were more interested in the caryatid
porches—for there are not one but two—that flank the rear.
Other Inwood churches in London, such as All Saints in Camden Street of
1822-4 and St Peter’s in Regent’s Square of 1824-6, are equally Greek in
detail but less directly related to particular ancient monuments. They
are also much less impressive. No more interesting are most of the
Grecian churches built by other architects. St Mary’s, Wyndham Place of
1823-4 by Smirke, however, is set apart by the circular tower placed on
the south, a feature which he had already used on St Philip’s, Salford,
of 1822-5. His church at Markham Clinton in Nottinghamshire of 1833,
cruciform in plan and with a fine octagonal lantern, is considerably
more original, but it was rather a family mausoleum than an ordinary
parish church.
A revolution was getting under way in Great Britain in the realm of
church architecture at this very time, and the heyday of the temple
church was destined to be brief. After the early thirties only
Nonconformists continued to build them. But such a Congregational chapel
as that built by F. H. Lockwood (1811-78) and Thomas Allom (1804-72) in
Great Thornton Street, Hull, in 1841-3, its broad temple front flanked
by lower side wings, still had real distinction, a distinction rarely
maintained after this date, although rather similar structures continued
to be erected for several more decades both in London and in the
provinces.
In Scotland, where Greek sanctions lasted longer than in England,
Alexander Thomson (1817-75) built in the fifties and sixties three of
the finest Romantic Classical churches in the world. His Caledonia Road
Free Church in Glasgow of 1856-7 was designed for those Presbyterians
who had left the established Scottish church in 1843 (Plate 29). This
owes a great deal to Schinkel’s suburban Berlin churches, which Thomson
must have known through the _Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe_. The
composition is more Picturesque, in being markedly asymmetrical, and the
superb tower at the corner reduces the temple front to a subordinate
element in a sort of Italian Villa composition. Yet the idea for this
sort of composition may well have come from Schinkel also, a derivation
which the rather _Rundbogenstil_ character and asymmetrical organization
of certain of Thomson’s earlier suburban villas seems to make still more
probable. The interior of the church is very different from that of
Soane’s in Walworth, but it is equally architectonic in the
Schinkelesque way the galleries are incorporated in the general scheme.
This is real interior architecture, not just a gallery-surrounded hall
like the Grecian churches in England built back in the twenties.
Thomson’s more prominently located St Vincent Street Church of 1859,
also in Glasgow, is not finer. But it utilizes a difficult site with
striking success, and the exotic eclecticism of the spire is peculiarly
personal to Thomson. His Queen’s Park Church of 1867, in a southern
suburb of Glasgow, was as perversely original as anything by Soane, and
is perhaps Thomson’s final masterpiece. Inside, he handled the light
iron supports with clear logic and elegantly appropriate painted
decoration. Both the heavy masonry tower—which is, of course, invisible
from the interior—and the heavy clerestory are carried on these
delicately proportioned metal columns with a frankness and boldness
hardly equalled before the twentieth century. Externally Thomson
detailed the trabeated masonry with the purity of a Schinkel and the
originality of a Soane, yet he composed the façade in three dimensions
in a fashion that is almost Baroque beneath his strange near-Hindu
‘spire’.
Thomson’s churches, late though they are, can be better understood as
examples of Romantic Classicism, sharing important qualities with the
boldest French projects of the 1780s, than in relation to any other
stage of nineteenth-century architectural development. Yet it will be
evident later that they also have a good deal in common with the
architectural aspirations of their own quarter of the century (see
Chapter 9).
Soane in his latest work seems at times to have produced what were
almost parodies of his characteristic Bank interiors, approaching in
their strangeness and their oriental allusions the exotic spires of
Thomson. As these things do not survive, it is hard to know whether the
Court of Chancery at Westminster of 1824-5, with its pendentives cut
back so that they are no more than a sort of plaster awning, or the
Council Chamber in Freemasons’ Hall, with its strange canopy-like
covering, were effective or not. But these interiors do help to explain
why the idiosyncratic, not to say cranky, Soane left on his death in
1837 no such living tradition behind him as did Schinkel in Germany.
Nash, Soane’s rival as England’s leading architect in the second and
third decades of the nineteenth century, was a very different sort of
man. Until his marriage he was of no great prominence; it was the
Regent’s favour which then brought him to the fore. As an urbanist, if
not as a designer of individual buildings, he was worthy of his
opportunities—and no architect of his generation had greater. His
distinction at what is today called ‘planning’ resides not alone in the
amplitude, the elasticity, and the resultant variety of his schemes, but
as much perhaps in his ability as an entrepreneur in carrying amazingly
extensive operations to completion. Few, moreover, succeeded better than
Nash in modulating Romantic Classicism towards the Picturesque; and this
was over and above his important direct contribution to Picturesque
practice in the building of castles, villas, and cottages.
At the beginning of the second decade of the century the lease of the
Crown’s Marylebone Estate fell in. Nash’s scheme for its development, by
far the most comprehensive, won the day, evidently because he had the
personal backing of the Regent. Nash’s scheme of 1812, somewhat modified
in ultimate execution, provided for a park—Regent’s Park—surrounded by
terraces of considerable size organized into a series of palatial
compositions (Figure 10). The traditions of homogeneous terrace design
go back to the early eighteenth century, and terraces facing out towards
open scenery appeared soon after the middle of the century. But what
Nash planned for Regent’s Park, and in the main executed, vastly
exceeded not only in extent but also in originality the early
eighteenth-century terrace in Grosvenor Square, where the idea of
over-all composition was probably first tried out, or the
mid-eighteenth-century Royal Crescent at Bath by John Wood II (1728-81),
which was the first terrace to face not a square or a street but open
park-like country. This work around the park alone should have been
enough to make Nash’s reputation.
But in these unquiet years, when the world was briefly trying to live at
peace with Napoleon, Nash sensed the Regent’s ambition to embellish
London in a way to rival the Emperor’s plans for Paris. He therefore
projected a street which should proceed, much as had been proposed even
before this, along the line where the residential West End began,
northward from the Regent’s residence at Carlton House to the southern
entrance of the new park. An early scheme for such a street, entirely
lined with colonnades and interrupted by squares in which public
structures would stand in splendid isolation, suggests his original aim
of emulating the Rue de Rivoli and Parisian monuments like the Madeleine
and the Bourse. As the project was gradually adjusted to the realities
of the situation, most of its geometric regularity and practically all
of its Parisian character disappeared. The colonnades survived only
along the Quadrant leading out of Piccadilly Circus; the Duke of York’s
Column in Waterloo Place, rising between the two blocks of Carlton House
Terrace, which eventually replaced Carlton House, is the one feature of
Napoleonic scale and character. It is not by Nash but by the Duke of
York’s favourite architect, Benjamin Dean Wyatt (1775-?1850), and was
built only in 1831-4.
Instead of an imitation of Paris, something vastly more original was
created, an example of civic design whose full implications are perhaps
not wholly digested even today. Nash, the former partner of the
landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818), in his new Regent Street
as well as in his Regent’s Park and its surrounding terraces, sought to
carry out, not with natural scenery but with urban scenery, the
principles of Picturesque landscaping. Yet his architectural vocabulary
remained well within the accepted range of Romantic Classicism.
Waterloo Place is wholly formal, serving as a sort of forecourt to
Carlton House when it was laid out in 1815. But going up Lower Regent
Street the separate buildings erected in 1817-19 were separately
designed, to a harmonious scale but with no over-all regularity of shape
and size. At Piccadilly, first the Circus, also of 1817-19, a circular
place, and then the Quadrant of 1819-20 took care most ingeniously of a
drastic leftward shift in axis. A relatively monumental façade, that of
the County Fire Office, faced the head of Lower Regent Street; the other
façades of the Circus were regular and plain in an almost Soanic way
(Plate 30). The Quadrant gained great distinction from its projecting
colonnades of Doric columns (made of cast iron) and from the skilful
placing of a domed pavilion opposite its western end.
From there on the street, as carried forward in 1820-4, proceeded more
directly, but with great variety in the individual façades—one terrace
of houses over shops (1820-1) was by Soane. There were also special
pavilioned structures to phrase several slight changes in direction and
to mark the openings of intersecting streets. At Regent (now Oxford)
Circus a second circle, similar to that at Piccadilly but elaborated by
Nash with a Corinthian order, marks a major cross artery. Above this the
street continues quite straight for a little way; then comes another
sharp leftward shift in the axis. There Nash placed his All Souls’
Church, which was built in 1822-4. Its curious fluted steeple still
rises through the colonnade that crowns the tower to provide a pivot by
which the eye is carried around the sharp corner. Almost at once another
right-angled turn leads into the broad pre-existing esplanade of Adam’s
Portland Place. From here on all is formal again as at Waterloo Place.
At the upper end, between the top of Portland Place and the Park, was to
be a large residential circus. Of this only the two southern quadrants
were built—one of them the earliest portion of the whole scheme,
initiated at the very start in 1812. As executed, there are above
this—for this part of the scheme is all extant—two regular terraces
facing each other across Park Square.
In 1813, as has been said, Nash succeeded Wyatt in the
Surveyor-General’s office; but it was in the role of private
entrepreneur rather than as an official that he executed the Regent
Street scheme, hazarding his own rising fortune and using every device
of subleasing to carry the project through. This he accomplished in the
relatively short period of fifteen years, even though the renewal of the
war held up execution for several years immediately after the start. Of
all this nothing remains below Portland Place but the planning and All
Souls’. However, in the district east of Lower Regent Street, the Royal
Opera Arcade still exists behind New Zealand House and, much larger and
more conspicuous, the conventional temple portico of the Haymarket
Theatre of 1821 stands at the end of what is now Charles II Street.
At the base of Waterloo Place, facing the Green Park, the two ranges of
Carlton House Terrace, built in 1827, still rise above their cast-iron
Doric basement colonnades. In the lower half of this square, south of
Pall Mall, with the two clubs on either side—one by Nash, the other by
Burton—and the Duke of York’s Column silhouetted against the distant
scenery of park and Government buildings between the two wings of
Carlton House Terrace, Nash’s urbanism can still be fully appreciated.
The full grandeur of Napoleon’s Paris or Alexander I’s Petersburg is
lacking, but so also is their archaeology. This obviously belongs to the
nineteenth century. It establishes, for modern eyes, Nash’s capacity as
‘planner’ quite as much as do his terraces around Regent’s Park, as
these were carried out in 1820-7 by himself and by various younger
architects working under his general supervision.
[Illustration:
Figure 10. John Nash: London, Regent Street and Regent’s Park,
1812-27, plan
]
Curiously enough, the first Regent’s Park terrace, built in 1821 while
construction was still proceeding in Park Square, was at least nominally
by young Decimus Burton (1800-81), the talented son of the builder James
Burton, who was as active here in these years as in Bloomsbury.
Dignified and severe, although not Grecian in detail like the handsomer
Ionic York Terrace and its flanking Doric villa completed the next year,
Cornwall Terrace certainly lacks the specifically Nashian qualities.
Happily typical of Nash’s response to urbanistic opportunities is the
way he opened York Gate in the middle of York Terrace through to the
Marylebone Road in order to incorporate visually the new façade provided
by Thomas Hardwick (1752-1829) in 1818-19 for the Marylebone Parish
Church.
Sussex Place of 1822, with its curved plan and its ten domes, is much
more notably Picturesque; but the most spectacular composition of all is
Cumberland Terrace, Nash’s in general conception, but executed by James
Thomson (1800-83) in 1826-7 (Plate 32). This is far more palatial, at
least superficially, than the rather humdrum Buckingham Palace that Nash
was gradually erecting for the King from 1821 on.[75] When seen through
the trees of the park or in sharp perspective from the ring road, this
range of houses provides a Picturesque three-dimensional composition of
a dream-like order—what matter if the conventional Classical elements
are organized and executed in a very slapdash way?
The total scope of the Regent’s Park development provided a ‘New Town’
in a rather complete sense inspired possibly by Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’.
There were detached villas in the park, mews behind the terraces, a
market-place to the east, modest two-storey houses near by in Munster
Square and, finally, the two Park Villages, carried out by his protégé
Sir James Pennethorne (1801-71) after Nash’s ideas from 1827 on. These
last are extensions of the Picturesque hamlet, consisting of groups of
semi-detached villas some of Italianate, some of Tudoresque character,
loosely strung along curving roads, which provide the very prototype of
the later-nineteenth-century suburb.
To most of his professional contemporaries, and not least to his
associates on the Board of the Office of Works, Soane and Smirke, Nash
seemed an opportunist and almost a charlatan. He differed as markedly
from the archaeologically-minded Smirke as from Soane, even if he was as
ready to borrow Greek orders from the one as incised detail from the
other. Despite the independent stylistic position of Soane and of Nash,
Britain could hardly have produced a line of archaeologist-architects
from James Stuart to C. R. Cockerell—a line at least as distinguished as
the French line from Leroy to Hittorff—without developing by this time
Greek Revival doctrines quite as rigid and as self-assured as those of
France and Germany. From the end of the second decade of the century the
Grecian mode was, indeed, rather more firmly entrenched in Great Britain
than anywhere on the Continent.
The historical importance of Wilkins’s Downing College at Cambridge has
already been noted. If Wilkins was never able to complete this, so that
it remained but a fragment of an ideal Grecian college, he had greater
opportunities later in London, opportunities which on the whole he
muffed. His University College of 1827-8 in Gower Street impressed
contemporaries because its central temple portico ran to _ten_ columns
in width. It is not otherwise distinguished, and the advancing wings of
the quadrangle are not by him. His St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park
Corner, of the same date, is a much more modest building (Plate 31). Yet
it already shows some of the restlessness, if little of the elaboration,
of later Grecian work on the Continent, such as Klenze’s Hermitage
Museum in Petersburg. The hospital, although the theme of the Choragic
Monument of Thrasyllus is ingeniously exploited, lacks the delicacy and
elegance of Decimus Burton’s Ionic screen of 1825 across the way (Plate
31).
The hospital is, however, rather more original than Burton’s nearby
Constitution Hill Arch, also of 1827-8, now moved back towards the Green
Park. This is one of the two erected in connexion with the new
Buckingham Palace and in conscious rivalry of those Napoleon had set up
in Paris and other Continental cities. The other one, originally forming
the entrance to the court of the palace, is Nash’s Marble Arch of 1828;
that was moved to the corner of Hyde Park where Park Lane meets Oxford
Street in 1851 after the palace was refronted by Blore in the late
forties. Neither arch has the urbanistic value of Benjamin Dean Wyatt’s
Duke of York’s Column or of the Nelson Column, erected in 1839 in
Trafalgar Square by William Railton (1803-77), because of their very
casual siting. Apsley House, as remodelled by B. D. Wyatt for the Duke
of Wellington in 1828, rising too high beside the Burton screen, is not
altogether an addition to the group at Hyde Park Corner.
Wilkins’s largest and most conspicuous work, and the one which ruined
his reputation, is the National Gallery of 1832-8. The long façade of
this, extending across the top of Trafalgar Square, is excessively
episodic and best seen in sharp perspective looking along Pall Mall East
or from the south side of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The order is not
Greek, since the columns of the portico Henry Holland (1745-1806)
erected in front of Carlton House in the early 1790s were re-used, and
the little dome behind the central pediment is almost Byzantine in
character. Comparison of this Picturesque-Classical composition with
Cumberland Terrace is inevitable; the honours are all Nash’s.
If Wilkins made the first Grecian spurt, it was Soane’s pupil Smirke who
held the course. In Trafalgar Square the unified range of buildings
built in 1824-7 on the west side that once housed the Union Club and
later the College of Physicians contrasts most strikingly with Wilkins’s
National Gallery. Heavy, dignified, and immaculately ‘correct’ in its
Greek detailing, this block also shows considerable variety in the
handling of standard Romantic Classical elements without any such
striving for Picturesque effect as the National Gallery. Later additions
on the west have not seriously damaged Smirke’s work.
It is highly typical that the most considerable Grecian edifice of
London should be a museum and library. The British Museum, begun by
Smirke in 1824, was not completed until 1847.[76] Its principal internal
feature, moreover, the domed Reading Room built of cast iron in the
central court (see Chapter 7), was designed and carried out in the mid
fifties by Smirke’s younger brother Sydney (1798-1877). Only the King’s
Library was finished rapidly within the twenties to house the library of
George III. This is dignified and crisp, if somewhat less immaculately
correct than Smirke’s façade in Trafalgar Square.
The characteristic south front of the Museum, one of the most
overwhelming examples of Romantic Classical stylophily, or love of
columns—there are forty-eight of them—was one of the last portions of
the whole to be completed (Plate 33). The great temple portico and the
colonnade that is carried round the inner sides and the ends of the
flanking wings was probably not decided on until the thirties; such a
redundancy of columns seems to belong well into the second quarter of
the century—compare Elmes’s St George’s Hall in Liverpool (Plate 34A) or
Basevi’s Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The façade of Smirke’s General
Post Office of 1824-9, with columns used only at the centre and the
ends, and two ranges of good-sized windows between, was more
characteristic of the usual Romantic Classical balance between columnar
display and rationalistic provision for internal function.
Wilkins and Smirke were not alone in providing Grecian public buildings
for the London of George IV. The London Corn Exchange of 1827-8 by
George Smith (1783-1869) was an excellent example, less heavy than most
of Smirke’s work, less inconsequent than Wilkins’s. Decimus Burton, who
provided various gatehouses at Hyde Park as well as the screen at Hyde
Park Corner in 1825—the modest ones at Prince’s Gate are almost
identical with Schinkel’s tiny Doric temples at the Potsdamer Tor in
Berlin—also provided the finest façade in Waterloo Place when he built
the Athenaeum there in 1829-30. This clubhouse is severe and astylar
externally but grand and sumptuous within to a degree hitherto unknown.
Henry Roberts (1803-76), a Smirke assistant, followed his former master
closely in the design of the Fishmongers’ Hall built in 1831-3. His
great Ionic portico rises as splendidly above the solid substructure
that flanks the Thames as Klenze’s Walhalla does above its stepped
terraces.
Corporate clients that came to the fore in the thirties saw in the
solemn Grecian mode the best means of achieving representational
monumentality in their buildings; moreover, they were increasingly ready
to employ leading architects in order to obtain it. C. R. Cockerell
(1788-1863), the son of S. P. Cockerell, soon to be Soane’s successor as
Architect of the Bank of England, began his distinguished career as a
favourite servant of the financial world by providing the Westminster
Insurance Office in the Strand in 1832 with a range of Doric
half-columns. Five years later, in the London and Westminster Bank in
Lothbury, he attained a still greater effect of dignified restraint,
with no loss of sumptuousness, in an astylar façade of great
originality.
The new railways, whose earliest stations had been very modest indeed,
were as interested as insurance companies and banks in the
representational dignity of Classical frontispieces. At Euston Grove in
London, before what was intended to be a double station planned by the
engineer Robert Stephenson (1803-59)[5^a] in 1835 to serve the London &
Birmingham and the Great Western Railways, there rose from the designs
of Philip Hardwick (1792-1870) the Euston ‘Arch’, a giant Greek Doric
propylaeon; for the Birmingham terminal of the railway at Curzon Street
Hardwick provided a second gateway that is more in the form of a Roman
triumphal arch. This theme John Foster (1786-1846) expanded into a
continuous Roman screen in front of Lime Street Station at Liverpool in
1836. At Huddersfield James P. Pritchett (1789-1868) and his son Charles
fronted the main station block in 1845-9 with a Roman temple portico and
flanked it with minor colonnaded features. The Monkwearmouth station by
John Dobson (1787-1865) of 1848 is similar, but Grecian in its
detailing.
More appropriate to modern eyes was the endless red-brick façade
designed by Francis Thompson for Robert Stephenson’s Trijunct Station in
Derby of 1839-41. This was astylar but had various subtle projections
and recessions of the wall plane and a comparable variety of levels in
the very long skyline. Thompson also, in the stone towers he designed
for Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge of 1845-50, handled his material with
a superbly rational directness (Plate 61). The technical significance of
such structures as examples of the new uses of iron which the railways
encouraged, must be considered later (see Chapter 7). Of comparable
quality to Thompson’s work is the enormous Royal Navy Victualling Yard
at Stonehouse of 1826-35 by the engineer Sir John Rennie
(1794-1874)—able son, like Robert Stephenson, of a more famous engineer
father and also a brother-in-law of C. R. Cockerell. Despite the
severity characteristic of the period, this has an almost Baroque
plasticity and vigour of silhouette rarely achieved by contemporary
architects before the mid-century.
Except for certain large provincial and suburban Nonconformist churches,
the heyday of the temple portico came to an end about 1840. The last
prominent example in London is the Royal Exchange, built by Sir William
Tite (1798-1873) in 1841-4, but there is nothing Classical about other
aspects of this prominent structure. The side, rear, and court façades
are in a sort of Neo-Baroque that prefigures the bombast of the third
quarter of the century (see Chapter 9).
Grecian public monuments were as characteristic of provincial cities in
the twenties and thirties as of London, perhaps more so. Francis Goodwin
(1784-1835)[77] provided Manchester with a handsome town hall in 1822-4,
now long since superseded. In the latter year he lost the competition
for the new Royal Institution there to the young Charles Barry
(1795-1860), hitherto most unsympathetically employed in building cheap
Gothic churches for the Commissioners.[78] This edifice Barry erected
over the years 1827-35. Happily it still stands, serving as the
Manchester Art Gallery, an excellent example of Barry’s command of that
Grecian idiom which his more personal Italianate mode forced into
obsolescence even before this building was finished (see below).
In 1828 Foster began the fine Grecian Custom House in Liverpool,
completely destroyed, alas, in the blitz; while in 1831 Joseph A. Hansom
(1803-82) won the competition for the Birmingham Town Hall with the most
striking British example of the temple paradigm. This characteristic
Romantic Classical edifice, raised on a high rusticated podium, was
slowly executed by Hansom and his partner Edward Welch (1806-68) over
the next fifteen years and more.
The more widespread the use of Greek forms became, the less vitality and
character they seemed to retain. It is not the columnar detail, so much
more correct than that at Regent’s Park, which gives interest to the
terraces—built from the twenties on—that George Basevi (1794-1845)
designed for Belgrave Square in London or to those of slightly later
date designed by Lewis Cubitt (1799-?) and by John Young in Eaton
Square; it is the remarkable scale and extent of this newest urban
development, rivalling that at Regent’s Park, which was undertaken by
the builder Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855), Lewis’s brother, for the
Grosvenor Estate behind the gardens of Buckingham Palace.
So also at Newcastle, where Thomas Grainger (1798-1861), with the
presumptive assistance of Dobson[79] as designer, laid out and built up
a series of streets from 1834 on, it is not the more correctly Greek
orders that make Grey Street a finer piece of urbanism than Nash’s
Regent Street; it is the fine, creamy freestone that replaces London’s
stucco and the skilful organization of the ranges of buildings, all so
much more carefully grouped and related to one another than in Regent
Street, along the curving and rising slope. The Grey Column, built by
John Green (?-1852) in 1837-8, is superbly placed in the best manner of
the period as a focal accent at the top of the development just like the
Duke of York’s Column at the bottom of Lower Regent Street. The cleaning
of many buildings has of late much enhanced the attractiveness of
central Newcastle.
It was not until the early forties that Greek Revival buildings began to
be characterized by contemporaries as ‘insipid’. But Basevi’s façade of
the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, begun in 1837 and carried to
completion with some emendations by C. R. Cockerell in 1847 after
Basevi’s death, well illustrates some of the changes that were already
coming over Romantic Classical design. As at Wilkins’s National Gallery,
the silhouette is elaborately varied—here much more skilfully than in
Trafalgar Square. As with Tite’s Royal Exchange, there is also a most
un-Grecian sort of plastic bombast. The orders are not Grecian but
Roman, moreover, and the spirit is more Roman still, but Roman of the
later Empire in the East, as at Baalbek or Palmyra.
St George’s Hall in Liverpool, the latest of the major Romantic
Classical monuments of England, was finished like the Fitzwilliam by C.
R. Cockerell long after its original designer’s death. It displays much
less bombast and much more true grandeur of scale. The young Harvey
Lonsdale Elmes (1814-49) won two successive competitions, for a Hall and
for Law Courts, in 1839 and 1840 respectively. Then, when it was decided
to combine the two in one structure, he paid a visit to Berlin to study
the work of Schinkel. Schinkelesque, indeed, is the long colonnade
facing Lime Street Station, and even more so the curious square piers,
free-standing in their upper half, that Elmes used elsewhere on the
building (Plate 34A).
The temple portico at the south end is conventional enough, but with its
steps boldly raised above a massively plain foundation wall; the rounded
end to the north is much more original and also rather French in
feeling. French surely, but of the Empire rather than the contemporary
July Monarchy, is the tremendous scale of the whole and the stately
axial planning of the sort to be seen in many Prix de Rome projects of
the preceding fifty years. The great hall is slightly larger than its
prototype in the Baths of Caracalla.[80] As completed by Cockerell in
the early fifties, the interior lost all the Grecian severity of the
exterior. Together with the elegant elliptical concert hall, planned by
Elmes but entirely executed by Cockerell, the great hall belongs to the
next period of architectural development as much by its rich decoration
as by its date.
It was in Scotland, not in England, that the Greek Revival had its
greatest success and lasted longest. There seems to have been some
special congruity of sentiment between Northern Europe in the first half
of the nineteenth century and the ancient world. Edinburgh, which
considered itself for intellectual reasons the ‘Athens of the North’,
set out after 1810 to continue in a more Athenian mode the extension and
embellishment of her New Town begun in the 1760s. The result rivals
Petersburg as well as Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich. Indeed, in
Edinburgh, what was built between 1760 and 1860 provides still the most
extensive example of a Romantic Classical city in the world.
If the architecture of Edinburgh is largely Classical—the most
conspicuous exceptions are the inherited medieval Castle on its rock at
the head of the Old Town and the Walter Scott Monument in Prince’s
Street Gardens—the setting is extremely Picturesque. The fullest scenic
advantage was taken of the castle-crowned hill, above the filled-in and
landscaped North Loch, and of the two heights to the east and the
south-east, Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat. The latter was kept quite
clear of buildings, the former gradually turned into a sort of Scottish
Akropolis. Perhaps fortunately, the largest structure there, the
National Monument, a copy of the Parthenon by C. R. Cockerell and the
local architect W. H. Playfair (1789-1857), was never finished; thus it
appears to be a ruin and adds to the Picturesque effect of this terminus
to the eastward view along Prince’s Street.
Calton Hill is approached, and the view of it framed, by Waterloo Place,
the buildings of which were erected by Archibald Elliott (1763-1823) in
1815-19. This is no unworthy rival of the homonymous square in London,
despite the lack of a central column. The view had to remain open to the
hill beyond, where Playfair’s Observatory was rising in 1814-18 and
later, in 1830, the Choragic Monument by Thomas Hamilton (1785-1858)
dedicated to that very un-Grecian poet Robert Burns, as well as various
other objects of visual interest. In St Andrew’s Square in the New Town,
however, is the Melville Column. This was built by William Burn
(1789-1870) in 1821-2 and based, like the Colonne Vendôme in Paris, on
that of Trajan.
These Scottish architects were perhaps more fortunate than Dobson in the
material available to them; Edinburgh’s Craigleith stone becomes with
time a rather deep grey, but not so black as that in Newcastle when left
uncleaned. Seen in Playfair’s terraces, executed gradually from 1820 to
1860, which run around the base of Calton Hill on the south, east, and
north, the effect may be rather dour; but the dignity and solidity of
these Grecian ranges, rivalled in the contemporary circuses on the
slopes to the north of the eighteenth-century New Town, are undeniably
impressive.
From the completion of his Observatory in 1814 to the completion of the
Scottish National Gallery forty years later Playfair continued to
ornament Edinburgh with Classical (and on occasion with non-Classical)
structures. Looking south along the cross-axis of the new Town, one sees
just beyond Prince’s Street his Royal Scottish Institution begun in
1822, its rather massive Doric bulk happily crowned just after its
completion in 1836 by the seated figure of the young Queen Victoria
(Plate 34B). Behind this lies his Ionic National Gallery of 1850-4,
which is not unworthy of comparison with Smirke’s British Museum begun
more than a quarter of a century earlier. High to the rear, on the
slopes of the Old Town, rise the two towers of the Free Church College,
also by Playfair and begun in 1846, framing with their crisp Tudorish
forms the richer and more graceful spire (sometimes attributed to Pugin)
of Tolbooth St John’s, which was built by James Gillespie Graham in
1843.
Finer than any individual work of Playfair’s, and splendidly sited on
the south side of Calton Hill, is the High School by Thomas Hamilton
(1784-1858). Begun in 1825, this complex Grecian composition shows how
well the lessons of the Athenian Propylaea were learned by Scottish
architects. More original, but still essentially Grecian, is Hamilton’s
Hall of Physicians in Queen Street of 1844-5.
Banking was not far behind State and Church as a patron of monumental
architecture in Scotland. Before the astylar _palazzo_ mode took over
the financial scene, two banks grander than any in London had been
erected in the Edinburgh New Town. The Commercial Bank of Scotland of
1846 in George Street by David Rhind (1808-83), despite its pedimented
portico, is no longer Greek in detail; the British Linen Bank of 1852 in
St Andrew’s Square by David Bryce (1803-76), more plastically Roman
still, has giant detached columns upholding bold entablature blocks, an
idea deriving from C. R. Cockerell’s rejected competition design for the
Royal Exchange in London.
As the earlier mention of Thomson’s churches in Glasgow will have
indicated, the Greek Revival lasted even longer there than in Edinburgh.
But such edifices as the Royal Exchange of 1829-30 by David Hamilton
(1768-1843) or Clarke & Bell’s Municipal and County Buildings of 1844 do
not rival the work of Playfair and of the other Hamilton in the capital;
nor is there in Glasgow much good urbanism of this period. In his
domestic work Thomson remained closer to the conventional norms of the
Greek Revival than in his churches. However, in Moray Place,
Strathbungo, of 1859, where he lived himself, he produced the finest of
all Grecian terraces (Plate 35A) and, still later, in Great Western
Terrace an ampler if less original composition.
In England the Greek Revival was barely established as the dominant mode
in the twenties before it was challenged. Barry, as has been noted
earlier, began his career with the building of cheap Commissioners’
Gothic churches, but his favourite mode was the Renaissance Revival. We
have seen that in Germany the Renaissance Revival may be considered to
begin with Klenze’s Munich work of the mid twenties. Now, in 1827-8,
Barry built the Brunswick Chapel, later St Andrew’s, at Hove in a
_quattrocento_ mode—the exterior, that is, for the modest interior can
hardly be thus characterized, and in its present form includes various
changes since Barry’s time. The façade looks rather nineteenth-century
French to modern eyes; yet comparable French churches, such as Lequeux’s
Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe in Paris, are mostly from five to fifteen
years later (see Chapter 3). Barry doubtless turned to some of the
available French publications on the Italian Renaissance for his detail,
most probably to the _Architecture toscane_ of Grandjean de Montigny and
Famin, but he certainly did not derive the design of his church from
current Continental practice.
Following immediately upon the Brunswick Chapel, Barry built for Thomas
Attree of Brighton a symmetrical Italian Villa, now the Xavierian
College, with an architectural garden setting. This was part of a
scheme, otherwise unexecuted, for surrounding Queen’s Park, east of the
town, with a range of detached houses, some Italianate, some Tudoresque,
in an extensive suburban development of the order of Nash’s only
slightly earlier Park Villages. The intended effect can best be seen in
Decimus Burton’s Calverley Estate at Tunbridge Wells carried out over
the years 1828 to 1852.
Far more important, however, was the fact that Barry in 1829 won with a
_palazzo_ composition the competition for the new Travellers’ Club. This
was built in Pall Mall in the next two years beside the prominent corner
site where Burton’s astylar but still Grecian Athenaeum was rising.
Raphaelesque on the front—although not as derivative from Raphael’s
Pandolfini Palace in Florence as was claimed at the time—but rather
Venetian on the rear, this clubhouse notably eschews the flat barrenness
and the giant orders of the Grecian mode to throw emphasis on the
elegant aedicular treatment of the windows and the bold _cornicione_
which crowns the top (Plate 35B).
Very soon Charles Fowler (1791-1867), who owned the copy of Durand’s
treatise now in the Library of the Royal Institute of British
Architects, was introducing a more utilitarian sort of Italianism in the
Hungerford Market in London of 1831-3, now long gone, and in the Lower
Market at Exeter of 1835-6. There the Durandesque and almost basilican
interiors, destroyed in 1942, contrasted markedly with the Greek Doric
detailing of the façade of his Upper Market of 1837-8.
In 1836 Barry designed a larger edifice of the _palazzo_ type, the
Manchester Athenaeum built in 1837-9. But this was overshadowed in size,
in prominence, and in quality by the new Reform Club next door to the
Travellers’ in Pall Mall; for this he won the competition in 1837, and
it was built in 1838-40 (Plate 35B). Here his model was obviously San
Gallo’s Farnese Palace in Rome. But there are many differences such as
the unaccented entrance, the balustrade which sets the façades back from
the pavement, the simpler and more San Gallesque top storey, the corner
emphasis provided by prominent chimneys, not to speak of the
metal-and-glass roofing of the central court.
Barry’s two Pall Mall clubs provided architectural paradigms much
followed through the forties and well into the third quarter of the
century. Moreover, W. H. Leeds (1786-1866), in the text of a monograph
on the _Travellers’ Club-House_ published in 1839, developed at some
length the arguments for a Renaissance Revival. A little less evidently
than the Continental work of these years in Renaissance modes, but none
the less truly, Barry’s _palazzi_ represent a continuation of Romantic
Classicism. In the block-like unity of the external masses, the
regularity of the fenestration, and the extreme orderliness of the
planning his _palazzo_ mode is at least as characteristic an aspect of
later Romantic Classicism in Great Britain as is the _Rundbogenstil_ on
the Continent.
This is considerably less true of two other directions in which Barry
first turned in the thirties. It would be premature, however, to discuss
here the design with which Barry won the competition for the new Houses
of Parliament in 1836 (Plate 54). As the first major public monument to
be designed anywhere in Gothic this constituted above all an
epoch-making step in the English revolt _against_ Romantic Classicism
(see Chapter 6).
This is not so much the case with Barry’s first and only important essay
in the ‘Jacobethan’ mode—or the Anglo-Italian as he preferred to call
it—the remodelling of Highclere Castle in Hampshire, proposed as early
as 1837 and carried out over the next two decades (Plate 37A). Despite
the Picturesque effect of its towered and bristling silhouette, this
great country house rigidly maintains the quadrangular plan of the
Reform Club and is almost as regular as that in composition, and even
more coldly crisp in its detailing. Much the same can be said of
Mentmore House in Buckinghamshire, built by Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65)
in 1852-4 in a very similar vein but more directly derived from
Smithson’s Elizabethan Wollaton Hall near Nottingham. In general,
however, the extremely popular Jacobethan Revival of these years, even
more than the contemporary revival of the _style François I_ in France,
represents a reaction not merely against the Greek Revival, as does the
_palazzo_ mode, but against the basic disciplines of Romantic Classicism
and was one of the major stylistic vehicles of the later Picturesque.
On the other hand, the utilization of pre-Gothic medieval forms in
England in this period, so closely similar in its result to the
Romanesquoid aspect of the _Rundbogenstil_, seems to have been only
partly Picturesque in intention. From the twenties on a very
considerable number of churches, mostly small, had Norman Romanesque
detail, but usually there was little or no attempt to break away from
the hall-like tradition of the Late Georgian church in their plans.
However, three rather large churches that are early medieval in
inspiration but not Norman in detail deserve particular mention, for
they are among the finest, though not the most historically significant,
built in Britain in the early forties.
St Mary and St Nicholas’s, Wilton, built by T. H. Wyatt (1807-80) and
David Brandon (1813-97) in 1840-6 for Sydney Herbert and his Russian
mother, might almost have risen in the Prussia or the Baden of this
period. However, this Italian Romanesque basilica, with tall, detached
campanile and rich internal polychromy of Cosmati-work brought from
Italy, is rather more archaeological than Persius’s or Hübsch’s churches
in Germany. On the other hand, the so much more original Christ Church
of 1840-2 in Streatham, south of London, by J. W. Wild (1814-92) is so
similar to Prussian work that some knowledge on Wild’s part of
Schinkel’s suburban-church projects of a decade earlier might almost be
assumed (Plate 36). Although the exposed yellow brickwork and the
touches of external brick polychromy are notably premonitory of the next
period, the splendid obelisk-like campanile and the crisp ranges of
clerestory windows, for all their pointed tops, are quite as much within
the range of Romantic Classicism as the German churches that this
recalls. The handling of the galleries of the interior had local
precedent in Soane’s churches of the twenties as well as in Schinkel’s
of the thirties. Although the barrel vaults are presumably only of
plaster, St Jude’s, Bethnal Green, in London, built by Henry Clutton
(1819-93) in 1844-6, has an impressive cruciform interior. The exterior
here is notably Germanic with two thin towers flanking the great
polygonal apse.
But these three churches, for all their individual excellence, are
exceptional in England. They are related to the broad contemporary
current of the Renaissance Revival that Barry had set under way only in
rejecting Grecian sanctions even more completely than he. Barry was
himself too versatile ever quite to repeat the strict _palazzo_ formula
of the Reform Club, although he almost came to that in the British
Embassy in Istanbul of 1845-7. For this he provided sketches as early as
1842 and later emended the plans of the local executant architect, W. J.
Smith. This structure, carrying the Renaissance Revival to, or even
beyond, one edge of the western world as Grandjean de Montigny did to
Rio de Janeiro at the other edge, is considerably larger than the Reform
Club and rather bleak, though splendidly sited and very dignified
indeed. At Bridgewater House in London of 1847-57, however, Barry
enriched the _palazzo_ paradigm quite considerably, not only by the
introduction of a good deal of carved work but also by breaking the
continuity of the garden front towards the Park in order to emphasize
the end bays. This personal compositional device is even more
conspicuous on the river front of his Gothic Houses of Parliament.
It was for clubhouses and business buildings that Renaissance models
were most generally used in England after 1840. For the remodelling of
the Carlton Club in 1847 Sydney Smirke, who had provided the winning
design in a select competition, based himself, not on San Gallo’s
Farnese Palace in sixteenth-century Rome as Barry had done at the Reform
Club next door, but on Sansovino’s Library in sixteenth-century Venice.
Before this was finished in the mid fifties, C. Octavius Parnell
(?-1865) and his partner Alfred Smith had erected across Pall Mall in
1848-51 the Army and Navy Club based on Sansovino’s Palazzo Corner della
Cà Grande. Both are now gone.
But if these architects in London were moving in the late forties
towards an altogether richer and more plastic sort of High Renaissance
design, from which almost all traces of the cold asceticism of Romantic
Classicism had departed, most provincial architects were content to
stick fairly close to the Farnese Palace model of the Reform Club well
down into the sixties. This was most notably true in the design of
edifices for financial institutions. In 1840 George Alexander (?-1884),
who had made his own study of the _cinquecento_ in Italy, designed the
Savings Bank in Bath as a little Reform Club; the next year in the
Brunswick Buildings in Liverpool A. & G. Williams applied the formula to
a much larger block of general offices. Henceforth the mode was solidly
established for almost a generation.
Barry usually gave a characteristically Italian Villa bent to the many
country houses that he remodelled by introducing a tall loggia-topped
tower (used to store water for the more elaborate sanitation now
demanded) placed asymmetrically at one side of the main block. The first
of these was at Trentham Park, near Stoke-on-Trent, where a second later
rose in the stable court; the finest are those at Walton House near
London of 1837 and at Shrubland in Norfolk of 1848-50. In these the
inherited Georgian blocks became subordinate parts of rich
three-dimensional compositions almost like the villas that Schinkel and
Persius built at Potsdam. The rebuilding of Osborne House as a country
retreat for Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight gave Royal sanction to
the Italian Villa mode. Unfortunately she did not employ Barry; the work
was done in 1845-6 and 1847-9 by the builder Thomas Cubitt and the
design was dictated, if not actually prepared, by Prince Albert.
Despite the continued use of Greek forms for certain purposes and in
some areas, the controls of Romantic Classicism were loosening rapidly
in Great Britain in the forties. A real change of style was at hand; but
since certain stylisms, such as the conventional use of Renaissance
forms, tended to continue indefinitely, it is hard to know just where to
draw the line chronologically.
The Geological Museum in Piccadilly in London, built in the late forties
by Pennethorne, Nash’s protégé and his successor at the Office of Works,
was far more successful than the ballroom wing he added in the early
fifties to Buckingham Palace. Even that, however, was a considerable
improvement on the curious façade—more Neo-Baroque than
Neo-Renaissance—with which Edward Blore (1787-1879) masked the front of
Nash’s edifice in 1847. The Museum was more successful precisely because
its exteriors retained the regularity and severity characteristic of
Romantic Classicism. Still later, the Free Trade Hall built by Edward
Walters (1808-72) in Manchester in 1853-6 followed the lusher
Sansovinesque Italianism of Smirke’s Carlton Club, while his many
handsome warehouses there moved ever farther away from the severity of
Barry’s Athenaeum despite their generic _palazzo_ character. Yet the
Corn Exchange in Leeds, erected as late as 1860 by Cuthbert Brodrick
(1825-1905), is still Romantic Classical in the cool regularity of its
diamond-rusticated walls broken only by ranges of plain arches (Plate
37B).
There can be little question, however, that his Town Hall in Leeds of
1855-9, despite the reiterative grandeur of its giant colonnades and the
evident derivation of its principal interior from St George’s Hall in
Liverpool, is in English terms definitely ‘High Victorian’ (Plate 78A).
If the Corn Exchange can hardly be considered typically Early Victorian
in character, and in any case is some ten years too late in date, it
might almost be called _Louis Philippe_, so close is it to some French
work of the 40s.
Run-of-the-mill English railway stations of the forties, mostly designed
by engineers and minor architects, clearly rank in their dullness with
the most utilitarian French work of that decade. They indicate to what
depths of conventionality late Romantic Classicism in England had sunk
by this time. Yet Lewis Cubitt’s long-demolished Bricklayers’ Arms
Station in London of 1842-4, with its entrance screen compounded of
rustic Italian elements derived from the books of Charles Parker,[81]
seems to have had considerable plastic interest. Moreover, the great
plain arches at the front of his King’s Cross Station of 1850-2 (Plate
66A) remain to signalize to every traveller a masterpiece of the period
more than worthy of comparison with Duquesney’s somewhat earlier Gare de
l’Est in Paris (Plate 22B).
On the whole, however, for all that King’s Cross is one of the major
late monuments of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism, it is
better to consider railway stations in relation to their sheds of iron
and glass, technically, that is, rather than stylistically (see Chapter
7). They illustrate especially well something which the stylistic
preoccupations of the first half of the nineteenth century tended to
mask from most contemporaries, the success with which new functional
needs were satisfied in this period by the bold use of new materials and
new types of construction.
Yet the most characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism in Europe
after those prime urbanistic symbols of Napoleonic or counter-Napoleonic
triumph, the arches, the columns, and the obelisks that rose in all the
great cities from Petersburg to Madrid, are the museums and libraries,
starting with Soane’s Dulwich Gallery, begun in 1811, and ending with
Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, opened in 1850. These are
useful, yes; moreover, they serve what were effectively new purposes,
purposes closely related to the rising ideal of providing cultural
opportunities for the general public. On the whole, however, they could
be carried out—and so they usually were down to Labrouste’s library—with
established methods of construction; while their cultural
significance—and in the case of the sculpture galleries from Klenze’s
Glyptothek, begun in 1816, to Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum, opened in
1848, their very contents—seemed to justify, if not indeed to demand,
the use of Greek or Roman forms.
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CHAPTER 5
THE NEW WORLD
IN varying degree Romantic Classicism left its mark on all the major
cities of Europe. Paris without the Napoleonic monuments that Louis
Philippe brought to completion is inconceivable, while Karlsruhe,
Munich, Petersburg, and Edinburgh owe most of their architectural
interest to this period.
In the New World, where the independence of the principal colonies of
the European nations, British, Spanish, and Portuguese, was generally
established in this period or just before it, one might expect that
Romantic Classicism would have made a still more conspicuous
contribution to the architectural scene. Yet the very youth of most of
the countries of the New World, settled though many of them had been in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also the strong cultural
links that they still maintained with the ancient traditions of their
several homelands, tended to hold them back from entering fully into the
new international movement of the day in architecture. What national
libraries, moreover, were yet needed in Venezuela or Colombia, what
sculpture galleries in the American Middle West? Columns and obelisks,
if not triumphal arches, rose—frequently very belatedly—to celebrate
national heroes of the various wars of independence; but outside the
eastern United States the still very simple organization of society and
the primitive means of transport required neither the institutional
edifices of France—markets, hospitals, and prisons—nor the new railway
stations of England.[82]
Yet in the United States, and not alone along the eastern seaboard, the
period of Romantic Classicism left a very rich architectural deposit.
The monuments of real distinction range all the way from such a church
as Latrobe’s Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore (Plate 5), one of the very
finest ecclesiastical edifices of the first half of the century to be
seen anywhere, to Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia
of 1823-35, the first to be planned on the radial cellular system
(Figure 11). Studied and published by the English penologist William
Crawford as well as by Demetz and Blouet,[83] this provided a new
functional concept for penal architecture influential abroad from the
time that Gilbert projected his Nouvelle Force Prison in the late
thirties. Haviland’s prison was Castellated like Lebas’s Petite
Roquette, not Grecian in detail; his New York prison of 1836-8, however,
was Egyptian in detail, to which it owed its curious nickname, ‘The
Tombs’. That both Latrobe and Haviland were English-born and
English-trained is certainly significant; the latter, who was a cousin
of the painter Haydon and a pupil of H. L. Elmes’s father James
(1782-1862), had first tried his luck in Petersburg.
The characteristic and almost universal use of Grecian forms in domestic
building, however, in many parts of the country continuing down to the
Civil War of 1861-5, was the result of no foreign influence. Moreover,
the Grecian details were not drawn by most architects and builders from
the great basic treatise of Stuart and Revett, available in America only
to a very few, but at second hand from the local Builders’ Guides[84]
prepared by Haviland in Philadelphia, Asher Benjamin (1773-1845) in
Boston, Minard Lafever (1798-1854) in New York, and various others. Such
authors consciously Americanized what they borrowed from European
sources in order to adapt Classical masonry forms to the ubiquitous
wooden construction of the American countryside.
There are two levels of Romantic Classicism in America. Work of the
upper professional level is found chiefly in the big eastern cities
where architects operated who were either themselves foreign-born and
foreign-trained or else pupils and emulators of such. The lower
vernacular level is more conspicuous in America than in Europe because
it includes a much greater proportion of building production than in
older countries, where so many structures of earlier periods remain
extant. ‘Carpenter’s Grecian’, so to call it, represents the perhaps
naïve, but culturally significant, determination of all who built to
exploit, in some degree at least, the modern style of their day.
The frontiersman in the Oregon of 1850 when raising a tavern in the
Willamette Valley thus shared with the new and old royalties of Europe
the satisfaction of architectural patronage. Moreover, like so many
English gentlemen of the eighteenth century or such a nineteenth-century
prince as Frederick William IV, he often took a hand at design himself.
In this he was assisted by memories of the relatively settled towns he
had left behind in the Middle West, themselves largely products of this
period architecturally, and also by the Builders’ Guides issuing from
the east in recurrent editions.
It was not alone the transient patronage of a Corsican soldier, for a
few brief years heir to Louis XIV and overlord of Europe, nor the
Building Committee of an autocrat on the banks of the Neva controlling
all public and private architecture in an Imperial capital for a quarter
of a century, that really established Romantic Classicism as the last
universal style before that of our own day. It is the fact that Boston
architects and builders, when Quincy granite (that most perfect of
Romantic Classical building materials) became readily available in the
mid twenties, arrived at a rational sort of trabeated design as
distinguished as Schinkel’s; while three thousand miles to the west, and
a quarter of a century later, amateur builders working in wood produced
almost the same sort of ‘pilastrades’, simplified well beyond the
Americanized paradigms of Greek antae they found in the plates of Asher
Benjamin’s books, as Schinkel had in Berlin.
The Grecian writ ran far south to Buenos Aires in Latin America, where
the broad portico of the cathedral, designed by the French engineer
Prosper Catelin and built in 1822, follows closely Grand Prix designs of
the 1790s; and deep into the Antipodes as well where Australia moved
like the United States into nationhood and into the Greek Revival at
much the same time, but at a slower pace and with less sophistication.
Washington, as the greatest fiat city of the period, might well have
been, rather than Edinburgh, the Romantic Classical city _par
excellence_. Even so, as it was laid out by a French engineer in the
1790s the prototype of its plan was not the Baroque city but the French
hunting park. And L’Enfant envisaged for it no walled-in streets and
squares but rather the isolated block-like structures that once stood
around his ‘circles’ as some still stand around Fischer’s Karolinenplatz
in Munich. In Washington, moreover, from 1803 when Jefferson made him
Surveyor of Public Buildings until 1817, Latrobe generally had his
headquarters; there his pupil Mills became Government Architect and
Engineer in 1836, retaining the post until 1851.
[Illustration:
Figure 11. John Haviland: Philadelphia, Eastern Penitentiary, 1823-35,
plan
]
The great monuments of the thirties still stand in Washington, mostly
designed by Mills himself at the peak of his career. But at the Capitol
(Plate 82A), rising at the head of the main axis of the city, the
Romantic Classical elements of the edifice completed in 1827 by Bulfinch
are now all but invisible between and below the wings and the dome added
after 1851 by Thomas U. Walter (1804-87). Hoban’s White House, moreover,
on the cross axis, remains, despite its restoration by Latrobe after the
War of 1812 and two twentieth-century campaigns of enlargement and
reconstruction, a quite Anglo-Palladian—indeed, almost Gibbsian—work.
These focal edifices largely belie the Romantic Classical ideals so
boldly epitomized in the tallest of all nineteenth-century obelisks,
Mills’s Washington Monument. This was designed in 1833, begun in 1848,
and not completed until 1884, when T. L. Casey, an Army engineer,
sharpened the pitch of the pyramidon and crowned it with solid
aluminium.
Immediately beside the White House, however, the Grecian granite of
Mills’s Treasury (Plate 38A), worthy of Playfair if not of Schinkel, is
overshadowed by the former State, War and Navy Department Building with
its tremendous Second Empire plasticity (Plate 82B). Begun in 1836, when
Mills received his official appointment, the Treasury was largely
completed by 1842; the west wing was added by Isaiah Rogers (1800-69) in
1862-5 following the original design.
Mills’s career got under way decades before he was called to Washington
(see Chapter 1). Churches in Philadelphia, Richmond, and Baltimore
occupied him first, of which the most notable is the octagonal
Monumental Church in Richmond begun in 1812. This is an austere
structure with a strongly geometrical organization of the elements, but
much less suave and refined than Latrobe’s Baltimore Cathedral.
Polygonal planning also gives original character to his Insane Asylum of
1821-5 in Columbia, S.C.; but this has, at the front, a giant Greek
Doric portico such as was just becoming even more conventional in
America than in Europe at this time.
In an age so monumentally-minded it was a much earlier work, for which
Mills won the competition in 1814, the monument erected in honour of
Washington at Baltimore in 1815-29, that first made his national
reputation. This was the first giant column to be erected in the New
World. Superbly placed on a square podium of almost Egyptian severity at
the centre of cruciform Mt Vernon Place, this Doric shaft is one of the
most effective of the many that this period produced, even if it lacks
the megalomaniac scale of his later obelisk in Washington. Mills claimed
credit also for proposing the obelisk form for the Bunker Hill
Monument[85] which Solomon Willard (1783-1861) erected in Charlestown,
Mass., in 1825-43.
In Washington Mills’s Government buildings include, besides the Treasury
and the Monument, the Patent Office and the old Post Office Department,
both begun in 1839. These are sober masonry edifices of wholly fireproof
construction incorporating much vaulting. They are dominated by Grecian
porticoes, like the Treasury, but without that more conspicuously sited
structure’s peristyles along the sides. Mills’s smaller custom houses in
various seaboard towns are simple and massive blocks of granite ashlar,
the best preserved today being that in New London, Conn. These provided
worthy symbols of Federal authority among the slighter edifices of wood
and brick that filled the seaports of this period. Like Latrobe, Mills
was as much engineer as architect, which helps to explain his
preoccupation with fireproof construction; moreover, lighthouses and
waterworks figured prominently in his total production.[86]
Mills, more than anyone else, set the high standard of design and
construction for Federal buildings that was fortunately maintained by
his successors until after the Civil War. These were Ammi B. Young
(1800-74), who took over the Government post[87] in 1852, and Rogers,
who followed him ten years later in 1862. In remote San Francisco the
Grecian rule in Federal architecture continued very late, as the U.S.
Mint there of 1869-74 rather surprisingly indicates. This was possibly
designed by Rogers just before his death even though A. B. Mullet had
succeeded him in office in 1865.
Related to the Romantic Classicism of Washington is certain Virginia
work. Arlington House, as remodelled by the English-born and
English-trained Hadfield, rises just across the Potomac River on a high
hill-crest; by its tremendously overscaled Paestum-like temple portico,
added in 1826 to give grandeur to a modest earlier mansion, this
provides a more monumental note in the Washington scene than anything of
this period inside the city except Mills’s obelisk and his Treasury.
Just outside Charlottesville, Jefferson, after his retirement from the
Presidency, devoted himself architecturally as well as educationally
from 1817 until his death to the organization of the University of
Virginia and the construction of its buildings. The layout, with
pavilions for the various professors’ use linked by porticoed galleries
behind which the students’ rooms are placed, culminated at the upper end
in the Library and was originally open[88] to the view at the bottom
(Figure 12). Although most of the pavilions reflect earlier stages of
Romantic Classicism—if not usually the Anglo-Palladian with which
Jefferson’s architectural career had begun half a century earlier—this
is a more remarkable entity than his Virginia Capitol. Perhaps it has a
lesser general historical importance, yet it is certainly not without
special significance for America. This is most notably true of one of
the pavilions whose design was suggested to Jefferson by Latrobe in
1819. Here for the first time a modern American dwelling, and one of
quite modest size—for these pavilions were used as houses for the
professors as well as providing classrooms on the ground storey—was
encased within the shell of a prostyle Greek temple. Moreover, Jefferson
accomplished this rather more successfully than Beaumont in France in
the late eighteenth century at the Temple de Silence, or Wilkins in
England at Grange Park in 1809.
Not the least successful among the innumerable imitations of the Roman
Pantheon, the building which originally served as the Library of the
University, built in 1822-6, dominated the two ranges of
colonnade-linked pavilions (Plate 38B). Here more drastically than by
Wilkins at Downing College or Ramée at Union, the earlier Anglo-Saxon
patterns of educational architecture were reconstituted in Romantic
Classical guise, yet the University of Virginia did not have a very
considerable influence, then or later. The central group at Amherst
College in Massachusetts—two dormitories of 1821 and 1822 and a chapel
between of 1827—offers a modest group of quite different but equally
notable quality on a splendid hill-crest site (Plate 45). At other
colleges only individual structures usually survive from this period.
The temple house, initiated by Jefferson and Latrobe, had a tremendous
success with builders in the thirties and forties, particularly in the
new territories west of the Alleghenies. But the finest and most
paradigmatic came rather earlier and were architect-designed. Ithiel
Town (1784-1844), for example, built the Bowers House in Northampton,
Mass., in 1825-6 with an Ionic portico on the main block and fronted the
lower side wings with antae. The big Corinthian Russell house, a pure
temple with no side wings—the present wing was added later—rose in
Middletown, Conn., to the design of his partner, A. J. Davis (1803-92),
in 1828.
From such a ‘Parthenon’ as Berry Hill in Virginia, built by its owner
James Coles Bruce in 1835-40, which is flanked by two lodges also of
temple form, to innumerable more modest houses in the older towns of
Ohio and Michigan, the roster of such edifices is infinitely extensive.
It is also surprisingly varied in scale and in the materials used—most,
but not all, are of white-painted wood—as also in the handling of the
dominating columnar porticoes. In the South, for example, the
characteristic plantation houses of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and
Mississippi are peripteral but unpedimented, with external galleries
splitting the height of the giant columns. Natchez in Mississippi has
several fine examples; in Louisiana, Greenwood near St Francisville of
about 1830 may be specifically mentioned, and also Oak Alley of 1836 at
Vacherie near New Orleans.
The most ambitious Grecian houses of the Deep South are often very late
in date, and architects were rarely employed to design them. Moreover,
Greek detail was adopted in the South only very slowly and rarely used
with the correctness of the Northern builders, who leaned so heavily on
the plates of the orders in the books of Benjamin and others. Belle
Meade, near Nashville, of 1853, being by the distinguished Philadelphia
architect Strickland, is something of an exception in several ways; it
had, for example, a fine portico of square antae executed in white
marble that was almost Schinkelesque. Vast Belle Grove at White Castle,
Louisiana, built by Henry Howard in 1857, was probably more effective in
the romantically ruinous state in which it existed for many years before
its final destruction than in its pristine condition, so confusedly
eclectic was the general composition, with Italianate as well as
Classical elements quite casually mixed.
Unpedimented porticoes are not unknown in the North, both east and west
of the Alleghenies, as in the Levi Lincoln house of 1836 (once in
Worcester, Mass., now moved to nearby Sturbridge) by Elias Carter
(1781-1864) with its convex-fluted Doric order. Such original touches,
which many carpenters introduced out of plain ignorance and more
sophisticated architects developed out of a conscious desire to
nationalize and personalize even such absolute paradigms as those of the
Greek orders, often lend variety and piquancy to the mode. The finest
Grecian houses, such as Elmhyrst at One Mile Corner, Newport, R.I.,
built probably by Russell Warren (1783-1860) about 1833, certainly owe
their originality to the studied intentions of architects. This house,
in particular, has a façade composed in overlapping planes that is not
unworthy of Cockerell (Plate 42B). On the other hand, the Hermitage near
Savannah, Georgia, designed by Charles B. Cluskey _c._ 1830, could
almost be by Schinkel, so simple and pure is its design.
Trained architects, on the whole, were too rationalistic or too
adventurous to follow closely the plain temple model in domestic or
institutional work. Walter presumably surrounded Andalusia, the home of
the philhellene banker Nicholas Biddle outside Philadelphia, with a
Doric temple-shell in 1833 only against his own better judgement. In
1833-47 he also built for Girard College in Philadelphia, of which
Biddle was the trustee who called the tune, an enormous Corinthian
temple. Inside this he incorporated a variety of educational functions
only with considerable difficulty, but he vaulted all the interiors in
the manner of Latrobe and Mills in order to provide a completely
fireproof structure.[89] Curiously enough, this was one of the first
American buildings to be published abroad,[90] thus rivalling Haviland’s
prison, but it attracted no emulators in Europe. By the thirties, of
course, these buildings by Walter were no novelties in Philadelphia.
[Illustration:
Figure 12. Thomas Jefferson: Charlottesville, Va., University of
Virginia, 1817-26, plan.
]
Philadelphia, the former colonial metropolis and briefly the national
capital, was much more than Washington the cultural centre of the
country in the early decades of the century. Here Latrobe had had his
start, significantly with a bank in the form of an Ionic temple. Now in
1818 Strickland,[91] a native-born American and quite untravelled, won
in competition the commission for building the Branch Bank of the United
States with a much more archaeologically correct temple. Like various
European and British public monuments of the period, but unlike any bank
abroad, this is a marble Parthenon. But the various needs of the banking
business were skilfully provided for inside, and the principal
barrel-vaulted interior is very fine indeed. Built in 1819-24, this bank
(later a Custom House) rivals the Bavarian Walhalla and the Scottish
National Monument, though lacking their splendid hill-top sites. It was
just the thing to establish Strickland’s national reputation. But his
Merchants’ Exchange in Philadelphia of 1832-4, with a rounded end and a
trabeated ground storey, provides more interesting and impressive
evidence of his talent, perhaps the greatest of the generation following
Latrobe in America (Plate 40).
Strickland’s latest major work, the State Capitol in Nashville,
Tennessee, of 1845-9, still a temple but with various accretions, has
the high site his bank lacked, but it suffers otherwise from the general
deterioration of the sense of Grecian style after the mid thirties, a
deterioration quite as evident in American architecture as in European.
This Tennessee temple was the last but one of a series of state capitols
that followed the model of Jefferson’s at Richmond, Virginia, rather
than Bulfinch’s dome-crowned Boston State House or the national Capitol
in Washington. The first example that was correctly Greek in detail
seems to have been that for Connecticut in New Haven; it was built by
Town and his partner Davis in 1827-31, and has long since been
demolished. However, that designed by Gideon Shryock (1802-80) in
Frankfort, Kentucky, was going up at about the same time.
In 1831-5 Davis built a larger and grander Greek Doric temple (no longer
extant) as a Capitol for Indiana at Indianapolis, but provided it with a
small central dome. The latest of all the temples built to serve as
state capitols was a very modest one of 1849 at Benicia, California,
where the columnar portico was reduced to two Doric columns _in
antis_—it is worth noting that this was erected in the very year that
Sutter’s gold strike first put California on the map of the world.
Other state capitols of this period are Grecian but not of temple form;
a good example is that Town & Davis built at Raleigh, North Carolina,
which was begun in 1833. The finest of all is that for Ohio at
Columbus,[92] begun in 1839-40 and carried to completion over the years
1848-61. Here the giant ‘pilastrade’, for which columns are substituted
in the central third of the front, has a Schinkel-like directness and
severity (Plate 39A). Not so happy is the flat-topped central lantern,
which is also surrounded by a pilastrade. In conscientious pursuit of
trabeated consistency the architects thus sought to mask the rounded
shape of the dome within, as had been tried in various French projects
of the late eighteenth century and by Schinkel in the Altes Museum
already.
After Philadelphia, Boston was the architectural metropolis of this
period; and from Boston, beginning in 1827, issued the later treatises
of Benjamin purveying the Grecian orders to carpenters and builders all
over the North and the Middle West. Here Bulfinch, however, established
as the leading architect in the 1790s, long remained faithful to the
ideals of Chambers and Adam (see Chapter 1).
At University Hall, built for Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., in
1813-15, Bulfinch used granite for the ashlar of the walls as he had
done for his Boston City Hall of 1810, but the white-painted wooden trim
is not yet Grecian. The Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, also
of granite, was designed by him in 1816-17, just before he left for
Washington to take over from Latrobe supervision of the construction of
the Capitol. The hospital building (now known as the Bulfinch Pavilion)
as executed by Alexander Parris (1780-1852) in 1818-20 is certainly a
mature Romantic Classical edifice if not a typically Grecian one. Above
the plain pediment of the central portico a square attic with corner
chimneys supports the saucer dome, and the long side wings with three
ranges of unframed windows display the fine granite ashlar of Boston in
all its cold pride. Compared to Latrobe, however, Bulfinch remained a
provincial if not a colonial designer, high as is the intrinsic quality
of his best work.
A younger generation, hitherto much influenced by Bulfinch’s established
manner, took over leadership in Boston on his departure for Washington.
Parris soon provided the first Greek temple in conservative New England
when he built St Paul’s Church (now the Anglican Cathedral) in Tremont
Street in 1819-21. Where Strickland’s contemporary Philadelphia bank was
Doric and of marble, this is Ionic with the portico executed in the
Acquia Creek sandstone from Virginia which was then being used so much
in Washington. Solomon Willard carved the capitals. Parris’s Stone
Temple of 1828, the Unitarian ‘Church of the Presidents’—the two Adams
presidents—in Quincy, Mass., is not at all a temple in form but more
comparable to the Grecian churches built in England in this decade. The
Stone Temple outranks most of them in dignity, however, because of the
superbly appropriate local material of which it is built. It was from
this town that the Quincy granite came that was employed for the best
Boston buildings of the next thirty years and more, and this church was
a relatively early instance of its monumental use. Quincy granite had
become more readily available after the first American railway was built
from the quarries to the seashore by Willard solely to facilitate
bringing it out by water.[93]
The first notable use of this granite away from Quincy had been for the
Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Mass., built by Willard in 1825-43.
Not only Mills, as has been mentioned, but the sculptor Horatio
Greenough[94] and also Parris claimed, and perhaps deserve, some credit
for the particular form of this simple but grandiose obelisk, which
rivalled those of the Old World a decade before Mills’s in Washington
was designed. On its completion, a steam-operated lift or elevator was
provided in 1844 capable of carrying six people; this was one of the
earliest examples of an important technical device that would later
influence architecture profoundly (see Chapter 14).
Granite imposed rigid restrictions on detailing. But the new generation
knew how to make of those restrictions an opportunity for developing a
highly original sort of basic classicism such as even the most
determined European rationalists rarely approached. The houses at 39-40
Beacon Street in Boston, now occupied by the Women’s City Club, and the
David Sears house at No. 42, now the Somerset Club (Plate 43B)—the
latter by Parris and of 1816, the former probably by him and of 1818—as
also the granite terrace at Nos. 70-75, probably by Benjamin, are good
examples of domestic work of this period. More important is Parris’s
Quincy (properly Faneuil Hall) Market in Boston, designed in 1823 for
Mayor Joseph Quincy as the central feature of a considerable urbanistic
development on the site of earlier docks. This domed and porticoed
structure lacks the geometrical severity of the Sears house with its
great bow on the front and its superbly placed scroll panel; but in the
Market House Parris not only used cast iron for the internal supports
but also experimented on the exterior with a trabeated framework of
monolithic granite piers and lintels. The same sort of ‘granite
skeleton’ construction (so to call it) was also used but with greater
delicacy of proportion and elegance of finish—note the Soanic incised
detail of the wooden window-frames—for the commercial buildings[95]
which Parris designed and that various lessees shortly built along the
streets that flank the Market House to the north and the south (Plate
112B). This was one of the major structural innovations of the period
(see Chapter 14).
Within a few years other Boston architects and builders were currently
using this sort of construction, and it soon spread to several New
England cities. However, more typical of the urban ambition of the
twenties and thirties than the destroyed block of 1824 in Providence by
J. H. Green (1777-1850), which followed line for line Parris’s
commercial work, are two other buildings there. The Providence Arcade of
1828 by Warren has not one, but two terminal porticoes of Ionic columns
executed in granite and also a fine interior consisting of raised side
galleries under an iron-and-glass roof. Few extant galleries of this
decade in Europe are as notable in scale and in finish. The Washington
Buildings of 1843 by James C. Bucklin (1801-90), who had assisted Warren
on the Arcade, had a plain range of three storeys of window-pierced
red-brick wall above a trabeated granite ground storey, the whole
dominated by a central pedimented feature (Plate 39B). This was a
commercial project as grand as any in contemporary Europe in scale, in
materials, and in finish, although without the originality of the
trabeated all-granite bow-front of Rogers’s contemporary Brazier’s
Buildings on State Street in Boston. Yet Bucklin’s Westminster
Presbyterian Church in Providence of 1846 is a straight Greek Ionic
temple like so many other non-Anglican edifices of this period in
England and America.
Where Romantic Classicism, and more specifically the Greek Revival,
found its noblest opportunities in Europe in public monuments, in
America after the days of Latrobe it was rather commercial,
institutional, and even industrial[96] commissions that stimulated
architects and builders to original achievement, while public work grew
more and more conventional. For instance, the Lippitt Woollen Mill of
1836 in Woonsocket, R.I., and the Governor Harris Manufactory at Harris,
R.I., dating from as late as 1851 can both be properly described as ‘in
the Grecian vernacular’. They are most admirably proportioned and very
soundly built, with walls of random ashlar masonry and boldly scaled
wooden trim, very plain, yet of generically Greek character. The
discipline of Romantic Classicism accorded well with the requirements of
industrial building; not until the present century would factories of
comparable architectural quality be built. Moreover, they were often
complemented by consonant low-cost housing, as in the extant mill
village at White Rock, R.I., of 1849.
No European public edifice has a grander Greek Doric portico than that
which dominates the tremendous four-storey front block of the Lunatic
Asylum in Utica, N.Y., of 1837-43, designed by no architect, according
to the records, but by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, William
Clarke (Plate 46). Still later, in 1850, after the Grecian mode was
_passé_ with most architects if not with the general public, Davis built
in the Renaissance Revival mode that he called ‘Tuscan’ the Insane
Asylum at Raleigh, North Carolina; this is distinguished by his
characteristic arrangement of the windows in tall vertical bands. Such
American institutions are not at all unworthy of comparison with the
best French productions of the period by Gilbert and others, although
generally of rather smaller size (Plate 20).
[Illustration:
Figure 13. Isaiah Rogers: Boston, Tremont House, 1828-9, plan
]
Hotels in Europe had not as yet received much architectural elaboration,
nor did they in general before the mid century. Such English hotels of
Grecian pretension as the Queen’s by W. C. and R. Jearrad at Cheltenham,
which opened in 1837, or the Great Western in Bristol by R. S. Pope
(1781-?), opened two years later, are rather exceptional, being located
at spas, and in any case a decade later in date than the first notable
American example. It was in Boston, at the Tremont House built in
1828-9, a Grecian granite structure of dignified grandeur externally
(Plate 41) and of considerable functional elaboration internally (Figure
13), that Rogers and his clients consciously initiated a new standard of
hotel design. For thirty years Rogers himself, in various hotels from
New Orleans—the St Charles—to Cincinnati—the Burnet House—all long ago
demolished, personally maintained and, at least in terms of functional
organization, continued to raise that standard. Not for nothing did the
big new London hotels of a generation later label their bars and their
barber-shops ‘American’.
In 1832 Rogers began the Astor House in New York; when completed in 1836
this already outranked the Tremont House in every way. Not least
extraordinary must have been the elaborately fan-vaulted hall. This
reflected that eclectic interest in Gothic of which Rogers’s wooden
Unitarian Church of 1833 in Cambridge, Mass., provides extant evidence.
The last hotel that he built was the Maxwell House in Nashville,
Tennessee, of 1854-60.
Rogers’s pre-eminence at hotel design was signalized from the first by
the publication in 1830 of a monograph on the Tremont House;[97] thus
the hotel joined the prison as a type of building in which American
influence became important internationally. But Rogers’s practice was by
no means confined to hotels; among other things he gave both Boston and
New York their Merchants Exchanges long before he became Supervising
Architect in Washington. The colonnade of the latter, a little like that
of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, still survives at the base of McKim, Mead &
White’s First National City Bank in Wall Street to illustrate Rogers’s
high competence at handling a standard Romantic Classical theme.
Resort hotels repeated the same Grecian themes in wood, their columns
being often much attenuated in order to rise three and four storeys
above the circumambient verandas. However, an early example, the first
Ocean House of 1841 at Newport, R.I., had a colonnade only two storeys
tall set against the main four-storey block. On the Atlantic House there
of 1844 the fourth storey occupied the broad Greek entablature
surrounding the entire main block, but the front portico of elongated
Ionic columns was only hexastyle. Both were burnt many years ago, but
later examples of inferior quality remain in several forgotten spas and
mountain resorts of the period, particularly in New York State.
New York City was drawing architectural talent in these years from other
cities. Before Rogers moved there from Boston in 1834, mid way in the
Astor House campaign, Town & Davis had arrived from Connecticut. Davis’s
Sub-Treasury in Wall Street begun in 1834,[98] however, is rather less
successful than the earlier New England houses of similar temple form
that he and Town had designed. Davis was himself more notably a
protagonist of the Picturesque, despite all the very large and prominent
Grecian buildings for which he was responsible (see Chapter 6). Yet his
Colonnade Row in Lafayette Street of 1832, a terrace all of freestone
with a free-standing giant Corinthian colonnade, equals in grandeur
anything of the period that London or Edinburgh have to offer (Plate
42A). More typical of New York in this period than Colonnade Row, and of
uncertain authorship, is the terrace of red-brick Grecian houses built
on the north side of Washington Square in the thirties, of which a few
have survived on sufferance the vandalous encroachments of New York
University.
Some of the finest Greek houses are by provincial architects. One such
is stone-built Hyde Hall in Cooperstown, N.Y., very crisp and severe as
it was remodelled in 1833 by Philip Hooker (1766-1836) of Albany, who
had built it originally in 1811. Still others are of uncertain
authorship, notably the Alsop house of 1838 in Middletown, Conn. This is
a symmetrical Grecian villa almost worthy of Schinkel’s Potsdam, with
very fine murals on the exterior as well as inside. The Alsop house (now
the Davison Art Centre of Wesleyan University) was probably designed by
a relative of the family who had access to the resources of the Town &
Davis office; however, the painters employed were Italian or German. The
Wooster-Boalt house of 1848 in Norwalk, Ohio, indicates the late
continuance of real restraint and sophistication of design in the Middle
West, something already lost in the sumptuous mansions of New Orleans
and the Deep South. But many Middle Western houses illustrate rather the
surprising elasticity of Carpenters’ Grecian.
A mode that approaches the German _Rundbogenstil_—indeed, in the work of
such foreign-trained architects as the Prague-born Leopold Eidlitz
(1823-1908) relatively authentic examples of that mode—was not uncommon
in the America of the mid century.[99] The Astor Library in Lafayette
Street opposite Colonnade Row, built by A. Saelzer in 1849, was a good
example. Less successful was Appleton Chapel at Harvard College in
Cambridge, Mass., by Paul Schulze (1827-97), who sent over the drawings
from Germany, and later settled in America. Begun in 1856, this was a
very reduced version of Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche in Munich with only one
tower. However, the largest and finest example was by a precocious
student at Brown University, Thomas A. Tefft (1826-59).[100] This was
the Union Station in Providence, begun in 1848 and gradually carried out
by Bucklin and his partner Talman (Plate 44). This station rivalled in
extent and in the distinction and ingenuity of its rather Lombardic
Romanesque detailing, simply executed with ordinary red brick, the
German ones by Eisenlohr and Bürklein in Baden and Bavaria; without much
question it was the finest early station in the New World. Tefft also
designed various New England churches of somewhat similar character, all
dominated by very tall and simple spires. However, his churches in the
East are outrivalled by such a Middle Western example as the Union
Methodist in St Louis, built by George I. Barnett (1815-98) in 1852-4.
Tefft’s best works, other than the station, are not _Rundbogenstil_ but
Barryesque; such is the brownstone Tully-Bowen house on Benefit Street
in Providence of 1852-3, for example. Others were building as fine ones
there, however. The consistent use of brownstone and red brick well
illustrates the sharp reaction that had set in by his time against the
pale tones and untextured surfaces of the Greek Revival.
The towered Italian Villa[101] was introduced by John Notman (1810-65)
in Bishop George W. Doane’s house at Burlington, NJ., in 1837 and soon
actively propagandized by A. J. Downing (1815-52) in his influential
books (see Chapters 6 and 15). Indeed, the Barryesque Renaissance mode
was also probably first introduced by the Scottish-born Notman at the
Philadelphia Atheneum[102] built in 1845-7 (Plate 47A). These
non-Grecian, yet still basically Romantic Classical, modes were in
relatively common use by 1850, though not very much earlier. Young, for
example, who had made his reputation with the saucer-domed but otherwise
Greek Custom House[103] that he built in Boston in 1837-47, substituted
a somewhat Barryesque manner for Mills’s Grecian as the current mode for
Federal buildings[104] when he became Supervising Architect in 1853. But
neither Notman nor Young was a Barry—nor even as competent at such
design as the youthful Tefft—and the most notable result of the waning
of the Greek Revival in the forties, in the East at any rate—it waned
much more slowly in the South and West—was the rise of a rather
considerable variety of Picturesque modes of suburban-house design, of
which the Italianate was only one (see Chapters 6 and 15). In cities,
the shift from the characteristic granite or, more usually, hard red
brick with white trim to the chocolate tones of brownstone, used alone
or with brick, is much more indicative of a general change of taste than
any widespread exploitation of Renaissance forms.
A fine relatively early Italian Villa such as the Stebbins house of 1849
on Crescent St, off Maple St, in Springfield, Mass., by Henry A. Sykes
belongs to the realm of Romantic Classicism like Schinkel’s or Barry’s
country houses in this mode (Plate 43A). But on the whole the Italian
Villa in America is rather one of the many vehicles of the Picturesque
reaction against a doctrinaire Greek Revival. This fact was well
illustrated in one by Eidlitz, also in Springfield, on Maple Street,
that was built of brick with much wooden ‘gingerbread’ of a vaguely
Tyrolean order and latterly, at least, painted a warm pink where Sykes’s
villa is painted white with brown trim. Sykes’s originality within the
Italian Villa mode is most happily illustrated by the former observatory
at Amherst College, now known as the Octagon, whose stuccoed polygonal
elements stand in such interesting contrast to the severe row of
red-brick dormitories and chapel behind. Not often did the mid century
add so effectively to groups of buildings produced in earlier decades.
Just as the Iberian peninsula was in general devoid of significant
architectural activity in the first half of the nineteenth century, so
in the Spanish and Portuguese lands beyond the seas there came no early
wave of autochthonous Romantic Classicism to submerge and succeed the
Baroque that had flourished there to the end of the colonial period and
beyond. In Brazil Dom Pedro, later the first Brazilian Emperor, under
whose rule the centre of gravity of Portuguese civilization moved from
Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, imported in 1816 a group of French artists.
They were expected to found a new post-Baroque Brazilian culture much as
Alexander I’s architects had done a little earlier in Russia. One was
the French architect Grandjean de Montigny, author with Famin of that
most influential work _L’Architecture toscane_ to which all Europe
turned for _quattrocento_ models, who had been employed by Jerome
Bonaparte in Westphalia as long as Napoleon’s Empire lasted. He erected
in Rio in 1826 the first home for the new Imperial Academy of Fine Arts,
founded of course on the model of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, the
Market, and the extant Custom House. He also trained a group of
Brazilians who gave local architectural production an Empire flavour
that lasted until it was superseded well after the mid century by a wave
of Second Empire influence.
In vernacular building traditional treatments were often maintained in
Brazil, notably the use of _azulejos_ (glazed tiles) for wall surfaces
and of rich painted colour for the ubiquitous stucco. But more
sophisticated work can be very French indeed. For example, the Itamaratí
Palace in Rio of 1851-4 by J. M. J. Rebelo, a pupil of Grandjean de
Montigny, might well be taken for a _hôtel particulier_ erected in the
new quarters of Paris in the earlier decades of the century (Plate 47B).
Beautifully restored, this now houses the Brazilian Foreign Office—one
says ‘Itamaratí’ as one says ‘Quai d’Orsay’. Rebelo also built the
Summer Palace at Petrópolis. The Santa Isabel Theatre at Recife,
Pernambuco, built about 1845, which is so like a French provincial
theatre of this period, is by another French architect who had settled
in Brazil in 1840, L.-L. Vauthier.
In Chile, on the other side of the South American continent, C.-F.
Brunet-Debaines (1799-1855), a brother of the architect who built the
Museum and Library at Le Havre, was employed on government work in
Santiago. But the schools that such French architects assisted in
founding had more significance than the few buildings they were able to
erect. Henceforth, Latin America would be less dependent in architecture
on the Spanish and Portuguese homelands than on Paris. The character of
the larger cities outside their colonial cores—if, indeed, more than a
few early monuments remain extant—was henceforth determined by this
fact. However, it is the Second Empire and not the First which left the
more visible mark; for the various capitals, some like Montevideo in
Uruguay almost without earlier architectural history, saw their greatest
expansion in the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first
of the twentieth.
The establishment of a Latin American architecture of really
autochthonous character, as distinguished from the continuance of
various local vernacular building traditions, had to await the present
period (see Chapters 22 and 25). Once again French influence had a
significant role to play. But between the arrival of Grandjean de
Montigny in 1816 and Le Corbusier’s first visit to South America in 1929
that continent took little part in the major architectural developments
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the United
States, building on the professional foundations laid by Latrobe and
exploiting to the full new structural materials and methods, rose before
the nineteenth century was over to a position of world leadership (see
Chapters 13, 14, and 15).
What is true of Latin America is not altogether untrue of the British
Dominions in the New World and at the Antipodes, as also of various
British Colonies throughout the rest of the world. No French architects
were imported, of course, and the links with England remained very close
and strong. As in all colonial situations, however, the transfer of new
ideas from the homeland was slow and inefficient and the capacity of
_émigré_ architects usually rather low. No Latrobes or Havilands seem to
have gone to the Dominions; and the Greek Revival was hardly accepted
before the forties, when it was already passing out of favour in the
United States.
The first professional to work in Australia, Francis Greenway
(1777-1837), who arrived in Sydney in 1814 as a convict and almost at
once became Governor Macquarie’s architect, remained faithful in most of
his public work to the modes of his eighteenth-century youth in Bristol.
But his house of 1822 for Robert Campbell, Jr, in Bligh Street in Sydney
showed that he had real skill as a designer of up-to-date Regency
villas. Canada had no early architect of comparable ability to serve the
British community.
As the western world expanded in the nineteenth century, significant
architectural achievement tended to move outwards from the old centres
on the Tiber, the Seine, and the Thames; but that movement was always
very uneven, and still remains so today. Russia was building more and
finer structures of Western European character than Spain and Portugal;
while the United States, not yet fantastically disparate in size and
population, produced many more productive Romantic Classical architects
than either Holland or Sweden. All the same, the architectural
leadership of the western world remained for at least a generation
longer in the old centres of Europe; our story must return to where it
started in order to proceed beyond the mid century or even to complete
the account of the period 1810-50.
Romantic Classicism came to no sudden end. If in Vienna a monumental
Grecian Parliament house could rise as late as the seventies, so in the
desert of Arizona the Crystal Palace Saloon of 1878 at Tombstone is
still in the Greek Revival vernacular. From the very first, on the other
hand, there was some admixture of the Picturesque in Romantic
Classicism. Almost all the architects that have been mentioned, both of
the earlier and of the later generation, were more eclectic in their
practice and even in their theories than this account of their major
works has made altogether evident. But in the main, down into the
forties, Romantic Classicism, while increasingly eclectic, remained a
coherent style whose canons controlled most of the accepted variants to
the Grecian.
The dissolution of the dominant stylistic discipline, hardly completed
even in the fifties, had nevertheless begun very early indeed. In terms
of historical significance, if not of absolute achievement, the
Picturesque rises rapidly in comparative importance from the time of
Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey in the 1790s. Beside Soane’s crisp Bank interiors
it is necessary to carry in the mind’s eye the prophetic image which his
renderer J. M. Gandy (1771-1843) provided of them as a Romantic ruin;
nor should the vast dream-like Gothic cathedrals that Schinkel made the
centre of some of his early paintings be forgotten in the cool presence
of his Grecian Schauspielhaus and Museum. Fortunately no one is likely
in looking at Barry’s _palazzi_ to forget that they are contemporary
with his Gothic Houses of Parliament; one does, however, tend to forget
that the career of his associate Pugin as protagonist of the mature
Gothic Revival ended well before Barry’s did as the chief English
protagonist of the Renaissance Revival. Earlier the Gothic Revival was
hardly more than a special aspect of the Picturesque; with Pugin,
however, it became a major movement in its own right and actually
anti-Picturesque in theory, if rarely so in practice. To a considerable
extent, moreover, the Gothic Revival usurped during the forties the
centre of the stage in England, if hardly to the same degree in other
countries even in the following decades.
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CHAPTER 6
THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL
THE principal modern treatise on the Picturesque with a capital P,
Christopher Hussey’s of 1927, is subtitled ‘Studies in a Point of View’.
By the opening years of the nineteenth century the term had come to have
a far more precise, if also a more complex, meaning than the adjective
‘picturesque’ as it is generally used today. But Hussey is perfectly
correct: the Picturesque is no more a style than is the Sublime, it _is_
a point of view. That point of view nevertheless influenced
architecture[105] increasingly as the first half of the nineteenth
century wore on. It had a solvent, and eventually a destructive, effect
on the dominant Romantic Classical style as has already been suggested
in discussing the later work of various leading architects in several
countries.
The Picturesque had its early eighteenth-century origins[106] in
England, and its most notable theorists were English. In the first
quarter of the century, moreover, there was no British architect so
resolutely Grecian that he did not, either on his own initiative or in
deference to his clients’ wishes, experiment with alternative modes in
conscious pursuit of the Picturesque. Despite the stringencies of the
Greek Revival as represented, early, in Wilkins’s Downing College or,
later, in Smirke’s British Museum, Smirke had built several Castellated
mansions in the years before Waterloo and Wilkins the Gothic screen and
the hall range at King’s College, Cambridge, in the twenties; while at
the National Gallery in the thirties he handled standard Classical
elements in a markedly Picturesque way. Nash was the initiator of one
characteristically Picturesque mode, the asymmetrically towered Italian
Villa, at Cronkhill in 1802; he also exploited in an exemplary way
another longer-established one, the Rustic Cottage, in Blaise Hamlet in
1811 (Plate 50A). The score or more of Castellated mansions that Nash
built were always Picturesque and irregular whether their detailing was
Norman[107] or some sort of Gothic. Above all, he handled the urbanistic
development which was his greatest achievement in a thoroughly
Picturesque way. Soane’s Picturesque was of a less usual order and his
personal tendency was as much or more towards the Sublime, otherwise a
largely forgotten category after 1810.
But from 1810 on new buildings in which the basic principles of Romantic
Classicism were ignored and exotic stylistic alternatives to the Grecian
exploited were generally larger, more prominent, and also more
creatively original than they had ever been before. C. A. Busby
(1788-1838) was responsible as late as 1827 for one of the finest, most
formal, and most extensive examples of Romantic Classical urbanism, Kemp
Town at Brighton. Yet in 1814 he exhibited at the Royal Academy his
design for Gwrych Castle, completed in 1815, which he was building in
North Wales near Abergele, presumably in collaboration with his client,
Lloyd Bamford Hesketh, a notable amateur (Plate 49).
The next year Nash began for the Regent the transformation of his
favourite residence, the Royal Pavilion[108] at Brighton. This was at
that time an elegant early example of a Romantic Classical house as
first remodelled and enlarged by Henry Holland[109] (1745-1806) just
before the Napoleonic Wars began. Nash now made of it an extraordinary
oriental confection (as had already been proposed by Repton[110] in
1806). Part Chinese, part Saracenic, and part Indian, this is quite in
the spirit of Porden’s earlier Dome near by (Plate 48). Festive and
frivolous, the Pavilion resembles an oversized garden fabrick or
sumptuously ornamented marquee; but the scale is fully architectural,
even monumental, both externally and in the principal apartments. Not
least interesting is Nash’s frank use of visible iron elements. These
are not masonry-scaled like the columns he employed later in the Regent
Street Quadrant and on Carlton House Terrace, but delicate and playfully
decorative. The pierced ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 have
naturalistically coloured bamboo detailing and the tops of the four
columns that carry the monitor over the kitchen of 1818-21 are
embellished with copper palm-leaves (Plate 58A).
The Pavilion had no real sequel; even the Regent, King as George IV from
1820, tired of it almost as soon as it was finished. Indeed, he forsook
Brighton for good in 1823 just as the general building activity
there,[111] commonly but incorrectly called ‘Regency’, was getting under
way. Turning his attention to Windsor Castle, the King employed Sir
Jeffrey Wyatville (1776-1840) to remodel the accumulated mass of
heterogeneous construction there into a Picturesque mansion of the
Castellated sort in which the real medieval elements were quite
submerged. But Windsor, being much more obviously a remodelling than was
the Pavilion when Nash completed it, is not a very exemplary specimen of
a fake castle. Busby’s Gwrych, set against a hanging wood, its round and
square towers simply detailed and tightly though asymmetrically
composed, is a better instance of that abstract sculptural massing which
critics of the mid century would sometimes define as ‘architecturesque’
(Plate 49). For this sort of three-dimensional composition the Italian
Villa mode provided on the whole a better vehicle. Wyatville, for
example, did his best to turn the vast regular mass of late
seventeenth-century Chatsworth[112] into a more Picturesque adjunct to
its landscape setting by Capability Brown (1715-83), by adding a long
service wing on the north side and terminating that with a very large
and tall loggia-topped tower.
Well before George IV undertook the remodelling of Windsor, a relatively
modest mansion linked the Castellated mode more closely to the rising
enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. The author of the immensely popular
Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott, employed Blore in 1816 to build
Abbotsford near Melrose in Roxburghshire in this vein—it was much
extended along the same lines by William Atkinson (_c._ 1773-1839) in
1822-3. With its definitely Scottish features Abbotsford initiated a
special mode, the Scottish Baronial, that eventually received Royal
sanction when Queen Victoria acquired Balmoral Castle near Ballater in
1848, a modest residence built in the late thirties by John Smith of
Aberdeen. At the time she and Prince Albert first occupied this Scottish
retreat Balmoral was quite small, but it was reconstructed in 1853-5 on
a vastly larger scale in the same Scottish Baronial mode by William
Smith, son of the original architect, working in close collaboration
with Prince Albert. Thus the Queen’s two private residences, Osborne and
Balmoral, both in part at least designed by the Consort, illustrated—in
neither case very happily—the two major types of determinedly
Picturesque design for edifices of some consequence, the Italian Villa
and the Castellated; the viability of the Rustic Cottage mode was
necessarily rather limited and hardly suitable for Royal use.
Castellated design was not restricted to the field of country-house
building. At Conway, in Wales, the engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834)
in his suspension bridge of 1819-24 and, after him, Robert Stephenson
and his associated architect Francis Thompson in the tubular bridge[113]
there of 1845-9 castellated the piers out of deference to the nearby
thirteenth-century Castle. Another example of Engineers’ Castellated is
the first Temple Meads Railway Station at Bristol, built in 1839-40 by
I. K. Brunel (1806-59). Brunel, however, had preferred Egyptian forms
for the piers of the Clifton Suspension Bridge[114] near Bristol that he
designed in 1829.
Somewhat more appropriately, prisons were likely to be Castellated in
the forties and fifties, thus echoing the design as well as the planning
of Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The Reading Gaol of
1842-4 by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) and his partner W. B.
Moffatt (1812-87) and the Holloway Gaol in London of 1851-2 by J. B.
Bunning (1802-63) are the most striking examples. Both are essentially
Picturesque essays; but by the time the latter was built the accepted
standards of fake-castle building had entirely changed. The
reconstruction of Alton Castle in Staffordshire, about 1840, by A. W. N.
Pugin (1812-52) was archaeological in intention; even more
archaeological is Peckforton Castle in Shropshire, newly erected by
Anthony Salvin (1799-1881) in 1846-50, and his extensive ‘restoration’
of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland carried out in the next decade.
Thanks to its magnificent hill-top site and its present state of
disrepair, Peckforton is in fact notably Picturesque; but the fine,
hard, structurally expressive detailing of the beautiful pink sandstone
may almost be considered anti-Picturesque—contemporaries praised it for
its ‘realism’.
The welter of alternative Picturesque modes is most entertainingly
epitomized in the model village of Edensor,[115] built by Joseph Paxton
in 1839-42 at Chatsworth. He was probably assisted by John Robertson, a
draughtsman for that encyclopaedist of the Picturesque, J. C.
Loudon.[116] One particular mode, however, had begun to take the lead
even before this ‘point of view’ came closest to dominance in the early
decades of the new century. The use of Gothic[117] for new churches was
common enough from the mid eighteenth century. Down to about 1820,
however, this was usually done without much archaeological pretension.
The mood of the protagonists of what was then called ‘Gothick’, whether
architects or clients, was not very serious. Architects lacked accurate
illustrations of old work such as the volumes of Stuart and Revett and
other similar treatises were providing for the Grecian. In the first two
decades of the new century the more thorough and general study of
ancient Gothic monuments in England and the handsome publications of
John Britton (1771-1857)[118] and of Nash’s Gothic specialist, the elder
Pugin,[119] were gradually changing the situation. Thomas Rickman
(1776-1841), a pharmacist turned medievalist, began to put his
knowledge[120] of old churches to practical use; his St George’s,
Birmingham, built 1819-21, is a not unsuccessful essay in revived
Perpendicular. Several others had built or were building by this time
churches whose relationship to monuments of the medieval past was about
as close as that of most of the contemporary Grecian work to its ancient
models. St Mary’s, Bathwick, in Bath, of 1814-20 is at once very early
and exceptionally well-scaled. The local architect John Pinch
(1770-1827) even vaulted it throughout in Bath stone.
The ultimate purging away of the frivolity of Georgian Gothick detail
and the effective substitution of archaeological for Picturesque ideals
in over-all composition was by no means always a gain. In two later
Birmingham churches, St Peter’s, Dale End, of 1825-7, and Bishop Ryder’s
of 1837-8, Rickman did not improve on St George’s, while St Luke’s,
Chelsea, built in London by James Savage (1779-1852) in 1819-25, despite
its great size and its stone vaulting, is as cold and dry as the Grecian
churches of the day and quite inferior to Pinch’s.
Edward Garbett’s Holy Trinity, Theale, of 1820-5—with tower added after
the architect’s death by John Buckler (1770-1851) in 1827-8—is rather
more interesting and also premonitory of what was coming. Here the
detail, imitated from Salisbury Cathedral, is thirteenth-century in
character, not fifteenth-sixteenth-century, as in the churches of Pinch,
Rickman, and Savage. Moreover, Theale is more boldly scaled and more
plastically handled altogether than are theirs. The placing of the
tower, far to the rear on the south side, while more Picturesque in its
asymmetry than the standard position at the centre of the west front, is
also an archaeological echo of the free-standing tower which still
existed then beside Salisbury Cathedral.
Most Gothic churches built in the twenties and thirties under the Act of
1818—Commissioners’ Churches as they are called—were neither very
satisfyingly Picturesque nor at all archaeological. The usual reason for
preferring Gothic to Grecian, indeed, was to save money by avoiding the
need for expensive stone porticoes! Barry’s Commissioners’ Churches
around Manchester and in north-eastern London are among the better
examples; but only his St Peter’s, Brighton, of 1824-6 (not financed by
the parsimonious Commissioners) is at all elaborate. Among the most
successful contemporary examples are several by one of Soane’s pupils,
R. D. Chantrell, at Leeds. His Christ Church there of 1823-6 has
considerable spatial grandeur in its tall nave and aisles, while the
Perpendicular detailing is rich and even fairly plausible.
Generally preferable to the ecclesiastical Gothic of this decade is the
collegiate work; of this more exists both at Oxford and at Cambridge
than is generally realized. At King’s College, Cambridge, Wilkins’s
Gothic screen fronting the quadrangle and the hall range at right angles
to it are not altogether unworthy of the magnificent Perpendicular
chapel and Gibbs’s Fellows Building that form the other two sides.
Wilkins won the competition for this work in 1823, and it was all
completed by 1827. Still more appealing, because an effectively
independent entity, is Rickman’s New Court at St John’s College, also at
Cambridge,[121] built by him with the aid of his pupil Henry Hutchinson
(1800-31) in 1825-31 (Plate 50B). This is not very plausibly Gothic
perhaps, but the papery planes of the light-coloured ashlar walls of the
U-shaped quadrangle, now richly hung with creeper, form an eligibly
Picturesque composition above and behind the open gallery across the
south side despite their total symmetry.
By the thirties standards of Gothic design were generally rising, both
in the greater degree of plausibility attained by the leading
practitioners and in their more positive command of various borrowed
idioms. Thus Barry’s King Edward’s Grammar School in Birmingham,
designed in 1833 and built 1834-7, seems to have been a rather
satisfactory Neo-Tudor design, notably Barryesque in the breadth of the
composition and in the use of strong terminal features. This building
was unusually literate in detail owing to the assistance of the younger
Pugin, who was just about to make a tremendous personal reputation as a
Gothic expert thanks to his books.[122]
Pugin’s _Contrasts_, published 1836, marks a turning point even more
than does the acceptance in that year of Barry’s Gothic design for the
Houses of Parliament. Newly converted to Catholicism, Pugin believed the
building of Gothic churches to be a religious necessity. His programme
of Gothic Revival was far more stringent than any existing programme of
Greek Revival or, _a fortiori_, of Renaissance Revival. If the Gothic
were really to be revived, Pugin saw that its basic principles must be
understood and accepted. Merely to copy Gothic forms was as futile, and
to him as immoral, as merely to copy Grecian or _cinquecento_ ones. The
methods of building of the Middle Ages must be revived; architecture
must again derive its character, in what he considered to have been the
true medieval way, from the direct expression of structure; and at the
same time it must serve the complicated ritual-functional needs of
revived medieval church practices.
In some ways Pugin’s ideas are closely parallel to those of the most
rationalistic Romantic Classical theorists in France; doubtless they
could be traced back, through his father, to French eighteenth-century
sources (see Introduction). However, Pugin’s primary motivation was
devotional and sacramental. Approaching all matters of building with
passion, he could not but reject the frivolous emphasis on visual
qualities that had always been characteristic of the Picturesque point
of view.
The mature Gothic Revival that began with Pugin, essentially an English
manifestation despite its presumptive French background and carried
eventually wherever English culture extended—as far as the West Coast of
the United States and to the remotest Antipodes—grew out of the
Picturesque yet is itself basically anti-Picturesque. One must build in
a certain way because it is right to do so, not because the results are
agreeable to the eye. The Gothic Revival thus came to be, for about a
decade, as absolute as the most doctrinaire sort of Grecian Classicism.
When the Anglicans of the Established Church just after 1840 took over
and began to apply rigidly the principles of the Catholic Pugin, a new
church-architecture came into being. This is quite as characteristic of
the nineteenth century as is Romantic Classicism, even though the mode
was—nominally at least—entirely dependent on English medieval Gothic of
the fourteenth century. Within a decade, however, Puginian Gothic, after
being accepted and codified by the Cambridge Camden Society,[123]
developed into a much more original mode, the High Victorian Gothic,
very remote indeed from the models which Pugin had recommended as
providing the only proper precedents for the Revival (see Chapter 10).
Here it will be well to consider two exceptional Gothic monuments,
designed in the late thirties and built in the forties, one very large,
the other rather small, which did _not_ follow the new Puginian
standards, even though in the case of one of them Pugin collaborated on
the design from the first. The most Picturesque addition to the Romantic
Classical scene in Edinburgh, curiously effective by contrast with the
big-scaled and very cold Grecian structures near by, is the Sir Walter
Scott Monument in Prince’s Street Gardens (Plate 51). This was designed
in 1836 and executed in 1840-6 by G. Meikle Kemp[124] (1795-1844). His
project had originally been placed below both Fowler’s and Rickman’s in
a competition; as the local contender, however, he had eventually
obtained the commission in 1838. The lacy elaboration of this florid
shrine, if less appropriate to Sir Walter’s own brand of medievalism
than Abbotsford, is certainly in the richest Late Georgian tradition of
the Picturesque.
Picturesque also are certain aspects of the Houses of Parliament,
notably the contrast in shape and placing of the two towers at the ends
and, above all, the silhouette of the Clock Tower, almost certainly one
of Pugin’s personal contributions to the design (Plate 54). But
essentially the Houses of Parliament, as might be expected of Barry,
their architect, are one of the grandest academic productions of the
nineteenth century. Summerson has suggested a relationship to Fonthill
Abbey in the way the plan is organized round a central octagon; there
may also be an echo of Wyatville’s east front of Windsor in the
composition of the river front. But except for the incorporation of the
medieval Westminster Hall, the Crypt Chapel, and the Cloister Court,
which necessitated irregularity along the landward side, the plan is
almost as regular and as classically logical in its balanced provision
for multiple functions as a pupil[125] of Durand might have developed.
Equally regular are the façades and, in the case of the principal front
towards the river, elaborately symmetrical as well.
The rich Late Gothic detail was provided in incredible profusion by
Pugin, who worked under Barry against his own developing taste for
earlier and less lacy Gothic forms. Doubtless, like the towers, this
detailing reflects the Picturesque, but the extreme regularity of the
façades provides also the characteristic reiterations of Romantic
Classicism. Pugin is supposed to have said that the river front was ‘all
Greek’, a considerable exaggeration. But just as Highclere shows what
Barry’s basic principles of design could produce when expressed in the
revived Jacobethan mode, so without too great a strain one can imagine
this front executed with some sort of Renaissance detailing, if hardly
in columnar Grecian guise.
Commissioned in 1836, the Houses of Parliament rose slowly. The House of
Lords was opened in 1847; the House of Commons only in 1852, the year of
Pugin’s early death. Even at the time of Barry’s death in 1860 the whole
group was still not finished, although his eldest son (Edward Middleton,
1830-80) made but few personal contributions when he took over control
and finally completed the job later in the decade. During this extended
period of about thirty years the Puginian phase of the Gothic Revival
had been initiated and run its entire course; even the succeeding High
Victorian Gothic was more than half-way over by the mid sixties. Like
the Napoleonic monuments of Paris, which were also a generation
a-building, the Houses of Parliament belong historically to the period
of their beginning. They are not quite pre-Victorian, since construction
above ground began only in 1840 after considerable revision of the
competition design, but they are definitely Early Victorian.
Not all of Pugin’s own work is as remote in character from the Houses of
Parliament as his mature principles would lead one to expect. His first
church of any consequence, St Marie’s, Derby, of 1838-9, is
Perpendicular in style and very crisp and flat in treatment.
Nevertheless, both in its detailed ‘correctness’ and in Pugin’s real
command of the national Late Gothic idiom, this church marks a great
advance over the work of Rickman and the other Gothic architects of the
older generation who were still in practice. Scarisbrick Hall in
Lancashire, a remodelling, is confused by the retention of earlier
elements and also by a considerable addition made by Pugin’s son (Edward
Welby, 1834-75) in the sixties. But the portions carried out in 1837-52
are quite consonant with Pugin’s work done in association with Barry.
The great hall is a definitely archaeological feature of the plan yet
also a feature that would be of great significance in the later
development of the nineteenth-century house (see Chapter 15).
If Scarisbrick is not exactly _anti_-Picturesque, comparison with such a
great house as Harlaxton near Grantham, first designed by Salvin in the
Jacobethan mode in 1831 and rising under Burn’s supervision from 1838
on, reveals how little the Picturesque really influenced Pugin even at
the beginning of his career. However, Neo-Tudor Lonsdale Square in
London, begun by R. C. Carpenter (1812-55) in 1838, is still less
Picturesque than Scarisbrick because of its extreme regularity. This
example makes evident how far other young architects—and Carpenter was
precisely Pugin’s contemporary—were behind him in understanding and
exploiting even Late Gothic forms; yet within a very few years Carpenter
became the most ‘correct’ of Anglican church architects by following
Pugin’s lead.
In 1839 and 1840 Pugin designed two modest churches that provided
favourite paradigms for Anglo-American church-building for a generation
and more. St Oswald’s, Old Swan, Liverpool, built in 1840-2, adopts the
fourteenth-century English parish-church plan with central western tower
broach-spired, aisles, deep chancel, and south porch, each element being
quite clearly expressed in the external composition. Internally the
effect is low and dark, since Pugin provided no clerestory, roofed the
nave with much exposed timber, and filled the traceried windows with
stained glass. More original is St Wilfred’s, Hulme, Manchester, built
in 1839-42, in that the tower—never completed, alas—was set at the
north-west corner. The detail of St Oswald’s is fairly elaborate,
including a rather rich east window. St Wilfred’s is simpler, with
lancet windows to avoid the expense of fourteenth-century tracery.
A larger, more complete, and more expensively decorated example of the
Old Swan model was St Giles’s, Cheadle, of 1841-6 (Plate 52A). This has
a quite magnificent, if hardly very original, spired tower and interior
walls all patterned in colour. Here Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin’s most
important patron, provided sufficient funds to furnish the church as the
architect intended. Pugin’s largest churches, unfortunately, never
received the carved work, stained glass, and painted decoration that he
planned for them. At St Barnabas’s, Nottingham, now the Catholic
Cathedral there, of 1842-4 he achieved externally a rather fine piling
up of related masses at the rear, the whole crowned by a central tower.
For lack of any decoration, however, this is grim without and barren
within, despite all the spatial interest of the very complex east end.
Pugin, always his own severest critic, was most nearly satisfied with
the church that he built for himself next door to his own house, the
Grange, at Ramsgate.[126] The house dates from 1841-3, the church from
1846-51. Externally of Kentish knapped flint and internally of Caen
stone with a very heavy roof of dark oak, this edifice is worthy of his
highest standards of revived medieval construction. But it is rather
less original and interesting in external massing and internal spatial
development than such a big bare church as St Barnabas’s. To the house
we will be returning later (see Chapter 15).
Pugin’s production is largely concentrated in the years 1837-44, between
the two periods of his employment by Barry on the Houses of Parliament.
By 1844 other architects, Anglican and not Roman Catholic, were
accepting his principles and rivalling his success. G. G. Scott, for
example, never a really great architect but a notable self-publicist,
after modest beginnings designed the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford in 1841
in the form of a fourteenth-century Eleanor Cross and followed up that
prominent commission by building the large suburban London church of St
Giles’s, Camberwell, in 1842-4. At that time he was still in partnership
with Moffatt. Then, in 1844, he signalized the international standing of
the English Gothic Revival by winning alone the competition for the
Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, which he carried to completion over the years
1845-63.
Although the body of this church was all but completely destroyed by
bombs, the tower and spire still dominate the Hamburg skyline (Plate
52B). It is interesting to compare this grand scenic accent with the
tower and spire of the Petrikirche, almost equally prominent, built in
1843-9 by de Chateauneuf and Fersenfeld (Plate 57A). Although built,
with a curious echo of London’s characteristic stock brick, of an
unpleasantly yellowish brick, while the Petrikirche is of a handsome
deep-red brick like de Chateauneuf’s Alte Post, the silhouette is so
enriched with elaborate fourteenth-century stonework—part English, part
German in derivation—that it almost rivals in richness of effect Kemp’s
Walter Scott Monument in Edinburgh. Yet the scale is grand, the parts
well related, and in every way it represents a more advanced, almost
mid-century taste, in contrast to the simplicity and the geometrical
clarity of de Chateauneuf’s square brick tower with its plain triangular
gables and its very tall and svelte metal-clad spire.
From 1845 down to 1855, when Henry Clutton (1819-93) and William Burges
(1827-81) won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France and G. E.
Street (1824-81) received the second prize, the pre-eminence of English
architects at plausible revived Gothic was generally recognized abroad.
Though few of the innumerable churches built by Scott and his rivals at
home in the forties are in any way really memorable, by the middle of
that decade the characteristics of English church edifices had been
completely revised, largely thanks to the propaganda of the Cambridge
Camden Society. There is no more typical nineteenth-century product than
a Victorian Gothic church of this period built to the Camdenian canon;
yet the real achievement of the most original architect who designed
such churches, Butterfield, belongs to the next, or High Victorian,
phase (see Chapter 10). The more Puginian Carpenter, the other favourite
architect of the Society, who died in 1855, is hardly as interesting a
designer—however ‘correct’ he may be—in such prominent works as St
Paul’s in West Street, Brighton, of 1846-8 and St Mary Magdalen’s,
Munster Square, in London of 1849-51, as in what he built for Lancing
College in 1851-3. There the plain high-roofed ranges with their fine
smooth walls of knapped flint and very flat and simple cut-stone
dressings have a quality of precision quite lacking in most contemporary
churches. Almost finer is St John’s College, Hurstpierpoint, although
largely posthumous in execution.
Scott, Carpenter, and Butterfield all supplied designs for churches in
various parts of the British Empire; other English architects emigrated
to the Dominions and to the United States, carrying with them the
doctrine of the Gothic Revival, just as French architects half a century
earlier had carried a rather different sort of doctrine all over the
western world. As a symbol of Britain’s major world position, moreover,
English churches now rose in many Continental cities, from German
watering-places and French Riviera towns to remote capitals such as
Athens and Istanbul. Remarkably alien in their foreign contexts, these
express the vigour and the assurance, if rarely the real creative
possibilities, of the Victorian Gothic.
The Established Church in England was the great patron of the revived
Gothic, although other denominations were not far behind. But the use of
Gothic was by no means confined to churches, nor indeed to country
houses as it had largely been in the late eighteenth century. No other
Gothic public buildings rivalled the Houses of Parliament; but in 1843-5
Philip Hardwick, designer of the most Grecian of railway stations, with
his son (P. C., 1822-92) built the Hall and Library of Lincoln’s Inn in
London of Tudor red brick with black brick diaperings and cream stone
trim. This offered a foretaste of the external polychromy which would be
the sign-manual of the next period of revived Gothic in England. An
earlier, more severe, sort of Tudor, carried out in stone, served
Moffatt, Scott’s former partner, for a mansion at No. 19 Park Lane. But
this house was most exceptional; in the forties London architects and
builders generally eschewed Gothic of any sort except for churches.
Generically medieval, if not specifically Gothic, inspiration would
eventually play a major part in forming the advanced commercial mode of
the late fifties and sixties however (see Chapter 15).
The success that Victorian Gothic, initiated by a Romanist and supported
by the Catholicizing wing of the Church of England, had with
non-Anglicans in England and throughout the English-speaking world is
surprising. Ritualistic planning, almost the essence of the Revival to
Pugin and his Camdenian followers, was naturally avoided; but the Gothic
work of the best Nonconformist architects, such as the Independent
Church of 1852 in Glasgow by J. T. Emmett, is by no means unworthy of
comparison with Scott’s, if not the more puristic Carpenter’s. Samuel
Hemming of Bristol even employed a few touches of Gothic detail on the
prefabricated cast-iron churches that he exported all over the world
from Bristol in the early fifties.
The mature Gothic Revival, as has been said, is more anti-Picturesque
than Picturesque, at least in the realm of theory; as a writer in _The
Ecclesiologist_ expressed the matter succinctly, ‘The true picturesque
derives from the sternest utility.’ Yet the revived Gothic could only be
expected to appeal widely to architects and to a public who had long
fully accepted the Picturesque point of view. All its irregularity and
variety of silhouette, its plastically complex organization and its
colouristic decoration, its textural exploitation of various traditional
and even near-rustic materials is profoundly opposed to the clear and
cool ideals of Romantic Classicism, but fully consonant with the
Picturesque.
The significance of the English Gothic Revival of the thirties and
forties is manifold, and no two critics will agree how to assess it.
Certainly the functional doctrines of the Revival and its renewed
devotion to honest expression of real construction remain of great
importance, even though much of this runs parallel to—if, indeed, it
does not follow from—the more rationalistic aspects of Romantic
Classical theory. In this way the Revival made a positive historical
contribution, if not perhaps as new and original a one as has sometimes
been maintained in recent years.
Negatively, the English Gothic Revival was clearly of very great
effectiveness as a solvent, not only of the rigidities and
conventionalities of Romantic Classicism, but also of the older and
deeper Classical traditions that had been revived by the Renaissance and
maintained for several centuries. The lack of an equally effective
solvent on the Continent helps to explain why the revolutionary
developments of the next period, particularly in the domestic and in the
commercial fields, were so largely Anglo-American.
Even in the twentieth century it may be said that part of the profound
difference between a Wright and a Perret lay in the fact that one had
the tradition of the English Gothic Revival in his blood—largely through
reading Ruskin—while the other had not (see Chapters 18 and 19). Still
later, the California ‘Bay Region School’ of the 1930s and 1940s implies
a Gothic Revival background, however little its leaders may be aware of
the fact; the coeval ‘Carioca School’ of Brazil manifestly has no such
background (see Chapter 25). It is therefore of more consequence to see
how the ideals of the Picturesque, and concurrently the anti-Picturesque
doctrines of the Gothic Revival, were accepted in the United States,
than to give comparable attention to Europe, where neither the
Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival were very productive of buildings of
distinction. For that matter, most of the American buildings that fall
under these rubrics are but feeble parodies of English originals. The
Greek Revival architects of America were no unworthy rivals of the
Europeans of their day; the exponents of the Picturesque and the
followers of Pugin—sometimes the same men—produced little of lasting
value. But when seen in relation to the later development of the
American house, the contribution of the Picturesque period, lasting in
America down to the Civil War and even beyond, is of real significance
(see Chapter 15).
There was not much eighteenth- or very early nineteenth-century Gothick
of consequence in America. Latrobe’s Sedgeley of 1798, Strickland’s
Masonic Hall in Philadelphia of 1809-11, and Bulfinch’s contemporary
Federal Street Church in Boston were none of them of much intrinsic
interest, and all are now destroyed. Other early manifestations of the
Picturesque were even rarer, and it was not until the thirties that a
concerted Gothic movement got under way. Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary
of 1821-9 was very modestly Castellated; Strickland’s St Stephen’s in
Philadelphia, a rather gaunt two-towered red-brick structure of 1822-3,
more or less Perpendicular, represents but a slight advance in
plausibility over his Masonic Hall.
The finest works of the next decade are a group of churches in and
around Boston, all built of granite. Willard’s Bowdoin Street Church in
Boston of 1830 and St Peter’s of 1833 and the First Unitarian or North
Church of 1836-7, both in Salem, Mass., are the best extant examples
(Plate 55A). The material discouraged detail, but provided, when used
rock-faced, an almost antediluvian ruggedness. Tracery is generally of
wood and much simplified; the most characteristic decorative features
are very plain crenellations and occasional quatrefoil openings. Thus,
on the whole, these monuments are closer to Romantic Classicism than to
the Picturesque and have little in common with English work of their own
day or even of the preceding period. However, the wooden Gothic of this
period is in general of a rather lacy Late Georgian order.[127]
The mid thirties saw some quite elaborate Gothic houses of stone, such
as A. J. Davis’s Blythewood of 1834 at Annandale, N.Y., and Oaklands,
built by Richard Upjohn (1802-78) the next year at Gardiner, Maine. Both
architects were capable of designing at the very same time Greek
edifices of considerably higher quality—Davis’s Indiana State Capitol of
1831-5 at Indianapolis and Upjohn’s Samuel Farrer house of 1836 at
Bangor, Maine, for example—but both were already leaders in the rising
revolt against the Grecian.
Upjohn’s Trinity Church in New York completed in 1846 is the American
analogue of Pugin’s St Marie’s, Derby, and by no means inferior despite
its plaster vaults (Plate 53A). With Trinity to his credit Upjohn,
English-born but not English-trained, became the acknowledged leader of
the American ecclesiologists. At Kingscote, Newport, R.I., which he
built in 1841, Upjohn also rivalled Davis as a designer of Picturesque
Gothic houses. But he was almost equally addicted to Italianate forms,
even in the church-building field, for there his rigid ecclesiological
principles made him unwilling to use Gothic except for Episcopalians.
His non-Gothic work ranges from a vague sort of _Rundbogenstil_, as
illustrated in his Congregational Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn of
1844-6, once provided with a highly original spire of scalloped outline,
and the more Germanic Bowdoin College Chapel in Brunswick, Maine, of
1844-55, to Italian Villas, such as that built in Newport, R.I., for
Edward King in 1845-7 (now the Free Library), and even to public
buildings in the Italian Villa mode, such as his City Hall in Utica,
N.Y., of 1852-3 (Plate 53B). His basilican St Paul’s in Baltimore,
Maryland, of 1852-6—its style is rather surprising, since the parish was
Episcopalian—is more successful than most of his later Gothic churches.
His Corn Exchange Bank of 1854 in New York, round-arched if not exactly
_Rundbogenstil_, was one of the most distinguished early approaches to
the use of an arcaded mode for commercial building (see Chapter 14). Of
very similar character and comparable quality was the H. E. Pierrepont
house in Brooklyn completed in 1857.
But Upjohn’s reputation, rightly or wrongly, is based on his Gothic
churches. Externally these are usually quite close to contemporary
Camdenian models; internally they are often distinguished by very
original—and also very awkward—wooden arcades rising up to the open
wooden roofs above. St Mary’s, Burlington, NJ., of 1846-54 is perhaps
the most attractive and English-looking of his village churches, the
modest cruciform plan culminating in a very simple but delicate spire
over the crossing. Not least significant, moreover, are Upjohn’s still
more modest wooden churches[128] of vertical board-and-batten
construction, such as St Paul’s in Brunswick, Maine, of 1845. They
illustrate, like his openwork wooden arcades, a real interest in
expressing the stick character of American carpentry. This interest is
intellectually similar to, but visually very different from, Pugin’s
devotion to the direct expression of masonry construction. At building
churches in stone British immigrants like Notman and Frank Wills
(1827-?)[129] were not surprisingly Upjohn’s rivals in the quality of
their craftsmanship.
Running parallel with Upjohn’s career is that of Davis, but with the
difference that he built few churches and, as Ithiel Town’s former
partner, continued on occasion, even after the latter’s retirement in
1835, to provide Grecian as well as Gothic designs. He was perhaps most
successful, however, with Italian Villas such as the Munn house in
Utica, N.Y., or the E. C. Litchfield house in Prospect Park, Brooklyn,
N.Y., both of 1854. At Belmead, in Powhatan County, Virginia, built in
1845, he introduced Manorial Gothic to the southern plantation, but this
mode never rivalled the Grecian peripteral temple in popularity in the
South. Walnut Wood, the Harral house in Bridgeport, Conn., of 1846, was
more typical and long retained all its original furnishings. With the
building of Ericstan, the John J. Herrick house in Tarrytown, N.Y., in
1855 Davis brought the fake castle to the Hudson River valley—so
frequently compared to that of the Rhine and favourite subject in these
years of a new American school of landscape painters of the most
Picturesque order. As a scenic embellishment Ericstan was not unlike the
ruins that Thomas Cole introduced in his most Romantic and imaginary
landscapes.
Despite Davis’s ranging activity, extending westward into Kentucky and
Michigan, elaborate Gothic houses, whether Castellated or manorially
Tudor, were relatively rare in the America of the forties and fifties.
But a type of gabled cottage with a front veranda and elaborate
traceried barge-boards was rather popular. This is well represented by
the extant Henry Delamater house in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and also by that of
William J. Rotch of 1845 in New Bedford, Mass., both by Davis himself.
The mode was energetically supported by Davis’s great friend, the
landscape gardener and architectural critic A. J. Downing (1815-52).
Downing was a characteristic proponent of the Picturesque point of view,
leaning heavily on earlier English writers. The designs for Picturesque
houses, some by Davis, some by Notman, one at least—the King Villa—by
Upjohn, and others presumably by himself, illustrated in Downing’s two
house-pattern books[130] were quite as likely to be towered Italian
Villas as Tudor Cottages or more pretentiously Gothic designs. Most
significant of all are those called Bracketted Cottages by Downing for
which he recommended the board-and-batten[131] external finish that
Upjohn later took up for modest wooden churches. But these, which are
neither very Picturesque—at least with the capital P—nor yet at all
Gothic, are better considered in relation to the general development of
Anglo-American house-design in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 15).
Rare in execution, as are indeed all the more exotic Picturesque modes,
but also significant for its later influence, was the Swiss Chalet.
Although chalets were illustrated in the English Villa books of P. F.
Robinson (1776-1858)[132] and others from the twenties, the finest
extant American example is fairly late, the Willoughby house in Newport,
R.I., of 1854. As this is by Eidlitz, it may be presumed to derive from
Swiss[133] or German sources rather than from Robinson’s or other
English designs.
Thus at Newport, already rising towards its later position as the
premier American summer resort, there were by the time the Civil War
broke out in the early sixties examples of the Tudor Cottage (Upjohn’s
Kingscote), the towered Italian Villa (his Edward King House)—as for
that matter also the more Barryesque symmetrical villa without tower,
the Parish House of 1851-2 by the English-trained Calvert Vaux
(1824-95)[134]—and the Swiss Chalet, not to speak of other more formal
houses which here in Newport began to show very early the influence of
the French Second Empire. There were also several big hotels of this
period, now all destroyed. Two Grecian examples have been mentioned
earlier; but the second Ocean House, built by Warren in 1845, was
Gothic, a gargantuan version of a Davis-Downing Tudor Cottage. On this
the Tudoresque veranda piers were carried to a fantastic height in naïve
competition with the columned porticoes of the previous Ocean House and
the Atlantic House.
If there were in America no castles of the scale and plausibility of
Salvin’s Peckforton, no pavilions of the pseudo-oriental magnificence of
Nash’s at Brighton, the will to build them was none the less present.
Ericstan has already been mentioned; while at Bridgeport, Conn., P. T.
Barnum erected Iranistan in 1847-8 in conscious emulation of the
Regent’s pleasure dome at Brighton from designs he had obtained in
England. This was carried out by Eidlitz. Longwood, near Natchez,
Mississippi, by Samuel Sloan (1815-84), begun in 1860, is even more
ambitiously oriental, but was left unfinished when the Civil War broke
out the next year.[135] Rather curiously the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, set down like an enormous garden fabrick in L’Enfant’s Mall
near the Mills obelisk, was at the insistence of its director, Robert
Dale Owen,[136] designed as a Norman castle by James Renwick (1818-95).
Built in 1848-9 of brownstone, this is a very monumental manifestation
of the Picturesque and one of the more surprising features of a capital
otherwise mostly Classical in its architecture. On the whole the
happiest American achievements in the Picturesque vein were the towered
Italian Villas, from Notman’s Doane house of the mid thirties down
through Upjohn’s City Hall in Utica of the early fifties and Davis’s
still later houses in the East and the Middle West (see Chapter 5).
The Gothic Revival in America, deriving after 1840 from Pugin and the
Camdenians, was a much more alien movement than the Greek Revival. In
the British Dominions and Colonies, even though the characteristic
production of this period is in many ways more similar to that of the
United States than to that of the homeland, the Neo-Gothic achievement
appears somewhat less exotic. However, St John’s in Hobart, Tasmania, by
John Lee Archer, which was completed in 1835 in the most rudimentary
sort of Commissioners’ Gothic, is far inferior to the granite churches
of its period in the Boston area. From that to Holy Trinity in Hobart,
completed by James Blackburn in 1847, the advance in mere competence is
very evident. Yet, as in the case of Upjohn in America, the Norman
church that Blackburn built for the Presbyterians of Glenorchy and even
more his Congregational Church at Newtown, an asymmetrically towered
Italian Villa edifice, may well be preferred to his Gothic work.
Greenway’s Government House Stables of 1817-19 in Sydney, Australia,
were already Castellated, but in a modest eighteenth-century way. M. W.
Lewis’s Camden church of 1840-9 was based on plans sent out by Blore and
simply executed in red brick. In W. W. Wardell (1823-99), who emigrated
as late as 1858, Australia finally obtained an experienced Neo-Gothic
architect of real ability. He had already made his mark in England a
decade before his departure with Our Lady of Victories, Clapham, in
London; but even that very decent early church of his required no
specific mention in the English section of this chapter. His Australian
work is too late to be considered here (see Chapter 11).
Across the Atlantic, communications were doubtless quicker than with the
Antipodes, and the cultural climate of Canada was undoubtedly more
similar to that of the homeland. The first important Neo-Gothic work in
Canada, however, was built for the French and not the British community.
Notre Dame, the Catholic Cathedral of Montreal, was originally designed
and erected by an Irish architect, James O’Donnell (1774-1830), in
1824-9 somewhat to the disgust of most French Canadians, who considered
O’Donnell’s Gothic to be Anglican when in fact it was merely Georgian.
Equipped later with western towers and redecorated internally with
operatic sumptuousness in the seventies, it is not easy to realize just
what Notre Dame was like when O’Donnell completed it. It was bigger,
certainly, but not more advanced than the New England churches of a few
years later.
In 1845 Wills arrived in Canada from England and began the Anglican
Cathedral at Fredericton, New Brunswick, as a moderate-sized cruciform
parish-church with central tower, the whole of rather run-of-the-mill
Camdenian character despite its pretensions. Very similar, but
considerably larger and richer, is the Montreal cathedral which he began
a decade later in 1856. His American churches, though smaller and less
elaborate, have somewhat more character. Canadians must have sensed
Wills’s inadequacy almost at once, for both Butterfield and G. G. Scott
were asked to send out church designs in the forties. The former
provided in 1848 a scheme for a more elaborate east end for Wills’s
Fredericton Cathedral, which had been started only three years before.
Scott’s Cathedral in St John’s, Newfoundland, initiated in 1846,
deserves a relatively important place in the roster of his churches as
Butterfield’s New Brunswick work does not. But this large edifice was
completed only some forty years later by his son (G. G. II, 1839-97).
Even the stone used here was imported from Scotland.
As in the United States, there is plenty of more-or-less Gothic domestic
work in Canada, most of it relatively late. An early and rather
pretentious secular edifice was the so-called Old Building of Trinity
College, Toronto, erected in 1851 by Kivas Tully (1820-1905). This was a
by no means incompetent example of Collegiate Gothic, but more like
Wilkins’s or Rickman’s work of the twenties at Cambridge than the
advanced Camdenian edifices of its own period. Canadian Neo-Gothic rose
to a certain autochthonous distinction only in the next period (see
Chapter 10).
If early illustrations of the Picturesque point of view and of the
mature Gothic Revival are on the whole of minor interest in the
English-speaking world outside Great Britain, that whole world from
California to Tasmania was absorbing the propaganda of the English
exponents of the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival. This had its effect
in the succeeding period when the High Victorian Gothic of England was
exploited to more considerable purpose than the Neo-Gothic of the Early
Victorian period. By the time a great English critic came to the support
of the Gothic Revival, John Ruskin (1819-1900), he had almost from the
original publication of his _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ in 1849 more
readers beyond the seas than at home.[137]
Neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival has the same importance
on the Continent of Europe as in English-speaking countries. The
Picturesque point of view was carried abroad by the great British
artistic invention of the eighteenth century, the English garden—_jardin
anglais_, _englischer Garten_, _giardino inglese_, _jardin inglès_,
etc., to muster the various well-established and revelatory foreign
terms for the more or less naturalistic mode that succeeded the
architecturally ordered French gardens of the Le Nôtre type. By 1800 the
Picturesque was as familiar in theory as were the international tenets
of Romantic Classicism. But for all the garden fabricks that were built
in Europe in the English taste, the point of view tended to remain
alien. Moreover, from the continuance of Orléans Cathedral[138] in
Gothic, ordered as early as 1707 by Louis XIV though not finally
finished until 1829, to Schinkel’s painted Gothic visions of the opening
of the nineteenth century, there is no lack of evidence of Continental
interest in Gothic forms. In France there was also a very considerable
theoretical interest in Gothic methods of construction that can hardly
be matched in eighteenth-century England (see Introduction). But there
followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century no such
effective crystallization of an earlier dilettante interest in the
Gothic as in England, no popular fad for building fake castles, no flood
of cheap Commissioners’ Churches.
Yet, in France as in England, a new and more serious phase of the Gothic
Revival did open in the late thirties, stimulated by the ideals of
Catholic Revival of a series of writers from Chateaubriand to
Montalembert. No great Gothic public monument like the Houses of
Parliament in London was initiated in these years in Paris—nor for that
matter at any later date—but several churches designed around 1840 were
at least intended to be as exemplary as Pugin’s; they were also
considerably more ambitious in their size and their elaboration than
most of those his Catholic clients and the Camdenians’ Anglican ones
were sponsoring in England at this point.
A curious example of the change in taste is the Chapelle-Saint-Louis at
Dreux.[139] The original chapel was built in 1816-22 by an architect
named Cramail (or Cramailler) as a Classical rotunda to serve as the
mausoleum of the Orléans family. In 1839 Louis Philippe ordered its
remodelling and enlargement in Gothic style by P.-B. Lefranc
(1795-1856), desiring thus to associate the Orleanist dynasty with the
medieval glories of French royalty in a manner already fashionable[140]
with intellectuals to the left and to the right, if not with many
architects. The new exterior, completed in 1848 just as the Orléans rule
came to an end, is in a very lacy and unplausible sort of Gothick, not
without a certain still rather eighteenth-century Rococo charm but quite
inharmonious with the Classical interior. Like another Royal mausoleum
of these years, the Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand in the Avenue Pershing in
Neuilly, built in 1843 in memory of an Orléans prince who had been
killed in an accident near its site, the Chapelle-Saint-Louis has
stained glass windows designed in 1844 by no less an artist than Ingres.
These are even less appropriate in association with Lefranc’s Gothic
than with the Romanesquoid mode that the elderly Fontaine—who knew, like
Talleyrand, how to maintain his position under several successive
regimes—used for the Neuilly chapel. They are hardly superior in
quality, moreover, to the glass, whether imported from Germany or
produced locally, that was being used in the early forties in England
for Neo-Gothic churches.
A more important Gothic project of this date than the
Chapelle-Saint-Louis was that for the large new Paris church of
Sainte-Clotilde prepared in 1840 by F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), German-born
but a pupil of Lebas. Doubts as to the extensive use of iron proposed by
Gau held up the initiation of the construction of Sainte-Clotilde until
1846, so that several provincial Neo-Gothic edifices of some consequence
were executed first. These may be compared, but only to their
disadvantage, with Pugin’s churches of around 1840 as regards their
plausibility, their intrinsic architectonic qualities, and the elegance
of their detail. However, several of them are larger and more
ambitious—being Catholic churches in a Catholic country—than are even
his various cathedrals.
In any case the character of real Gothic architecture in France, as in
most other European countries, made unlikely a programme of revival
based chiefly on parish churches in the way of Pugin’s. The Continental
Middle Ages had most notably produced cathedrals, and it was for new
churches of near-cathedral scale that the re-use of Gothic was likely to
be proposed. Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, built by J.-E. Barthélémy
(1799-1868) in 1840-7 on the heights of Ste Cathérine above Rouen, opens
the serious phase of the Revival in France. It has a superb site and is
best appreciated from a considerable distance, but the silhouette is not
happy and the execution is rather hard and cold. Saint-Nicholas at
Nantes was begun in 1839 just before the Rouen church by L.-A. Piel
(1808-41), a confused Romantic character who died a monk, and taken over
in 1843 by J.-B.-A. Lassus (1807-57), a pupil of Lebas and Henri
Labrouste. It is very hard to accept this church as even in part the
production of Lassus, the erudite archaeologist who brought out in 1842
the first volume of a major monograph on Chartres Cathedral and who
undertook in 1845, together with the better-known E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc
(1814-79), the restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris after sharing with
Duban the responsibility for restoring the Sainte-Chapelle. Rather more
plausible—at least in the sense that it merges fairly successfully with
the original fourteenth-century nave to which it is attached—is the
façade of Saint-Ouen at Rouen built in 1845-51 by H.-C.-M. Grégoire
(1791-1854), a pupil of Percier.
Sainte-Clotilde was finally begun in 1846, as has been noted, and
completed after Gau’s death by Ballu in 1857 (Plate 55B). This ambitious
urban church of cathedral scale lacks almost as completely as those just
mentioned the personal qualities of design and the integrity of revived
medieval craftsmanship that give character, if not always distinction,
to the churches of Pugin, Carpenter, and other leading English Gothic
Revivalists of the forties. Nor does it have the grandeur of proportion
of Scott’s Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, to which it is more comparable in
size and pretension (Plate 52B). The style is Rayonnant, or French
fourteenth-century, and the material good freestone, but deadly
mechanical and quite characterless in the detailing. The parts seem
somehow too large for the whole. Ballu’s west towers, for example, are
excessively tall for so stubby a plan, and the chapel-surrounded chevet
is too elaborate for even an urban parish church.
Two later churches by Lassus, Saint-Nicholas at Moulins, built in
collaboration with L.-D.-G. Esmonnot (1807-80) in 1849, and Saint-Pierre
at Dijon of 1853 hardly rival Sainte-Clotilde in size, elaboration, or
even plausibility. Viollet-le-Duc was rather more of an executant
architect than Lassus, even though in this decade and the next most of
his vast energy and very considerable archaeological knowledge went into
the restoration of medieval monuments. At Notre-Dame in Paris the
Chapter House that he designed is a wholly new construction of 1847 not
unworthy of comparison with the best work of Scott in these years. The
block of flats (Plate 56) he built at 28 Rue de Berlin (now de Liège) in
Paris in 1846-8—his first executed building—may better be compared with
the most advanced English secular Gothic of its date, Salvin’s
Peckforton, say, or Butterfield’s St Augustine’s College, Canterbury.
The front is so simple and straightforward in composition that it fits
between more conventional façades with no awkwardness, and the rather
plain detailing has the ‘realism’ that was coming to be admired by this
date in the most advanced English circles.
The Romanesquoid design of Fontaine’s Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand of 1843
has been mentioned. The use of such forms was in the forties even more
exceptional in France than in England. In 1852 Didron estimated—probably
with some exaggeration—that over two hundred Neo-Gothic churches had
been built or were building in France, a record which compares
statistically, if in no other way, with English church production in
this period. None of them, however, is as impressive to later eyes as
Saint-Paul at Nîmes, which follows with notable success the alternative
Romanesquoid mode of Fontaine’s chapel. C.-A. Questel (1807-88), a pupil
of Blouet and Duban, the architect of this church, had evidently studied
the Romanesque with the care and enthusiasm usually lavished on the
Gothic by his generation, and the result is so great an advance over
Fontaine’s work that the resemblance is merely nominal. Thus might the
Camdenians have hoped to build had they considered the twelfth-century
Romanesque of France as worthy of conscientious emulation as the
fourteenth-century Gothic of England. Saint-Paul is a large cruciform
edifice, rib-vaulted throughout in a proto-Gothic way, and crowned with
a great central lantern. The detail is plausible in its design, neither
too skimpy nor too elaborate, although the execution lacks any real
feeling for medieval craftsmanship in stone. Questel’s church, however,
is as much of an exception as Fontaine’s chapel. No Romanesque Revival
got under way in the forties in France in the way that one did to a
certain extent in Germany, and the few other Romanesquoid churches of
high quality belong to the next period (see Chapter 8).
Minor evidence of French interest—and rising interest—in the Picturesque
is not hard to find in these decades, but that is all there is. No
Picturesque modes comparable to those of the Anglo-Saxon world became
widely popular. In the first decade of the century the brothers Caccault
built at Clisson[141] in the Vendée a whole village based on their
memories of the Roman Campagna, a more considerable essay in the Italian
Villa vein than anything carried out in England. But the asymmetrically
towered Italian Villa[142] did not mature in France in the way that it
did in England, Germany, and the United States. Séheult’s _Recueil_ of
1821, of which a second edition appeared in 1847, is one of the earliest
and richest repositories of inspiration drawn from rustic Italian
building; but the edifices Séheult illustrated, however Picturesque in
other ways, are all symmetrical and quite in the Durand tradition. J.-J.
Lequeu (1758-_c._ 1824)[143] had produced bolder projects a generation
earlier. These are often asymmetrical, generally quite wildly eclectic,
and very vigorously plastic; but such things rarely, if ever, came to
execution in France except as garden fabricks. Lequeu had no success at
all in his later years.
Moreover, the Rustic Cottage mode seems to have struck no real roots in
France, even though the painter Hubert Robert and the architect Richard
Mique (1728-94), in designing the fabricks of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau
at the Petit Trianon in 1783-6, had followed native rather than English
rural models. Under the Restoration and the July Monarchy inspiration
came generally from English Cottage books. Visconti’s Château de Lussy,
S.-et-M., of 1844, though a fairly large structure, is really in the
English Cottage mode with an asymmetrically organized plan and an
irregularly composed exterior. This is almost unique and, in any case,
quite undistinguished. A more vigorous flow of rustic influence entered
France via Alsace and directly from Switzerland. The Chalet aux Loges of
1837 by Bonneau near Versailles was, as its name implies, a Swiss
Chalet, but it quite lacked the integrity of structural expression and
the originality of plastic organization of Eidlitz’s Willoughby house in
Newport, R.I., which is, of course, considerably later in date.
Occasional imitations of the _style François I_, such as the already
mentioned country house by Canissié at Draveil, S.-et-O., have some
irregularity both of outline and of plan; but in general the _François
I_ of the July Monarchy, like so much of the Jacobethan of Early
Victorian England, is Picturesque only in detail, not in general
conception.
In 1840 the elder Bridant, who also built Chalets in the succeeding
years around the lake at Enghien, a watering-place on the outskirts of
Paris, built a Gothic ‘Castel’ on the plain of Passy, then a fairly open
suburb. This was markedly asymmetrical and consistently medieval in
detail. The contemporary fame of this enlarged garden fabrick—for such
it really was—indicates its unique position in contemporary production,
as unique as Moffatt’s Gothic house in Park Lane in London. L.-M. Boltz,
an architect of Alsatian if not German origin but a pupil of Henri
Labrouste, had some success with a less feudal mode, half-timbered and
asymmetrical, in the forties—a house of 1842 at Champeaux, S.-et-M., was
typical.
This modest influx into France of Picturesque models from contemporary
Germany as well as from contemporary England might lead one to assume
that the Picturesque, if not the Gothic Revival, was more significant in
Central Europe. In Germany and Austria, however, as also in Scandinavia,
Picturesque and medievalizing tendencies mostly merged with Romantic
Classicism in the _Rundbogenstil_ rather than standing apart, thus
constituting neither an opposition eventually rising to triumph in the
English way, nor a mere gesture of aberrant protest as in France.
Schinkel’s interest in Gothic has already been touched on, but none of
his more ambitious Gothic projects ever got beyond the drawing-board
(see Chapter 2). There are fewer such, in any case, belonging to his
later than to his earlier years. Moreover, the Gothic of the early
projects naturally belongs to the contemporary High Romantic world of
Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey and Latrobe’s alternative design for the
Baltimore Cathedral, not to the ethical and archaeological milieu of
Pugin and the Camdenians. Most of the virtues—by no means negligible—of
his Berlin Werder Church of the twenties are not Gothic virtues—not at
any rate as Englishmen of the succeeding decades understood them—they
are rather Romantic Classical virtues. The principal interest of his
earlier Kreuzberg Memorial lies in its cast-iron material, a material
anathema to Pugin as a ‘modernistic’ innovation. The Babelsberg Schloss,
based principally on the modern castles that he saw on his visit to
England in 1826, makes no pretensions to archaeological correctness in
the way of Pugin’s Alton Castle of about 1840 or Salvin’s still later
Peckforton.
A few Castellated mansions of more local inspiration, such as
Hohenschwangau in Upper Bavaria, as reconstructed by J. D. Ohlmüller
(1791-1839) in 1832-7, are closer in spirit to Pugin’s and Salvin’s
ideals. Hohenschwangau, like certain castles built in this period on the
Rhine, exploits the Picturesque possibilities of a fine site and the
nostalgic overtones of a district with a romantic medieval past. Schloss
Berg in Bavaria, which owes its present very domesticated Gothic
character to the work done there by Eduard Riedel (1813-85) in 1849-51,
hardly deserves mention in this connexion any more than do Schinkel’s
more or less medievalizing country houses, so crisp and regular is their
design. Curiously enough, the vast Schloss at Schwerin, begun by G. A.
Demmler (1804-86) in 1844, is a more elaborate and extensive example of
_François I_ than anything this period produced in France (Plate 57B).
It is also notably Picturesque, with innumerable towers and gables
disposed around the sides of an irregularly polygonal court. Stüler
carried this extraordinary pile to completion after Demmler left
Schwerin in 1851. Not very Picturesque, but representing another sort of
medievalism, were two Venetian Gothic houses Am Elbberg in Dresden,
built with considerable archaeological plausibility by an architect
named Ehrhardt in the mid forties. They provide a curious premonition of
Ruskin and the High Victorian Gothic of England (see Chapter 10).
Semper’s Gothic Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden has already been
mentioned.
As in France, much energy went at this time into the restoration and
completion of major medieval churches in Germany. Most notable in this
connexion was the work on Cologne Cathedral begun in 1824 by F. A.
Ahlert (1788-1833), continued by E. F. Zwirner (1802-61), and finally
completed by Richard Voigtel (1829-1902) in 1880. Assisting Zwirner, who
had worked earlier under Schinkel on the Kolberg Town Hall, was (among
others) Friedrich von Schmidt (1825-91), after 1860 the most important
Gothic Revivalist in Austria (see Chapters 8 and 11). No more than in
France did this activity in ‘productive archaeology’ in Germany lead to
new building of much interest, not at least until Schmidt began to work
in Vienna.
Ohlmüller’s Mariahilfkirche outside Munich, begun in 1831 and completed
after his death by Ziebland, the next considerable essay in
ecclesiastical Gothic in Germany after Schinkel’s Berlin church, is
certainly much less appealing than is his mountain castle. The
hall-church form, authentically German though it was, produced a
clumsily proportioned mass, at the front of which a stubby tower ending
in an openwork spire seems to be ‘riding the roof’. This church is as
‘advanced’, in the sense of being fairly plausible archaeologically, as
Barthélémy’s Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours built a decade later, but that is
about all one can say for it. It certainly does not stand up to
comparison with Rickman’s or Savage’s English churches of the twenties.
De Chateauneuf’s Petrikirche in Hamburg begun in 1843, or at least its
tower, has already been mentioned (Plate 57A). This is superior in
design, and in some ways also better built, to most of Pugin’s churches
of this date. It is, for example, rib-vaulted throughout in a quite
plain but very competent way. The interior lacks, however, the
strikingly simple proportions and the warm colour of the red brick
exterior; above all, the complex spatial development of the transeptal
members lacks clarity, although the plan was probably taken over from
the medieval Petrikirche that had been burned. The Gothic churches of K.
A. von Heideloff (1788-1865), beginning with his Catholic church in
Leipzig built in the Weststrasse there in 1845-7, are hardly above the
level of Ohlmüller’s and certainly much less successful than the
Petrikirche, though Heideloff had a much higher reputation than de
Chateauneuf with contemporaries as a specialist at Gothic on account of
his published studies of medieval architecture.[144]
In Berlin most of the new churches of this period by Stüler, Strack, and
others were in a Romanesquoid version of the _Rundbogenstil_. Of these
elaborated and coarsened versions of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects
of a decade earlier, Stüler’s Jacobikirche of 1844-5 was basilican in
plan; his Markuskirche, begun in 1848, was of the central type but with
a tall campanile rising at one side. The Berlin Petrikirche, built by
Strack in 1846-50, was Gothic, however, and even clumsier than
Ohlmüller’s much earlier Mariahilfkirche, which it very closely
resembles. Nor was Stüler’s one important essay in Gothic, the
Bartholomäuskirche, begun in 1854 and completed by Friedrich Adler
(1827-?) in 1858, much better. In general, the first half of the century
was well over before Gothic churches of any great size and pretension
were built either in Germany or Austria. The largest and most prominent,
the Votivkirche in Vienna (Plate 99A), for the designing of which
Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) won the competition in 1853 when he was
only twenty-five, was not begun until 1856 nor completed until 1879 (see
Chapter 8).
In England the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival were effective
solvents of Romantic Classicism, because both, and particularly the
latter, were consciously nationalistic, emphasizing in an increasingly
nationalistic period the recovery of local rather than of universal
building traditions. For a good part of their local acceptability they
were dependent, moreover, on certain warm connotations which their
visual forms had for English patrons. The Rustic Cottage, the Tudor
Parsonage, the Castellated Mansion had all, supposedly, been
autochthonous products of the insular past. On the other hand, even
though the English of the eighteenth century had adopted as their own
such foreign painters as Claude and Poussin, from whose canvases the
Italian Villa mode principally derived both its forms and its prestige,
that mode was certainly not English in its ultimate prototypes. It is
readily understandable, therefore, that it was the Italian Villa, of all
the established vehicles of the Picturesque, which had the greatest
success in a Germany romantically mad about Italy. But such superb
compositions as the Court Gardener’s House by Schinkel (Plate 14A) or
Persius’s Friedenskirche at Potsdam (Plate 15), perhaps the highest
international achievements in the Picturesque genre, owed only their
basic concept, if even that, to England. Their elements were for the
most part borrowed directly from Italian sources, and they were
carefully composed according to a formal discipline not inconsonant with
the standards of Romantic Classicism.
The Swiss Chalet, an even more alien mode in England than the Italian
Villa, was a native one in Central Europe. Hence one finds Schinkel
first, and then his pupils, exploiting it with considerable virtuosity
as the _Tirolerhäuschen_. Indeed, the particular form of wooden fretwork
which came to be called ‘gingerbread’ in English, one of the favourite
forms of later Picturesque detail everywhere in the western world from
Russia to America, is more likely to be derived from Alpine chalets via
nineteenth-century German than via nineteenth-century English
intermediaries.
Romantic Classicism, being founded on the basic Western European
heritage of Greece and Rome, could readily broaden its sources to
include the Early Christian and the Italian Renaissance. But to men of
the early nineteenth century the Gothic was not a universal European
style as we are likely to consider it today; it was ‘Early English’ or
‘Altteutsch’ or (with far more justification) ‘l’architecture
française’. The bigotry of the English Gothic Revival was so intense in
the forties that Scott was denounced in _The Ecclesiologist_ for even
entering a competition for a church in Germany since, if successful, his
clients would be Lutherans not Anglicans. Such insular narrowness made
the Catholic Pugin’s Gothic paradoxically intransmissible to Catholic
countries abroad, quite as intransmissible in effect as the Jacobethan.
Scott won his Hamburg competition by modulating, to the horror of
puristic compatriots, his usual fourteenth-century English Decorated
towards its German equivalent, on the whole a grander style as he
exploited it there.
Continental nationalism, like Continental Neo-Catholicism outside
France,[145] favoured earlier—or later—modes than the Gothic, down at
least to the mid century. The _Rundbogenstil_, moreover, despite the
fact that the precedent for its detail was quite as often Italian as
local, received warm support from nationalists in Germany; when
exported, moreover, as to the Scandinavian countries and the United
States, it was properly recognized as a German product (see Chapters 2
and 5). In Latin countries, and particularly in Italy, Gothic continued
to seem alien; hence there are few examples of revived medieval design
of any sort there or in Spain and Portugal before 1850. Jappelli’s
highly exceptional work at Padua, mentioned earlier, is rich and
delicate but not in the least plausible to Northern eyes in the way of
Ehrhardt’s somewhat similar Italian Gothic houses in Dresden.
A European consensus of taste had been achieved by the late seventeenth
century, despite the division of Europe into Catholic and Protestant
countries, and this consensus was maintained, and even grew in strength,
for another hundred years and more. When it finally broke down in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century, it necessarily broke down in
different ways and to a different degree in each country. No new
cultural synthesis was achieved, at least as regards architecture,
before our own day. The resultant stylistic patchwork that the second
half of the nineteenth century inherited was largely the product of the
increasing nationalism of the two decades that preceded the mid century.
This particularistic nationalism, rather than the concurrent increase in
mere eclecticism of taste—for such eclecticism had existed to a greater
or lesser degree since the mid eighteenth century—explains the major
difference in the architectural climate around 1850 from that around
1800; at least it is some part of the explanation. To be Roman in
architecture, to be Greek, even to be Italian, one need not cease to be
English or French or German. But to be Tudor one must be English, as to
be _François I_ one must be French, or so it seemed to most architects
and their clients in the forties.
From this pattern of growing nationalistic divergence, this Late
Romantic disintegration of the cultural unity that had remained strong
and vital through the first few decades of the century, it is important
now to turn to an aspect of architecture that derived from a different
international absolute, that of science and technology. The English led
in most technological developments affecting building methods from the
mid eighteenth century on, both in the introduction of new materials and
in the exploitation of new types of construction to serve new needs. But
they led only because the Industrial Revolution, at once the result of
certain major technological changes and the cause of innumerable others,
had its origins and its early flowering in England. Before the first
half of the nineteenth century was over, other countries to which the
Industrial Revolution came relatively late were rapidly catching up.
After the fifties technological leadership in building passed from
Britain to the United States and to the Continent. Some consideration of
the increased use of iron and glass between 1790 and 1855 may well
conclude the first part of this book.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 7
BUILDING WITH IRON AND GLASS: 1790-1855
ARCHITECTURAL history has many aspects. Ideas and theories, points of
view and programmes can have real importance even when, as with the
Picturesque and the earlier stages of the Gothic Revival, most of the
buildings which derive from them or follow their prescriptions are
lacking in individual distinction. Volume of production is also
significant; the disproportion between the previous chapter and the four
that precede it expresses fairly accurately the difference in the amount
of building in the first half of the century belonging, at least by a
broad definition, to the rubric of Romantic Classicism and the very much
smaller amount—up to 1840 at least and outside England—that can be
considered essentially Picturesque or programmatically Neo-Gothic. But
the history of architecture must include the history of building as a
craft or technic; sometimes the story of technical development is—or has
appeared to posterity to be—more important than any other aspect of a
particular historical development. Such has been the case until quite
lately with the rise of the Gothic in the twelfth century in France; it
has also seemed true in varying degree for the nineteenth century to
many historians and critics.
The Industrial Revolution induced a parallel but gradual revolution in
building methods; even today, after two hundred years, the
potentialities of that revolution have not been fully actualized. The
technical story, particularly as it concerns the structural use of
ferrous metals, first cast iron,[146] next wrought iron, and then steel,
begins well before 1800. There has already been occasion to mention, in
passing, technical innovations in various edifices where those
innovations had a determinant effect on the total architectural result.
But it is worth while, partly for the intrinsic interest of the subject,
partly as preparation for subsequent technical developments of great
importance later in the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, to go
back to the beginning and to recount sequentially the episodes in the
rise of iron as a prime building material, as also to touch at least on
the concurrent use of other ‘fireproof’ materials and the vastly
increased exploitation of glass. This sequence of episodes reaches a
real culmination in the fifties with the construction of a considerable
number of ‘Crystal Palaces’, first in London and then all over the
western world, edifices that were almost entirely of iron and glass.
A marked change in the situation came around 1855. For one thing, it was
in that year that Sir Henry Bessemer invented a new method of making
steel in quantity so that it could be profitably used for large building
components. However, the full architectural possibilities of the use of
structural steel were hardly grasped before the nineties. There was also
in the fifties an increasingly general realization that unprotected iron
was not as fire-resistant[147] as had hitherto been fondly supposed.
Then, too—and perhaps most significantly—a sharp shift in taste at this
time, leading to a predominant preference for the massively plastic in
architecture, made unfashionable both the delicate membering suitable to
iron and the smooth transparent surfaces provided by large areas of
glass (see Chapters 8-11).
The technical development of the use of ferrous metals in building
continued unbroken beyond the fifties; indeed, most of the quantitative
records of the first half of the century, in the way of distances
spanned and volumes enclosed, were progressively exceeded in the
sixties, seventies, and eighties (see Chapter 16). From the point of
view of architecture, however, the story passes more or less out of
sight for a generation. To a certain extent metal literally ‘went
underground’ as new types of foundations were evolved for taller and
heavier buildings; but more generally metal structure was masked with
stone or brick, as was first proposed in the forties in England, to
provide protection against the adverse effects of extreme heat in urban
fires (see Chapter 14). When the use of exposed metal and glass became
significant again in the nineties that use was to be a major constituent
of general architectural development as it has remained ever since (see
Chapters 16, 22, 23, and 25). But down to the 1850s the rise of iron and
glass is best considered as a separate story.
This story is not confined to the most advanced countries. The tall,
slim columns used by Wren in 1706 to support the galleries in the old
House of Commons _seem_ to have been of iron[148]; but short ones,
introduced in 1752, can still be seen in the kitchen of the Monastery of
Alcobaça in Portugal, and a very early use of iron beams was in the
Marble Palace at Petersburg built by Antonio Rinaldi (1709-94) in
1768-72. The main line of development, however, was undoubtedly English,
French, and American. Definitely dated 1770-2 were the iron members
supporting the galleries in St Anne’s, Liverpool.
A much more notable and better publicized use of iron followed shortly
after this when metal replaced masonry for the entire central structure
of the Coalbrookdale Bridge in Shropshire. This was begun in 1777 by
Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (?-1777) with the active co-operation of
Abraham Darby III, an important local ironmaster.[149] Darby’s
Coalbrookdale Foundry cast the iron elements that were needed and the
bridge was completed in 1779. Pritchard was an architect, and architects
played a more important part in the story of the early development of
iron construction than is generally realized. Soon, however, the
importance of special problems of statics to which such construction
gave rise and, above all, the need to measure accurately the strength of
various components required the expert assistance of civil engineers,
and often the engineers came to build on their own without the
collaboration of architects.
At this point the story crosses the channel to France.[150] There
Soufflot, the very technically minded architect of the Paris
Panthéon—one of the edifices with an account of which this book
began—assisted by his pupil Brébion, provided in 1779-81 an iron roof
over the stair-hall[151] that he built to lead up to the Grande Galerie
of the Louvre. In the next few years two rather obscure French
architects, Ango and Eustache Saint-Fart (1746-1822), were occupied,
respectively, with the introduction of iron framing and of ‘flower-pot’
(i.e. hollow-tile) elements supported on timber framework to produce
more or less fireproof types of floors. Over the years 1786-90 the great
French theatre architect J.-V. Louis (1731-1800), horrified by the
recurrent fires at the Palais Royal, combined these two ideas when he
designed the roof of the new Théâtre Français in Paris.
Now the main line of advance returns to England. In 1792-4 Soane avoided
timber altogether in the fireproof vaults of his Consols Office at the
Bank of England, using nothing but specially made earthenware pots; he
also covered the twenty-foot oculus in the central vault with a lantern
of iron and glass (Plate 3). The architectural qualities of this
interior have already been stressed. Even more important for later
architecture, however, although effectively invisible, had been the
adoption just before this of French principles in a calico mill at Derby
and the West Mill at Belper, both begun in 1792. These were planned and
carried out by the millowner-engineer William Strutt (1756-1830) who
used specially designed iron stanchions throughout carrying timber beams
and, in the top storey only, ‘flower-pot’ vaults between the beams such
as Saint-Fart had first introduced, but flat brick vaults or
‘jack-arches’ elsewhere.
Other mills soon followed. The first to have iron beams as well as
stanchions seems to be the Benyons, Marshall & Bage flax spinning mill
in St Michael’s Street, Shrewsbury. This was built in 1796-7 from the
designs of Charles Bage (1752-1822) a friend and correspondent of
Strutt. The much-publicized Salford Twist Company’s cotton mill at
Salford of 1799-1801, designed and built by Boulton & Watt of
steam-engine fame—they knew Bage’s mill since they had installed his
steam-engine—was according to present evidence the second[152] to be
erected with a complete internal skeleton of iron. By 1800, then, a
system of fire-resistant construction using cast-iron stanchions and
cast-iron beams, carrying what are sometimes called ‘jack-arches’ of
brick, had been established in the world of English mill-building. By
1850 such construction was in use in Britain for almost all high-grade
building. The system was significantly modified, however, after about
1845 by the substitution of rolled—that is wrought—iron beams, as
proposed by Sir William Fairbairn (1789-1874),[153] since cast-iron ones
had proved dangerously brittle.
It is not necessary here to do more than sketch out the steps by which
the new iron skeleton structure became generally accepted. In 1802-11
James Wyatt introduced it in the Castellated New Palace that he built at
Kew for George III, an edifice of which little is otherwise known since
it was demolished in 1827-8. In line with this curious conjunction of
technical and stylistic innovation, already noted in Schinkel’s somewhat
later cast-iron Gothic monument of 1819-20 in Berlin, is Porden’s
profuse use of iron for the Gothic traceries and balustrades at Eaton
Hall[154] in Cheshire in 1804-12, as also by Hopper in the even more
ornate Gothic Conservatory at Carlton House in London in 1811-12 (Plate
60B).
Isolated columns of iron appeared in many edifices from the 1790s on.
The most notable extant examples, perhaps, are those in the kitchen and
in several of the rooms that were added by Nash to the Royal Pavilion at
Brighton in 1818-21 (Plate 58A). His ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18
there are entirely of decorative pierced ironwork and the framing of his
big onion dome is also of metal, although of course invisible. From the
early use of iron columns for gallery supports in churches, increasingly
general by the early 1800s, there shortly developed the aspiration to
exploit iron still more extensively in such edifices. In three churches
that Rickman and the ironmaster John Cragg built in Liverpool, St
George’s, Everton, and St Michael’s, Toxteth Road, both begun in 1813,
and St Philip’s, Hardman Street, completed in 1816, the entire internal
structure is of iron. At St Michael’s the new material is not restricted
to the interior but appears on the outside as well. Rickman’s increasing
archaeological erudition and that of his contemporaries soon limited the
use of iron in Gothic churches, however; by Pugin and the Camdenians it
was rigidly proscribed. Structural elements of iron in churches of any
architectural pretension became acceptable again only in the fifties
(see Chapter 10).
Turning to what long remained the most notable field of metal
construction, bridge building,[155] one finds a rapid increase in the
numbers and the spans of English metal bridges from the mid 1790s on. In
Shropshire, where the first iron bridge and the first all-iron-framed
factory had been built, one of the greatest English engineers, Thomas
Telford (1757-1834),[156] built the Buildwas Bridge with a span of 130
feet in 1795-6. At the same time the much longer and handsomer metal
arch of the Sunderland Bridge in County Durham was rising to the designs
of Rowland Burdon. He was assisted, it appears, by certain ideas
supplied by Thomas Paine (1737-1809), better known for his political
writings than as a technician, who had had some association with
bridge-building in America. Burdon was a Member of Parliament and
neither an architect nor an engineer. Telford, however, though not
professionally trained as an architect, had worked for Sir William
Chambers as a journeyman-mason on Somerset House in his youth;
throughout his career he built masonry toll-houses and even, on
occasion, modest churches in a competent if rudimentary Romantic
Classical vein.
In connexion with his work on the Bridgewater Canal and on the road
system of the Scottish Highlands, Telford designed and built innumerable
bridges, the majority of them of stone. But some of his later iron
bridges, more skilfully devised technically and more graceful visually
than the Buildwas Bridge, deserve mention here. On the Waterloo Bridge
of 1815 at Bettws-y-Coed in Wales he used an openwork inscriptional band
and floral badges rather than architectural detail to give elegance and
even richness to a modest cast-iron arch. A longer and simpler bridge of
similar design but unknown authorship built in 1816 still spans the
Liffey in Dublin.
The same year as the Waterloo Bridge, at Craigellachie, amid austere
Scottish mountains, Telford bridged the Spey with a plain latticed iron
arch. But it is worth noting that he elaborated the masonry abutments as
battlemented towers in a wholly Picturesque way (Plate 59). For the
Menai Bridge, built in 1819-24 between North Wales and Anglesey, Telford
used a new principle in metal construction, suspending his roadbed from
metal chains (Plate 58B). This was a principle of great antiquity
already exploited with success in America.[157] Telford’s masonry towers
at the Menai Bridge are of extremely elegant Romantic Classical design,
tapered like Egyptian pylons and pierced with delicate arches. In the
twin bridge to this at Conway, also in North Wales, the close proximity
of the Edwardian castle led him to provide Castellated towers. In a
still later arched bridge at Tewkesbury of 1826 the latticed metalwork
itself has the cuspings of Gothic tracery.
The Menai Bridge remains the longest of its type in the British Isles.
I. K. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, for which he won
the competition in 1829, but which was begun only in 1837, has already
been mentioned because of the Egyptian detailing proposed for the piers.
This bridge was finally completed only in 1864 by W. H. Barlow (1812-92)
using the materials of Brunel’s earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in
London. Of early arched metal bridges there are very many and by all the
leading English engineers of the first half of the century: John Rennie
(1761-1821), I. K. Brunel (1806-59), George Stephenson (1781-1848) and
his son Robert (1803-59), as well as Telford. The new railways, from the
early thirties on, required even more bridges than the canals
constructed by the previous generation.
In France Napoleon’s engineers built two arched iron bridges across the
Seine. L.-A. de Cessart (1719-1806) designed before 1800 and Delon in
1801-3 executed the Pont des Arts, the first French bridge of iron, and
Lamandé completed the Pont du Jardin du Roi in 1806.[158] Neither is
comparable in span or in logic of design to the earlier English
examples, thus reversing the pre-eminence which the French had held as
bridge-builders so long as masonry was used. The much later Pont du
Carrousel in Paris, built by A.-R. Polonceau (1788-1847) in 1834-6, was
considerably superior to these Napoleonic examples, though hardly
epoch-making. But already in 1824, just as Telford’s Menai Bridge was
completed, Marc Séguin (1786-1875) was spanning the Rhône near Tournon
with a suspension bridge hung on wire ropes[159] instead of chains.
From the early forties Séguin’s cable principle was developed much
further in America in bridges at Wheeling, W. Va., Pittsburgh, Penna.,
and Cincinnati, Ohio, by the German immigrant John A. Roebling
(1806-69). Those at Wheeling[160] and Cincinnati are still in use. The
more dramatically sited Niagara Falls Bridge of 1852, which attracted
world-wide attention when it was new, is no longer extant (Plate 60A);
its success, however, led to Roebling’s being commissioned to build the
famous Brooklyn Bridge[161] in New York. Begun by him in 1869 and
completed by his son Washington A. Roebling (1837-1926) in 1883, this is
still one of the principal sights of New York. It is sad to record that
work in the caissons sunk for the foundations of the piers killed the
designer.
Bridges are at the edge of the realm of architecture. Fairly early,
moreover, they came almost entirely under the control of men without
architectural training or standards—Roebling, for example, was such a
one. Ordinary buildings, all of iron or with much use of iron, are more
significant as the century proceeds, both in France and in England.
Hopper’s Carlton House Conservatory (Plate 60B) has been mentioned. In
1809 the architect F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818), a pupil of Brongniart,
replaced the domed wooden roof of the Halle au Blé in Paris, added in
1782 by J.-G. Legrand (1743-1807) and J. Molinos (1743-1831), with one
of metal. The Marché de la Madeleine, designed by M.-G. Veugny
(1785-1850) possibly as early as 1824 but not built until 1835-8, was
apparently all of metal internally; its masonry exterior, however, was
quite conventional. Already in 1835, in the fish pavilion which formed
part of his rather Durandesque Hungerford Market in London, Charles
Fowler had outstripped this in the direct and elegant use of light metal
components, here with no surrounding shell of masonry at all.
Some further Continental examples of the use of iron in the late
twenties and thirties deserve mention at this point. Alavoine—at whose
suggestion Duc’s Bastille Column, begun in 1831, was made of metal,
though the metal is bronze not iron—designed in 1823 a flèche 432 feet
tall to rise over the crossing of Rouen Cathedral in the form of an
openwork cage of iron. Begun in 1827 and interrupted in 1848, this was
finally completed by the younger Barthélémy (Eugène, 1841-98) and L.-F.
Desmarest (1814-?) in 1877. In 1829-31 Fontaine roofed the
Galeried’Orléans, which he built across the garden of the Palais Royal,
with iron and glass. This structure, now destroyed, was more prominent
and also much wider than most of the many _passages_ and _galeries_[162]
with glass roofs that had been built in Paris and elsewhere in France
from the 1770s on. The most impressive extant French example is the
Passage Pommeraye in Nantes, built by Durand-Gasselin and J.-B. Buron
(?-1881) in 1843; in this the circulation moves upwards from one end to
the other through three storey-levels. A modest Milanese example of
1831, the Galleria de Cristoforis by Andrea Pizzala (?-1862), might be
mentioned here also, as it was the local prototype for the greatest of
all these characteristic nineteenth-century urban features, Mengoni’s
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele begun in the sixties (Plate 75B). Of the many
early nineteenth-century ones that remain in other European cities, the
Galerie Saint-Hubert in Brussels, built by J.-P. Cluysenaer (1811-80), a
pupil of Suys, in 1847, is one of the largest and best maintained.
Warren’s Providence Arcade in Providence, R.I., has been mentioned
earlier.
Related to the _galeries_, and sometimes also so-called, were the large
Parisian enterprises of this period that were really early department
stores. The Bazar de l’Industrie, built by Paul Lelong (1799-1846) in
1830, had a large glass-roofed and iron-galleried court of the sort that
was to be continued in Parisian department stores down into the present
century (see Chapter 16). Even larger and bolder were the similar courts
in the department store known as the Galeries du Commerce et de
l’Industrie, built by Grisart and Froehlicher in the Boulevard
Bonne-Nouvelle in 1838, which has already been mentioned for its richly
arcaded Renaissance façades (Plate 62A). Shop-fronts of iron were also
frequent in Paris[163] by this time. Thus in France, as in England and
America, the use of iron was closely associated with structures for
business use, but more usually with sales emporia than with office
buildings (see Chapter 14). Such, however, were not unknown in England
and America, though they were generally less extensive and made less use
of glass-roofed courts.
Glass held in wooden frames had for some time been extensively employed
for greenhouses. How early iron began to be substituted for wood is not
clear, and not perhaps of much consequence.[164] Hopper’s ornately
Gothic Conservatory of iron and glass at Carlton House in London,
demolished in the twenties, has been mentioned several times already
(Plate 60B). In 1833, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Charles
Rohault de Fleury (1801-75) built a very large and handsome iron
greenhouse without any stylistic decoration. The structure of the square
pavilions was as transparent and rectilinear as the interior framework
of Veugny’s slightly later market seems to have been, and the ranges
between were covered, just as so many wooden greenhouses had been, with
transparent roofs rising in two quadrants. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire
the Great Conservatory was built in 1836-40 by the 6th Duke of
Devonshire’s gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65), possibly with some
minor assistance from Decimus Burton. This quite outclassed the largest
earlier greenhouse, the Anthaeum at Brighton, designed in 1825 and built
in 1832-3 for the horticulturist Henry Phillips, with a dome of iron and
glass 160 feet in diameter which collapsed before it was quite
completed. The Chatsworth conservatory was a still larger rectangle, 227
feet by 123 feet, with the exterior rising in a double cusp like the
side ranges of Rohault’s Paris greenhouse—or, for that matter, like the
section of the Anthaeum. The columns and beams here were of iron, but
the great arched principals of the ‘nave’ and the ‘aisles’ were of
laminated wood and four-foot long panes of glass were held in wooden
sashes arranged in a ridge-and-furrow pattern. A particular invention of
Paxton’s, whose name was given to such roofs, was the hollowing out of
the wooden members at the base of the furrows to serve as gutters.
Decimus Burton’s still extant Palm Stove at Kew, carried out by the
contracting engineer Richard Turner of Dublin in 1845-7, with rounded
ends and a higher central area, is more bubble-like than Paxton’s
because of the absence of ridges and furrows on its continuously glazed
surface (Plate 67A). But both these great greenhouses were among the
most striking monuments of their Early Victorian day and were never
exceeded later in elegance though often in size. French rivals, long
since destroyed, were the Jardins d’Hiver in Lyons and Paris of 1841 and
1847 by Hector Horeau (1801-72), the latter a rectangle 300 by 180 feet
and 60 feet tall.
With the thirties begins the story of a new building type, the railway
station,[165] in whose sheds the mid century was to realize some of the
largest and finest examples ever of ‘ferrovitreous’, or iron-and-glass,
construction. The structures utilizing iron thus far mentioned have been
of two sorts, some, such as bridges, markets, greenhouses, etc., with
only subsidiary masonry elements, if any at all; others, examples of
mixed construction with metal providing only the internal skeleton or
the roof. Railway stations were generally—and before the fifties
always—examples of mixed construction, but of a rather special sort. The
iron and glass portions, that is the sheds, and the masonry portions are
likely to be merely juxtaposed, not truly integrated. Such a masonry
frontispiece as Hardwick’s Euston Arch in London of 1835-7 had no
connexion at all with the functional elements of the station behind—here
by Robert Stephenson—although Euston was an extreme case. But a happy
co-ordination of the masonry and the iron-and-glass portions of stations
was rarely achieved anywhere.
Of the earliest railway station, that at Crown Street in Liverpool of
1830, nothing remains; it was in any case a very modest structure.[166]
Of its successors at Lime Street the present station is the fourth on
the site. Even the ‘Arch’ at Euston, the next major station to be built,
is now gone, despite the strenuous efforts of the Victorian Society and
others in Britain and overseas to save this symbolic portal to the
Victorian Age. However, the first station at Temple Meads in Bristol,
which was built by Brunel in 1839-40, is physically intact, though
supplanted in present-day use by a larger and later one. Castellated as
regards the masonry block in front, the shed here is equally
medievalizing; for its roof is of timber, not of iron, and based on the
fourteenth-century hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall in London, whose
width it exceeds by a few feet only.
Of the once far finer Trijunct station at Derby, built in 1839-41, the
last portions of Francis Thompson’s brick screen have finally been
destroyed; the three original sheds provided by Robert Stephenson, with
Thompson’s collaboration on the detailing, were each 56 feet wide in
comparison to the 40-foot width of Stephenson’s earlier ones at Euston
(Plate 62B). The tie-beam roof had much of the graceful directness and
linear elegance of Rohault’s greenhouse or Veugny’s market.
More and more, the use of iron was being generally accepted as a
technical necessity in the forties. At Buckingham Palace Blore, in
adapting one of Nash’s side pavilions as a chapel for Queen Victoria in
1842-3, used visible iron supports just as Nash had done so long before
in the interiors of the Brighton Pavilion for her uncle. Yet generally
the use of iron in important masonry structures in the thirties and the
early forties was quite invisible, being confined to the floors and the
substructure of the roofs. In 1837-9 C.-J. Baron (1783-1855) and Nicolas
Martin (1809-?), for example, provided a complete iron roof above the
vaults of Chartres Cathedral, a work of very considerable scale and
technical elaboration that provided the immediate prototype for the iron
roof of Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, designed in 1840 and begun in
1846. At the Houses of Parliament, the actual construction of which
started only in 1840, Barry capped the whole with iron roofs—the
external iron plates are actually visible, of course, but the fact of
their being of iron is rarely recognized. Fireproof floors built
according to various French and English patent systems were increasingly
thought necessary in all high-grade construction. Queen Victoria’s
Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, constructed without the aid of an
architect by the builder Thomas Cubitt, had them throughout, as did many
other well-built country houses of the forties, at least in the passages
and stair-halls.
Here and there in the commercial buildings of this decade the iron
skeleton used inside came through to the exterior, as it had on one of
Rickman’s Liverpool churches a generation earlier. A small office
building at No. 50 Watling Street in London, with visible iron supports
and lintels in the upper storeys but with brick corner piers and brick
spandrels, was a case in point, probably dating from early in the
decade. By 1844 Fairbairn was recommending in a report that fireproof
construction should be used in all warehouses. Increasingly this was
done in Lancashire and, before long, elsewhere; Fairbairn himself had
introduced it ten years earlier in the Jevons Warehouse on the New Quay
in Manchester.
Closely associated with the development of iron construction is the
development of prefabrication; indeed, the parts of an elaborate iron
edifice, such as a bridge or a greenhouse, are necessarily prefabricated
and merely assembled at the site. From the early forties, and perhaps
even before that, lighthouses were frequently erected in ironmasters’
yards in Britain, disassembled, shipped to Bermuda or the Barbadoes, and
then reassembled. In 1843 John Walker of London provided a prefabricated
palace for an African king and, by the end of the decade, prefabricated
warehouses and dwellings of iron were being supplied to gold-diggers in
California and emigrants to Australia in very considerable quantity. A
look at the prefabricated houses of the 1940s will perhaps explain why
almost none of these ancestors of a century earlier seems to have
survived, at least in recognizable form. None the less, the advance of
prefabrication remains a notable technical—though hardly
architectural—achievement of the 1840s and 1850s.
To the mid and late forties belong several splendid examples of mixed
construction in various countries that not only represent technical
feats of a high order but are also fully architectural in character.
Some are by architects, others by teams of architects and engineers
working in close collaboration. In building the Britannia Bridge,[167]
which crosses the Menai Strait near Telford’s Menai Bridge, the Derby
Trijunct team of Stephenson and Thompson in 1845-50 utilized with great
success the rectangular tubes built up of wrought-iron plates that
Fairbairn, the consulting engineer, recommended (Plate 61). The Holyhead
railway line still passes through these tubes. The masonry entrances and
the tall towers, taller than they need have been because of Stephenson’s
original intention to use suspensory members for additional support to
his rigid tubes, were superbly detailed by Thompson. Contemporaries
called them Egyptian, but the design has already been noted as fully
consonant with Romantic Classicism though quite devoid of Grecian
elements. At least the sculptor John Thomas’s pairs of gigantic lions at
the entrances are Nubian!
At the London Coal Exchange[168] built in 1846-9 in Lower Thames Street,
the City Corporation’s architect Bunning arrived at no such complete
co-ordination of masonry and metallic design as did Stephenson and
Thompson on the Britannia Bridge. The masonry exterior consists of two
_palazzo_ blocks set at a fairly sharp angle to one another and loosely
linked by a very Picturesque round tower, free-standing in its upper
stages. Behind all this the dome of the interior court can barely be
glimpsed. Inside this court, however, no masonry at all is visible; one
sees only an elegant cage of iron elements rising to the glazed
hemisphere above (Plate 63). The metal members are richly but
appropriately detailed, and there is even more appropriate decorative
painting by Sang in such panels as are not glazed.
In France two monuments of comparable distinction have already been
mentioned, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of 1843-50
and Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est of 1847-52 (Plate 22B). Unfortunately the
original shed of the latter, with arched principals of 100-foot span,
was taken down when the station was doubled in size in the present
century. Inside the library a central row of iron columns of somewhat
Pompeian design—that is, resembling the slender, metallically scaled
members seen in Pompeian wall paintings—still carries the two barrel
roofs on delicately scrolled arches of openwork iron (Figure 14). Since
the masonry walls with their ranges of window arches are visible all
round, the effect produced is less novel than in the iron-and-glass
court of the Coal Exchange; but Labrouste achieved much greater
integration between interior and exterior (Plate 21). The Dianabad in
Vienna, built by Karl Etzel in 1841-3, had a fine iron roof; the
circular bracing of the iron principals, a frequent motif in large
openwork members of cast iron at this time, was most appropriate to the
_Rundbogenstil_ detailing of the masonry walls (Plate 66B).
Monferran’s cast-iron dome on St Isaac’s in Petersburg, completed about
1842, has already been mentioned (Plate 27A). This was rivalled before
very long by several American examples,[169] most notably Walter’s
enormous dome, built in 1855-65, above the Capitol in Washington (Plate
82A). Baroque in silhouette and rather Baroque in detail also, this may
have encouraged—along with the rising taste for elaborately plastic
effects of which it was itself a notable expression—the increasingly
common practice of casting the exposed iron elements of American
commercial façades in the form of rich Corinthian columns and heavily
moulded arches.
Around 1850 cast-iron architecture was coming to its climax everywhere.
James Bogardus (1800-74), a manufacturer of iron grinding machinery, not
an architect or engineer, began to erect in Center Street in New York in
1848 a four-storeyed urban structure for his own use as a factory with
an exterior consisting only of cast-iron piers and lintels. This was one
of the earliest[170] and most highly publicized of the cast-iron fronts
which Bogardus and various other ironmasters in New York and elsewhere
made ubiquitous in the principal American cities before and after the
Civil War. But his earliest completed iron front was that of the
five-storey chemist shop of John Milhau at 183 Broadway erected within
the year 1848. An extant work by Bogardus, the range of four-storey
stores built for Edward H. Laing at the north-west corner of Washington
and Murray Streets in New York, was begun in 1849 and finished within
two months, well before his own building was completed. These early
cast-iron fronts are very logical and expressive in the way the
attenuated Grecian Doric columns and flat entablatures are used to form
an external frame; but the Laing stores have lost most of the applied
ornament that appealed so much to mid-century taste (Plate 67B). Later
façades are richer and heavier, generally with Renaissance or Baroque
arcading, as has just been noted. For the Harper’s Building in New York
built in 1854, which incorporated the first American rolled-iron beams,
the architect John B. Corlies provided a design of ornate Late
Renaissance character. Curiously enough, in executing this building
Bogardus used for the upper four storeys the same castings as in the Sun
Building that he had erected in 1850-1 in Baltimore to the designs of R.
G. Hatfield (1815-79). To the typical cast-iron fronts of New York,[171]
of which the most extensive and one of the simplest was that of the old
Stewart Department Store on Broadway begun in 1859 by John W. Kellum
(1807-71), vacated several years ago by Wanamakers and burned during
demolition in 1956, one may well prefer the delicacy of a Glasgow
example, the Jamaica Street Warehouse[172] of 1855-6, or a remote Far
Western department store like the Z.C.M.I. of 1868 in Salt Lake City,
rivalling amid the Rocky Mountains those of Paris. Neither of these is
the work of architects.
Great Britain and Europe saw few all-iron façades. This was in large
part because the danger of their collapse when exposed to the extreme
heat of urban conflagrations, a danger made real to Americans only by
the fires of the seventies in Boston and Chicago, was appreciated very
early. Yet it was not in America but in Britain that the greatest
masterpieces of iron construction of the fifties were built. The
succeeding turn of the tide against the visible use of iron also had its
origins in Britain, not in America where the material had early become
so tediously ubiquitous.
In 1850 Paxton was completing at Chatsworth a relatively small new
greenhouse to protect the _Victoria regia_, a giant water-lily imported
from Africa by the Duke of Devonshire. With its arcaded walls of iron
and glass and its flat ridge-and-furrow roof, this seemed to Paxton to
provide a suitable paradigm for the vast structure[173] needed by May
1851 to house the Great Exhibition, the first international exposition,
which was scheduled to open at that time. The Commissioners of the
Exhibition had held an international competition that produced several
extremely interesting ferrovitreous projects, notably an Irish one by
Turner, Burton’s collaborator at Kew, and a French one by Hector Horeau.
Rightly or wrongly, all of them were rejected, and the Commissioners’
own Building Committee, including the chief architectural and
engineering talents of the age, then produced a project of their own.
Reputedly in large part the work of the engineer Brunel and the
architect T. L. Donaldson (1795-1885), this manifestly impractical
scheme, a sort of _Rundbogenstil_ super-railway-station intended to be
built of brick—the project actually provided the inspiration for
Herholdt’s Central Station in Copenhagen of 1863-4, or so it would
appear—was already out for bids when Paxton presented in July 1850 his
own scheme based on the Chatsworth Lily House. Published in the
_Illustrated London News_ and offered with a low alternative bid by the
contractors Fox & Henderson, this was accepted and—with much significant
modification—erected in the incredibly short space of nine months.
[Illustration:
Figure 14. H.-P.-F. Labrouste: Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève,
(1839), 1843-50, section
]
Inside this vast structure, with its tall central nave, galleried
aisles, and arched transept, Paxton and his engineer associates, Sir
Charles Fox (1810-74) and his partner Henderson (to the two of whom a
considerable part of the credit must go), created unwittingly a new sort
of architectural space. So large as in effect to be boundless, this
space was defined only by the three-dimensional grid of co-ordinates
which the regularly spaced iron stanchions and girders provided (Plate
64). These elements, designed for mass-production, and also in such a
way that they could be disassembled as readily as they were assembled,
had a new sort of mechanical elegance towards which the design of metal
components had hitherto been moving only very gradually. The character
of the casting process made it only too easy to impose on cast-iron
elements all sorts of more or less inappropriate decorative treatments
from Gothic to Baroque; only rarely had stylistic detail been
successfully reinterpreted, as by Bunning in the Coal Exchange, in terms
of the fat arrises and broad radii that are suitable to the material and
to the particular method of its production. Even at the Crystal Palace a
few touches of ornament provided by Owen Jones (1806-89), who was also
responsible for the highly original and rather Turneresque colour
treatment, suggest the gap—and, alas, it was in the 1850s a widening
gap—between the technicians’ and the architects’ ambitions for iron.
Contemporaries had no words for what the Crystal Palace offered. Even
today, when the aesthetic possibilities of the new sort of space it
contained as well as the technical advantages of its method of assembly
from mass-produced elements have been more generally explored, it is not
easy to describe Paxton’s and Fox & Henderson’s achievement despite the
remarkably complete documentation that exists. The space inside the tall
transept (an afterthought designed to allow the saving of a great elm),
arched on laminated wooden principals, was more readily appreciated in
its day than that in the long nave, because it was more familiar. It is
not surprising, therefore, that when the Crystal Palace was disassembled
and rebuilt in 1852-4 at Sydenham, where it lasted down to its
destruction—ironically by fire—in 1936, the entire nave was arched
although with principals of openwork metal rather than of laminated
wood.
The Crystal Palace’s structural vocabulary—though not, alas, the quality
of its space—can be appreciated in the Midland Station at Oxford, built
by Fox & Henderson with identical elements in 1852. There one can still
see how the new methods enforced a modular regularity more rigid than
that of Romantic Classicism and also encouraged a tenuity of material
quite unknown to the Neo-Gothic as executed in masonry. Thus the visual
result ran doubly counter to the rising fashions in architecture in the
fifties (see Chapters 9 and 10). Within five years of the moment when
the Crystal Palace was greeted with such general—though never
universal—acclaim the climactic moment of the early Iron Age was already
over. In those few years, however, Crystal Palaces rose in many other
major cities. The finest was perhaps that built in Dublin in 1852-4 by
Sir John Benson (1812-74) with its bubble-like rounded ends; the least
successful that in New York[174] of 1853 by G. J. B. Carstensen
(1812-57), the founder of the Tivoli in Copenhagen, and Charles
Gildemeister (1820-69). The prompt destruction of this last by fire was
a fearful early warning of the limitations of iron construction
unsheathed by masonry. The burning of Voit’s Glaspalast of 1854 in
Munich, like that of the Sydenham Palace, occurred in our own day, as
also the similar end of the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam, which
was built by Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75) in 1856.
The prestige of iron construction was never higher than in the early
fifties. For Balmoral Castle, not yet rebuilt in its final form, the
Prince Consort ordered in 1851 a prefabricated iron ballroom by E. T.
Bellhouse of Manchester modelled on the houses for emigrants to
Australia by Bellhouse that the Prince had seen at the Great Exhibition.
In the Record Office in London, begun by Pennethorne in this same year,
even more iron was used for the internal grid of separate storerooms and
for the window-sash than in the great mill that Lockwood & Mawson built
for Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1854. The internal
structure of this last represented another major contribution by
Fairbairn. Characteristically, however, the detailing of the external
masonry of the Record Office is more or less Tudor, if rather crude and
over-scaled, while that of the Saltaire mill is picturesquely
Italianate.
In two new London railway stations, both happily extant, these years
produced the chief rivals to the Crystal Palace. At King’s Cross,
planned by the architect Lewis Cubitt in 1850 and built in 1851-2, the
two great arched sheds somewhat resembled technically the transept of
the original Crystal Palace, their principals having been of laminated
wood. These had eventually to be replaced in 1869-70 with the present
steel principals which are, however, still held by Cubitt’s original
cast-iron shoes. The masonry block of the station on the left, or
departure, side is undistinguished but fairly inconspicuous. The great
glory of the station is the front, with its two enormous stock-brick
arches that close the ends of the sheds towards the Euston Road (Plate
66A). The idea had been Duquesney’s at the Gare de l’Est, but here there
is no irrelevant Renaissance detail, only grand scale and clear
expression of the arched spaces behind.
Paddington Station, built in 1852-4, has no such grand exterior, being
masked at the southern end by the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. The
engineer Brunel here called in the architect M. D. Wyatt (1820-77) as
collaborator, and for the metal members of the shed Wyatt devised
ornamentation which—as Brunel specifically requested—is both novel and
suited to the materials (Plate 65). There is a slightly Saracenic
flavour both to the stalagmitic modelling of the great stanchions and to
the wrought elements of tracery that fill the lunettes at the ends and
even run along the sides of the great elliptically-arched principals.
But the detailing of these, if unnecessarily elaborate, is certainly
quite original and not inappropriate to the materials or to the complex
spatial effects of the three great parallel sheds crossed by two equally
tall transepts. The cool spirit of Cubitt’s station recalls that of
earlier Romantic Classicism; the richer forms of Paddington are related
to the rising ‘High’ styles of the third quarter of the century, of
whose initiation the Great Western Hotel was one of the earliest
indications (see Chapter 8).
By 1853 the craze for iron construction was so great that the
Ecclesiological Society, forgetting their Puginian principles—Pugin had
died the previous year, but not before issuing a severe critique of the
metal-and-glass construction of the Crystal Palace—commissioned their
favourite and most ‘correct’ architect, Carpenter, to design for them an
iron church. It was not Carpenter’s death two years later but the
refusal of the English bishops to consecrate prefabricated structures
for permanent use that brought to nothing this interesting project along
the lines of Rickman’s and Cragg’s Liverpool churches of forty years
earlier. The general flood of prefabrication, now producing all sorts of
structures for the Antipodes and other remote areas that still lacked
their own building industries, slowed down in 1854, when the demands of
the War Office for barracks (on account of the Crimean War) deflected
prefabricators from civil production.
In that year, however, Sydney Smirke began one of the last major
monuments of cast iron in England, the domed Reading Room in the court
of his brother’s British Museum. Awkward in proportion and encased in
stacks, this is not to be compared in distinction of design with the
Reading Room that Henri Labrouste added to the Bibliothèque Nationale in
Paris in 1862-8[175] (Plate 69). That superb interior, with its many
light domes of terracotta carried on the slenderest of metal columns and
arches, is a great advance over his earlier Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève (Figure 14). The Reading Room in Paris has no proper
exterior, however, any more than does that in London, for it is
incorporated in a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
structures that Labrouste adapted and enlarged (see Chapter 8). Even
more striking are Labrouste’s stacks, visible from the Reading Room
through a great glass wall, for in them the entire spatial volume is
articulated by vertical and horizontal metal elements in a fashion
somewhat like the interior of the Crystal Palace. But in the sixties
such things were exceptional.
In 1853-8 L.-P. Baltard’s son Victor (1805-74) built the Central
Markets[176] of Paris with the assistance of F.-E. Callet (1791-1854) in
a mode much less elegant but still franker, exposing his metal structure
outside as well as in, at Napoleon III’s personal insistence.
Saint-Eugène, an almost completely iron-built church of Gothic design,
was erected in Paris in 1854-5 by L.-A. Boileau (1812-96).[177]
Boileau’s Saint-Paul at Montluçon, Allier, completed in 1863, is a
second French example of a cast-iron church, and he made designs for
several others. His Notre-Dame-de-France off Leicester Square in London,
a modest church of 1868, has been completely rebuilt since the last war.
However, to house the first Paris international exhibition, that of
1855, F.-A. Cendrier (1803-92) and J.-M.-V. Viel (1796-1863), both
pupils of Vaudoyer and Lebas, provided in 1853-4 not another Crystal
Palace, such as Dublin, New York, Copenhagen, Munich, Amsterdam, and
Breslau, among other cities, had built or were building, but an example
of mixed construction. The great iron-and-glass arched interiors were
all but completely masked externally by a very conventional masonry
shell. It was not until the Paris Exposition of 1878 that iron and glass
were frankly exposed and decoratively treated on the exterior of such a
structure in France (see Chapter 16). The curve of enthusiasm for iron
was evidently taking a downward dip; in Britain the Age of Cast Iron
came to an end even more suddenly and much more dramatically than in
France.
In 1855 Sir Henry Cole, the prime mover of the Great Exhibition of 1851,
had to provide on the estate at Brompton, in the part of London now
called South Kensington that the Commissioners had just acquired from
the proceeds of the Exhibition, temporary housing for the collections
that were being formed by the Government’s Department of Practical Art.
Having to build in great haste and in war-time, it is perhaps not
surprising that Cole employed, properly speaking, neither an architect
nor an engineer, but allowed the Edinburgh contracting firm of C. D.
Young & Son to design as well as erect the structure subject to some
nominal control from the engineer Sir William Cubitt (1785-1861). It was
certainly a surprising product of a Government agency devoted to raising
the standard of ‘art-manufactures’! Although we can today appreciate
some of the practical virtues of this edifice as a Museum of Science and
Art, it must be admitted that it was inferior even to the general
contemporary run of prefabricated structures to which it belongs
technically. Derisively christened the ‘Brompton Boilers’ by George
Godwin (1815-88), editor of the _Builder_, it roused a chorus of
disapproval as loud if not as widespread as the Crystal Palace had done
of approval five years before.
After this time British and Continental interest in iron construction
waned rapidly; for fifteen years or so exposed iron was chiefly
exploited in the commercial façades of the United States, themselves now
more and more masonry-like in scale and in detailing, as has been noted.
Structural steel began to be used here and there from the early sixties,
but the serious beginnings of the Age of Steel lay a quarter of a
century ahead (see Chapter 14).
At least in England, its principal home, the Age of Cast Iron, so
paradoxically interrelated with the Gothic Revival in its very early
stages, came to an end in considerable part because of the triumph of
the Gothic Revival around 1850 (see Chapter 10). For several decades the
characteristic new architectural developments were stylistic rather than
technical. Yet it was the later theories—not the practice—of a French
medievalist, Viollet-le-Duc, which played a great part in the renewed
interest in the frank use of metal on the Continent in the eighties and
nineties (see Chapter 16).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART TWO
185O-19OO
CHAPTER 8
SECOND EMPIRE PARIS, UNITED ITALY,
AND IMPERIAL-AND-ROYAL VIENNA
MANY historians, in despair, have merely labelled the period after 1850
‘Eclectic’ as if earlier periods of architecture—and notably all the
preceding hundred years since 1750—had not also been eclectic, although
admittedly to a lesser degree. Within the eclecticism of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there can readily be
distinguished the two major stylistic divisions with which Part I has
dealt separately (in Chapters 1-5 and in Chapter 6, respectively). So
also in the fifties, sixties, and seventies two principal camps are
discernible among the architects. Their programmes were less clear than
in the previous half century, and in one case much less widely accepted
internationally. Yet the High Victorian Gothic of England, taken
together with the later Neo-Gothic elsewhere, on the one hand, and what
may be loosely called the international Second Empire mode on the other,
subsume between them a fair part of the more conspicuous architectural
production of the third quarter of the century.
Both the Victorian Gothic of this period and the Second Empire mode were
‘high’ phases of style. Perhaps for that reason neither of them
controlled, in the way that Romantic Classicism had done in the earlier
decades of the century, all or even any very extensive segments of
building activity; yet between them they gave colour to a very
considerable proportion of it. The obvious stigmata of one or of the
other, or even of both—external polychromy and high mansard roofs,
respectively—are to be found on such modest things as mills and
working-class housing blocks as well as on major public monuments. The
High Victorian Gothic first developed in Anglican ecclesiastical
architecture and always carried with it a rather churchy
flavour—sometimes quite ludicrously, as in the case of Gothic
distilleries, Gothic public-houses, and Gothic sewage plants.
Continental Neo-Gothic was more largely confined to churches, especially
in France. The international Second Empire mode found its inspiration in
the grandiose extension of a palace in Paris; something of the Parisian
and even the palatial clung to it when it was used—as often in the
non-French world—for such things as factories and modest suburban
villas.
Both the Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire had definite national
homes, yet both were also full of elements of Italian origin. In that
respect the High Victorian phase of the fifties and sixties was somewhat
analogous to the Germanic _Rundbogenstil_, as well as being the direct
heir of the earlier and more puristic Gothic Revival of the forties in
England. Often the Second Empire mode was even more Italianate, since it
was in the main but a pompous modulation of the earlier Renaissance
Revival. The one had its roots in the Picturesque, but it differed from
earlier Picturesque manifestations in being a ‘style’—or very nearly
such—not merely the reflection of a point of view. The other had roots
not only in Romantic Classicism but also farther back in the High
Renaissance and the Baroque; some qualities of those earlier styles were
both continued and revived. But neither High Victorian Gothic nor Second
Empire were ‘revivals’ in the sense of those of the first half of the
century; they lived with a vigorous nineteenth-century life of their
own, not one borrowed from the past. In both cases one may more properly
say that they _had_ revived.
The Second Empire mode was the heir, or at least the successor, of the
last universal style of the western world, the Romantic Classical.
Moreover its wide international sway was hardly terminated by the end of
Napoleon III’s reign in France any more than its beginning had waited
for his enthronement. Concerning that sway it should be noted, however,
that considered as a definite ‘style’ the Second Empire mode is very far
from characterizing as much of French production in this age as of that
in several other countries. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, its actual
initiation may almost be said to have occurred outside France and before
the political Second Empire actually began in 1852. In this chapter and
the next, certain alternative developments in succession to the earlier
Renaissance Revival have been associated with the Second Empire mode,
sometimes a bit arbitrarily perhaps, for lack of a more appropriate
place to deal with them.
Although France was less affected by the Picturesque in the first half
of the nineteenth century than England, the Renaissance Revival had
permitted some straying from the more rigid paths of Romantic Classicism
in the thirties and forties (see Chapters 3 and 6). The earliest French
work of the twenties that may seem of Italian Renaissance inspiration is
very severe and flat, approximating occasionally the effects of the
German _Rundbogenstil_ yet consistently disdaining that mode’s
tendencies towards either medievalism or originality in detail.
Gradually, under Louis Philippe, there were changes: on the one hand,
there arose an interest in later periods of the Italian Renaissance; on
the other, there came an increasing and less peripheral use of
sixteenth-century and even later native models. Common to both these
developments was an evident desire for richer and more plastic
effects.[178] What above all distinguishes the mature Second Empire
mode, even more in other countries than in France, is the elaboration of
three-dimensional composition by the employment of visible mansard roofs
and of pavilions at the ends and centres of buildings, these last capped
either with especially tall straight-sided mansards or, even more
characteristically, with convex or concave ones. Such features are rare
before 1850 in France and almost unknown elsewhere.[179]
The return of the mansard in France is harder to document than its
appearance as a new element of architectural composition in other
countries, for in France it had never passed out of use as a practical
device for providing usable attics. With the increasing emulation of
sixteenth-century French models in the second quarter of the century
tall roofs of a more medieval sort began to be used with some frequency.
Biet’s ‘Maison de François I’ of 1825 did not have them; but ten years
later they are very prominent on the _François I_ house Dusillion built
in the Rue Vaneau. Moreover, Lesueur in the late thirties could hardly
avoid their use when extending the sixteenth-century Hôtel de Ville
(Plate 22A). As noted earlier, it seems to have been H.-A.-G. de Gisors,
at the École Normale Supérieure built in 1841-7, who first re-introduced
on a prominent building mansards of seventeenth- or early
eighteenth-century character, and in association with detailing that
suggests, vaguely at least, the _style Louis XIV_. By the late forties
the use of such mansards was fairly common in France, although they
rarely received much emphasis.
Had Dusillion in 1849-51 built the mansarded mansion for T. H. Hope[180]
in Paris rather than in London therefore, or the Danish-born but
Paris-schooled Detlef Lienau (1818-87)[181] his mansarded Hart M. Shiff
house of the same date in France rather than in America, neither would
have been especially notable. But in the England and the United States
of the mid century emulation of French models was in itself novel.
Dusillion’s and Lienau’s mansards, moderate enough by French standards,
suggested to the English and the Americans a way by which edifices of
generically Renaissance character could be given something of the bold
silhouette that high pointed roofs provided for Victorian Gothic
structures. Like Barry’s loggia-topped towers and his corner chimneys,
mansards appealed directly to the mid century’s characteristic desire to
break sharply away from the flat-surfaced, and nearly flat-topped, cubic
blocks of Romantic Classicism. Pavilion composition offered a similar
resource for the plastic modelling of façades.
In 1851, following immediately after the Hope house, came the designing
of the Great Western Hotel at Paddington in London by the Hardwicks.
This was still, one should note, before the Second Empire actually began
in France. Gawky though this hotel is, and very uncertain in its use of
French precedent, contemporaries generally recognized its inspiration as
derived from the period of Louis XIV. The complex massing and the broken
skyline, with roofs of different heights and pavilion-like towers at the
ends, are much more obviously a premonition of the Second Empire mode in
the form the world outside France would shortly adopt it than were the
London and New York houses of two years earlier. Unlike Dusillion and
Lienau, moreover, the architects of the Great Western Hotel, recognized
masters of the dying Greek Revival as well as of the rising Gothic and
Renaissance Revivals, were not French-trained.
If the international Second Empire mode had thus, in a sense, beginnings
outside France, it is nevertheless true that its spiritual headquarters
was in Paris. The prestige of the new Emperor’s capital, a prestige
rapidly regained after more than a generation of desuetude, quite as
much as the visual appeal of multiple mansards and pavilioned façades,
explains the world-wide success of the mode during, and even well after,
the eighteen years that the Second Empire lasted.
It was in 1852 that Napoleon, then Prince-President, made himself
Emperor. He had already signalized, a few months earlier, his ambition
to revive the splendours not alone of his uncle’s rule but those of
earlier French monarchs by his decision to complete the Louvre[182]—or
more accurately to connect the Louvre with the Tuileries. This was a
project over which generations of architects had struggled on paper and
at which several abortive starts had already been made. Visconti
received the commission, not Duban, who had been engaged since 1848 on
what was proving a highly controversial restoration of the old Louvre.
Visconti was chosen not for his reputation as a private architect but
largely because a succession of public projects for new library
buildings in Paris that he had been asked to prepare under Louis
Philippe and even under the Second Republic had all fallen through, and
it was felt he deserved an important commission from the State. Perhaps
also his Tomb of Napoleon I at the Invalides made him especially
sympathetic to Napoleon III.
A viable scheme for the New Louvre was produced by the sixty-year-old
Visconti with very great rapidity. Counting on the great size of the
Cour du Carrousel to obscure the awkward lack of parallelism between the
Louvre and the Tuileries, he planned two hollow blocks extending
westward at either end of the existing western front of the old Louvre.
Beyond these blocks narrower wings, in part built already, would connect
with the two ends of the Tuileries Palace in which French rulers usually
lived. In the middle of the court fronts of the side blocks there were
to be large pavilions, echoing Le Mercier’s in the centre of the west
wing of the old Louvre, and other smaller pavilions to mark the salient
corners towards the Place du Carrousel. Although the new constructions
were intended to house various things—two ministries, a library, stables
for the Tuileries, etc.—they were designed comprehensively with no
specific indication of what would go on behind the long walls and inside
the various pavilions. The New Louvre was not a palace or Royal
residence; but like the old Louvre, which by this time housed several
disparate activities—most notably the chief art gallery of France—it was
meant to be representationally palatial.
In 1853 Visconti died and H.-M. Lefuel (1810-80), a pupil of Huyot, took
over. Lefuel very much enriched the design and thereby provided the
prime Parisian exemplar of the Second Empire mode, at least as the world
outside France came to know it in the late fifties and sixties. Heavily
though Lefuel leaned on the precedents provided by the various sections
of the old Louvre, it is important to stress that his design did not
represent, in the way of the first half of the century, a specific
‘revival’. For one thing, the old Louvre, begun by Pierre Lescot late in
François I’s reign and carried forward by a succession of architects in
the next four hundred years, offered a wide range of suggestions but no
one consistent model. The most characteristic and striking features of
the New Louvre, the corner pavilions, were those that were most eclectic
in inspiration and in their total effect most nearly original (Plate
68). No part of the old Louvre is as boldly plastic as these pavilions
with their rich applied orders set far forward of the wall-plane; only
Le Mercier’s Pavillon de l’Horloge on the old Louvre offered precedent
for the great height of all the new pavilion roofs and in particular for
the convex mansards, like square domes, over the central pavilions
flanking the Cour du Carrousel.
Sumptuous as was Goujon’s sculptural investiture of the earliest work in
the court of the old Louvre, this was delicate in scale and very flat;
much of the sculptural decoration of the new pavilions follows Goujon
fairly closely, but even more—some of it nearly in the round—is so
bombastically plastic as almost to justify the term ‘Neo-Baroque’.
Although there is actual early-seventeenth-century precedent for most of
their individual details, the very lush stone dormers set against the
high straight mansards of the corner pavilions are particularly novel in
effect. For the next thirty years, and even longer, such features of the
New Louvre would be imitated all over the western world yet,
paradoxically, they had much less influence in France and almost none in
Paris.
As far as the outside world—particularly perhaps England and the United
States, but hardly less Latin America—was concerned the New Louvre was
the prime architectural glory of Second Empire Paris and the symbol,
_par excellence_, of cosmopolitan modernity. Burghers in Amsterdam and
Montreal, vacationers in Yorkshire and silver-miners in the Rocky
Mountains all expected to find echoes of it in the sumptuous new hotels
they frequented; Latin Americans continued to emulate it even into the
twentieth century. Yet in the real Paris of the Second Empire, the Paris
which is largely still extant today, the New Louvre is but one prominent
structure among many and, as has been said, not even a very typical one.
The first Napoleon had had no time to carry out any considerable
urbanistic reorganization of his French capital. But for the goodwill of
his successors, notably Louis Philippe, the architectural projects that
he was able to initiate would never have been brought to completion. His
nephew, however, vowed to peace and not to war, had nearly two decades
in which to build. Well before his reign began, moreover, he had
definitely made up his mind to replan Paris more drastically than any
great city had ever been replanned before.[183] Only a few fine squares,
the Champs Élysées, and the Rue de Rivoli remain in Paris from earlier
campaigns of urban extension and replanning; but the Paris of the Second
Empire, the Paris of the boulevards and the great avenues, is the
urbanistic masterwork of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a
period notably deficient in urbanistic achievement almost everywhere
else except in Vienna.
For all the sumptuousness of the individual monuments with which the
focal points of Napoleon III’s Paris were ornamented, their settings are
generally more distinguished than the ‘jewels’ mounted in them; an
exception, of course, is the Place de l’Étoile where, however, the jewel
was inherited from an earlier period (Plate 7). This is because of the
high standard of design that was maintained in the general run of new
blocks of flats that lined the _places_, the boulevards, and the avenues
(Plate 75A). Since in Second Empire Paris the urban totality is more
significant than the individual buildings, and since over the years of
the Empire—or for that matter down even to the eighties—there was very
little stylistic development, the Parisian production of this period may
well be presented more topographically than chronologically, as if one
were outlining a tour[184] of its splendours.
There is one extant railway station of some distinction belonging to the
period at which to arrive. Yet this station, Hittorff’s Gare du Nord
designed in 1861 and built in 1862-5, is perhaps less advanced than
Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est, which was just being completed as the Second
Empire opened (Plate 22B). The flat Ionic pilasters of the façade and
the great archivolt-surrounded openings between them are evidence of the
firm resistance that Hittorff’s generation put up against the lusher
tastes of the mid century as expressed in Lefuel’s work on the New
Louvre. Even more characteristically Romantic Classical, and probably
finer though less famous than the Gare du Nord, was Cendrier’s Gare de
Lyon, since demolished, which had been built almost a decade earlier at
the same time as his Palais de l’Industrie in the early fifties.
Proceeding from Hittorff’s station one strikes immediately the
characteristic broad straight streets, often lined with trees, that were
the new Second Empire arteries of Paris. The continuous ranges of grey
stone buildings, their even skyline crowned with inconspicuous mansards,
generally include shops below and always contain flats above. They are
so designed as to attract very little attention to the individual
structures,[185] almost as little as do the separate houses in London
terraces. There is much less irregularity of outline than along Nash’s
Regent Street, for example, and a general consistency in the size and
phrasing of the windows. There is also very little noticeable variety in
the handling of the conventional apparatus of academic detail so crisply
carved in fine limestone. Even where, by great exception, some bolder
architect such as Viollet-le-Duc used more original detail, the unity of
character is barely disturbed, so consistent are the basic patterns of
the façades (Plate 101A).
Since the plan of Paris has remained basically radial, the visitor has
the choice of proceeding circumferentially along one of the lines of
outer or inner boulevards or of turning inwards to the centre. It is
more profitable, on the whole, to advance centripetally, for the outer
boulevards are generally very monotonous. The Île de la Cité was the
original core of Paris; the east-and-west axis of the Louvre, extended
westward along the Champs Élysées all the way to the Étoile, already
provided a central tract parallel to the Seine; the new cross axis was
to be a north and south artery running from the Gare de l’Est to the
Observatoire. On the Île the vast complex of the Palais de Justice,
whose restoration and extension had been undertaken by Duc as early as
1840, received a notable Second Empire ornament in its western block,
facing the Place d’Harcourt, which was built by Duc assisted by E.-T.
Dommey (1801-72) in 1857-68. Rationalistic in its structural expression
and Classical in most of its detailing, this façade and the hall behind
it reflect the tastes of the period in the heavy scale of the parts and
the rather cranky—and certainly studied—awkwardness of the modelling of
the various conventional elements of the orders and minor features of
detail. Duc’s earlier work at the Palais de Justice, on the other hand,
was detailed with very great grace and elegance, it may be noted.
The principal Second Empire construction on the east-and-west axis of
Paris, the New Louvre, has been described already. Along the north side
of the Louvre the Rue de Rivoli was extended eastward in 1851-5 the
entire length of the palace with no change in the original Percier and
Fontaine design except for the addition of high quadrantal mansards
throughout the entire length of the street and its subsidiaries. Even a
large new hotel[186] was forced into this framework. Yet because of its
island site, the high rounded roofs give this block as it is usually
seen from the Place du Théâtre Français to the north something of the
new plasticity; it thus provided eventually an appropriate terminus to
the Avenue de l’Opéra, after that was finally completed under the Third
Republic.
Facing the east side of the Louvre, Hittorff balanced the restored
Gothic front of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois with the new front of the
Mairie du Louvre built in 1857-1861. Characteristic of this period in
France is the avoidance of Gothic detail on this secular façade in
favour of something vaguely _François I_; yet the pattern of the front
of the church is carefully repeated, even to the rose-window in the
high-pitched gable, and the new tower by Ballu, on axis between the
Church and the Mairie, is Gothic.
Up to the Rond Point, the Champs Élysées is flanked by parked areas on
either side and decorated by fountains and other features designed by
Hittorff (see Chapter 3). At the Rond Point there are a few very
sumptuous _hôtels particuliers_, but beyond that the avenue was built
up—or more accurately, for the most part, would eventually be built
up—like a very broad boulevard flanked by large blocks of flats with
shops and cafés below. In the open area on the left between the main
axis, the river, and the new quarter which had taken its name ‘François
I’ from Biet’s house, lay the Jardin d’Hiver of 1847 and the Palais de
l’Industrie of 1853-4. Here also is the Rotonde des Panoramas of 1857 by
G.-J.-A. Davioud (1823-81). Around the Arc de l’Étoile, at the far end
of the Champs Élysées, are ranged pairs of dignified houses; these were
designed by Hittorff with the collaboration of Rohault de Fleury in 1855
and executed in 1857-8 in a mode so academic as to be almost a revival
of the _style Louis XVI_ (Plate 7). The general layout of the _place_
was determined by Haussmann, expanding a much earlier scheme of
Hittorff’s.
What is most notable in all this mid-nineteenth-century construction
along the main axis of the city is the continuity of taste between the
Second Empire period and the period that preceded it. The only real echo
of the New Louvre was in the big private houses set back from the Rond
Point.
The Avenue de l’Opéra, extending north-westward from the Place du
Théâtre Français, has become, since its completion in 1878, the major
cross axis, rather than the earlier Boulevard Sébastopol to the east.
The Place de l’Opéra, with a short spur of the avenue at its south end,
was laid out in 1858; and the façades of the buildings (Plate 70C)
around it began to go up in 1860 from the designs of Rohault de
Fleury[187] and Henri Blondel (1832-97). The Opéra[188] (more properly
Académie Nationale de Musique)—after the New Louvre the most conspicuous
product of the Second Empire—was begun in 1861 from the design with
which J.-L.-C. Garnier (1825-98), a pupil of Lebas who also worked
briefly for Viollet-le-Duc, won the second competition held in that
year. Although the Garnier design is often thought to be particularly
characteristic of the taste of the Imperial couple, it was actually very
unpopular with the Empress Eugénie; she had expected the project of her
friend Viollet-le-Duc to be accepted and was furious when it failed to
win. Substantially completed externally by 1870, the Opéra was not
finally finished and opened until January 1875, so that neither Napoleon
III nor Eugénie ever entered it.
Here, at its heart, the contrast between setting and monument in Second
Empire Paris is at its most extreme, even though this setting is far
richer and more plastic than that provided by the severely flat houses
that surround the Arc de l’Étoile. Just as there, however, the use of a
giant order on all the big blocks that form the _place_ reveals the
distinctly academic taste of the leading French architects in this
period; but Blondel’s rounded pavilions, where two major streets come in
on either side at an angle, provide an almost Baroque elaboration in the
grouping of the various masses by which the complex space is defined
(Plate 70C). Certainly the result is very different from the large open
areas surrounded by discrete blocks of plain geometrical shape favoured
by Romantic Classicism.
The Opéra is sumptuous in a rather different way from the New Louvre
(Plate 70B). Yet in Garnier’s work, as in Lefuel’s, a generically
Neo-Baroque effect is achieved with elements mostly High Renaissance in
origin, but here Italian rather than French. The richly coloured
marbles, the admirably placed sculpture by Carpeaux, and above all the
fashion in which the masses pile up—from the ornate colonnade crowning
the main façade, through the half-dome which expresses the auditorium
externally, to the tall stage-house at the rear—is much richer
plastically than the somewhat repetitive scheme of the New Louvre. The
whole, moreover, is made fully three-dimensional by the comparable
organization of the major elements at the sides and on the rear. Thus
Garnier provided a visual equivalent to the complex ordering of his
extremely elaborate plan, a plan the undoubted virtues of which can be
fully appreciated only on paper (Figure 15). Inside the Opéra the great
staircase, the foyer, and the actual auditorium drip with somewhat
brassy gold and the profusion of detail has a curiously un-Renaissance
spikiness and lumpiness (Plate 71). This quality underlines how
un-archaeological was Garnier’s approach, how responsive he was (perhaps
unconsciously) to the new tastes of the mid century that had produced
the High Victorian[189] Gothic in England in the previous decade and
fostered generally the international success of the Second Empire mode.
When Eugénie asked him what the ‘style’ of the Opéra was—_Louis XIV_,
_Louis XV_, _Louis XVI_—he replied with both tact and accuracy: ‘C’est
du Napoléon III’.
Like the lushness of the New Louvre, Garnier’s lushness has an
undeniably parvenu quality characteristic of the time and place; but the
pace he set, however much emulated all over the world in later opera
houses, and the peculiar capacity he showed for satisfying the taste for
bombastic luxury of the third quarter of the century were never equalled
by other architects, least of all by French ones. In the twin theatres
flanking the Place du Châtelet,[190] which were built in 1860-2,
Davioud, the architect of the Rotonde des Panoramas, made little attempt
to vie with Garnier’s Opéra; but they are considerably more successful
in their own right than is the Vaudeville in the Boulevard des Capucines
of 1872 by A.-J. Magne (1816-85), which does. Garnier’s own Panorama
Français of 1882 at 251 Rue Saint-Honoré has only a modest façade to the
street.
Only one other work of Garnier himself rivals the Opéra, his Casino at
Monte Carlo of 1878. The fine site that this occupies somewhat makes up
for its tawdry finish in painted stucco, and the two-towered façade
towards the bay has a properly festive air. The Casino and Baths he
built at Vittel in 1882, his Observatory at Nice, and the Cercle de la
Librairie of 1880 in the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris are
considerably quieter in design. The Palais Longchamps[191] of 1862-9 in
Marseilles by H.-J. Espérandieu (1829-74), who had worked for Questel
and for Vaudoyer, two palatial museum blocks joined by a curved
colonnade above an elaborate cascade, is more Neo-Baroque than most work
of the period (Plate 70A); but much of the credit should go to the
sculptor Bartholdi whose earlier fountain project Espérandieu took over.
[Illustration:
Figure 15. J.-L.-C. Garnier: Paris, Opéra, 1863-74, plan
]
Despite what has been said of the houses at the Rond Point, most Second
Empire mansions in Paris, at least those built by leading architects,
tend to be rather restrained in their general design and often quite
archaeologically correct in their detailing. They are likely, moreover,
to follow French seventeenth- or eighteenth-century models rather than
those of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Italy. Already, in the Hôtel
de Pontalba, Visconti had copied Versailles closely in the interiors,
while his exterior followed the line of the early eighteenth-century
_hôtels particuliers_. (This was drastically remodelled in the
eighties.) Labrouste, in the Hôtel Fould, 29-31 Rue de Berri, which was
built in 1856-8, was rather plausibly Louis XIII; while Alfred Armand
(1805-88), a pupil of Leclerc and a frequent collaborator with
Pellechet, in designing the Hôtel Pereire and its twin in the Place
Pereire about 1855 approached the _style Louis XVI_ as closely as
Hittorff did round the Étoile. Nevertheless, study of Parisian exemplars
inspired many foreign architects to design houses that could hardly be
anything else but Second Empire.
This is largely explained by the special character of the
publications[192] of C.-D. Daly (1811-93), a pupil of Duban, and of
P.-V. Calliat (1801-81), a pupil of Vaudoyer, through which current
French work of this period chiefly became known to the outside world.
Almost as was the case at the opening of the century, when the volumes
illustrating Prix de Rome projects made the higher aspirations of French
architects better known to students abroad than their ordinary practice,
the publications of this later day seem to have focused attention on
certain aspects only of the French architectural scene, aspects
prominent enough, but not altogether characteristic as regards public
monuments and dominant official taste. Without knowledge of the French
architectural past, without the inhibitions instilled early in French
architects by their training at the École des Beaux-Arts, foreign
architects readily derived from published sources a Second Empire mode
considerably lusher than was generally approved for public use in French
academic circles and made it very much their own. Even in public
architecture foreigners must have seen current work with different eyes
from the French.
For example, the Tribunal de Commerce on the Île de la Cité, an agency
provided in 1858-64 with a building of its own instead of mere quarters
in the Bourse, was supposed by French contemporaries to express in its
detailing the Emperor’s personal enthusiasm for the _quattrocento_
buildings that he had lately seen in Brescia. But posterity, like
foreigners when the Tribunal was new, notes in this work of A.-N. Bailly
(1810-92) the characteristic Second Empire mansards and the almost
Neo-Baroque dome—which at Haussmann’s insistence was added to close the
vista down the new north-south artery—not the uncharacteristically flat
and delicately detailed façades. Far finer is the front of that section
of the École des Beaux-Arts facing the Seine which was built by Bailly’s
master Duban in 1860-2, finer and doubtless also truer to the most
exigent taste of the day. Rather directly expressive of its interior
uses—it houses exhibition galleries, etc.—the detailing of this façade
is quite original without being at all cranky like Duc’s on the Palais
de Justice, and the whole very subtle in composition (Plate 72B). Much
of the cold severity characteristic of the previous half-century
remains; but Duban was clearly trying to be creative, not
archaeological, so that one cannot properly apply stylistic names from
the past, not even to the extent that it is possible to do so in the
case of the New Louvre and the Opéra. However, such high distinction of
design as Duban achieved here was rather rare in Second Empire Paris; it
parallels in this period the equally exceptional distinction of Henri
Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of the forties.
The accepted range of stylistic inspiration was so wide that it is often
only a certain syncretism that gives buildings of this period, nominally
in any one of half a dozen ‘styles’, a recognizably contemporary
flavour. So also new methods of construction, rather than superseding
masonry in toto and thereby demanding original expression as in Victor
Baltard’s Central Markets, were more characteristically fused with it,
as in the reading-rooms of Labrouste’s libraries. Of these only the
later, that in the Bibliothèque Nationale, was built under the Second
Empire (Plate 69). Except for this Salle de Travail of 1861-9 and the
Magasin or stacks, both so exciting to posterity, most of Labrouste’s
other work at this institution, begun in 1855, is as derivative as his
private houses; for the most part it is actually hard to say where the
old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings stop and his
nineteenth-century additions and those of his successor J.-L. Pascal
(1837-1920) begin.
Despite the increasing use of metal in all sorts of buildings, there was
undoubtedly less sympathy for it than earlier, and hence less success in
finding appropriate expression of its qualities (see Chapter 7). By
exception, however, the Central Markets in Lyons of 1858 by Antoine
Desjardins (1814-82), a pupil of Duban, have a somewhat Labrouste-like
elegance in the arched and pierced metal principals spanning the three
naves that is not found in Baltard’s so much larger Central Markets in
Paris.
In church architecture something like full eclecticism reigned in Paris
under Napoleon III, although Gothic was most popular in the provinces.
The new Parisian churches generally occupy focal points where major
avenues join or boulevards change direction; but, like the Opéra, they
have little visual relation to the sober settings provided by the blocks
of flats among which they are placed. Instead, each one seems intended
to illustrate an alternative mode quite different from the standard
urban vernacular of the day.
Saint-François-Xavier in the Boulevard Montparnasse was begun by
the elderly Lusson in 1861 and finished by T.-F.-J. Uchard
(1809-91) in 1875. With its basilican plan and cold Early
Renaissance detail, this might well have been built under Louis
Philippe. Saint-Jean-de-Belleville by Lassus, on the other hand,
begun in 1854 and completed in 1859 after his death, while larger
and rather better built than his churches of the forties, hardly
represents any advance over Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde, completed by
Ballu only two years earlier. Neo-Gothic could hardly be duller.
However, Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée (Plate 98), the parish church of
the suburb of St-Denis, designed by Lassus’s associate and
successor Viollet-le-Duc[193] in 1860 and built in 1864-7, is more
comparable in quality to the contemporary High Victorian Gothic
churches of England (see Chapter 11).
Victor Baltard’s church of Saint-Augustin, also of 1860-7, is not
located, like the Gothic edifices by Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc, in a
working-class district or suburb, but occupies a very prominent if
awkwardly narrow triangular site in the Boulevard Malesherbes near its
intersection with the Boulevard Haussmann. Considering the success of
his Central Markets, it is not surprising that Baltard used iron here;
but he did so with much less consistency and thoroughness than Boileau
had done at Saint-Eugène (see Chapter 7). The arched iron principals of
the roof accord very ill with the Romanesquoid-Renaissance design of the
masonry structure below. The front, with its great rose window, is
somewhat more effective. At least it provides a strong urbanistic focus
among the standardized ranges of blocks of flats that line the
boulevards in this quarter. Two other big Parisian churches are similar
in quality although quite different in appearance. Ballu, in addition to
finishing Sainte-Clotilde, built both Saint-Ambroise in the Boulevard
Voltaire, which is certainly more plausibly Romanesque than
Saint-Augustin, and also La Trinité in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin,
which is much less plausibly _François I_ than his later work at the
Hôtel de Ville. La Trinité was built in 1861-7, Saint-Ambroise in
1863-9. Both are vast and pretentious, but neither has much positive
character. Like so many comparable examples of the eclecticism of this
period in other countries, it is by their faults and not by any
characteristic virtues that they are readily recognizable as products of
the Second Empire.
Two Romanesquoid churches less prominently located, and hence less well
known, are considerably more interesting. One is the parish church of
Charenton, Seine, built by Claude Naissant (1801-79) in 1857-9; this is
clearly composed and detailed with a somewhat eclectic elegance not
unworthy of Labrouste or Duban. Much larger is Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix in
the Rue Julien-Lacroix in the Menilmontant quarter of Paris. Built by
L.-J.-A. Héret (1821-99), a pupil of Lebas, in 1862-80, this is a
cruciform edifice with the vaulting ribs all of openwork iron like those
of Saint-Augustin. For archaeological plausibility it compares not
unfavourably with Questel’s church at Nîmes, begun some twenty years
earlier, in the design of the masonry portions of the structure.
The only big Paris church of the sixties of much real distinction—the
only French church, for that matter—is Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge at the
intersection of the Avenue du Maine and the Avenue d’Orléans. This was
built by J.-A.-E. Vaudremer (1829-1914), a pupil of Blouet and Gilbert,
in 1864-70. Romanesque and Early Christian—perhaps more specifically
Syrian—in inspiration,[194] this basilica is notably direct in its
structural expression, nobly scaled, expressively composed, and
restrained almost to the point of crudity in its detailing (Plate 72A).
Vaudremer’s Santé Prison off the Boulevard Arago in Paris, which was
commissioned in 1862 and built in 1865-85, is also Romanesquoid or at
least in a sort of very simple _Rundbogenstil_. The still quite
Durandesque character of this prison illustrates Vaudremer’s close
linkage, through the work of his two masters, who had both specialized
in designing prisons and asylums under Louis Philippe, with the
classicizing rationalism of 1800. His much later Lycées of the eighties,
Buffon and Molière in Paris and those at Grenoble and Montauban, on the
other hand, reflect the more Gothic rationalism of Viollet-le-Duc (see
Chapter 11).
Vaudremer’s work may have had some influence, around 1870, on the
American Richardson, who was still a student in Paris when
Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge was begun (see Chapter 13). However, no
significant line of development led forward in France from his sort of
church design. In a smaller and later Parisian church, Notre-Dame in the
Rue d’Auteuil of 1876-83, Vaudremer himself showed no further
development of his personal style, though the interior here is not
unimpressive in its scale and proportions.
The vast and prominent church of the Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre in
Paris was begun by Paul Abadie[195] (1812-84), a pupil of Leclerc,
well after the Second Empire was over in 1874, and largely finished
before the end of the century by the younger Magne (Lucien,
1849-1916). This is Romanesque in inspiration, too, but painfully
archaeological—’painfully’, because its architect, in carrying out
the restoration of his principal medieval exemplar, Saint-Front at
Périgueux, seems to have sought to provide ‘precedent’ for several
of the features that he introduced here! Yet the bold exploitation
of the remarkable site of this church, dominating Paris from the
heights of Montmartre, and the bubble-like silhouette of its cluster
of domes when seen from a distance give the Sacré-Cœur positive
qualities lacking in most other French ecclesiastical work of the
later nineteenth century except Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge.
Architecture in France had been a highly centralized profession ever
since the late seventeenth century. Under Louis XV a few provincial
cities showed some capacity for independent activity, but this subsided
during the unproductive years that followed the Revolution. Except to a
certain extent in Lyons and Marseilles, local activity did not revive
very notably in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the
Second Empire most French cities still remained content to follow the
lead of Paris. There is hardly a large provincial town which did not—to
stress first the positive side of the picture—lay out broad boulevards
or straight avenues and line them with more or less successful versions
of the _maisons de rapport_ of Paris; on the negative side, the public
buildings and churches were usually derived from, and too often very
inferior to, prominent Parisian models.
In the centres of the biggest cities one can well believe that one has
not left Paris. Occasionally, however, there are urbanistic entities
which have more vitality than the rigidly controlled and tastefully
restrained new squares and streets of the capital. The fairly modest
square in front of the cathedral at Nantes, with its ranges of
high-mansarded blocks, is a case in point. Better known is the rising
slope of the Cannebière, continued in the Rue de Noailles and the Allées
de Meilhan at Marseilles, with the columnar dignity of the Chamber of
Commerce on the left near the Vieux Port at the bottom and the paired
Gothic towers of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul closing the vista at the top.
Public buildings in smaller cities sometimes have a rather illiterate
sort of gusto in their boldly plastic massing and exuberantly coarse
detailing closer to Second Empire work abroad than to that of Paris; to
some eyes these have a theatrical charm not unlike the period flavour of
Offenbach’s operas. They often date from well after 1870.
Espérandieu’s Neo-Baroque Palais Longchamps at Marseilles has been
mentioned (Plate 70A). Also at Marseilles is the enormous
Romanesco-Byzantine cathedral of 1852-93, which was designed by the
younger Vaudoyer (Léon, 1803-72), a pupil of his father and also of
Lebas. Espérandieu became _inspecteur_ on the job in 1858 and carried on
the work after Vaudoyer’s death. This is hardly superior to Ballu’s
Paris churches, much less to Vaudremer’s or even Abadie’s, but it is
more striking plastically in its rather redundant combination of domed
west towers, crossing dome, and transeptal domes; it is also
exceptionally colouristic for France. There is an almost High Victorian
Gothic brashness in the treatment of the exterior walls with bands of
alternately white and green stone. Here the aggressive assurance of the
period speaks with an even louder voice than at the New Louvre and the
Paris Opéra; this assurance is echoed, moreover, near by in
Espérandieu’s own high-placed church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde of
1854-64, a scenic accent of the most brazen Second Empire vulgarity.
The Marseilles Exchange, however, dominating its own tree-lined square,
is rather similar to the Chamber of Commerce in the Cannebière as it
rises among ranges of houses that are more Provençal than Parisian in
the modesty of their painted stucco fronts. Originally begun in 1842 by
Penchaud, the Exchange was largely built in 1852-60 by his pupil Coste,
but its style remains _Louis Philippe_ rather than Second Empire.
The great elaboration and consequent expensiveness of Second Empire
modes of design, as generally executed in France in fine freestone,
restricted their full exploitation to the capital and the largest
provincial cities. There is a sort of economic striation, from the
immense sums the Emperor and, after him, the authorities of the Third
Republic—even though relatively impoverished—were willing to put into
representational public construction at the top, through the level
represented by what Parisian investors spent on blocks of flats or rich
provincial cities on their principal monuments, down finally to the
niggardly building budgets of small towns and villages. This striation
provides a sort of analogue to the breakdown of that earlier stylistic
unity which had been so marked and happy a characteristic of French
architecture for at least a century and a half. That this breakdown was
still relative in France is apparent when one turns to other countries
where eclectic taste in this period was bolder and where the variation
in expenditure on different sorts of buildings was at least as great.
French architectural prestige revived internationally in the fifties to
remain surprisingly high for another two generations.[196] However, the
Second Empire mode was gradually succeeded internationally by another
Parisian mode to which it is convenient to apply the name ‘Beaux-Arts’,
from the École des Beaux-Arts out of whose instruction it stemmed. More
and more foreigners went to Paris to study as the second half of the
century wore on, until Paris became almost what Rome had been in the
eighteenth century. In architectural education the influence of the
École was especially strong in the New World; the training of English
and most Continental architects was much less affected. The first two
architectural schools to be founded in the United States, both by
William Robert Ware (1832-1915)—himself, curiously enough, a
practitioner of a fairly aggressive sort of Victorian Gothic (see
Chapter 11)—that at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston
opened in 1865 and the somewhat later school at Columbia University in
New York, were both based on the methods of the École.[197] French
winners of the Prix de Rome were increasingly imported to serve as
teachers, and three generations later the last of them had not yet left
the United States. The influence of the École in Latin America was even
more powerful, and the dominance of its ideas has lasted in some
countries down almost to the present.[198]
Both in the New World and the Old most cities grew like weeds in the
third quarter of the century; the analogy is, indeed, a rather accurate
one, for the growth was characteristically rank, uncontrolled, and
destructive of earlier architectural amenities. Various European
capitals, however, imitating Napoleon III’s re-organization of Paris,
took advantage of the clearing away of their fortifications to lay out
something equivalent to the _grands boulevards_. Florence during the
late sixties, for example, when it was very briefly the capital of
Italy, saw the laying out, according to the general plan of Giuseppe
Poggi (1811-1901), of a range of avenues and squares that extend around
the city to the east, north, and west on the site of the old walls.
These districts, built up over the years 1865-77, display little or none
of the new Second Empire afflatus. For the most part everywhere in Italy
in this period the architecture is of generically Renaissance revival
character. Only in the much later Piazza della Repubblica, carved out of
the slummy heart of the city in the 80s and 90s, is there a heavy
pomposity of scale that is curiously un-Florentine—the centre of
nineteenth-century Athens might be Neo-Greek, but it was Munich, not
Florence, that became characteristically Neo-Tuscan!
In the old Savoy capital of Turin, where the first half of the century
had seen such notable urbanistic projects, a vigorous local tradition
continued to control most of the new work.[199] However, at the farther
side of the Piazza Carlo Felice the Porta Nuova Railway Station was
built in 1866-8, as was mentioned in Chapter 3, by the engineer
Mazzuchetti and the architect Ceppi in a rather original sort of
_Rundbogenstil_. The vast iron and glass lunette at the front still
provides a handsome termination to the long axis of the Via Roma,
although the rear of the station has been rebuilt since the War. Along
the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II the earlier arcades of Promis were
continued almost indefinitely; but the detailing of the façades grew
continually richer in evident emulation of Second Empire Paris. This
influence also affected the building up of the contiguous quarter of the
city. In the fine new square at the end of the Via Garibaldi, however,
balancing the earlier Piazza Vittorio Veneto at the end of the Via Po,
the Piazza dello Statuto opened in 1864, the façades by Giuseppe Bollati
(1819-69) are not at all Parisian, but recall rather the local Academic
Baroque of Juvarra. Especially effective, and rare in Turin, are the
warm and tawny colours of the painted stucco walls here.
With the uniting of Italy and the eventual taking over of Rome as the
capital of the kingdom of Italy on the downfall of Napoleon III in 1870,
a tremendous expansion[200] of the old Papal city began. The two
principal new streets extending eastward, the Via Venti Settembre and
the Via Nazionale, were laid out in 1871 and built up over the next
fifteen years. Vast and tawny-coloured like the Piazza dello Statuto in
Turin, but much less distinguished in design, is the Finance Ministry in
the former street built by Raffaele Canevari (1825-1900) in 1870-7.
Equally grand in scale and much more dignified are the quadrantal
façades of the Esedra built by Gaetano Koch (1849-1910) in 1885 at the
head of the Via Nazionale facing Michelangelo’s Santa Maria degli Angeli
(Plate 76A). With the fine later fountain by A. Guerrieri and Mario
Rubelli in the centre this provides a most impressive piece of
late-nineteenth-century academic urbanism. It still offers a not
altogether unworthy preface to the Baths of Diocletian—of which it
actually occupies the site of the largest exedra—and to the new railway
station (Plate 183B), both so near, which epitomize between them the
ancient and the modern worlds in the architecture of Rome.
Koch’s Palazzo Boncampagni in the Via Vittorio Veneto, now the American
Embassy, built in 1886-90, is also very dignified. It represents very
well the occasional tendency in that decade towards restraint and
sobriety in Renaissance design, a tendency that balances the
contemporary stylistic development towards the Neo-Baroque. In the Via
Nazionale the two most prominent edifices[201] by Italian architects,
the Palazzo delle Belle Arti of Pio Piacentini (1846-1928) begun in 1882
and Koch’s Banca d’Italia of 1889-1904, are both quite academic in a
respectable Renaissance way, and in the latter case impressively
monumental as well. The same applies _a fortiori_ to the two principal
public edifices begun in Rome in the eighties—not the respectability,
goodness knows, but the monumentality. The enormous Palazzo di
Giustizia, in a new quarter across the Tiber, is an incredibly brash
example of Neo-Baroque loaded down with heavy rustication, doubtless of
Piranesian inspiration. This was designed by Giuseppe Calderini
(1837-1916) in 1883-7 and built in 1888-1910 without the intended high
mansards.
But the most overpowering new structure in Rome, dominating the whole
city and blocking the view of both the ancient Forum and the Renaissance
Campidoglio, is the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, rising above the
much enlarged Piazza Venezia at the head of the Corso. Largely the work
of Count Giuseppe Sacconi (1854-1905),[202] who in 1884 won the third
competition held for its design, this was begun in 1885 and continued
after his death by Koch, Piacentini, and M. Manfredi (1859-1927), being
finally brought to completion only in 1911 by the engineer R. Raffaelli.
Hardly Second Empire nor yet quite ‘Beaux-Arts’, this most pretentious
of all nineteenth-century monuments well illustrates the total decadence
of inherited standards of Classicism in Europe towards the end of the
century. It can be compared only with Poelaert’s Palace of Justice in
Brussels, begun twenty years earlier, and entirely to the latter’s
advantage even as regards mere gargantuan assurance.
In general, Italian production of the second half of the century is of
relatively slight interest; moreover, it often seriously upsets the
balance of earlier urban entities by its heavy scale. The great
exception, and the one ranking Italian work of the period, is generally
recognized to be the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan. In Genoa,
behind the theatre, the Galleria Mazzini of 1871 also exceeds in length,
in height, and in elaboration all the galleries and passages built in
various European cities in the first half of the nineteenth century, yet
it is not essentially very different from them in its scale or its
detailing. The vast cruciform Galleria in Milan, however, extending from
the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Scala, with a great octagonal
space at the crossing, is in concept and in its actual dimensions more a
work of urbanism than of architecture (Plate 75B). Built with English
capital by an English firm, the City of Milan Improvement Company Ltd,
and even, presumably, with some English professional advice—M. D. Wyatt
was a member of the English board—this tremendous project more than
rivals the greatest Victorian railway stations of London in the height,
if not the span, of its metal-and-glass roof. But the actual designing
architect was Italian, Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-77), and the Galleria de
Cristoforis provided him with at least a modest local prototype. Erected
in 1865-77 and now completely restored to its pristine richness and
elegance, the Galleria scheme involved the enlargement of the Piazza del
Duomo and the lining of two of its sides with related façades—executed
only partly from Mengoni’s designs—as also the regularization of the
Piazza della Scala. Alessi’s sixteenth-century Palazzo Marino, itself of
almost Second Empire lushness, was enlarged to serve as the offices of
the municipality and provided with a new façade in Alessi’s extreme
Mannerist style across one side of the square facing La Scala. This was
carried out in 1888-90 by Luca Beltrami (1854-1933), who had studied in
Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, to serve as municipal offices.
Like all the other most prominent buildings of this period, Mengoni’s
Galleria makes its impression by its size, its elaboration of detail,
and above all its unqualified assurance. From the triumphal-arch portal,
rising as high as the nave of the medieval Duomo, to the gilded
arabesques of the pilasters, all is obvious, expensive, and rather
parvenu; yet the setting—at once so comfortable and so magnificent—that
it provides for urban life, centre as it has always remained of so much
Milanese activity, has not been equalled since.[203] The Galleria
Umberto I in Naples is a late and rather inferior imitation whose ornate
entrance most ungenerously overpowers the San Carlo Theatre across the
street. This was built by Emmanuele Rocco in 1887-90.
After Paris the most extensive and sumptuous example of the
re-organization of a great city carried out in this period is not in
Italy but in Austria. Vienna had been relatively inactive
architecturally in the first half of the nineteenth century under
Francis I (see Chapter 2). His successor Francis Joseph, however, who
came to the throne in 1848, set out in the following decades as _Kaiser_
and _König_ to see that his Imperial and Royal capitals should rival
Napoleon III’s Paris. In 1857 the fortifications surrounding the old
city of Vienna were removed, and the following year Ludwig Förster
(1797-1863) won the competition for the layout of the Ringstrasse that
was to take their place. The execution of this project, with many
modifications, took some thirty years (Plate 74). Outside the actual
walls there had been a wide glacis, and therefore the Ring could be
developed not merely as a series of wide tree-lined boulevards like
those of Paris but with large open spaces in which major public
buildings were grouped. These edifices are even more various in style
than the comparable ones in Paris, despite the fact that they were the
work of a very closely knit group of architects. None of them is of
specifically Second Empire character, though the high mansards and the
pavilion composition of the New Louvre were used fairly frequently on
private buildings in Vienna and throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The earliest major project of Francis Joseph was the construction of the
Arsenal, begun in 1849, where most of the leading architects of the
period worked (see Chapter 2). All in various versions of the
_Rundbogenstil_, this group of buildings culminates in the centrally
placed Army Museum of 1856-77 by Förster and his Danish son-in-law
Theophil von Hansen (1813-91). On this the very ornate detail is
Byzantinesque and Saracenic in inspiration, yet it is not without a
distinctive flavour that is unmistakably of this particular period: the
brilliant polychromy of the red and yellow brick walls almost seems to
echo, like Vaudoyer’s Marseilles cathedral, the bolder effects of the
contemporary High Victorian Gothic architects of England.
Ferstel’s bank in the Herrengasse of 1856-60, also _Rundbogenstil_, has
been mentioned earlier. The North Railway Station of 1858-65 by Theodor
Hoffmann was _Rundbogenstil_ of an even more ornate sort, with only a
rather modest iron-and-glass-roofed shed set between its two massive
masonry blocks. This was badly damaged by bombing in the last War but
not totally destroyed. On the other hand, the South Station, built in
1869-73 by Wilhelm Flattich (1826-1900), a pupil of Leins in Stuttgart,
was of rather conventional High Renaissance character.
The typical and, one may suppose, the preferred stylistic vehicle of
most Viennese architects in these decades was, indeed, a rather rich
High Renaissance mode. This, for example, Hansen used very effectively
for the Palace of Archduke Eugene of 1865-7 and for the Palais Epstein
at 1 Parlamentsring of 1870-3. He and Förster, and after Förster’s death
Hansen alone, as well as many other architects, employed this mode
ubiquitously for various big blocks of flats along the Ring and
elsewhere (Plate 74). Good examples are such new hotels of the period as
the former Britannia, still standing in the Schillerplatz, and the
Donau, which once rose opposite the North Station. Both are by Heinrich
Claus (1835-?) and Josef Grosz (1828-?) and were built in the early
seventies. Their rather Barryesque raised end-pavilions, without
mansards, and the heavily sumptuous detailing of the façades are most
characteristic. The better known Sacher’s Hotel behind the Opera House,
built by W. Fraenkel in 1876, is somewhat smaller and less lush, at
least externally. The block at 8 Operngasse, built by Ehrmann in the
early sixties, was topped with Parisian mansards, as are also the long
blocks in the Reichstrasse behind the Parlament and the University on
either side of the Rathaus; these also have open arcades at their base
somewhat like those in Turin.
As along the boulevards of Paris, there is a considerable homogeneity in
the private architecture that lines the Ring and the many squares and
streets that were built up at the same time. Only in the design of
public monuments—often by much the same architects, it is worth
noting—did a pompous and somewhat retardataire eclecticism rule.
Consider the major works of Ferstel: his bank is _Rundbogenstil_; his
Votivkirche of 1856-79 is Gothic; his University something else again.
Ferstel’s Gothic must be compared, not with the distinctly original High
Victorian churches of its period in England (see Chapter 10), but with
Gau’s earlier Sainte-Clotilde in Paris (see Chapter 6): it is certainly
a considerable improvement over that in the general justness of the
scale and the plausible laciness of the fourteenth-century detail. But
in English terms the Votivkirche is still Early rather than High
Victorian. The painted decoration by J. Führich and others, somewhat
more discreet than that in the chief _Rundbogenstil_ churches of Vienna,
relieves effectively the coldness usual in these big Continental
examples of Neo-Gothic.
Ferstel’s much later University of 1873-4, which stands next door to his
church and balances Hansen’s precisely contemporaneous Grecian Parlament
(see Chapter 2), is a richly plastic pavilioned composition of
generically Renaissance character. It also has a high convex mansard
over the central block like those on the New Louvre, a feature echoed on
the Justizpalast in the Schmerlingplatz, built by Alexander Wielemans
(1843-1911) after the University in 1874-81. So much for the main works
of one leading architect of the period. Not all Ferstel’s contemporaries
had quite so varied a stylistic repertory, however.
In Vienna, as in Paris, one of the most conspicuous and also one of the
most successful and original of the new public buildings was the Opera
House. This was built in 1861-9 by Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in a mode
quite unrelated to their earlier work at the Arsenal but one not easy to
define. The Vienna Opera House is a somewhat simpler and less boldly
plastic structure than Garnier’s, both in its generally right-angled
massing, with pairs of rectangular wings projecting on each side towards
the rear, and in the rather flat, somewhat _François I_ detail. Yet the
vast curved roof, actually rather like that over the buildings along the
Rue de Rivoli, does give it a distinctly Second Empire air (Plate 74).
Less grandly sited than the Paris Opéra, it was none the less balanced
across the Opernring by one of the largest and handsomest of Hansen’s
private works, the Heinrichshof of 1861-3 (Plate 73B). This had a fine
glass-roofed passage through its centre and ranges of flats behind the
elaborate Late Renaissance façades. It has unfortunately been demolished
since the War to make way for a very poor modern block of offices.
Here by the Opera House, as at the Place de l’Opéra in Paris, the
Viennese urban achievement of the age was concentrated. The
Heinrichshof, with its raised central portion matching the high roof of
the Opera House opposite and its corner towers corresponding to the
mansarded pavilions of more definitely French-styled blocks of flats,
offered a handsomer Austrian equivalent of the Second Empire mode than
does the Opera House itself; for the Opera House lacks externally the
lushness and bombast characteristic of the period at its most assured,
while the auditorium within, re-opened in 1955, is today a much
simplified reconstruction by Erich Boltenstern (b. 1896). Yet the
masonry exterior of the Opera House is clean and fresh today thanks to
Boltenstern’s restoration and, with the great staircase and foyer
regilded and refurbished generally, it offers a lighter and more festive
vision of the period than do the vast majority of Viennese buildings
whose stucco so often badly needs a coat of paint.
Hansen’s Musikvereinsgebäude of 1867-9 in the Dumbagasse is academic in
an almost eighteenth-century way, both as regards the general
organization of the exterior and the restraint of the detailing. In his
still later Parlament of 1873-83, as has been noted earlier, he produced
the last grandiose monument of the Greek Revival. More characteristic,
however, is his contemporaneous Academy of Fine Arts of 1872-6 in the
Schillerplatz. This is externally in the Renaissance mode that he
presumably preferred after he left Athens, but it has Grecian detailing
inside of a delicacy and elegance that recalls the thirties. Especially
handsome is the colonnaded Aula in the centre, even though its rich
painted ceiling of 1875-80 by Anselm Feuerbach is inappropriately
Baroque in a rather Rubens-like way.
Another Austrian architect besides Ferstel was using Gothic for
prominent Viennese edifices in this period (see also Chapter 11). After
Ferstel’s Votivkirche the next Neo-Gothic structure was the Academische
Gymnasium in the Beethovenplatz; this was built in 1863-6 by Friedrich
von Schmidt (1825-91), who had worked earlier under Zwirner on the
restoration and completion of Cologne Cathedral. But the school was soon
outshone in size and in elaboration by Schmidt’s Rathaus of 1872-83.
This stands between Hansen’s Parlament and Ferstel’s University but in a
line with the Reichstrasse at their rear. The Vienna Rathaus is
certainly not unrelated to G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic and that of
Waterhouse in England, particularly in the side wings that end,
eclectically enough, in high-mansarded pavilions. But the general
fussiness of the turreted front recalls rather pre-Puginian Gothic, say
Porden’s Eaton Hall of seventy years earlier (see Chapters 6 and 10).
Despite the total visual unlikeness of the Rathaus to its Grecian
neighbour, the Parlament, both have a similarly obsolete air. It is as
if Francis Joseph’s presumptive intention in the fifties of outbuilding
Napoleon III had been succeeded by a belated and rather provincial
desire to outrival the larger structures in other countries in the two
leading modes of the previous period, the Greek Revival and the Gothic
Revival, neither much represented hitherto in Vienna.
Yet an equally prominent public monument of the seventies and eighties,
the Burgtheater, which stands just opposite the Rathaus, is of a Late
Renaissance, almost Neo-Baroque order, with a distinctly Second Empire
flavour to its bowed front and generally very plastic composition (Plate
73A). This, the most distinguished of all the public monuments along the
Ringstrasse, was built in 1874-88 by Semper, whose international career
in Germany, England, and Switzerland wound up in Vienna after he was
called there in 1871 by Francis Joseph to advise on the extension of the
Hofburg Palace. Except perhaps in its bowed front, this Viennese theatre
does not much resemble the rebuilt Dresden Opera House of 1871-8 which
Semper had just designed (see Chapter 9). Perhaps Semper and his
Viennese partner Karl von Hasenauer (1833-94), a pupil of Van der Nüll
and of Siccardsburg, were somewhat influenced by the plans on which they
were working together for the extension of the nearby palace; these
were, not inappropriately, in the Austrian Baroque of Fischer von
Erlach’s unfinished Michaelertrakt of the Hofburg dating from the second
quarter of the eighteenth century. However that may be, the theatre,
boldly scaled and tightly composed, is a far more successful building
than the very derivative Neue Hofburg projecting out towards the Ring as
that was executed in 1881-94 by Hasenauer after Semper’s death. The
post-War restoration of the theatre and the rebuilding of its auditorium
are by Michel Engelhart (b. 1897).
Semper and Hasenauer’s two vast Museums of Art History and Natural
History face each other on a large square across the Burgring from the
Neue Hofburg. Of identical design, they were both largely built in
1872-81. In the treatment of the exteriors—they were finished internally
only very much later—as also in some of Hansen’s very latest work in
Vienna, one senses a conscious rejection of the bold plasticity and the
compositional elaboration characteristic of the preceding decades, and
most notably of the Burgtheater. The Renaissance detail is by no means
sparse, but there is an academic sort of primness and orderliness
belonging to the last quarter of the century such as has been noted
earlier in Koch’s Roman work.
The Bodenkreditanstalt built by Emil von Förster (1838-1909), Ludwig’s
son, in 1884-7 is still more severe in its Florentine _quattrocento_
way, recalling the more Tuscan aspects of the _Rundbogenstil_. With this
may be contrasted the unashamed Neo-Baroque of Karl König’s Philipphof
of 1883, introducing one of the modes most characteristic of the end of
the century in both Austria and Germany.
Budapest, the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was also
much embellished with public buildings by Francis Joseph. Stüler from
Berlin worked here, using a quiet version of the _Rundbogenstil_ for the
Academy of Sciences in 1862-4. But the later and more ornate
_Rundbogenstil_ of Berlin and Vienna had already been echoed in Budapest
by Frigyes Feszl (1821-84) in the Vigado Concert Hall of 1859-65. This
could easily be by Ferstel, so similar is it to his bank in Vienna. The
leading Hungarian architect of the period, Miklós Ybl (1814-91), who was
trained in Vienna, also used the _Rundbogenstil_, but of a rather more
Romanesquoid sort, for the Ferenczváros Parish Church which he built in
1867-78. However, his Renaissance Revival Custom House of 1870-4 is more
nearly up to the best Vienna standards of the day as maintained by
Hansen. The Opera House that Ybl built in 1879-84, with its boldly
convex mansards, vies in its rich plasticity with Garnier’s, but none
too successfully. The Szent Lukásh Hotel by R. L. Ray (1845-99), a
Swiss-born pupil of Gamier, is one of the largest mansarded Second
Empire hotels anywhere in the western world. On the whole, the dominant
influences in Hungary were Austrian and German, however, not Parisian,
as is hardly surprising. No autochthonous note was struck; as is true of
all Eastern Europe, the architecture of this age is as essentially
colonial in character as in the outlying British Dominions or in Latin
America, although the models emulated were rather different.
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CHAPTER 9
SECOND EMPIRE AND COGNATE MODES ELSEWHERE
IN the cities of Germany and of Northern Europe generally there were in
this period no such comprehensive urbanistic developments as in Paris
and Vienna. Some individual public monuments are, perhaps, not inferior
to those that Napoleon III and Francis Joseph obtained from their
architects; but these are rarely grouped into such coherent entities as
the Marktplatz in Karlsruhe of the first quarter of the century or the
Ludwigstrasse in Munich of the second quarter. The domestic building of
the period is also considerably less consistent in character than in
Paris and Vienna.
The architectural scene in Germany was overshadowed by the distinguished
achievements of the previous period. The Schinkel tradition, although
increasingly corrupted, lasted on almost indefinitely not merely in
Prussia but in most German states. Stüler, Schinkel’s ablest disciple in
Berlin after the death of the short-lived Persius, remained an
internationally respected practitioner. He was employed in Sweden and in
Hungary, as has been noted, not to speak of German cities, down to his
death in 1865. By him and by many others the _Rundbogenstil_ was
employed quite as late as in Austria-Hungary both in the various German
states and also in the Scandinavian countries. Such a very large and
prominent public building as the Berlin Rathaus of 1859-70 by H. F.
Waesemann (1813-79) well indicated the long-continued hold of this mode
on German officialdom. Nor was this particularly inferior in quality to
much similar work produced in the earlier heyday of the _Rundbogenstil_
before 1850. As in Austria, however, alternative modes were growing
increasingly popular, even though none rose to a local dominance
comparable to that of revived Renaissance in Vienna. The taste of the
period for elaboration, both in general composition and in detail, is
everywhere evident regardless of the mode employed.
French influence was not absent; indeed, specifically Second Empire
features were perhaps more common than in Austria. G. H. Friedrich
Hitzig (1811-81), a former assistant of Schinkel’s, had actually studied
in Paris. After Stüler, he was the most prominent and successful
architect of the period in Berlin, and in the fifties he built a few
mansarded houses there. Along the new Viktoriastrasse in the Tiergarten
quarter, where he did a great deal of work in 1855-60, one house among
the eight that he built was mansarded; the others and most of those he
was erecting near by in the Bellevuestrasse, the Stülerstrasse, and
other streets at the same time were, however, in a much elaborated
Schinkelesque vein. Suburban houses of the sixties occasionally followed
Parisian modes also; but far more were clumsy variants of Schinkel’s and
Persius’s Italian Villas, or else in some sort of equally clumsy Gothic.
Public buildings in Germany were only occasionally designed in the
mansarded mode and, in general, only after the mid sixties. The
Baugewerkschule in Stuttgart, built in 1866-70 by Josef von Egle
(1818-99) its director, had projecting centre and end pavilions with
crudely Parisian detailing. It is curious to realize that it was
contemporary with Leins’s belated but rather distinguished Grecian
Königsbau there. In Cologne the High School of 1860-2, and the
Stadttheater of 1870-2 by Julius Raschdorf (1823-1914), both destroyed
in the last War, were heavily mansarded and very plastically modelled;
the latter, at least, on which H. Deutz collaborated with Raschdorf, had
some real compositional interest in the tight interlocking of the masses
(Plate 77B). Despite their very evidently French character, both were
considered by contemporaries to be ‘German Renaissance’—as, for that
matter, was Wieleman’s Justizpalast in Vienna—because of the specific
precedent of much of the detail; German Renaissance was by this time the
latest fashion, but to later eyes these buildings in Cologne were no
more characteristic examples of it than the one in Vienna. Raschdorf is
better known in any case for his much later Neo-Baroque work, notably
the Berlin Cathedral, for which he prepared the design in 1888, although
it was not built until 1894-1905.
The Military Hospital by F. Heise in Dresden of 1869 was considerably
more French in the strong articulation of the mansarded centre and end
pavilions and also in its quite Parisian detailing than Raschdorf’s
contemporary buildings in Cologne. More prominent in Dresden by far,
however, is the Hoftheater, which is not at all French in character.
This was designed in 1871 by Semper after his earlier theatre there had
been destroyed by fire; its construction was supervised by Semper’s son
Manfred after he settled in Vienna, and completed in 1878. Gone was most
of the festive grace and delicacy of his Hamburg and Dresden work of the
forties, even though the auditorium was not dissimilar to the one that
had been destroyed. Yet in the arrangement of the interior and the
disposition of the masses this rivals in clarity of organization the
opera-houses of Garnier in Paris and of Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in
Vienna. The plans undoubtedly owed a great deal to the elaborate studies
Semper had made for Ludwig II in 1865-7 for an opera-house to be built
in Munich especially for the production of Wagner’s operas.
The relative importance of Berlin was, of course, rising well before its
establishment as the imperial capital in 1871. Friedrich Hitzig’s most
considerable public building in Berlin, the Exchange, built in 1859-63
at the same time that the Rathaus was in construction, was neither
Schinkelesque nor _Rundbogenstil_ but in a rather academic sort of Late
Baroque (Plate 77A). Hitzig seems to have been consciously recalling
what Knobelsdorf built for Frederick the Great and thus presaging the
more overt Neo-Baroque of the last decades of the century. His later
Reichsbank of 1871-6, on the other hand, was in general considerably
more Classical despite its banded and diapered walls in two colours of
brick.
The public buildings of Martin K. P. Gropius (1824-80) are also
indicative of the general stylistic stasis of this period in Germany.
His Museum of Decorative Art in Berlin, begun in 1877 and completed in
1881 by Heinrich Schmieden (1835-1913), resembled Hitzig’s houses of the
fifties in its Grecian elaboration; it also recalled Klenze’s Hermitage
Museum, built more than a generation earlier in Petersburg. Gropius &
Schmieden’s still later Gewandhaus in Leipzig of 1880-4, however, is
less reminiscent of Schinkel or Klenze and more conventionally academic.
This concert hall was renowned for its superb acoustics.
It is easy to forget how much the architects of these decades,
apparently obsessed with stylistic elaboration, were also concerned to
incorporate in their buildings all sorts of technical advances. Iron may
show less than in the previous period, but it was quite consistently
used behind the scenes. Central heating, extensive sanitary equipment,
vertical transportation, and various other things that are taken for
granted today first became accepted necessities in these decades. But it
was only in the commercial field—and in England and the United States
above all—that such technical innovations influenced architecture very
positively or visibly (see Chapter 14), however much they must actually
have preoccupied architects who seem today so imitative and
retardataire. The Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin by Franz Schwechten
(1841-1924), however, built in 1872-80, did represent a real advance
over the principal English railway station of this period, St Pancras in
London of 1863-76, in the clarity and coherence of its organization. One
can hardly say that the shed roof of the Anhalter Bahnhof was in the
_Rundbogenstil_; yet it is much more happily related in scale and shape
to the masonry elements of the station than are the two parts of that in
London, world-famous nonetheless until the nineties for the unrivalled
span of its shed.
Architectural activity in Bavaria was of a very different order. The
Ludwigsschlösser,[204] the country palaces that Ludwig II of Bavaria
erected for his private delectation after he succeeded Maximilian II in
1864, are the playthings of a monarch mad about Louis XIV. Linderhof,
built in 1870-86, revived a local Bavarian sort of Baroque, and was thus
even more premonitory of a favourite German mode of the eighties and
nineties than Hitzig’s Berlin Exchange (Plate 84). Herrenchiemsee, first
projected as early as 1868 but begun only in 1878, is a direct imitation
of Versailles. Neuschwanstein, on the other hand, is a wild Wagnerian
fantasy of a medieval castle occupying a superb mountain site.
It must be assumed that the architect of the first two, Georg von
Dollmann (1830-95), was little more than the draughting agent of his
master’s dreams of grandeur. More interesting than the exteriors are the
incredibly rich interiors of Linderhof, operatic recreations of the
Bavarian Rococo. Appropriately enough these were designed by Franz von
Seitz (1817-83), then director of the Munich State Theatre, who was
famous for his stage-sets. At Herrenchiemsee, however, many of the
interiors were exact copies of the main apartments of Louis XIV at
Versailles. These were executed by Julius Hoffmann (1840-96), who began
to work under Dollmann in 1880 and succeeded him in 1884. More original
were certain other rooms at Herrenchiemsee designed by F. P. Stulberger
after 1883 in an even more elaborate and fantastic Neo-Rococo than those
by Seitz at Linderhof.
Ludwig II had another obsession besides the majesty of Louis XIV, and
that was the genius of Richard Wagner. This cult is almost nauseatingly
reflected at Neuschwanstein, for which Riedel, who had built Schloss
Berg in 1849-51, prepared the original design in 1867. Construction
there began in 1869, was taken over by Dollmann in 1874, and only
completed as regards the exterior in 1881; much of the decoration is
still later. Despite Ludwig’s romantic love of the real Romanesque of
the Wartburg, Neuschwanstein really differs very little from the fake
castles of the first half of the century, except in its very ingenious
adaptation to a most precarious site. It is the later interiors,
designed by Hoffmann in the early eighties, that attempt to realize the
Wagnerian legends both in the architectural detailing and in endless
murals. The whole culminates in the Byzantinesque throne room of 1885-6
intended by Ludwig to be a sort of ‘Grail Hall’ from _Parsifal_. The
results of his other obsession are more gratifying to the eye.
Never again would any ruler, however, not even in Germany, be so
spendthrift a patron of architecture. Considering the deterioration in
quality evident in these palaces and castles of the seventies and
eighties from the work done for Ludwig’s predecessor Ludwig I or for
Frederick William IV of Prussia in the thirties and forties, this was
just as well. Fortunately the activities of William II were less related
to the building arts; and Hitler, a thwarted architect, had too little
time.
Far more typical of the turn German architecture in general was taking
in the seventies than the Ludwigsschlösser were such things as the von
Tiele house in Berlin by Gustav Ebe (1834-1916) and Julius Benda
(1838-97). In its crawlingly rich German Renaissance detail and its
irregularly gabled silhouette this prepared the way far more definitely
than Raschdorf’s contemporary Cologne buildings for a veritable flood of
such coarse work all over Germany in the next decade. This
characteristic German mode has analogies with the English style-phase of
the seventies and eighties somewhat perversely known as ‘Queen Anne’;
more specifically it often resembles very closely what is called ‘Pont
Street Dutch’ in England. But leadership comparable to that provided in
England by Webb and Shaw was entirely lacking, and even lesser talent of
the order of George’s or Collcutt’s (see Chapter 12).
Usually executed in dark-coloured brick with stone trim, this prime
manifestation of the bourgeois ambitions of the Bismarckian Empire
produced a spate of buildings of all sorts that have come to look very
grim indeed with the accumulated smoke of years. Old photographs
indicate that many of them once had a certain lightness and even a quite
festive air, Wagnerian in the _Meistersinger_ vein rather than in that
of the _Ring_ as at Neuschwanstein. But the materials used were always
hard and mechanically handled and the execution of the detail at once
fussy and metallic. No positive originality in general composition or in
planning made up, as with much comparable work in England, for the
anti-architectonic character of the basic approach.
A prominent late example is the Rathaus[205] in Hamburg built in
1886-97. This vast and turgid edifice contrasts most unhappily with the
suave High Renaissance design of Wimmel & Forsmann’s contiguous Exchange
built in the thirties. Its tall tower, moreover, has neither the
richness of outline of Scott’s on the Nikolaikirche nor the simple
directness of de Chateauneuf’s on the Petrikirche, with both of which it
still disputes the central position on the Hamburg skyline.
The nationalistic ‘Meistersinger mode’, so to call it, had only too
long a life, lasting well into the twentieth century. But it was early
challenged by a new modulation of German taste in the eighties,
parallel to that which the English also experienced, towards an
eighteenth-century revival—here in Germany definitely Neo-Baroque—of
which Linderhof was probably the first really sumptuous and striking
example. Ebe & Benda early deserted the German Renaissance for a
German Baroque at least as chastened as that of Hitzig’s much earlier
Exchange when they built their Palais Mosse in Berlin of 1882-4. In
1882 Paul Wallot (1841-1912), who had also worked earlier in the
Meistersinger mode, won the competition for the Reichstag Building
with an overpoweringly monumental Neo-Baroque project recalling
Vanbrugh more than Bernini or Schlüter. Erected by him in 1884-94,
this was soon matched at the inner end of Unter den Linden by
Raschdorf’s cathedral.
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
Figure 16A and 16B. Vilhelm Petersen and Ferdinand Jensen: Copenhagen,
Søtorvet, 1873-6, elevation
]
Unlike Napoleon III and Francis Joseph, the German emperors William I,
Frederick I, and William II did not succeed in making their capital an
important exemplar of nineteenth-century urbanism. Moreover, the
influential position that Germany had occupied in the international
world of architecture in the first half of the century was less and less
maintained after the death of Stüler. Not until the twentieth century
did Germans again make a significant contribution to European
architectural history (see Chapter 20).
With the deterioration of German leadership in the seventies and
eighties went also a general decline in the architectural standards of
the Scandinavian countries that had so successfully based their later
Romantic Classicism and their _Rundbogenstil_ on German models of the
thirties, forties, and fifties. In Denmark the work of Meldahl was
increasingly inferior to that of Herholdt. Although he was only nine
years younger than Herholdt, his direction of the Copenhagen Academy,
beginning in 1873, coincided with the feeblest and most eclectic period
in Danish architecture, from which recovery started only in the nineties
with the early work of Martin Nyrop (1849-1925) in Copenhagen and of
Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) in Aarhus (see Chapter 24).
A characteristic urbanistic development of the seventies in Copenhagen,
the Søtorvet built in 1873-6 by Vilhelm Petersen (1830-1913) and
Ferdinand Vilhelm Jensen (1837-90), is French not German in its ultimate
inspiration. This grandiose pavilioned and mansarded range of four tall
blocks forms a shallow U-shaped square along a canal (Figure 16). Its
definitely Second Empire character may not, all the same, have derived
directly from Paris but via German or English intermediaries, so much
more typical is this of the international than of the truly Parisian
mode of the third quarter of the century.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
As late as 1893-4 the much more conspicuous Magasin du Nord department
store, built by A. C. Jensen (1847-1913) and his partner H. Glaesel in
the Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen, also carried the high mansarded roofs
of the new Louvre, both flat-sided and convex-curved, above its end and
centre pavilions. The detailing was chastened, however, by memories of
local palaces and mansions in the nearby Amalie quarter of the city,
where Jensen had worked on the completion of the eighteenth-century
Marble Church. The Magasin du Nord thus combines two characteristic
aspects of the architecture of the period, evident in most countries but
rarely thus joined: a reflection of Napoleon III’s Paris, elsewhere
reaching its peak around 1870, and a revival of the style of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generally beginning about a decade
later.
In Sweden also there was some Second Empire influence, although nothing
very notable resulted from it. The Jernkontovets Building in Stockholm
erected by the brothers Kumlien (A.F., 1833-?; K.H., 1837-97) in 1873-5
has a high mansard and pavilions combined with a respectably academic
treatment of the façades that is quite different from the bombast of the
Søtorvet. Bern’s Restaurant in Stockholm of 1886 by Åbom, whose more
conservative Renaissance Revival theatre of thirty years earlier has
been mentioned, is similarly Parisian, particularly in the decorations
that were provided by Isaeus.
With I. G. Clason (1856-1930) the tide of eclecticism in Sweden turned
more nationalistic. The Northern Renaissance of his Northern Museum,
built in 1889-1907, parallels somewhat belatedly the Meistersinger mode
in Germany; but it also shows a more refined and delicate touch,
somewhat like that of George and of Collcutt in England. As in most
other countries, the revival of the native sixteenth-century style was
soon succeeded by a revival of the Baroque, here rather academically
restrained. This phase is most conspicuously represented in Stockholm by
the grouped Parliament House and National Bank of 1897-1905 by Aron
Johansson (1860-1936). In the nineties Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1946) was
also initiating a new movement somewhat comparable to that led by Nyrop
in Denmark (see Chapter 24).
The modes of Second Empire Paris left rather more mark on Holland than
did those of the First Empire, particularly in the work of Cornelis
Outshoorn (1810-75), whose iron-and-glass Paleis voor Volksvlijt in
Amsterdam of the late fifties has been mentioned earlier. That is long
gone, but the related Galerij, a U-shaped range of mansarded blocks
linked by a sort of veranda of cast iron, till lately bounded the south
of the Frederiksplein. His enormous Amstel Hotel, near by on the farther
side of the Amstel, was built in 1863-7. At Scheveningen the Oranje
Hotel (1872-3), also by him, was one of several typical resort
establishments there of an international Second Empire order, as is also
his hotel at Berg-en-Dal near Nijmegen (1867-9). Fairly generally high
mansards rose in the sixties and seventies over the narrow house-fronts
in the new quarters of Dutch cities. However, the opposing Neo-Gothic is
more significant historically in Holland, and the secular work of
Cuijpers as well as his churches, although rather like Clason’s, is
better considered in that connexion (see Chapter 11). As in the
Scandinavian countries, the nineties saw new beginnings in Holland, in
this case with the appearance of Berlage and Kromhout (see Chapter 20).
The principal Anglo-American developments in the second half of the
century were in the specialized fields of domestic and commercial
building (see Chapters 14 and 15). England, moreover, had from 1850 to
the early seventies a lively stylistic development of her own, the High
Victorian Gothic, rather different from the later Neo-Gothic of the
Continent, which was also very influential in the Dominions and in the
United States (see Chapters 10 and 11). Nevertheless, the international
Second Empire mode flourished on both sides of the Atlantic among
Anglo-Saxons to a greater extent, perhaps, than anywhere in Europe. It
is not, of course, possible to subsume all non-Gothic work of these
decades in England under the Second Empire rubric any more than on the
Continent. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, the most vigorous and
conspicuous buildings of a generically Renaissance character were
clearly inspired by Paris, and often specifically by the New Louvre, as
Prosper Mérimée noted and wrote to Viollet-le-Duc while on a visit to
London in the mid sixties.
The most considerable English public monument built just after the mid
century, the Leeds Town Hall of 1855-9, is by Cuthbert Brodrick (Plate
78A). That Brodrick was an architect markedly French in his leanings has
already been noted in describing his Leeds Corn Exchange, which is later
in date but earlier in style than his Town Hall (see Chapter 4). But
this major early work, for which Brodrick won the commission in a
competition in 1853, is not easily pigeon-holed stylistically. The great
hall inside derives quite directly from Elmes’s in Liverpool, designed
almost a quarter of a century earlier, though not opened until 1856. The
exterior recalls in its grandiose scale the English Baroque of Vanbrugh
more than it does anything that had even been projected since the
megalomaniac French projects of the 1790s. The Leeds Town Hall is
certainly no longer Romantic Classical, no longer Early Victorian; yet
except for the rather clumsy originality of some of the detail and the
varied outline of the tower—a late emendation of the original project of
1853—it is hard to say how or why it is so definitely High Victorian,
and rather a masterpiece of the High Victorian at that. Wallot in Berlin
in the eighties approached Brodrick’s mode of design in the Reichstag
but had little of his command of scale or his almost Romantic Classical
control of mass.
When Brodrick designed his town hall very little was known in England of
Visconti’s project of 1852 for the New Louvre, and Lefuel had not yet
begun to elaborate the design. So vigorously individual an architect as
Brodrick was hardly likely, moreover, to find inspiration in the Hope
house of Dusillion or the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. But the wave
of Second Empire influence arrived in England well before the Leeds Town
Hall was finished. When the English swarmed to Paris to visit the
International Exhibition of 1855 the character of the New Louvre became
generally known to architects and to the interested public. The Crimean
War in the mid fifties served, moreover, to bring English and French
officialdom into close contact. To English ministers and civil servants,
even more than to architects and ordinary citizens, the existing
governmental accommodations in Whitehall contrasted most unfavourably
with those Napoleon III was providing in the New Louvre. When a
competition was held in 1856-7 for a new Foreign Office and a new War
Office to be built in Whitehall, it is not surprising that most of those
entrants who were not convinced Gothicists should have modelled their
projects more or less on the work of Visconti and Lefuel.
Barry, the head of the profession, did not enter the competition; but
unofficially—for he was still an employee of the Government at the
Houses of Parliament—he prepared at this time a comprehensive scheme for
the development of the whole length of Whitehall from Parliament Square
to Trafalgar Square. In this project he crowned all his
façades—including that of his already executed Treasury—with mansards,
introduced stepped-back courts like that of the New Louvre, and marked
the corners and the centres of the court façades in the most Louvre-like
way with pavilions crowned by still taller mansards. Had this project of
Barry’s been followed, London would rival Paris and Vienna in the
extent, the consistency, and the boldness of her public buildings of
this period. In fact, practically nothing ever came of it nor, indeed,
of the official competition; for by this period earlier traditions of
urbanism had all but completely died out and architectural initiative
was largely in private hands.
When the competition was judged in 1857, the designs that received the
top prizes both for the War Office and for the Foreign Office were in
the pavilioned and mansarded manner; they derived, however, at least as
much from the Tuileries as from the New Louvre. It was the rising
prestige of Napoleon III, of course, that called public attention at
this time to the Tuileries which was his residence—as it had been, for
that matter, the residence of earlier nineteenth-century French
monarchs. Otherwise no one in England would probably have thought of
reviving any of the various periods, covering some four centuries,
represented in its conglomerate mass or of emulating its pavilioned and
mansarded composition.
Since neither of these projects for ministries was ever executed, and
their respective architects—Henry B. Garling (1821-1909), on the one
hand, and H. E. Coe (1826-85) and his partner Hofland, on the
other—never built much else of consequence, it is not necessary to
linger over them. However, their designs and other Second Empire ones
that received minor premiums were extensively illustrated in
professional and general periodicals, and they provided favourite models
in the sixties both in England and in the United States. The Paris
originals, on which graphic data was not only scarcer but also less
readily accessible, were not on the whole so influential. This helps to
explain why French influence _appears_ to have been stronger in the
Anglo-Saxon world than on the Continent, even though there was probably
less direct contact with Paris.
There was also in England at this time a general tendency, even more
notable than in Austria or Germany, to enrich and elaborate plastically
the long-established Renaissance Revival mode. This is less specifically
inspired by Paris. An excellent example is provided by the extensive
range of terraces, designed by Sancton Wood (1814-86) in 1857, that
flank Lancaster Gate in the Bayswater Road in London with their boldly
projecting bay windows linked by tiers of colonnades. In other examples,
such as the National Discount Company’s offices at 65 Cornhill built by
the Francis Brothers in 1857, the capping of the whole block with a
boldly dormered mansard[206] is more obviously of Second Empire
inspiration, though the façades below are merely of a much enriched
_palazzo_ order.
When the Moseley Brothers designed in 1858 the vast Westminster Palace
Hotel near Westminster Abbey at the foot of Victoria Street, a
caravanserai intended to exceed the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel of
1850-2 in international luxury, they took over its pavilioned and
mansarded design. To judge from the relative dignity and sobriety of
their detailing, they would seem to have studied contemporary Parisian
work—not the New Louvre but the quieter _maisons de rapport_ along the
boulevards—rather than merely basing themselves on the prize-winning
Government Offices projects as so many others were content to do at this
time. This hotel, which proved a failure, now serves as a block of
offices, and has been remodelled almost beyond recognition.
The next year Barry designed the Halifax Town Hall, his last work. He
did not himself propose to cap this, like the Government Offices in his
Whitehall scheme, with French mansards; those that were executed are an
emendation by his son, E. M. Barry, who carried the building to
completion in 1862 after his father’s death in 1860. But the richly
arcaded articulation of the walls and the emphatic forward breaks of the
great tower and of the more modest pavilion at the other end clearly
emulate, without directly imitating, the sumptuous plasticity of the New
Louvre. Nevertheless, the boldly asymmetrical composition, dominated by
a single corner tower, is more in the Italian Villa vein (Plate 78B).
This tower—but not the site—was lined up with the axis of Prince’s
Street, which enters Crossley Street at this point. The assured quality
of its design and above all that of its tremendous spire, more than
worthy of Wren in the ingenuity with which the silhouette of a Gothic
steeple was built up out of Renaissance elements, makes the Halifax Town
Hall thoroughly English and one of the masterpieces of the High
Victorian period. Totally devoid of Gothic elements, it has more Gothic
vitality than Barry’s Houses of Parliament, at this time just
approaching completion nearly thirty years after they were first
designed.
E. M. Barry went on to crown two London station hotels, that at Charing
Cross in 1863-4 and that at Cannon Street in 1865-6, with mansards; but
these were far from being masterpieces, and that at Charing Cross has
lately been much modified. The Grosvenor Hotel, built beside the new
Victoria Station in 1859-60 by Sir James T. Knowles (1831-1908), is far
more original. He covered the whole enormous mass with a very tall
convex mansard, giving further emphasis to the broad pavilions at the
ends by carrying their roofs still higher and capping them with
lanterns. Beyond this nothing was French. The detail indeed, defined by
its architect as ‘Tuscan’, i.e. _Rundbogenstil_, is highly individual,
partaking of the coarse gusto and even somewhat of the naturalism of the
most advanced Victorian Gothic foliage carving of the period (see
Chapter 10).
Similar mansards, but flat-sided not bulbous, and similar detail
characterize a pair of tall terraces that Knowles built in 1860 on the
north side of Clapham Common, south of London. These constituted a
subtle suburban attack on Early Victorian traditions of terrace-design
that soon had metropolitan repercussions. His Thatched House Club in St
James’s Street in London of 1865 has a great deal of very rich carving
by J. Daymond in the naturalistic vein, but is less interesting in
general composition.
Knowles’s Grosvenor was still new when John Giles outbid it with the
Langham Hotel, begun in 1864. Given a much finer site than Knowles’s at
the base of the broad avenue of Portland Place across from Nash’s All
Souls’, Langham Place, Giles rose boldly—most people now think too
boldly—to the occasion (Plate 80A). Certainly he overwhelmed Nash’s
delicate and ingenious steeple by the rounded projection and the tall
square corner tower—now bombed away at the top—with which he faced it.
Equally certainly his massive north façade, with its boldly modelled
flanking pavilions and its profusion of lively animal carvings, would
overwhelm the urbane refinement of the nearby Adam terraces flanking
Portland Place had these not by now been replaced by far inferior
buildings. For all its gargantuan scale and the somewhat elephantine
playfulness of the detail (not to speak of the dinginess to which the
‘Suffolk-white’ brickwork and the stone trim have now been reduced), the
Langham is a rich and powerfully plastic composition, most skilfully
adapted to a special site, and more original than most of what was
produced in the sixties in Paris. The carved animals at the window
heads, so varied and so humorous, deserve an attention they rarely
receive; these scurrying creatures almost seem to come out of Tenniel,
but may actually derive from Viollet-le-Duc.
That this degree of architectural originality, presented with such bold
assurance and even bombast, should within a decade or two have come to
seem tasteless and actually ugly—as, indeed, it has seemed to many ever
since—is not of major historical consequence. The age that achieved it
rejected as tasteless and insipid the architectural production of the
previous hundred years, and most notably Late Georgian work of the sort
to which the Langham stood in close proximity. What _is_ of consequence
is that such High Victorian buildings, even when not Gothic, possessed a
vitality and a contemporaneity within their period that was very largely
lacking in parallel work on the Continent, most of which in any case is
a decade or more later in date. In their parvenu brashness, the
Grosvenor and Langham balance the contemporary achievement of the Gothic
church architects—an achievement generally more acceptable even today as
it was already to highbrows and aesthetics in the sixties—without
necessarily equalling it (see Chapter 10).
In the English hotel boom of the early and mid sixties which these big
London hotels set off, some variant of the anglicized Second Empire
became the accepted type of design; indeed, a mansarded French mode
continued to be used as late as the nineties[207] for such a big London
hotel as the Carlton built by H. L. Florence (1843-1916) in 1897. Many
heavily mansarded London hotels of the seventies and eighties are now
gone or have been turned, like the earlier Westminster Palace and the
Langham, to other uses—among these the former Grand Hotel in Trafalgar
Square of 1878-80 by H. Francis and the front block of the former Cecil
in the Strand built in 1886 by Perry & Reed may at least be noted here,
since they remain so conspicuous and are so exasperatingly unavailable
to travellers.
It is a resort hotel, however, the Cliff (now the Grand) at Scarborough
in Yorkshire, built by Brodrick at the height of the boom in 1863-7,
just before he retired to live in France, that remains internationally
the most notable example of the type (Plate 79). And the type could be
found in such remote spots as the famous ‘ghost town’ of the Comstock
Lode, Virginia City, Nevada, where the large and elaborate hotel is no
more, or Leadville, Colorado, where the more modest and much later
Vendome Hotel, built by Senator Tabor for his ‘Baby Doe’, is still in
use, as well as in big European cities such as Amsterdam, Frankfort,
Brussels, and Budapest.
The site of Brodrick’s Grand Hotel is a superb one on the edge of the
Scarborough cliffs above the North Sea, as different as possible from
the setting of the New Louvre. Its corner pavilions are capped, not with
ordinary high mansards, but with curious roofs like pointed domes,
richly crowned with elaborate cornices. In the intricacy of their
silhouette these are not unworthy rivals of Barry’s Halifax tower. The
massive walls are not of freestone in the manner of Paris nor yet of
pallid Suffolk brick with light coloured stone or cement trim as in
London. Instead, they are of warm red brick with incredibly lush
decorative trim of tawny terracotta—a combination that M. D. Wyatt also
used on the most elegant Second Empire mansion in London, Alford House,
which stood from 1872 until 1955 in Prince’s Gate at the corner of
Ennismore Gardens (Plate 83A).
Public and private architecture could hardly hope to rival the
sumptuousness of the new hotels, and in Britain rarely attempted to do
so. At Liverpool T. H. Wyatt in 1864-9 carried a U-shaped range of
ornately pavilioned and mansarded blocks that housed the Exchange around
the open space at the rear of the Town Hall, somewhat as Outshoorn
carried his Galerij around the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam; but
that is now all gone.
In the English countryside, the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County
Durham, built in 1869-75 by J.-A.-F.-A. Pellechet (1829-1903), and
Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire by another French architect, G.-H.
Destailleur (1822-93), largely of 1880-3, are unique examples of
extensive mansions completely in the Second Empire mode (Plate 76B). In
London Montagu House, designed in 1866 by the elderly Burn for the Duke
of Buccleuch, once raised in Whitehall the mansarded pavilions that
Barry and the winners of the Government Offices competition had proposed
in 1857, but this has now been demolished.
The most notable Second Empire ensemble in London, however, still partly
survives (Plate 80B). Facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace and
extending southward from the group of Late Georgian monuments around
Hyde Park Corner, are the terraces of Grosvenor Place. These were
designed[208] in 1867 and built in the following years. They provide one
of the more striking features of the London skyline inherited from the
Victorian period. Rivalling the high roofs and, almost, the tall
steeples of the Victorian Gothic, the mansards over the end houses are
carried to fantastic heights and capped with pointed upper roofs,
providing several storeys of attics; while the centre houses have convex
mansards like square domes taken straight from the New Louvre.
Below these Alpine crests, elaborated at the base with rich stone
dormers, the enormous houses are all of fine Portland stone—hardly to be
found in any earlier nineteenth-century London terraces except those of
Ennismore Gardens—and detailed with a plausibly Parisian flair—it is
even said that draughtsmen were sent to Paris to study Second Empire
work at first hand. English are the porches, however, which make plain
that these pretentious ranges are rows of dwellings like those in nearby
Belgrave Square. English, also, are the red stone bands, novel touches
echoing the fashionable ‘structural polychrome’ of the contemporary
Victorian Gothic, just as the tall mansards echo its pointed roofs (see
Chapter 10).
Beyond the first two blocks of Grosvenor Place the new construction of
the sixties stops; but it starts again at the farther end and surrounds
the two triangles of Grosvenor Gardens, of which Knowles’s hotel
occupies part of the farther side. It is characteristic of the Parisian
inspiration of the whole that on the east side of the Gardens great
blocks of flats—’mansions’ in a Victorian euphemism—replaced the usual
London terraces of individual tall houses, but these now serve as
offices as do all the extant houses in Grosvenor Place. For one of these
blocks red brick was used, but set like a mere panel-filling within
stone frames according to a French rather than an English tradition.
There are no other comparably pretentious examples of Second Empire
terraces in London except Cambridge Gate (1875) by Thomas Archer and A.
Green (?-1904), an unhappy intrusion among Nash’s stuccoed Regent’s Park
ranges despite its handsome execution in fine ashlar of Bath stone.
Characteristically, London domestic architecture of the late fifties and
sixties merely elaborated the Renaissance Revival formulas of the
previous decade. Not only were the chosen models generally later and
richer as in Vienna; wherever possible bolder plastic effects were
achieved by a more extensive use of ground-storey colonnades,
first-storey porches, and projecting bay windows, as on Wood’s
magniloquent terraces at Lancaster Gate or those of 1858 by C. J.
Richardson (1800-72) that followed them in Queen’s Gate.
The high standards of the earlier period were maintained only in
business _palazzi_, not those of London’s City, but those in big
Northern towns like Bradford and in Scotland. There good freestone was
readily available and a certain cultural lag, as well as a regional
sobriety of temperament, led to the maintenance of a more Barry-like
tradition. Notable everywhere for their academic virtues are the various
National Provincial Bank buildings by Barry’s pupil John Gibson
(1819-92). The earliest, but not the most typical, is the head office in
Bishopsgate, which was begun in 1863.
A special school of Renaissance design is associated with Sir Henry
Cole’s Department of Practical Art, and this produced the various
buildings that he sponsored in the new London cultural centre in
Brompton (now usually called South Kensington). The Exhibition of 1862,
on the southern edge of the estate belonging to the Commissioners of the
Great Exhibition, was housed in a structure designed by Francis Fowke
(1823-65), an army engineer. As at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, the
metal and glass construction of this was masked externally with masonry
walls, but, unlike Cendrier’s and Viel’s Palais de l’Industrie, the
whole was pavilioned and mansarded in the Second Empire mode. A still
more elaborate Second Empire project was prepared by Fowke for the
Museum of Science and Art (later Victoria and Albert), Cole having
evidently accepted all too abjectly the criticism of his earlier
temporary structure, the notorious ‘Brompton Boilers’ (see Chapter 7).
As Fowke died at this point the Museum (Plate 83B), begun in 1866, as
also the associated Royal College of Science (Huxley Building), built in
1868-71, were carried out in a much less French vein under another army
engineer, H. G. D. Scott (1822-83). The walling material is a fine
smooth red brick, very rare in the London of the nineteenth century,
beautifully laid up with thin joints. With this is combined an enormous
quantity of elaborately modelled pale cream terracotta, as on various
Central European buildings deriving from Schinkel’s Bauakademie in
Berlin of 1831-6.
In these South Kensington structures, planned by an engineer, the
emphasis is on the sculptural embellishment designed and executed by
Godfrey Sykes and other artists associated with the Department. This
team-work, by-passing as it did over-all control by an architect, was
not very successful in achieving the coherence of Knowles’s and Giles’s
hotels, although those were built for much less sophisticated clients.
Much the same team, but with still more sculptors collaborating, was
responsible for the Albert Hall, the vast circular auditorium built in
1867-71 on the northern edge of the Commissioners’ Estate facing the
most characteristic monument of the age, G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic
Albert Memorial. The engineer Scott’s really notable achievement here in
the metal construction of the vast dome is unfortunately swamped by the
profuse investiture of sculptural detail in terracotta, intrinsically
elegant though much of that is.
In the sixties there was some coherence in the planning of the
Commissioners’ Estate as a whole, with a garden court surrounded by a
great hemicycle of terracotta arcading by M. D. Wyatt lying behind the
1862 Exhibition Building and below the Albert Hall. In Vienna the
cultural edifices were admirably grouped along the Ringstrasse with
plenty of open space between them, however much they may have lacked
intrinsic architectural quality. In sad contrast is the way the
following decades allowed this considerable tract to become clogged up
until almost no urbanistic organization at all remains.
Other European countries tended in this period, like Denmark, Sweden,
and Holland, to follow Paris and Vienna rather than London. Only a few
works of the sixties and seventies need be singled out from the welter
of pretentious public and private construction that turned Brussels, for
example, into a ‘Little Paris’.[209] The Boulevard Anspach as a whole
suggests the Cannebière in Marseilles, although the mansards on the
buildings that line it are more plastically handled; the Exchange, in
its own square half-way down the boulevard, was built by L.-P. Suys
(1823-87) in 1868-73, and this provides the focus of the
mid-nineteenth-century city, as does Garnier’s Opéra in Paris. A
provincial variant of the Opéra in many ways, despite its quite
different function, this is somewhat more academic in composition yet
also rather coarser in its profuse ornamentation. Brussels as a whole is
dominated, however, by one of the grandest and most original monuments
erected anywhere in this period.
The Palace of Justice,[210] built by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79) in
1866-83, occupies so high a site and is mounted on so mountainous a
substructure that almost the whole of its gargantuan mass is visible
from all over the city. Although generically Classical, a good deal of
the external treatment has an indefinable flavour of the monuments of
the ancient civilizations of the East, somewhat like that of the exotic
churches Alexander Thomson built in the late fifties and sixties in
Glasgow (Plate 81). Even more than Thomson’s relatively small and
delicately scaled work, the Palace of Justice also suggests the
megalomaniac architectural dreams of such a Romantic English painter as
John Martin. Heavy and almost literally cruel, it has a Piranesian
spatial elaboration and a plastic vitality of the most exaggeratedly
architectonic order. Thus it quite puts to shame the urbane Renaissance
costuming of most Continental public architecture of this period and the
usual Neo-Baroque of the next.
The existence of this extraordinary edifice in a minor European capital
prepares one a little for the important part that Brussels was to play
in the nineties, even though there could hardly be two architects
further apart in spirit than Poelaert and Victor Horta, who initiated
there the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 16). So also in Glasgow, the
originality of Thomson’s Queen’s Park Church of the sixties at least
opened the way for the notable international contribution to be made by
the Glaswegian C. R. Mackintosh in the nineties. But it was Alphonse
Balat (1818-95), not Poelaert, who was Horta’s master and also in these
decades professor of architecture at the local Academy. Balat’s Musée
Royale des Beaux Arts of 1875-81 already represents a reversion to a
more restrained and academic classicism with none of Poelaert’s force
and vitality. Yet this building is not without a certain correct
elegance of detail and conventional skill in composition for which his
houses of the sixties, with their Barry-like handling of the High
Renaissance _palazzo_ theme, prepared the way. The real eclecticism of
this period lies less significantly in the variety of nominal styles
employed than in the variety of ways of employing them. It is this,
rather than the concurrent multiplication of fashionable modes, that
makes it so difficult to characterize broadly the production of the
period between the mid century and the nineties.
In several other European countries the situation was made even more
complicated than in Belgium by a very considerable cultural lag such as
has already been noted in Scandinavia. While the Rütschi-Bleuler House
in Zurich of 1869-70 by Theodor Geiger (1832-82) had the fashionable
Second Empire mansard, here high and concave, at nearby Winterthur
Semper’s Town Hall of precisely the same date, with its dominating
temple portico, might at first sight be taken for a provincial French
public edifice of the second quarter of the century. At the Zurich
Polytechnic School, where Semper became a professor in 1855,[211] the
large building begun in 1859 that he erected with the local architect
Wolff is equally retardataire in style. His Observatory there of 1861-4
is a delicate and rather picturesquely composed exercise in the
_quattrocento_ version of the _Rundbogenstil_, rather like his Hamburg
houses of twenty years earlier.
If a German architect of established international reputation could be
thus affected by the conservative tastes of his Swiss clients, it is not
surprising that in the Iberian peninsula almost nothing of interest was
built in this period. It may, however, be mentioned that the building
for the National Library and Museums in Madrid, designed in 1866 by
Francisco Jareño y Alarcón (1818-92) and almost thirty years in
construction, while still of the most conventional Classical character
as regards its façades, has convex mansards over the end pavilions of
quite definitely Second Empire character. Characteristically, the
Chamber of Commerce in Madrid, completed in 1893 by E. M. Repulles y
Vargas (1845-1922), illustrates the general return of official
architecture to still more conventional academic standards towards the
end of the century. But in the seventies there began in Barcelona the
career of a Spanish—or more accurately Catalan—architect, Antoni Gaudí,
who was destined to produce around 1900 some of the boldest and most
original early works of modern architecture. Gaudí’s real links in the
seventies and eighties, spiritually if not so much actually, are with
the High Victorian Gothic not the Second Empire, although the earliest
project on which he worked reflected the Palais Longchamps at Marseilles
(see Chapter 11).
The situation in the United States was naturally most like that in
England. As has already been noted, a French-trained Danish architect,
Lienau, prefigured the Second Empire mode in the Shiff house in New York
as early as 1849-50. By the mid fifties mansards of rather modest
height, often with shallow concave slopes, had appeared in Eastern
cities on many houses not otherwise particularly Frenchified. Richard M.
Hunt (1827-95),[212] the first American to study at the École des
Beaux-Arts and actually an assistant as well as a pupil of Lefuel,
returned from Paris to America in 1855. But he brought with him no lush
Second Empire mode but rather the basic academic tradition of the French
official world, despite the fact that he had himself worked in 1854 on
the New Louvre. Although some of the earliest work of H. H. Richardson,
who returned from Paris a decade later after working for several years
for Labrouste’s brother Théodore, was of Second Empire character, he
showed himself from the first more responsive to influences from
contemporary England (see Chapters 11 and 13). On the whole, the Second
Empire mode, as it was practised in America through the third quarter of
the century, derived almost as completely as the local Victorian Gothic
from England. Most American architects were kept informed of what was
going on abroad through the English professional Press, and so they
naturally followed the models that were offered in the _Builder_ and the
_Building News_ rather than those in the publications of César
Daly.[213]
The Civil War of 1861-5 did not bring architectural production to a
stop; indeed, it seems to have had a less inhibiting effect than the
aftermath of the financial crash of 1857 in the immediately preceding
years. In Washington the building of Walter’s new wings of the Capitol,
initiated in 1851,[214] and of his cast-iron dome, designed in 1855,
continued until their completion in 1865, right through the war years at
President Lincoln’s express order (Plate 82A). There is nothing
specifically French about this new work at the Capitol, even though
Walter had the assistance from 1855 of the Paris-trained Hunt. On the
other hand, the original more-or-less Romantic Classical edifice that
had finally been brought to completion in 1828 by Bulfinch after so many
changes of architect was largely submerged. The new wings echo in their
academic porticoes the broader portico of the original late
eighteenth-century design; but the cast-iron dome (see Chapter 7),
rivalling in size the largest Baroque domes of Europe, has a high drum
and a Michelangelesque silhouette of the greatest boldness in contrast
to the Roman saucer shape of that designed by Latrobe and not much
raised in execution by Bulfinch.
It was not in Washington that the Second Empire mode was first
introduced for public buildings; Washington, indeed, would never again
be the centre of architectural influence that it was in the Romantic
Classical period, although the new state capitols begun in the sixties
and seventies were mostly capped with imitations of Walter’s dome. A
‘female seminary’ on the Hudson River, endowed by a brewer, and the new
City Hall in Boston, Mass., both dating from the opening of the sixties,
are the first monumental instances of the new mode that dominated the
field of secular public building until the financial Panic of 1873
brought the post-war boom to a close. James Renwick,[215] who designed
the very extensive Main Hall for Matthew Vassar’s new college at
Arlington near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1860, was specifically instructed
by his client to imitate the Tuileries—not the New Louvre—and so he did
in an elaborately pavilioned composition of U-shaped plan crowned by
various sorts of high mansards. This overshadows in significance his
earlier Charity Hospital of 1858 on Blackwell’s Island in New York,
already mansarded but very plain, and his Corcoran Gallery of 1859, now
the Court of Claims, in Washington, with a rich but muddled façade still
rather flatly conceived.
Renwick was at least as eclectic as such Europeans as Ballu and Ferstel.
Having made his first reputation with the building of the Anglican Grace
Church in New York in 1843-6—if not very Camdenian, this is at least a
fair specimen of revived fourteenth-century English Gothic—he continued
in the Gothic line with the Catholic St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York,
begun in 1859 and completed (except for the spires) in 1879. That vast
two-towered pile, however, is Gothic in a very Continental way,
resembling Gau’s and Ballu’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris and Ferstel’s
Votivkirche in Vienna more than anything English of the period. In the
late forties Renwick had also been the agent of Robert Dale Owen’s
‘Romanesque Revival’ aspirations in designing the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington (see Chapter 6).
For such things as the Smithsonian and his churches Renwick had plenty
of visual documents on which to lean, either archaeological treatises on
the buildings of the medieval past or illustrations of contemporary
foreign work. But for Vassar College, very evidently, he was dependent
for his inspiration on rather generalized lithographic or engraved views
of the Tuileries. Nor could he, at this relatively early date, borrow
much from published illustrations of contemporary English work in the
new international Second Empire mode. The particular plastic vitality of
the Americanized Second Empire is already notable in this early example,
however, even though the rather crude articulation of the red brick
walls is remote from anything French of any period from the sixteenth
century to the nineteenth. Later buildings by Renwick in the same mode
are richer and closer to Parisian standards, but their architectonic
vitality is considerably less.
The Boston City Hall,[216] built by G. J. F. Bryant (1816-99) and Arthur
D. Gilman (1821-82) in 1862-5, is a smaller but suaver edifice. Although
it is a compactly planned block, the articulation of the walls by
successive Roman-arched orders, coldly but competently executed in
stone, is boldly plastic below the crowning mansards. However, just
before this, for the Arlington Street Church of 1859-61, the first
edifice erected in the Back Bay district that Gilman was just laying
out,[217] he had turned not to France but to eighteenth-century England
for inspiration, basing himself chiefly on the same churches by Gibbs
that had been the most popular American models in later Colonial times.
A leading opponent of the Greek Revival, Gilman, like most Continental
architects of the day, evidently knew better what he meant to leave
behind than whither he wished to proceed. His Boston church initiated no
national wave of Gibbsian church architecture; indeed, the sixties were
the heyday of Victorian Gothic design for churches in the United States.
His City Hall, on the other hand, set off a nation-wide programme of
public building in the Second Empire mode; for Boston was now for a
score of years the artistic as well as the intellectual headquarters of
the country in succession to Philadelphia. In this programme
municipalities, state authorities, and the Federal Government all
participated actively during the decade following the Civil War. In the
case of many Federal buildings, only nominally the work of the office of
the Supervising Architect, where A. B. Mullet (1834-90) succeeded Rogers
in 1865, Gilman acted in these years as consultant, and was probably the
real designer rather than Mullet or his assistants.
These vast monuments were mostly constructed during General Grant’s
presidency. Parisian in intention, yet American in their materials, they
are withal rather similar to Second Empire work in England. Few were
completed before the mode went out of favour as changes in architectural
control sometimes make evident. In the case of the New York State
Capitol in Albany, for example, begun in 1868 by Thomas Fuller (1822-98)
and his partner Augustus Laver (1834-98), both arriving from England via
Canada, Eidlitz and Richardson took over jointly in 1875, modifying the
design of the building very notably above the lower storeys towards the
Romanesquoid. Thus it was finally brought to completion by them and
others in the following twenty years. The very tall tower on the
Philadelphia City Hall, begun in 1874, was finished over a decade later.
This tower, whose crowning statue of William Penn still tops the local
skyline, has hardly anything in common with the Louvre-like pavilions
below; yet the whole is nominally the work of one architect, John
McArthur, Jr (1823-90), the grandfather of General Douglas McArthur.
Undoubtedly the association of these prominent buildings with the
unsavoury Grant administration and the fact that there were—at least in
the two cases mentioned above—major financial scandals involved in their
slow and incredibly costly construction played an important part in the
early rejection of a mode so associated with the public vices of the
decade after the Civil War. Not many of them are extant today other than
the Boston, Albany, and Philadelphia structures just mentioned and the
old State Department Building in Washington (Plate 82B).
In New York, Boston, and other large cities the vast granite piles in
this mode that long served as post offices are all gone. In Chicago the
Cook County Buildings built by J. J. Egan in 1872-5 have also long since
been replaced. In San Francisco Fuller & Laver’s extensive group of
Municipal Buildings was destroyed in the fire that followed the
earthquake of 1906. This must have been the largest, the richest, and
plastically the most complex production of the whole lot, with its
triangular site, boldly articulated massing, and central dome.
Though threatened by every new administration, the State, War and Navy
Department Building built by Mullet in 1871-5 still stands,
overshadowing the nearby White House. This is perhaps the best extant
example in America of the Second Empire—or as it is sometimes called
locally, the ‘General Grant’—mode (Plate 82B). The tiers of Roman-arched
orders in fine grey granite, borrowed by Gilman as consultant architect
and presumptive designer from his earlier Boston City Hall rather than
from Paris, tower up storey above storey to carry mansards of various
different heights above the complex pavilioned plan. Cold and grand,
almost without sculptural decoration, this could hardly be less like the
New Louvre or the old Tuileries in general texture; nor is there any of
the playful semi-Gothic detail of Knowles’s and Giles’s London hotels or
of the festive colouring and lush ornamentation of Brodrick’s at
Scarborough.
The contrast of the old State Department Building with its _pendant_ on
the other side of Lafayette Square, Mills’s Grecian Treasury, finally
completed by Rogers a decade earlier, is shocking to most people. Yet it
is fascinating to read here the representational aspirations of an age
that found its most significant expression, not in its public buildings,
but in the new skyscrapers which first rose in New York at just this
time, Hunt’s Tribune Building and the Western Union Building by his
pupil George B. Post. Both, incidentally, were heavily mansarded, and
the one by the American-trained Post was much more typically Second
Empire than is the French-trained Hunt’s (see Chapter 14).
In urban domestic architecture, both on large mansions and on the more
usual terrace houses, mansards became characteristic but not
ubiquitous in the late fifties and remained so down to the mid
seventies and even later in the West. Boston’s Back Bay district, laid
out by Gilman in 1859, has a few mansions along Commonwealth Avenue
that resemble somewhat the _hôtels particuliers_ of Paris, and also
several mansarded terraces by Bryant & Gilman and other architects in
that avenue and in Arlington and Beacon Streets. The materials used
are un-Parisian—brownstone like Gilman’s nearby church or dark-red
brick with brownstone trim—and the detail is rarely very plausibly
French. In general, inspiration still came from London, even if
nothing so extensive and spectacularly monumental as Grosvenor Place
and Grosvenor Gardens was ever produced. In New York Lienau’s finest
terrace, that built in Fifth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets in
1869, was rather more sumptuous than the Boston examples, being of
white marble with very literate ranges of superposed orders. Hunt’s
New York work was often so authentically Parisian as quite to lack the
bombast of the international Second Empire mode. Especially
interesting were his Stuyvesant Flats in 18th Street, New York, of
1869-70. This block was a very early example of an apartment house of
the Parisian sort in America, where they did not generally flourish
much before the late eighties.
For the more characteristic free-standing houses that were built outside
cities, in suburbs, in towns, and even in the country, the Second Empire
mode was also very popular. Interpreted in wood, painted brown or grey
stone colours, these have a distinctly autochthonous character.
Generally symmetrical and tightly planned, they did not advance the
development of the American house in the way of the rival ‘Stick Style’;
but in their emphasis on complicated three-dimensional modelling,
especially the modelling of the roofs, they prepared the way for one
important aspect of the later and more original ‘Shingle Style’ (see
Chapter 15).
The Second Empire episode in the United States is a curious one. On the
one hand, it was a consciously ‘modern’ movement, deriving its prestige
from contemporary Paris, not from any period of the past like the Greek,
the Gothic, or even the Renaissance Revivals—of which last, of course,
it was in some limited sense an heir. On the other hand, the
considerable originality of the mode as it was actually employed was
largely unconscious and due to the lack of accurate visual documents, or
even a codified body of precedent, to be followed. At this time
contemporary conditions demanded, as in Europe, the construction of many
public edifices, Federal, state, and municipal, to house a complexity of
functions. It would have been almost impossible to compress these within
the rigid rectangles of the Greek Revival even had the Greek Revival not
already been rejected by most critics twenty years or more earlier.
Yet the Second Empire episode was necessarily brief, lasting little more
than a decade. The crass assurance it reflected, particularly the
special arrogance of the post-war politicians in Washington, the state
capitals, and in the bigger cities, was much shaken by the Panic of
1873. The mode did not therefore, as in much of Europe, continue in
America into the eighties and nineties.
The episode has a longer-term significance, nevertheless. Slight as was
the actual relationship to the Second Empire mode of the first two
Americans to be trained at the École des Beaux Arts, Hunt and
Richardson, their personal influence and their prestige encouraged a
growing trek of architectural students to Paris; their recommendations
alone would hardly have had much effect had not fashion already
established Paris rather than London in the public mind as the centre of
modern architectural achievement and inspiration. From the mid eighties
on, the long-maintained dependence on England in architectural matters
began to be notably weakened; for a generation and more very many
American architects would seek their roots abroad, but henceforth in
France, or even Italy, not England.
It is not surprising that in the British Dominions there was no such
direct French influence in this period as in Latin America. Urban
entities like the Colmena and its terminal square in Lima, Peru,
pavilioned and mansarded throughout, rival European examples like the
Søtorvet in Copenhagen or the Galerij in Amsterdam. Before they gave way
to skyscrapers, the _hôtels particuliers_ along the Paseo de la Reforma
in Mexico City were more numerous and more plausibly Parisian than along
Commonwealth Avenue in Boston or Bellevue Avenue at Newport. But both in
Canada and in Australia the Second Empire mode arrived from England late
and in a more corrupted form than in America. The mansarded Windsor
Hotel of 1878 in Montreal hardly rivalled the Palmer House of 1872 in
Chicago by J. M. Van Osdel (1811-91), to which the rich merchant Potter
Palmer was as proud to give his name as to the incredible fake castle
that he built for his own occupancy a decade later. The Princess Theatre
in Melbourne, Australia, built by William Pitt in 1877, with its three
square-domed mansards, has an appealing nonchalance, like that of the
contemporary edifices of the mining towns high in the American Rocky
Mountains—the hotel in Virginia City, Nevada, that has been mentioned
earlier, or the much more modest Opera House in Central City, Colorado,
for example. But the public architecture of the third quarter of the
century in Australia was more restrained in design just because it was
generally so very retardataire.
The Parliament House in Melbourne, begun in 1856 by John G. Knight
(1824-92) and completed in 1880 by Peter Kerr (1820-1912), has academic
virtues not unworthy of Kerr’s master Barry, though its giant colonnades
recall rather those of Brodrick’s contemporary Town Hall in Leeds. The
Treasury Buildings in Melbourne, by John James Clark (1838-1915) of
1857-8, are not unworthy of comparison with High Renaissance work of the
period on the Continent. Other public buildings of the sixties and
seventies are of more definitely Victorian character, but Early
Victorian rather than High. For example, Clark’s Government House of
1872-6 in South Melbourne is a towered Italian Villa consciously
modelled on Queen Victoria’s Osborne House of a generation earlier. Both
in Australia and in Canada the Victorian Gothic had more vitality in
this period (see Chapter 11).
There is little profit in pursuing farther in the outlying areas of the
western world evidence of direct influence from Paris (of which there
is, for example, some in Russia) or autochthonous variants of the Second
Empire mode. In this generally rather unrewarding period the best work
mostly falls under the High Victorian Gothic rubric, or else it
illustrates specifically the development of commercial and domestic
architecture in the Anglo-American world (see Chapters 10 and 11; 14 and
15). In an attempt to give an over-all picture too many buildings of low
intrinsic quality and little present-day interest have already been
cited.
What makes especially difficult the proper historical assessment of the
widespread influence of Paris in the decades following 1850 is that this
influence, whether direct or indirect, rarely produced buildings on the
Continent of real distinction or even of much vitality. Only in England
and the United States, where the mode was quite reshaped by a different
cultural situation and the bold use of local materials, is it of much
independent interest. The more plausibly Parisian the work outside
France, the less vigour it usually possesses. Some of it can be very
plausible indeed, as for example the street architecture of Mexico City
and Buenos Aires, even if what appears to be carved French limestone in
the Argentine capital is usually but a triumph of imitative
craftsmanship on the part of stucco-workers imported from Italy. In
general, Mexican and Argentine Second Empire is very dull, as dull as in
Belgium, say, with no Poelaerts to redress the balance. Yet along the
Malecón in Havana, Cuba, where the traditional galleried house-fronts
were reinterpreted in a generically Second Empire way with Andalusian
lushness, the results are much more notable, not least because the soft
local stone has been very richly weathered by the strong sea breeze. As
was mentioned earlier, the use of _azulejos_ in extraordinary tones of
brilliant green and purple gives autochthonous character to similar work
in Brazil.
The international Second Empire mode has so far found no historian or
even a sympathetic critic. Perhaps no other mode so widespread in its
acceptance and so prolific in its production has ever received so little
attention from posterity. Yet beside it the contemporary stream of the
Victorian Gothic mode, which has been recurrently studied, must seem
more than a little parochial and also excessively dependent on the
individual capacities—not to say the caprices—of its leading
practitioners. Within the areas in which the Victorian Gothic was
employed, however, an area effectively confined to the Anglo-Saxon world
geographically and to certain kinds of buildings typologically, it was
capable of major architectural achievement. Moreover, thanks to the line
of spiritual descent from the leaders of the generation of architects
active in the third quarter of the century to those of the next, the
more creative aspects of the architecture of the turn of the century
derive in not inconsiderable part from the later Victorian Gothic.
The Lefuels and Hansens, or such men as Brodrick, Poelaert, and Gilman,
trained no worthy pupils. But the disciples of the Victorian Gothic
leaders not only include such very able young men who actually worked in
their offices as Webb and Shaw and Voysey but also, in some sense at
least, so great an American architect as Richardson, whose formal
training had been wholly Parisian (see Chapters 11, 12, and 13). The
advance of domestic architecture in the second half of the nineteenth
century and, to a somewhat lesser extent, also that of commercial
architecture therefore owed a great deal to the Victorian Gothic, at
least in England and America (see Chapters 14 and 15).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 10
HIGH VICTORIAN GOTHIC IN ENGLAND
BY 1850 Neo-Gothic was accepted as a proper mode for churches throughout
the western world. Only in England, however, had it become dominant for
such use. Moreover, Gothic was a more than acceptable alternative there
to Greek or Renaissance or Jacobethan design for many other sorts of
buildings also. Only in the urban fields of commercial construction and
of terrace-housing was its employment still very rare. On the Continent
the nearest equivalent in popularity and ubiquity to the Victorian
Gothic was the German _Rundbogenstil_. Neo-Gothic, although used more
and more everywhere after 1850 for churches, attracted few architectural
talents of a high order (see Chapter 11).
There are several reasons why the Gothic Revival was able in England,
and almost only in England, to pass into a new and creative phase around
1850. One was certainly the ethical emphasis of its doctrines, an
emphasis more sympathetic to Victorians than to most Europeans of this
period, but not without its appeal on the Continent towards the end of
the century. Another reason was the informality, not to say the
amateurishness, of architectural education in Britain, encouraging
personal discipleship and the cultivation of individual expression
rather than providing for the continuation of an academic tradition.
Related to this is the private character of architectural practice in
England as compared to its more public responsibilities and controls on
the Continent. The desirable professional positions in France, and to
almost the same degree in many other European countries, were those
offered by the sovereign or the State. But after the time of Soane and
Nash official employment ceased to carry either prestige or opportunity
in England, the Houses of Parliament notwithstanding—it was not Barry’s
work there but his clubs and mansions that established his high
professional reputation. As in the eighteenth century, a social and
aesthetic _élite_ still provided both critical esteem and the most
desirable commissions for Victorian architects; by 1850 a large part of
that _élite_ was very church-minded and thoroughly Gothicized. Not until
the mid sixties was there any significant change; even then those
responsible for this change, both the architects and their patrons, had
all been brought up in the churchly Gothic Revival tradition.
The High Victorian Gothic opened with the building of a London church.
All Saints’, Margaret Street, designed in 1849, largely completed
externally by 1852, and consecrated in 1859, was the result of no
imperial fiat, like the Votivkirche in Vienna or the big churches of the
sixties in Paris, nor did it occupy like them an isolated site
approached by wide new boulevards. Intended as a ‘model’ church by its
sponsors, the Ecclesiological Society, and financed by private
individuals, All Saints’ is set in a minor West End street at the rear
of a restricted court flanked by a clergy house and a school (Plate 6A).
But for its tower, the tallest feature of the mid-century London
skyline, it would have been hard to find; but once found, it could never
be ignored.
The architect of All Saints’, Butterfield, had been for some years,
together with Carpenter, the favourite of the ecclesiologists because of
the Pugin-like ‘correctness’ of his revived fourteenth-century English
Gothic. Now, quite suddenly, he and his sponsors embarked on new paths.
As soon as the walls began to rise, their startling character became
apparent; for the church is of red brick, a material long out of use in
London, and that red brick is banded and patterned with black brick, a
theme varied on the tower by the insertion of broad bands of stone.
‘Permanent polychrome’, achieved with a variety of materials, thus made
its debut here. In the interior, moreover, the polychromatic effect was
even richer and more strident, with marquetry of marble and tile in the
spandrels of the nave arcade and over the chancel arch, not to speak of
onyx and gilding in the chancel itself (Plate 85). The very exiguous
site forced any expansion upwards; the nave is tall, the vaulted chancel
taller, and the subsidiary structures flanking the court are even higher
and narrower in their proportions.
While the construction of All Saints’ proceeded there was much
concurrent and complementary activity in the English architectural
world. In 1849 a young critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900), had brought out
an influential book, _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which many of
the recommendations ran parallel to, if indeed they did not influence,
Butterfield’s latest stylistic innovations. Notably, Ruskin urged the
study of Italian Gothic: if All Saints’ is, in fact, not specifically
Italian in the character of its polychromy, it seemed so to most
contemporaries. The real foreign influences here, as in the profile of
the fine plain steeple, are German if anything. Butterfield’s moulded
detail continued to follow quite closely English fourteenth-century
models.[218]
In this same year 1849 Wild[219] was building on an even more obscure
London site in Soho his St Martin’s Northern Schools with pointed
arcades of brick definitely derived from Italian models. Moreover, he
was being acclaimed for doing this by the very ecclesiological leaders
who had ten years before condemned his Christ Church, Streatham, as
‘Saracenic’. With the publication of the first volume of Ruskin’s next
book, _The Stones of Venice_, in 1851 (the two less important later
volumes came out in 1853) and the appearance of _Brick and Marble
Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy_ by G. E. Street (1824-81) in
1855, Italian influence increased. Street’s name, moreover, introduces
the third of the three men most responsible for the sharp turn that
English architecture was taking in the fifties.
Without depending on polychromy, Butterfield designed in 1850 and built
in 1851-2 St Matthias’s off Howard Road in Stoke Newington, a London
suburb, another church of novel character. Unconfined by a closed-in
urban site, this also showed in its great scale and the bold silhouette
of the gable-roofed tower—still standing today above the bombed ruin of
the church—how the timid Early Victorian Gothic of the forties could be
invigorated. Moreover, at St Bartholomew’s at Yealmpton in Devonshire,
built in 1850, Butterfield introduced in a country church striped piers
of two different tones of marble and considerable coloured marquetry
work. A former fellow assistant of Street in G. G. Scott’s office,
William H. White (1826-90), at All Saints’ in Talbot Road, Kensington,
in London, begun in 1850, also used the new polychromy that soon became
the principal, though by no means the only, hallmark of High Victorian
Gothic.
A large country house of stone by S. S. Teulon (1812-73), Tortworth
Court in Gloucestershire, built in 1849-53, has no polychromy, although
its architect was soon to be the most unrestrained of all in its
exploitation. His patrons, moreover, would be notably ‘lower’ in their
churchmanship than the members of the Ecclesiological Society who
employed Butterfield. But in the boldly plastic massing of Tortworth,
leading up to a tall central tower of the most complex silhouette,
Teulon exemplified the new architectural ambitions, ambitions that would
soon be finding as striking expression in secular work as in
ecclesiastical building whether ‘high’ or ‘low’.
Street had been a favourite of the High Church party since he first
began building small churches and schools of a most ‘correct’ sort in
Cornwall on leaving Scott’s office.[220] He was also the author of
several critical articles published in _The Ecclesiologist_, notable for
their cogency. In these he commented, for example, on the applicability
of the arcades of Wild’s school to commercial building; he also attacked
the curious habit of the forties, most prevalent with the
ecclesiologists, of designing urban churches on confined sites as if
they were to sprawl over ample village greens. Street began his first
important church with associated school buildings, All Saints’, Boyn
Hill, at Maidenhead, in 1853. Here he employed red brick and almost as
much permanent polychrome as Butterfield at All Saints’, Margaret
Street. He also handled the detail, particularly on the schools, with
something of the same sort of brutal ‘realism’ (to use the catchword of
the period) that Butterfield used on his subsidiary buildings.
In the same year in London Street’s former employer Scott, long
established as the most successful, if hardly the most ‘correct’, of
Early Victorian Gothic practitioners, and since 1849 Architect to
Westminster Abbey, built in Broad Sanctuary contiguous to the façade of
the Abbey a Gothic terrace. That the use of Gothic should have been
encouraged here by the Abbey authorities is not surprising. But they
themselves may well have been surprised at what their architect
produced; for this is no flat range of Neo-Tudor fronts in stock brick,
but a plastic mass of stonework bristling with oriels and turrets and
capped with a broken skyline of stepped gables. Nothing here recalls the
rather French thirteenth-century Gothic of the Abbey itself; instead the
effect is Germanic, recalling the medieval houses of the Hansa cities.
The work was executed with a boldness of detail doubtless less personal
in character than Butterfield’s or Street’s, but quite as striking to
the casual observer.
Scott’s houses had little influence, however. Gothic terraces were no
more popular in the fifties and sixties in England than in the preceding
decades. In residential districts the flood of more-or-less Renaissance
stucco continued to spread, little affected by the High Victorian
Gothic. As we have seen, the Second Empire mode also had only a very
limited success in this field of construction, a field dominated not by
architects but by builders.
In 1853 also Scott provided for the Camden Church in the Peckham Road in
South London—Ruskin’s own family church—a new east end in a round-arched
and banded medievalizing mode; Ruskin himself collaborated on the window
design, or so it is said. There is sufficient Gothic ‘realism’ in the
detail here to justify considering this a round-arched variant of the
High Victorian Gothic; but it is definitely of Italian inspiration. It
seems also to be related to the later _Rundbogenstil_ of this decade in
Germany and Austria; nor is it altogether without resemblance to such a
contemporary French church as Vaudoyer’s Byzantinesque cathedral of
Marseilles.
Several far more important and better publicized interventions in
architecture on the part of Ruskin followed immediately. In considerable
part because of his personal influence with Oxford friends, the Gothic
design of the Irish architects Sir Thomas Deane[221] (1792-1871) and
Benjamin Woodward (1815-61) was accepted for the University Museum at
Oxford in 1855. Woodward had already proved himself a would-be Ruskinian
in detailing their design of 1853 for the Museum of Trinity College,
Dublin, in a Venetian (though largely _quattrocento_) way. As the Oxford
Museum rose to completion in the next four years, Ruskin was in
continuous contact with Woodward, providing himself the design for at
least one window as well as encouraging the delegation to the Irish
carvers of much of the responsibility for the ornamental decoration—of
which only a small part was, in fact, ever executed. The work of the
O’Sheas is better appreciated in Dublin, where the decoration both of
the Trinity College building and of the Kildare Street Club of 1861 was
carried out by them in a very free and yet boldly naturalistic vein.
The most interesting feature of the University Museum—and one that it is
surprising to find Ruskin, who hated iron and all it stood for in the
nineteenth-century world, involved with—is the court, with its roof of
iron and glass (Plate 86B). How different this is, however, from what
iron-founders without architectural control were providing at the same
time in the Brompton Boilers! Yet it is even more different from
Hopper’s or Rickman’s iron Gothic of fifty years earlier (Plate 60B).
For all the elaboration of the ornament, which is very metallic in
character but also very aware of Early Gothic precedent, what is most
notable is the highly articulated character of the structure, as if the
architects had asked themselves: ‘How would medieval builders have used
structural iron had it been readily available to them?’ Is this,
perhaps, the first echo in England of the theories of Viollet-le-Duc,
the French architect who was to exercise an international influence
equal to Ruskin’s over the next generation? Probably not, as his own
enthusiasm for iron began only rather later (see Chapter 16). Whether or
not there is specific influence from Viollet-le-Duc here, his great
archaeological publication, the _Dictionnaire raisonné_,[222] had begun
to appear the year before. Very soon the structural expressiveness of
‘Early French’ detailing, studied by English architects at first hand as
well as in the woodcuts of the _Dictionnaire_, began to supplant Italian
polychromy as the hallmark of advanced fashion in the higher aesthetic
circles.
A more modest Oxford building by Deane & Woodward, the Union Debating
Hall of 1856-7, has more vigour on the whole than does the Museum,
particularly in its characteristically notched brick detailing. It also
has the advantage of murals by the young Pre-Raphaelites. One of these,
who had just left Street’s architectural office to turn briefly to
painting, was William Morris (1834-96).[223] His ceiling here initiated
the most distinguished career of architectural decoration of the second
half of the century. Morris as a critical writer was destined, moreover,
to be at least as influential on later architecture as Ruskin or
Viollet-le-Duc.
Of the same date, 1856, is perhaps the most successful of Butterfield’s
extant churches, that at Baldersby St James near Beverley in Yorkshire,
with its contiguous group of vicarage, schools, and cottages. All of
stone externally, the polychromy here is rather a sort of ‘poly-texture’
most effectively handled in the banding of the tall pyramidal spire
above the plain square tower (Plate 87). Internally a delicate harmony
of pink and grey-blue bricks, with accents of creamy stone, replaces the
acid chords of All Saints’ in London, a harmony rivalled in the Welsh
church of St Augustine’s at Penarth near Cardiff built a decade later in
1866. At the same time, Teulon at St Andrew’s in Coin Street off
Stamford Street south of the Thames in London was using the boldest of
brick-and-stone banding externally and, inside, elaborate patterns of
light-coloured brickwork. Moreover, the rather Germanic planning of this
church, demolished since the Second World War, was highly unorthodox by
ecclesiological standards. Already it was evident that within the High
Victorian Gothic there were to be two streams, one High Church in its
patronage and led by architects of considerable learning and
sophistication like Butterfield and Street, another more
characteristically Low Church and often quite secular; this was
generally coarser and more philistine, not to say outright illiterate.
Yet not all the best work of the High Church architects was
ecclesiastical. By 1857 J. L. Pearson (1817-97) had already built some
respectable if not very interesting churches distinguished chiefly by
their very fine spires; but his first work of positive High Victorian
character was Quar Wood, a country house he built in Gloucestershire in
that year. The skilful asymmetrical massing around the stair tower here,
the plastic variety provided by several different types of steep roofs,
the crisp precision of the detailing, all combine to produce a modest
mansion that is as different in effect from Teulon’s mountainous
Tortworth as both are characteristic of the beginnings of the High
Victorian Gothic.
Two houses begun soon after Quar Wood, both within the broad frame of
reference of the maturing High Victorian Gothic, could hardly differ
more from one another. In remodelling Eatington Park in Warwickshire in
1858 John Prichard (1818-86) attempted to mask an underlying Georgian
mansion with a profusion of bold innovations in the detailing. Stone
polychromy, applied sculpture, bold plastic membering of wall, roof, and
chimneys, all are used here more abundantly than ever before. The Red
House at Bexley Heath in Kent, on the other hand, which Philip Webb
(1831-1915), who had been a fellow pupil with Morris in Street’s office,
built for Morris in 1859-60, is notable for its extreme simplicity. So
also is the house now known as Benfleet Hall that he built in 1861 at
Cobham in Surrey for Spencer Stanhope, another of the young artists who
had collaborated on the murals of the Oxford Union. This has a rather
better plan than the Red House.
These houses have no external polychromy, only plain red brick
beautifully laid; there is no sculptured detail at all; and the few
breaks in the loose massing of the walls and roof are closely related to
the informal ease of the rather novel plans. Only the high roofs of red
tile are similar to those of Pearson’s Quar Wood. But in the plain, very
‘real’, detailing and the segmental-headed white-painted window-sash of
an early eighteenth-century sort, set under pointed relieving arches,
the relationship is close to the secular work of somewhat older men—to
Butterfield’s vicarages of the forties (Plate 122B) and more notably to
his clergy house and school at All Saints’, Margaret Street (Plate 86A).
Webb had himself worked on some of the latest of the rather similar
vicarages and schools that Street had been building for a decade. His
first big country house, Arisaig, built of local stone in the remote
Scottish Highlands forty miles beyond Fort William in Inverness-shire
beginning in 1863, may properly be considered High Victorian Gothic also
(Figure 23). It is especially interesting, like Benfleet Hall, for its
plan (see Chapter 15).
Down to about 1860 the development of the High Victorian Gothic was on
the whole convergent. Henceforth, ambitious young architects tried
harder to have personal modes of their own like Butterfield; yet,
conversely, many formed loose stylistic alliances in which individual
expression became merged in some sort of group expression. The boldest
and the most unruly were no longer likely to be of the High Church
party, but rather of the Low. St Simon Zelotes of 1859 in Moore Street
in London by Joseph Peacock (1821-93) hardly compares with the work of
Butterfield and Street in distinction; but its internal polychromy of
white and black brick outbids that of their best London churches, also
built at the end of this decade.
Butterfield’s St Alban’s in Baldwin’s Gardens off Holborn in London,
erected 1858-61, is all rebuilt now. But something of its splendidly
tall proportions, if not the rich brick and tile marquetry of the wall
over the chancel arch, can still be apprehended. The contrast in quality
with Peacock’s work was once amazing. Street’s St James the Less in
Thorndike Street off the Vauxhall Bridge Road in London also of 1858-61,
is less fine but still much superior to Peacock’s work (Plate 94B). The
tall square tower, set apart like a campanile, has a curiously gawky
roof based on French models and the interior is somewhat cavernous. But
in the richness of its red and black brick patterns, used both inside
and out, and in the naturalistic carving of the nave capitals this
church of Street’s rivals Butterfield’s All Saints’ and St Alban’s and
is, unlike the latter, still completely intact.
Various younger men of Webb’s generation were beginning to make
important contributions in church design also. G. F. Bodley (1827-1907),
trained in his kinsman Scott’s office rather than in Street’s, built St
Michael’s, Brighton, in 1859-62. This must have been very striking for
the boldness of its scale and for the vigour of its structural
expression before it was overshadowed by the tall later nave beside it
added by William Burges (1827-81).[224] But it is not the parody of
‘Early French’ detailing in the square archivolts and spreading capitals
of the nave arcade, so soon to be abjured by Bodley, that is significant
here but the fact that this was the first church to receive an over-all
decorative treatment, including stained glass, at the hands of Morris
and his associates, who included the painters Ford Madox Brown and
Edward Burne-Jones.
There is still finer glass of this period designed by Burne-Jones in the
east window of Waltham Abbey in Essex, where the rear wall was rebuilt
in the heaviest ‘Early French’ taste by Burges in 1860-1. As a painter
Burne-Jones is hardly to be compared with Ingres; yet as a designer of
stained glass the superiority of such early windows of his as these at
Waltham Abbey to the ones by Ingres at Dreux and at Neuilly is amazing.
It is not the least claim to distinction of the High Victorian Gothic
that it nurtured this brilliant revival of decorative art led by Morris.
Many churches of the sixties and seventies are worth visiting solely for
their windows by Morris, Brown, and Burne-Jones to which there are
apparently no worthy Continental parallels.
A quite different sort of contemporary church is White’s Holy Saviour,
Aberdeen Park, in London, of 1859. Externally this is quiet and rather
shapeless; but inside the red brick of the exterior gives way to a
subtle harmony of patterned brickwork in beiges, browns, and
mauves—assisted in the chancel by some additional decorative
painting—that is unequalled in High Victorian polychromy. Also rather
different from standard High Church Anglican work of the day is the
Catholic church of St Peter in Leamington of 1861-5 (Plate 89A) by Henry
Clutton (1819-93). He had won the competition for Lille Cathedral in
France in 1855 with a design prepared in collaboration with Burges, but
was not allowed to supervise the construction because he was a
Protestant; English Roman Catholics were not so bigoted. Internally the
characteristic articulation of Puginian planning was given up; nave and
apse form one continuous vessel, almost basilican in effect, under a
barrel roof that ends in a half dome. Unfortunately, the painted
decoration of the walls and the ceiling here has all been destroyed; the
effect must once have been much less barren than it is today.
Externally, plain red brick is most happily combined with stone trim
treated with great simplicity and yet with extreme subtlety. The
inspiration is Early French, perhaps influenced by Viollet-le-Duc,[225]
although Clutton knew old French work at first hand; but the smooth
concavities and the delicately varied chamfers are handled with the
greatest originality and justness of scaling. The fine tower, at once
sturdy in its detailing and svelte in its shape, has lost the original
pyramidal roof.
Not unworthy of the church, and vastly superior to Clutton’s rather dull
country houses, is the contiguous rectory here, a rectangle in plan with
the long gable broken only by elegantly chamfered pairs of brick
chimneys (Plate 89A). The expanses of plain brick wall are regularly but
not symmetrically pierced by coupled windows divided by colonnette
mullions of stone. In simplicity of massing this rectory surpassed the
Red House and Webb’s other—and in some ways better—early house for
Spencer Stanhope, Benfleet Hall. In their simple dignity such things
contrast sharply with the more ambitious secular work of the day, by
this time reaching peaks of elaboration almost exceeding Prichard’s
Eatington Park.
Teulon’s Elvethan Park in Hampshire of 1861, for example, is perhaps the
wildest of all High Victorian Gothic houses; this mansion is so complex
in composition and so varied in its detailing that it quite defies
description. Polychromy runs riot, forms of the most various but
undefinable Gothic provenience merge into one another, and the result
seems almost to illustrate that original mode of design which Thomas
Harris (1830-1900)[226] had just christened ‘Victorian’ in describing a
project he published in 1860 for a terrace of houses at Harrow.
However, several churches of the mid sixties rivalled Elvethan Hall, if
not Harris’s ‘Victorian Terrace’. There was, for example, Teulon’s own
St Thomas’s, Wrotham Road, of 1864, piling up to its heavy central tower
among the railway yards of Camden Town in London; and there was also his
much more peculiar St Paul’s, Avenue Road, also of 1864, in the
approaches to Hampstead. This was purged early of its original internal
decoration but it long remained externally an almost unrecognizable
variant of the standard Victorian Gothic church. Both have been
demolished since the war. At St Mary’s in the London suburb of Ealing,
built in 1866-73, Teulon used iron columns for the nave arcade; a still
wilder Low Church architect, Bassett Keeling (1836-86), did the same in
two London churches, St Mark’s in St Mark’s Road, Notting Dale, and St
George’s on Campden Hill (where they have since been replaced), both
begun in 1864. Nor were Teulon and Keeling by any means the only
architects to revive the use of iron columns in the sixties; even Burges
introduced them once in a church, St Faith’s at Stoke Newington, now
largely demolished, and also in his Speech Room at Harrow School of
1872.
Of a quite different order is another London church, St Martin’s in
Vicars Road, Gospel Oak, also begun in 1864. This is by E. B. Lamb
(1805-69), an architect who had already begun to show rather High
Victorian tendencies in the thirties. There is no polychromy here, and
the inspiration from the past is neither Italian nor French but the
still heterodox English Perpendicular. The massive plasticity of Lamb’s
personal mode, with much large-scale chamfering and a consistent use of
segmental-pointed arches in several orders, is happier where it was
exploited more simply on the nearby rectory. The interior of his church,
which has a sort of central plan with wide transepts and only a slightly
prolonged nave, is a forest of timber-work ingeniously bracketed and
intersected in a fashion peculiar to Lamb. Only perhaps in an
international context, in relation to the contemporary American ‘Stick
Style’, is this sort of structural articulation intelligible (see
Chapter 15). But the solid, compactly planned, and simply detailed
rectory has virtues not unworthy of comparison with Clutton’s at
Leamington, if not perhaps with Webb’s more delicately scaled and
functionally articulated early houses.
Two churches by Street, St John’s at Torquay of 1861-71[227] and St
Philip and St James’s at Oxford, which was completed in 1862, are more
standard products of the early sixties. The former is notable for the
very rich marble polychromy in the chancel and the full complement of
windows by Morris and Burne-Jones; the latter is more ‘Early French’
with a tall tower rising in front of the polygonal apse and a curiously
unorthodox but effectively ‘real’ way of running the nave arches into
the east wall with no imposts at all. This device was repeated at All
Saints’, Clifton, now a ruin, where the variety of colours of the fine
local stones—orange and blue Pennant and cream Bath—permitted a more
truly structural polychromy than usual and one of remarkable tonal
harmony and elegance. All Saints’ was begun in 1863.
Both Burges and Pearson erected distinguished churches at this time,
Burges in Ireland, Pearson in London. St Finbar’s Church of Ireland
Cathedral in Cork, designed in 1863 for a competition and built in
1865-76, is of unusual size for a British church of this period and,
what is more unusual for a nineteenth-century cathedral, it was
completed without serious modification of the original project. Provided
with a fine open site and a full complement of towers, two flanking the
west front and a taller one over the crossing, this rivals in
elaboration the big Continental Gothic churches of the period (see
Chapter 11). Moreover, the detailing is of a distinctly French
twelfth-century order with very few eclectic or Italianate touches, thus
recalling the winning design for Lille Cathedral that he had prepared
with Clutton in 1855. Yet the contrast with contemporary Continental
Gothic—especially with Lille Cathedral as finally executed by others—is
almost as great as in the case of the rather more original English
churches of this period by Butterfield or Street.
In the interior of St Finbar’s Burges developed the theme of
articulation, a theme more characteristically Early English than ‘Early
French’, with remarkable plastic vigour, while the handsome wooden roof,
so rare a feature in medieval France, lends to the whole an unmistakably
Victorian air. Less subtle, less aesthetic, than other churches of the
sixties by younger men, St Finbar’s has the sort of athletic strength
that is characteristic of much High Victorian Gothic, expressed in
unusually literate, not to say archaeological, terms.
Burges’s church opened the road again towards a more ‘correct’ imitation
of the medieval High Gothic, a road along which Pearson soon proceeded
more rapidly and more doggedly than he. Yet Pearson’s own South London
church of 1863-5, St Peter’s in Kennington Lane, Vauxhall, is more
typically High Victorian than St Finbar’s. The carved capitals and the
heavy scale of the stone detail are rather ‘Early French’. But walls and
vaults are of London stock brick and there is some polychromy of the
quieter, less Butterfieldian, sort resembling a little White’s at St
Saviour’s. The continuity of the chancel and rounded apse with the nave
echoes the ‘unified space’ of Clutton’s Leamington interior. Puginian
articulation of plan and mass was henceforth somewhat out of date.
The Albert Memorial[228] in Hyde Park in London is a monument
generally—and not unjustly—considered the perfect symbol of this High
Victorian period, more perfect than the Houses of Parliament (in the
early sixties at last approaching completion) were of the previous Early
Victorian period. In 1861 Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, the Prince
Consort, died. In the competition for a national memorial to rise in
Hyde Park near the site of the Crystal Palace, held the next year, G. G.
Scott almost inevitably won first place. Construction of the Albert
Memorial began in 1863 and took nearly ten years. By the time it was
completed in 1872 critics of advanced taste were already condemning it,
yet it represents precisely what Scott most liked to do and what he
undoubtedly did best—in his own words, this his ‘most prominent work’
represented his ‘highest and most enthusiastic efforts’. It is,
moreover, an epitome of the aspirations[229] that were most widely held
when it was designed (Plate 90).
The contrast between this elaborate shrine and Scott’s modest and
essentially archaeological Martyrs’ Memorial of 1841 at Oxford is very
great—what a long distance the English Gothic Revival had travelled in a
score of years! Among Early Victorian memorials the Prince Consort’s
cenotaph is rather more like Kemp’s Scott Monument in Edinburgh (Plate
51) than like the Oxford one. But where Kemp’s is soft and monochrome,
this is hard and almost kaleidoscopically polychromatic. Scott’s theme
is still that of the fourteenth-century English Eleanor Crosses, as is
certainly appropriate for a monument to a Royal spouse; but the
inspiration came in the main from relatively small reliquaries and other
medieval works executed in metal and embellished with enamels and
semi-precious stones.
The Martyrs’ Memorial was purely English, the specific precedents for
the Albert Memorial mostly Continental: Italian, French, German, and
Flemish. The materials are cold and shining, polished granites, marbles,
and serpentines of various colours; and much of the detail is executed
in gun-metal left plain or gilded. A profusion of white marble sculpture
at various scales leads up to the seated bronze figure of the Prince by
J. H. Foley, finally installed in 1876, over which is a vaulted canopy
of brilliantly coloured glass mosaic. Enamels, cabochons of marble or
serpentine, and intricately crisp detail of the most metallic character
carry out Scott’s basic idea of a ciborium enlarged, like Bernini’s in
St Peter’s, to fully architectural scale.
Beside the Albert Memorial most of Scott’s other work of this period
lacks interest. His churches, particularly, are likely to be dull and
respectable, reflecting the new eclectic tastes of the day only in a
rather inconspicuous way. His Exeter College Chapel at Oxford of 1856-8
is a sort of Sainte-Chapelle; St John’s College Chapel at Cambridge of
1863-9 is equally monumental but somewhat less French in character and
also more original in its proportions. His secular work at Oxford and
Cambridge is also dull, lacking the Ruskinian touches that give a
certain vitality to the Meadow Buildings built for Christ Church in 1863
by Sir Thomas Deane and his son Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-99).
Far finer, however, is their Kildare Street Club in Dublin, facing the
Trinity College Museum across an expanse of lawn; for this continues the
best Ruskinian tradition of the work that they did earlier with
Woodward.[230]
A very striking example of the Gothic of the early sixties in England,
superior to anything at Oxford or Cambridge, is the Merchant Seamen’s
Orphan Asylum of 1861 by G. Somers Clark (1825-82), now the Wanstead
Hospital, in a suburb north-east of London. This is actually more what
is supposed to be ‘Ruskinian’, because of its Venetian detailing, than
the very original Dublin clubhouse with its consistent theme of
segmental arches and its bold naturalistic carving; but, like that, the
Wanstead building is generically High Victorian in the asymmetrical
massing, the strong colours of the black-banded red brickwork, and the
surprising richness of the decoration Clark lavished on a utilitarian
structure.
In the early sixties several younger men, most of them trained in
Street’s office, were already turning away from the stridency of the
work of the High Victorian leaders towards a simpler and suaver mode.
Webb’s houses of this period have been mentioned, and will be again (see
Chapter 15). Here the plain row of small London shops that he built at
91-101 Worship Street, Finsbury, in 1861 might be described. In them the
material is not even red brick, but London stocks excellently laid.
Almost nothing is overtly Gothic, yet a sense of medieval craftsmanship
controls the handling of both the wide shop-windows below and the
sash-windows in the upper storeys. Above all, the general composition is
quiet and regular, more like Clutton’s Leamington rectory than the
asymmetrical articulation that is characteristic of Webb’s own houses of
these years.
A similar quietness controls the design of the wing that W. Eden
Nesfield (1835-88), son of Barry’s collaborator on Italian gardens,
William A. Nesfield (1793-1881), and a pupil not of Street but of Burn
and Salvin, was adding to the Earl of Craven’s seat, Combe Abbey in
Warwickshire, beginning in 1863. This was Nesfield’s earliest work.
Despite his own studies of French Gothic,[231] which he had published
the previous year with a dedication to Lord Craven, and the tracings he
is supposed to have made from the illustrations of Gothic detail in
Viollet-le-Duc’s _Dictionnaire_, the arches at Combe Abbey are round,
not pointed, and the major architectural theme is the English late
medieval ‘window-wall’ of many lights divided by stone mullions and
transoms.
In a completely new house, Cloverley Hall, that Nesfield began in 1865
together with his partner Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912), the great
window-bays and the other ranges of stone-mullioned windows in the
beautifully laid salmon-pink brick walls were even more the principal
theme of the design. But in the decorations, delicate in scale and
elegant in craftsmanship, a new sort of eclecticism made its appearance.
Basically the house derives from those manor houses of the sixteenth
century that were uninfluenced by Renaissance ideas; but in the
detailing of Cloverley there were Japanese motifs, notably the sunflower
disks that Nesfield called his ‘pies’, reflecting the new interest in
oriental art that such painters as Whistler and Rossetti were taking.
Except for its relatively early date, Cloverley Hall has no place in a
discussion of High Victorian Gothic, for it is characteristically Late
Victorian (see Chapter 15).
Nesfield’s partner Shaw, however, built in the sixties two churches that
were still High Victorian in style, one in Yorkshire, the other at Lyons
in France. Holy Trinity at Bingley of 1866-7 is one of the finest
examples of the ‘Early French’ phase of the Victorian Gothic (Plate
94A). Externally it builds up to a very tall central tower, superbly
proportioned and very simply detailed, that more than rivals in quality
Street’s at Oxford. Internally the fine random-ashlar stonework—there is
no polychromy—the very bold and structural detailing of the square
archivolts and the simply carved capitals illustrate even better than
does Webb’s domestic work in brick the new and more sophisticated
attitude towards the building crafts. The principles involved go back to
Pugin; but now for the first time in Webb’s and Nesfield’s and Shaw’s
work of the sixties one senses a real respect, at once intelligent and
intuitive, for the differing nature of different materials. Such a
respect would continue to give special virtue to the work of the most
distinguished English and American architects of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries (see Chapters 12, 13, 15, and 19).
The Lyons church, which Shaw began in 1868, is perhaps the finest of the
many Victorian churches built on the Continent for local English
colonies, but very different indeed from that at Bingley. A city church
set between tall blocks of flats, this is also very tall in its
proportions and has a more urban character than that of the Yorkshire
church. French freestone does not lend itself to the particular type of
semi-rustic craftsmanship that was now rising to favour with the younger
English architects; hence the Lyons church is less significant than the
Bingley one in that respect. But Shaw was not primarily a church
architect, nor did he long remain a High Victorian (see Chapter 12).
More characteristic of the various new directions that the Victorian
Gothic was taking in the mid sixties, directions that soon also led
quite away from the High Victorian, are two new churches both designed
well before Shaw’s at Bingley and Lyons were begun. At All Saints’ in
Jesus Lane, Cambridge, begun in 1863, the spikiness of the Italianizing
Victorian Gothic and the rugged structuralism of the ‘Early
French’—rarely carried farther than in Bodley’s own early work—gave way
to something much more English in inspiration. There is, for example, a
very deep chancel and only one aisle, not to speak of a battlemented
tower at one side, out of which rises a small stone spire. In fact,
Bodley returned here to the fourteenth-century Decorated models
preferred by Pugin, some so ‘late’ as to suggest the still forbidden
Perpendicular.
Bodley now made even more use of the decorative talents of Morris
and his associates than at St Michael’s, Brighton. His St
Martin’s-on-the-Cliff, Scarborough, completed in 1863, is a finer
church than either St Michael’s or All Saints’. Falling between them
in style as well as in date, this has less historical importance,
but it also was richly decorated by the Morris firm. At All Saints’
painted polychromy, but of a rather subtle order much superior to
most of that of the forties, entirely replaced permanent polychrome.
The brocade patterns stencilled on the walls seem almost to be
designs of Pugin strengthened in their outlines and their colours by
Morris. Although Bodley’s mature career as one of the two principal
Late Victorian church architects did not really get under way until
1870, Victorian Gothic was evidently coming full circle at All
Saints’, and the High Victorian phase was nearly over.
The other important new church of this period, St Saviour’s, Penn
Street, in the Hoxton district of the East End of London, was begun in
1865 by James Brooks (1825-1901). Unfortunately this was very badly
damaged in the blitz, and has since been demolished. St Saviour’s was of
brick and included some polychromy like Brooks’s slightly earlier East
End church, St Michael’s in Mark Street, Shoreditch, of 1863-5. But what
was really significant at St Saviour’s was the unified interior space,
ending like Clutton’s Leamington church and Pearson’s Vauxhall church in
London in a rounded apse (Plate 89B). Notable also were the Webb-like
quietness of the general composition and the straightforward handling of
the main structural elements. In another, happily unblitzed, church by
Brooks in the East End of London, St Chad’s, Nichols Square, in
Haggerston, which was begun in 1867, the same qualities can be seen in a
more mature state. Moreover, the rather plain windows and the simple
moulded brick trim are echoed at domestic scale on the nearby rectory.
The fine vessel of the interior of St Chad’s, with its simple nave
arcade of stone, clean red-brick walls, quietly structural wooden roof
over the nave, and brick-vaulted chancel, contrasts strikingly with the
hectic elaboration and dramatically vertical proportions of
Butterfield’s last London church of any great interest, St Augustine’s,
Queen’s Gate, of 1865-71. Two churches of the late sixties outside
London, All Saints’ at Babbacombe near Torquay, which was built in
1868-74, and the earlier mentioned St Augustine’s at Penarth, begun in
1866, are much more satisfactory examples of Butterfield’s middle
period.
Brooks continued through the seventies to develop the implications of
his East End churches with great success. The largest and most notable
is that of the Ascension, Lavender Hill, in Battersea, which was begun
in 1873 and completed by J. T. Micklethwaite[232] (1843-1906), a former
assistant of G. G. Scott, in 1883. The vast lancet-pierced red-brick
hull of this church is one of the landmarks of the South London skyline;
the interior, which is perhaps a little bare, has nevertheless a
monumentality of scale rare in English churches of any period. However,
this monumentality is rivalled both inside and out in St Bartholomew’s,
Brighton (Plate 93B), completed in 1875 by Edmund E. Scott (?-1895), and
considerably later in Brooks’s own London church of All Hallows,
Shirlock Street, begun in 1889 and never provided with its intended
vaults.
Victorian Gothic, whether Early or High, is primarily an ecclesiastical
mode. The leading Neo-Gothic architects were happiest when building
churches; their few secular works—if parsonages, colleges, and schools
can really in this period be called secular—generally have a churchy
tone. But it is characteristic of the High Victorian Gothic as opposed
to the Early Victorian Gothic, and _a fortiori_ to Neo-Gothic on the
Continent, that it became for some twenty years, from the early fifties
to the early seventies, a nearly universal mode.[233] A good many houses
have already been cited; and certainly no churches of this period
provide finer specimens of High Victorian Gothic than the warehouse at
104 Stokes Croft in Bristol, which was built by E. W. Godwin (1833-86),
a friend of Burges, in the early sixties (Plate 113), or the office
building of 1864-5 at 60 Mark Lane in London by George Aitchison
(1825-1910). The one is an especially subtly polychromed attempt to
follow Ruskin’s Italianism, the other more ‘Early French’ in its detail,
but both use round-arched arcading throughout their several storeys (see
Chapter 14).
Godwin in two rather modest town halls, one at Northampton of 1861-4,
which is very rich in sculptural detail, the other at Congleton,
Cheshire, of 1864-7, which is more severe and ‘Early French’ in
character, produced two further High Victorian Gothic[234] works of the
highest quality (Plate 92A). Unfortunately by the time the taste of the
authorities in the larger English cities caught up in the late sixties
with the advanced position of the High Church architectural leaders,
those leaders had left that position far behind. As a result, many of
the biggest and most conspicuous public edifices are very retardataire.
Gothic designs won only low premiums in the Government Offices
competition in 1857, although both Street’s and Deane & Woodward’s—on
which Ruskin advised—were of considerable distinction. When Alfred
Waterhouse (1830-1905) two years later won the competition for the
Manchester Assize Courts he elaborated the design of this large public
structure along the rather unimaginative lines of Deane & Woodward’s
earlier Oxford Museum, then just reaching completion.
At best Waterhouse had a rather heavy hand and an uncertain sort of
eclectic taste somewhat like G. G. Scott’s. He lacked the cranky
boldness of a Butterfield, the sophistication of a Street, and the sense
of craftsmanship of such men as Webb and Godwin who were his own
contemporaries. But he did have real capacity as a planner of large and
complex buildings, something at which most of the leading church
architects had little or no experience. Thus his Manchester Town Hall,
begun ten years later than the Assize Courts in 1869, while lacking all
the refinement of Godwin’s smaller and earlier ones, is a large-scale
exercise in High Victorian Gothic of some interest. But inevitably the
High Victorian Gothic was a mode less well suited to this kind of
monumental exploitation than the contemporary Second Empire mode as
naturalized in England and America. For all the skill of Waterhouse in
the organization of plan and general composition and in the bold
detailing of materials inside and out, the Manchester Town Hall is a
late and inferior work—late, that is, in the phase of style which it
represents, though not so late in the highly successful career of its
architect. It may properly be compared, and to its own manifest
advantage, moreover, with Schmidt’s Rathaus in Vienna.
The other most conspicuous High Victorian Gothic public monument, the
Law Courts in London, is the work of Street, an older and far more
distinguished architect; but it came very late indeed in Street’s
career, so late that he died before it was finished in 1882. Designed
originally for a competition held in 1866, many years dragged by during
which the site was twice changed—once southward to the river’s edge and
then back to the north of the Strand—before it was even begun in 1874.
Other work of the late sixties and early seventies by Street indicates
how completely his own taste had turned away from this sort of French
thirteenth-century Gothic even before the Law Courts were started.
At St Margaret’s in Liverpool, for example, which he designed in 1867,
Street reverted to English fourteenth-century models; thus, like Bodley
at All Saints’, Cambridge, he seemed to be returning to the particular
stylistic ideal with which the ecclesiologists had started out
twenty-five years before. In the Guards’ Chapel at the Wellington
Barracks in London, however, which was all but completely destroyed in
the blitz, he in 1877 remodelled the interior of an engineer-built
Grecian edifice with incredible sumptuousness in a sort of Byzantinoid
Italian Romanesque, using a stone-and-brick banded barrel vault and a
glittering investiture of gold and glass mosaic that quite outshone the
comparable work of Continental architects in the _Rundbogenstil_. Then,
in remodelling the interior of St Luke’s, West Norwood, near London,
built by Francis Bedford (1784-1858) in 1823-5, equally Grecian, he used
in 1878-9 round-arched Italian detail. Despite the bold banding in brick
and stone, this is certainly not Gothic or Byzantine, but rather recalls
the Tuscan Proto-Renaissance, or even the _quattrocento_.
Certain buildings by Deane & Woodward and by Scott at Oxford and
Cambridge have already been mentioned; much more exists by Scott,
Waterhouse, and various others, very little of it of any distinction,
yet sometimes fitting not too uncomfortably into the general scene. The
most striking example of Victorian Gothic architecture at Oxford,
fortunately on an isolated site opposite the Parks, where it had no
neighbours earlier than the Museum, is Butterfield’s Keble College, a
complete entity in itself, largely built in 1868-70. With its walls so
violently striated with bricks of various colours, Keble would have been
a most disturbing increment to any existing college; on the other hand,
Butterfield’s quietly stone-banded chapel at Balliol of 1857 is that
college’s happiest feature, the rest being largely the work of
Waterhouse.
Since Keble was founded by Butterfield’s pious High Church friends for
clerical students, the chapel, which was added to the group in 1873-6,
understandably dominates the whole. Tall and richly decorated, this has
many of Butterfield’s virtues, but it quite lacks the directness and the
poignance of his best work of the fifties and early sixties. The hall
and library are less monumental than the chapel, fitting more easily
into the ranges of sets that surround the two quadrangles. The over-all
composition is fairly regular, and there is less coarse or fussy
detailing than Scott and Waterhouse used for their ‘Collegiate Gothic’.
Moreover, the scale of Keble is modestly domestic and, despite its
considerable size, the features are simple and crisp; but in the
relatively clean air of Oxford Butterfield’s polychromy has received
less of the desirable mellowing than it gets in London. The banded walls
certainly lack the harmony that the softer colours of the materials used
in his country church interiors generally produced.
By the time Keble was completed—indeed in advanced circles well before
it was begun—such polychromatic brashness was out of date. Yet at Rugby
School, where Butterfield’s buildings of 1868-72 awkwardly adjoin
various earlier nineteenth-century Gothic structures, the polychromy is
even louder; moreover, it is still less mellowed by time. Although
Butterfield lived on through the rest of the century and continued to
build many churches and some schools, this first and boldest of High
Victorian Gothic architects was more and more left behind after the mid
sixties by the evolving taste of his own High Church milieu.
There are other High Victorian Gothic collegiate groups which are, or
would have been if carried to completion, far finer than Keble. Being at
less renowned institutions than Oxford, they are less well known.
University College on the sea-front at Aberystwyth in Wales is by J. P.
Seddon (1827-1906), from 1852 to 1862 a partner of John Prichard. This
structure was begun in 1864 to serve as a hotel, incorporating as its
most inappropriate nucleus a small Castellated villa built by Nash for
Uvedale Price in the 1780s. The failure of the hotel project, the slow
and faltering start of the college, and the necessary repair and
rebuilding after two fires have left a complex pile of most disparate
character, even though it is almost all by Seddon. But certain aspects
of the building, the bowed section on the sea-front—originally the hotel
bar, later the college chapel!—and the entrance and stair tower on the
rear are among the grandest and most boldly plastic fragments produced
in this period (Plate 91A). Neither Oxford nor Cambridge has anything of
comparable quality.
For Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., Burges prepared in 1873 a
splendid plan worthy of its fine new site on a high ridge south of the
city (Plate 88). Unfortunately only one side of one quadrangle was
finished according to his designs; but that is perhaps the most
satisfactory of all his works, and the best example anywhere of
Victorian Gothic collegiate architecture. The brownstone from nearby
Portland, Conn., favourite material all over the eastern states during
what Lewis Mumford has called the ‘Brown Decades’, is especially well
suited to Burges’s heavy and well-articulated detail. The rough
quarry-facing of the random ashlar contrasts tonally with the more
smoothly cut trim in a fashion that is polytonal if not polychromatic.
The roughness of the stone walls also enhances the massive proportions
of the long dormitory range and of the paired towers with their boldly
pyramidal roofs. Yet for the classrooms this masonry is articulated into
banks of large mullioned windows. Despite the general regularity and
even symmetry of the composition, there is plenty of functionally
logical variety in the handling of the different sections. Burges was
happy in the Scottish-born Hartford architect who supervised the work,
G. W. Keller (1842-1935); and Keller revealed his continued debt to
Burges in the construction of a Memorial Arch in the park in Hartford
which is one of the very few examples of such a Classical monument
completely translated into Gothic terms, and not without real interest.
Burges undoubtedly enjoyed more what he did for the Marquess of Bute,
beginning in 1865, in restoring Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch in
Wales. ‘Restoring’ should be put in quotation marks, for by the time
Burges got through with them both were almost as much fake castles as
any built in the first half of the century. They lie somewhere between
Fonthill Abbey and Peckforton in intention and are considerably more
sumptuous internally than either. Although Cardiff Castle, which had
been subjected to drastic Georgian remodelling, was gradually
re-castellated with considerable consistency, the work there never
reached completion. It is chiefly the incredibly rich interiors that are
of interest, even if the interest is of a rather theatrical order.
Castell Coch near Llandaff, restored in 1875, interiors of equal
fantasy, almost comparable to those of Neuschwanstein; that is,
they are more like settings for Wagnerian opera than anything the
Middle Ages actually created. But the quality of the imagination
and of the execution is of a very much higher order than Ludwig II
commanded. Externally Castell Coch is a sober and plausible
restoration-reconstruction of a smallish castle, chiefly of
archaeological interest, but most romantically sited and solidly
built. Beside its integrity the more famous restorations by
Viollet-le-Duc at Pierrefonds and Carcassonne appear rather harsh,
and obviously modern.
The McConochie house, built in Cardiff for Lord Bute’s estate agent, is
one of the best medium-sized stone dwellings of the High Victorian
Gothic, superior in almost every way to Burges’s own house at 9 Melbury
Road in London. That was built later, in 1875-80, by which time the
operatic medievalism of the interiors was quite out of date (see Chapter
12). Here in the Cardiff house the tight asymmetrical composition, the
excellent detailing of the handsome stonework, and a generally domestic
rather than Castellated air prepared the way for Burges’s fine
collegiate work in America.
English architects in the sixties were capable of exploiting a wide
range of different aspects of the High Victorian Gothic in almost
precisely the same years. Only the size and departmentalized
organization of G. G. Scott’s office, the largest of the period and more
like the ‘plan-factories’ of the twentieth century (see Chapter 24), can
explain how he could be nominally responsible for such a quiet,
well-scaled, and advanced church as St Andrew’s, Derby, designed in
1866—some say by Micklethwaite, who was working for him at the time—and
also for such a strident, complex, and over-elaborated edifice as the
Midland Hotel fronting St Pancras Station. The design for this was
prepared in 1865 for a competition held, curiously enough, two years
after the shed had been begun by the engineers W. H. Barlow (1812-1902)
and R. M. Ordish (1824-86). Such a drastic divorce of engineering and
architecture could hardly be expected to produce a co-ordinated edifice,
yet both aspects of St Pancras have considerable independent interest.
The shed, ingeniously tied below the level of the tracks and rising, for
purely coincidental technical reasons, to a flattened point of slightly
‘Gothic’ outline, has the widest span of any in the British Isles and,
until the nineties, in the world. It is, therefore, a nineteenth-century
spatial achievement of quantitative, if not so much of qualitative,
significance. The masonry block at the front is one of the largest High
Victorian Gothic structures in the world. It long had ardent admirers,
and it has come to have them again, for it epitomizes almost as notably
as the Albert Memorial the aspirations of Scott and his generation. The
contrast to its neighbour, Lewis Cubitt’s Kings Cross Station, begun
some fifteen years earlier, or even to Paddington, where the engineer
Brunel and the architect Wyatt collaborated so happily, is striking. The
taste of English railway authorities, as of most patrons of
architecture, had been revolutionized by the general triumph of the High
Victorian Gothic in the late fifties and early sixties. Yet on its
completion in the mid seventies St Pancras was even more out of fashion
in advanced circles than were Street’s Law Courts, the construction of
which only began at that time, so rapidly did taste continue to change
in the late sixties and early seventies.
By 1870 church architecture, for example, was in general much chastened.
Externally Teulon’s St Stephen’s, The Green, on Rosslyn Hill in
Hampstead of 1869-76 is not polychromatic but all of purple-brown brick
with some creamy stone trim. It builds up, moreover, somewhat like
Shaw’s Bingley church begun a few years earlier, to a tall rectangular
crossing tower with rather quiet, more or less ‘Early French’,
membering. Inside Teulon achieved in the brickwork a kind of golden
harmony of tone resembling that of White’s interior in St Saviour’s,
Aberdeen Park, completely eschewing the bold and almost savage patterns
of contrastingly coloured bricks he had favoured since the early
fifties. In the tremendously tall interior of Edmund Scott’s already
mentioned St Bartholomew’s, Brighton—aisleless, chancel-less, and
provided with broad, flat internal buttresses—the traces of brick
polychromy are hardly noticeable on the walls of a space so grandly
proportioned (Plate 93B). The later ciborium here is not by Scott.
Burges in the two Yorkshire churches which he began in 1871 at Skelton
and at Studley Royal, both near Ripon, the latter with a very fine
rectory near by, still aimed at a rather satiating luxury of both
coloured and sculptural decoration in the interiors. But Pearson at St
Augustine’s, Kilburn Park Road, in London, initiated at this time a new
line of vast plain churches (Plate 93A). That line would culminate in
the archaeological correctness of his Truro Cathedral in Cornwall,
started in 1880 and finally completed by his son (F. L., 1864-1947) in
the present century. His last work, the cathedral of Brisbane,
Australia, designed shortly before his death in 1897, was only begun by
his son in 1901.
As Pearson’s Kilburn church was built in 1870-80, it should perhaps more
properly be considered Late Victorian than High. But Pearson retained
here and to the end of his life, particularly in his tall towers and
spires, a truly High Victorian love of grand and bold effects. However
archaeological he became, and with his passion for rib-vaulting he could
from this time on be rather more archaeological in a Franco-English way
than Viollet-le-Duc in France or Cuijpers in Holland, his spaces are
usually nobly proportioned and his masses crisply composed no matter how
‘correctly’ they are membered. At Truro, where the cathedral rises
suddenly out of narrow streets, its granite still almost unweathered,
Pearson’s handling of the relationship of the three tall towers carries
vigorous plastic conviction; Burges had attempted the same effect at
Cork with rather less success when the High Victorian was still at its
highest. Brisbane Cathedral is plainer and tougher than Truro despite
its very late date.
It would be inappropriate in this chapter to carry the story of
Victorian Gothic much further. Scott and Street died in 1878 and 1881
respectively, though Butterfield and Bodley outlived Pearson.
Butterfield seems to have frozen for life in the mode of his early
maturity, and as a result produced ever feebler work after the mid
sixties; Pearson was able to maintain a leading position with a younger
generation grown chaster and more archaeological in its standards
without forsaking his pursuit of those more abstractly architectonic
values which give distinction to his earlier work. It was above all
Bodley, however, with his Late Decorated verging on Perpendicular, who
set the pace in Anglican church-architecture from this time forward. His
personal style, still tentative at All Saints, Cambridge, in the mid
sixties, was mature by the time he built St Augustine’s at Pendlebury in
Lancashire in 1870-4. Crisp and almost mechanical in its detailing, this
tall rectangular mass, buttressed by an internal arcade, is impressive
both inside and out (Plate 92B), yet it wholly abjures most of the
qualities that had for two decades given special vitality to English
Neo-Gothic.
With various modulations what might, rather ambiguously, be called
‘Bodleian Gothic’ remained the favourite of Anglicans in and out of
England well into the twentieth century. The continuing admiration for
the work of Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960) in certain milieus suggests
that it has not even yet been finally superseded; but much of Comper’s
large-scale work dates from before Bodley’s death in 1907. For example,
his principal London church, St Cyprian’s in Glentworth Street, was
built in 1903. This crisp and clean example of revived Late Gothic, with
its elegant gilt font-cover and screen, may wind up this account more
appropriately than the vast unfinished cathedral at Liverpool begun by
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), a grandson of the first G. G.
Scott, in 1903. But neither is Victorian Gothic; both are rather
manifestations of one aspect of twentieth-century ‘traditionalism’ (see
Chapter 24).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 11
LATER NEO-GOTHIC OUTSIDE ENGLAND
THE High Victorian Gothic produced in the United States no such
roster of distinguished—or at least prominent and highly
characteristic—monuments as in Britain. The period of its
florescence was much briefer, and few assured and sophisticated
talents came to the fore. If, in the case of Richardson, one such
did appear, his maturity came only in the mid seventies, when the
High Victorian Gothic was all but over. Why the period was so much
shorter in the United States, in effect only the decade 1865-75, is
not altogether clear. One reason, undoubtedly, is that the speed of
transmission of new architectural ideas from England to America had
increased so much by the seventies that the influence of the later
English mode which succeeded the High Victorian Gothic around 1870
reached America very promptly indeed (see Chapters 13 and 15).
Another quite different reason is that a wave of nationalism in
America, parallel to those current in North European countries at
the time, encouraged from the mid seventies developments that were
more autochthonous. Leadership in commercial and in domestic
architecture crossed the Atlantic almost precisely at the moment
when, in 1876, the centenary[235] of American political independence
was being celebrated.
The phenomenal success in the United States of Ruskin’s treatises, _The
Seven Lamps of Architecture_ of 1849 and _The Stones of Venice_[236] of
1851-3, should be emphasized; from 1855 Street’s _Brick and Marble
Architecture_ was also available. Yet, despite the warm reception of
such relevant writings, few reflections of the High Victorian Gothic can
be discerned in American production before 1860. The first is probably
the Nott Memorial Library[237] at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y.,
designed by Edward T. Potter (1831-1904) in 1856 and built in 1858-76.
Here the banded arches are pointed and the plan is circular, perhaps in
emulation of the Pisa Baptistery to which Ruskin had called attention,
but more probably in deference to Ramée’s general plan for the college
(see Chapter 1).
The years immediately following the Panic of 1857 and, quite
understandably, the Civil War years 1861-5 were relatively unproductive
of new buildings, as has already been noted. An edifice far more overtly
Ruskinian than Potter’s Library was the National Academy in New York,
built by Peter B. Wight (1838-1925) in 1863-5, although apparently first
designed as early as 1861. Its Venetian Gothic mode, with pointed arches
boldly banded and walls diapered in coloured stones, was still the
subject of considerable contemporary controversy as it would hardly have
been in England by this date.
Potter and Wight were both young men. Established Gothic Revivalists in
America did not swing over as rapidly as in England from the Early
Victorian to the High. Upjohn, Potter’s master, was no Butterfield;
Renwick when designing St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1859
followed contemporary Continental rather than English models, as has
been noted, presumably because his clients were Catholics.
At best the sort of High Church Anglican patronage which sponsored
Butterfield’s and Street’s innovations in England was relatively much
less important in the United States—or Canada and Australia, for that
matter. Enthusiasm for the High Victorian Gothic, although widespread in
the later sixties and early seventies, was rarely exclusive as is
evidenced by the disparate interests and activities of the members of
the prominent and successful firm of Ware & Van Brunt. It has already
been noted that when William Robert Ware founded in 1865 the first
American architectural school at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Boston, he based its instruction on that of the Paris
École des Beaux-Arts.[238] His partner Henry Van Brunt (1832-1903) was
one of the first to follow Richardson’s lead away from the High
Victorian Gothic in the seventies. So little were either of them
dyed-in-the-wool Gothicists in these decades.[239]
However, Ware & Van Brunt designed and built in Cambridge, Mass., one of
the largest and most conspicuous of mature High Victorian Gothic
edifices in America, Memorial Hall[240] at Harvard College, first
projected in the late sixties and erected in 1870-8. This somewhat
cathedral-like edifice has walls of red brick liberally lashed with
black and a massive central tower now denuded by fire of its high roof
(Plate 95A). The manner is more than a little Butterfieldian, but the
quality is not even up to G. G. Scott.
Before Memorial Hall was designed, a competition held in 1865 for the
First Church (Unitarian) in Boston in the new Back Bay residential
district had brought out a variety of rather feeble attempts by Boston
architects to follow the High Victorian Gothic line. The winning design
of Ware & Van Brunt, executed in 1865-7, while not of the wilder Low
Church order of Teulon’s or Keeling’s London work of these years, is
hardly comparable to Street’s or Butterfield’s, much less to the
contemporary production of younger architects such as Brooks, Bodley, or
Shaw. Its best feature is the material, the richly mottled and textured
local Puddingstone from nearby Roxbury.
The High Victorian Gothic of the sixties and early seventies in the
United States was no more restricted to the ecclesiastical field than in
England. Despite its churchy look, Memorial Hall served a variety of
secular purposes from refectory to concert hall; only the wide
transeptal lobby was strictly memorial in purpose. But there was rarely
even such relative devotion to the Gothic in this period in the United
States as the major works of Ware & Van Brunt display. For example, the
untutored Elbridge Boyden (1810-98), best known for introducing the
cast-iron commercial front into New England in 1854, could build two
buildings for the Polytechnic Institute of Worcester, Mass., in the same
year 1866 of which one, the Washburn Machine Shop, is mansarded with
crude, vaguely Second Empire, detailing; while the other, Boynton Hall,
is in a very provincial sort of High Victorian Gothic. Hunt, product of
a Parisian education, designed the Yale Divinity School in New Haven in
1869 in a frenzied, rather Teulonian, Gothic; while in his precisely
contemporary Lenox Library in New York, built in 1869-77, he followed
closely and with some dignity French, if not specifically Second Empire,
models.
It is not really surprising, therefore, that Richardson, returning from
Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts at the end of the Civil War and
entering a competition for a new Unitarian church to be built at
Springfield, Mass., offered a High Victorian Gothic project that seems
to derive rather directly from the work of Keeling and other Low Church
English practitioners. What _is_ surprising, however, considering the
lack of special interest to later eyes in his Unity Church as executed
in 1866-8, is the fact that he won the competition! The warm colour and
texture of the rock-faced brownstone from nearby Longmeadow laid up in
random ashlar, a certain masculine scale in the details, and an attempt
at least at a boldly asymmetrical composition evidently struck his
contemporaries as very promising, however. (The church was demolished in
1961.)
It was not in the Unity Church, but in Richardson’s second church, Grace
Episcopal, in Medford, Mass., happily still extant, of 1867-8, that one
recognizes strong personal expression. The more massively pyramidal
character of the asymmetrical composition and, above all, the great
boulders of which the walls are built, with heavy trim of rough
quarry-faced granite, announce an original approach (Plate 91B). Yet
this approach was evidently still nurtured on the English High Victorian
Gothic models that Richardson knew through the wood engravings in
imported periodicals. It is even specific enough here so that one can
describe this Medford church as Burgessy rather than Butterfieldian or
Street-like; it is certainly no longer Keelingesque like the church in
Springfield. Incidentally, when Richardson visited England in 1882 it
was the work of Burges, who had just died, that he went out of his way
to see—by that time, however, he found it rather disappointing.
If Richardson’s first churches were Gothic, his Western Railway Office
at Springfield, built in 1867 for a client associated with the Unity
Church commission, was generically Second Empire. Yet this was still
more directly derived from current English work that was closely related
to that mode, notably the Francis Brothers’ National Discount Building
of 1857 in the City of London, than from anything Parisian. His brick
and stone Dorsheimer[241] house of 1868 in Delaware Avenue in Buffalo,
N.Y., is also Second Empire rather than Victorian Gothic, but very
restrainedly so, and hence rather more French in effect. Other work by
Richardson dating from the late sixties, such as the B. H. Crowninshield
house in Marlborough Street in Boston of 1868-9, was more experimental
in design, often recalling wild English work of the early years of the
decade. Although built of wood and of very modest size, Richardson’s
most interesting house of this period was the one that he built for
himself in 1868 at Arrochar on Staten Island near New York.[242] This
combines the use of a high mansarded pavilion with a sort of imitation
half-timbering related to the contemporary American ‘Stick Style’ (see
Chapter 14).
In Farnam Hall at Yale College in New Haven (Plate 96A), begun in 1869,
the German-trained Russell Sturgis (1836-1909),[243] who had been for a
time Wight’s partner, somehow arrived at an almost Webb-like—or at least
Brooks-like—simplicity and sophistication of late High Victorian Gothic
design, in marked contrast to the stridency of Hunt’s precisely
contemporary Divinity School there. This, however, is almost unique. The
most characteristic work of the day was produced by such home-trained
architects as Ware & Van Brunt, Wight, Edward T. Potter, and his younger
brother William A. Potter (1842-1909).[244] Wight’s National Academy in
New York has been mentioned. His Mercantile Library in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
completed in 1869, of red brick with ranges of pointed-arched windows
regularly but asymmetrically disposed, is similar—and not inferior—to
much of G. G. Scott’s secular work. Edward T. Potter’s Union College
Library has also been mentioned. His Harvard Church in Brookline, Mass.,
of 1873-5 is more conventional for its period. Largely renewed
internally after being gutted by a fire in 1931, this shows how
effectively such American materials as the popular brownstone from
Portland, Conn., and the light-coloured Berea sandstone from Ohio,
enlivened by accents of livid green serpentine from Pennsylvania, could
produce a polychromy richer and more enduring than the endemic
Butterfieldian or Teulonian red brick, with banding of bricks dipped in
black tar, that had been in general use for a decade. Along this line
Richardson himself followed for a while (see Chapter 13). At the same
time William A. Potter, who became very briefly Supervising Architect in
Washington in succession to Mullet in 1875, produced a few post offices,
such as the one in Pittsfield, Mass., that are characteristic but not
very distinguished examples of secular High Victorian Gothic executed in
stone. (Both Potters, however, gave up the High Victorian Gothic to
accept Richardson’s leadership within the next few years.)
The Boston & Albany Railroad station in Worcester built by Ware & Van
Brunt in 1875-7, with its tall and striking tower and its vast
segmental-pointed arches at the ends of the shed, provides one of the
happiest illustrations of what the rather illiterate approach of even
the most highly trained Eastern architects of this period could produce.
By working in an almost primitive way, along lines suggested by the
half-understood work of the bolder English innovators, something was
often achieved of which few Continental architects were capable in this
period. In less sophisticated hands, whether of provincial architects or
of builders, the results were naturally still cruder, though sometimes
equally vital and fresh. In church design,[245] where ecclesiological
control of planning was not accepted outside the Episcopal denomination,
galleried auditorium schemes with rows of exposed iron columns were
often executed with a violence of polychromy and a gawkiness of notched
detailing that exceeded Teulon or Keeling at their most extreme. One of
the most prominent extant examples is the squarish New Old South Church
at Copley Square in the Back Bay district of Boston, built in 1874-5 by
Charles A. Cummings (1833-1905) and his partner Sears in 1875-7. Its
impressive tower resembling an Italian campanile has now been much
reduced in height and chastened in silhouette.
Even more extreme than most churches, but of the highest quality, is the
intensely personal work of Frank Furness (1839-1912)[246] in
Philadelphia. His building for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in
Broad Street was erected in 1872-6 in preparation for the Centennial
Exhibition. The exterior has a largeness of scale and a vigour in the
detailing that would be notable anywhere, and the galleries are top-lit
with exceptional efficiency. Still more original and impressive were his
banks, even though they lay quite off the main line of development of
commercial architecture in this period (see Chapter 14). The most
extraordinary of these, and Furness’s masterpiece, was the Provident
Institution in Walnut Street, built as late as 1879 (Plate 95B). This
was most unfortunately demolished in the Philadelphia urban renewal
campaign several years ago, but the gigantic and forceful scale of the
granite membering alone should have justified its respectful
preservation. The interior,[247] entirely lined with patterned tiles,
was of rather later character than the façade and eventually much
cluttered with later intrusions, but it was equally fine in its own way
originally. Later work by Furness is of less interest, and his big Broad
Street Station of 1892-4 has also been demolished. No small part of
Furness’s historical significance lies in the fact that the young Louis
Sullivan picked this office—then known as Furness & Hewitt—to work in
for a short period after he left Ware’s school in Boston. As Sullivan’s
_Autobiography of an Idea_ testifies, the vitality and originality of
Furness meant more to him than what he was taught at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, or later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris
(see Chapter 14).
In the realm of house-design the more-or-less Gothic-based ‘Stick Style’
represented a largely autochthonous American development not without
considerable significance and interest (see Chapter 15). In public
architecture there was little serious achievement even at the hands of
English-trained architects such as Calvert Vaux (1824-95) and his
partner F. C. Withers (1828-1901)[248] or second-generation Gothicists
like Upjohn’s son (Richard M., 1828-1903). The younger Upjohn’s
Connecticut State Capitol[249] in Hartford begun in 1873, the only major
American example of a High Victorian Gothic public monument of any great
pretension or luxury of materials, is singularly vulgar and
stylistically ambiguous, with its completely symmetrical massing and its
tall central dome, compared to Burges’s contemporary project for Trinity
College there.[250] Doubtless G. G. Scott would not have disdained it,
even so!
Still more comparable to Scott’s own thwarted ambitions for a High
Victorian Gothic governmental architecture, which led him as late as the
seventies to enter various Continental competitions, is an earlier group
of buildings in the New World outside the United States, the Parliament
House (Plate 97A) and associated structures at Ottawa, Canada, designed
by Fuller & Jones and Stent & Laver in 1859 and built in 1861-7. F. W.
Stent had come out from England some considerable time before this,
having last exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1846. Thomas
Fuller (1822-98), also English, had settled in Toronto in 1856. Of their
respective partners, Augustus Laver (1839-98) and Herbert Chilion Jones
(1836-1923), less is known. In the course of the work Fuller and Laver
joined forces, moving on shortly to the United States, as has been
noted.
The main block at Ottawa, which was by the first-named firm, has been
rebuilt after a fire in the present century in a considerably chastened
vein, except for the big chapterhouse-like library at the rear, which is
original. But the variety of form, the gusto of the detail, and the
urbanistic scale of this project made of the Dominion Capitol a major
monumental group unrivalled for extent and complexity of organization in
England.[251] The buildings flanking the vast lawn extending in front of
the Parliament House are by Stent & Laver. These are somewhat less
exuberant in scale and more provincial in the character of their
detailing than the Parliament House was originally.
Most of the Neo-Gothic in Canada up to this time is more properly to be
considered Early rather than High Victorian (see Chapter 6). An
exception to this, perhaps, is University College in Toronto, designed
in 1856 by F. W. Cumberland (1821-81), who had come out from England in
1847. Yet its rich and rather bombastic Norman design is closer to
English work of the earlier decades of the century than to the
round-arched Ruskinian Gothic of the fifties.
Australia, the other major British Dominion, had nothing comparable to
Canada to offer in this period. Wardell’s English, Scottish, and
Australian Bank in Melbourne is a passable example of secular High
Victorian Gothic but no more than that. St John Evangelist’s, which he
built at Toorak south of Melbourne in 1860-73, is handsomer but very
simple—still almost Puginian, indeed—and all of monochrome ashlar. The
enormous Catholic cathedral of Melbourne, St Patrick’s, which Wardell
began in 1860, is more Continental in character, with two west towers
like Renwick’s St Patrick’s in New York and also a tall crossing tower
completed only in 1939. The Catholic cathedral of Adelaide, St Francis
Xavier’s, begun in 1870 and still without its intended western spires,
reputedly goes back to a design prepared by Pugin before his death in
1852. But even the later design of his son E. W. Pugin, on which the
executed work was actually based, must have been much modified over the
years by W. H. Bagot (b. 1880), H. H. Jory (b. 1880), and Lewis
Laybourne-Smith (b. 1888), who successively supervised the job. It is
certainly no happier an example of High Victorian Gothic than Wardell’s
Catholic cathedral in Melbourne.
The Anglican cathedral in Melbourne, St Paul’s, having been begun in
1850 from designs by Butterfield, ought to be finer. But Butterfield had
made the drawings as early as 1847, before even he was a High Victorian,
and the laggard execution of the church by Joseph Reed evidently
entailed much modification of the original designs. Moreover, the spires
by John Barr date only from 1934. For the very late Anglican cathedral
at Brisbane, St John’s, perhaps the finest of the lot, which was begun
in 1901 by F. L. Pearson from earlier designs by his father J. L.
Pearson as has already been mentioned, Butterfield had also prepared
designs in 1884.
The architecture of the Dominions remained Colonial in spirit, as these
notes on a few Australian churches indicate, well into the present
century. First the able Frank Wills, moreover, the English-born
architect of Montreal Cathedral, and then Fuller & Laver were drawn away
from Canada to the United States, where opportunities were greater.
Despite the great interest of the Government Buildings at Ottawa, it was
in the United States rather than the British Dominions that the High
Victorian Gothic proved a stimulus to such highly original achievement
as Furness’s in the seventies.
The High Victorian Gothic episode in American architecture balanced
almost precisely the Second Empire episode. Both were disowned, even by
many of their most successful protagonists, by the mid seventies. It was
the Gothic, however, that prepared the way for the more original
developments of the last quarter of the century; as has already been
stated, those who had practised chiefly in the Second Empire mode
continued to take their lead from Paris. Yet there are paradoxes in the
situation which must not be ignored. Richardson, the most creative new
force in the seventies and eighties, continually urged young aspirants
to an architectural career to study at the École des Beaux-Arts as he
had done. Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), Richardson’s first really able
assistant, was Paris-trained; partly because of that training, it was he
who became in the mid eighties the leader of the reaction against the
Richardsonian. Sullivan, the first truly great modern architect not
alone of America but of the whole western world, was also in part
Paris-trained, even though he was always highly critical of the doctrine
of the École and much stimulated by Furness. Finally, it was even more
the later writings of the French Viollet-le-Duc than those of the
English Ruskin that encouraged bold and imaginative thinking about
architecture in America in the seventies and eighties when his
_Entretiens_ became available in translation and were first widely
read.[252]
Were this a history of architectural thought rather than of
architecture—that is of what was actually _built_ in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries—Viollet-le-Duc would play a much larger part. But
his production,[253] while not negligible, is curiously ambiguous. His
many ‘restorations’ are no contribution to nineteenth-century
architecture; rather they represent a serious diminution of authenticity
in the great monuments of the past subjected to his ministrations. These
include most notably Notre-Dame in Paris, the refurbishing of which he
continued alone after the death of Lassus in 1857, and the Château de
Pierrefonds, Oise, the rebuilding of which began the next year and
continued down to his death in 1879; but the whole list is very long
indeed, including Carcassonne, Vézelay, and Saint-Denis, to mention only
some of the best known things.
Viollet-le-Duc’s new parish church for the suburb of St-Denis,
Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée in the Boulevard Jules Guesde, built in 1864-7,
has considerable interest, however. Unlike most English High Victorian
Gothic churches, it is vaulted throughout; but the vaulting does not
have that look of a student exercise which characterizes Lassus’s at
Saint-Jean-de-Belleville in Paris of the previous decade. The broad
square bays of the nave are well lighted by groups of lancets in the
clerestory, and there is a sturdy sort of articulation of the elements
not unlike that in the early work of Burges (Plate 98). Externally the
rather complex plan, with a large rectangular Lady Chapel projecting
behind the altar, produces a gawky and confused composition; but the
detailing is simple and virile as in the interior. A massive western
tower rises over the entrance porch, culminating in a tall slated roof
rather than a stone spire. But the plate tracery of the large west
window over the porch and the lancets of the stage above are stony
enough and have a quite Street-like scale and vigour of form. It is
perhaps unfortunate that Viollet-le-Duc built so few new churches;
certainly most other French Neo-Gothic work is very inferior to this, as
such a large and prominent church as Saint-Epvre at Nancy, begun in 1863
by M.-P. Morey (1805-78), a pupil of Leclerc, well illustrates.
In secular work Viollet-le-Duc was too often content to follow the
current Second Empire mode with a good deal of the eclecticism, but
little of the plastic boldness, of the English and the Americans. Such
more or less Gothic blocks of flats as those that he built in the late
fifties and sixties in the Rue de Condorcet and at 15 Rue de Douai in
Paris are somewhat more comparable to the secular High Victorian Gothic
in England (Plate 101A). These are certainly praiseworthy for the
urbanistic politeness with which they fit between more conventional
Second Empire neighbours despite their distinctly ‘Victorian’
detail,[254] but there is little originality of conception. On paper
Viollet-le-Duc later showed great boldness, however, in certain projects
proposing the use of metal structural elements that he published with
the second volume of the _Entretiens_ (see Chapter 16).
In the late fifties and sixties the vigour of the ‘Early French’
detailing of certain English architects and a related logic of
structural expression then called ‘real’ was often derived in part from
a study of Viollet-le-Duc’s _Dictionnaire_. But Shaw’s book of
_Continental Sketches_ of 1858 and Nesfield’s similar book of 1862 make
evident how intense and how idiosyncratic was their own first-hand study
of medieval work across the channel. Certainly the ‘Early French’ detail
of the English leaders is generally of higher quality than even
Viollet-le-Duc’s best at Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée.
If there was very little Gothic work done in the third quarter of the
century in France comparable in quality or in interest to that of the
Anglo-Saxon countries, yet there was a general movement there away from
the somewhat mincing attitudes of the forties and early fifties. Just as
the Medieval Revival in America, considered in a broad sense, came to
its climax in the mature work of Richardson (see Chapter 13)—which is
much more Romanesque than Gothic in so far as it leans at all on the
past—in France the Romanesquoid work of Vaudremer represents the highest
achievement of the period in a non-Renaissance mode (Plate 72A). The
same may even be said up to a point of most of the other countries of
Europe. Yet the Germanic _Rundbogenstil_ of the third quarter of the
century was, for all the size, prominence, and elaboration of such
public monuments as Waesemann’s Berlin City Hall or Hansen’s Vienna
Waffenmuseum and the real excellence of Herholdt’s Danish work, already
a sinking rather than a rising mode.
In Germany and Austria more Neo-Gothic edifices, both secular and
ecclesiastical, were built after 1850 than before; several of them have
already been mentioned. These are, however, rather examples of
contemporary eclecticism than of a concerted movement. In addition to
his school and his Rathaus, however, Schmidt built in Vienna some eight
Gothic churches ranging in date from the Lazaristenkirche of 1860-2 to
the Severinkirche of 1877-8. Most of them are brick-vaulted
hall-churches—that is, of the characteristic medieval German plan and
section, with aisles of the same height as the nave. However, the
largest and most interesting, the Fünfhaus Parish Church of 1868-75, is
centrally planned. This is an aisled octagon rising to a ribbed dome
with hexagonal chapels grouped around the irregularly polygonal apse
(Plate 99B). The spatial complexity of the interior is of real interest,
and the walls are painted to suggest polychromatic brickwork of almost
English brashness. Two front towers flanking the gabled entrance bay are
set close against the dome to provide a very Baroque sort of
composition—this is really, therefore, a sort of Sant’ Agnese in Agone
or Karlskirche carried out with a G. G. Scott vocabulary of Neo-Gothic
elements.
In Hungary the eighties saw a very belated manifestation of secular
Neo-Gothic. The Parliament House, begun in 1883 by Imre Steindl
(1839-1902) and completed in 1902, was surely inspired by Barry’s in
London begun nearly a half-century earlier, but in character it is (not
surprisingly) more like Schmidt’s Vienna Rathaus. Thus did outlying
countries in the later decades of the century continue to take up modes
long obsolescent in the major architectural centres.[255]
The Gothic of C. F. Arnold (1823-90) at Dresden, as seen in his secular
Kreuzschule of 1864-5 or the two-towered Sophienkirche of the same
years, is inferior to Schmidt’s, both in command of the idiom and in
architectonic organization, as indeed is most such German work of these
decades. The Johanniskirche in Dresden of 1874-8 by G. L. Möckel
(1838-1915), however, has a rather fine tower set in the transeptal
position so much favoured in Victorian England. This is bold in scale
and carefully detailed in a literate twelfth-century—not to say ‘Early
French’—way much as Burges or Pearson might have designed it in England.
More characteristic of German work of these decades is the Munich
Rathaus, built in 1867-74 by G. J. von Hauberrisser (1841-1922) and
extended by him in 1899-1909. Excessively spiky, this seems almost to
have borrowed back from G. G. Scott the more Germanic features of his
Broad Sanctuary terrace in London of fifteen years earlier. But the
Neo-Gothic of the seventies and eighties in Germany is in general no
more aggressive and gawky than the popular Meistersinger mode that
revived so turgidly the forms of the Northern Renaissance (see Chapter
10).
Holland, which made almost no significant architectural contribution in
the first half of the nineteenth century, now produced in P. J. H.
Cuijpers (1827-1921) a sort of Dutch Viollet-le-Duc. In addition to
undertaking important restorations, he built many vast new Gothic
churches of brick which he exposed once more in reaction against the
earlier nineteenth-century practice of stucco-coating. Cuijpers was
learned and ambitious, and in such work he could be rather more original
than Viollet-le-Duc in France, if less so perhaps than Schmidt in
Austria. His Vondelkerk, a church of 1870 near the Vondel Park in
Amsterdam, is not centrally planned like Schmidt’s Fünfhaus church in
Vienna, but he obtained a somewhat similar spatial effect by making the
crossing octagonal. The brickwork of the piers and the vaults is very
richly treated but in a fashion as much polytonal as polychromatic. The
banding is in bricks of different sizes and textures rather than of
different colours, and the result has something of the subtlety of the
interior of White’s Aberdeen Park church in London.
A larger and later Amsterdam church by Cuijpers, the Maria Magdalenakerk
in the Zaanstraat of 1887, is considerably more impressive, both inside
and out. Occupying one of those narrow triangular sites so often
assigned to important urban churches in this period, the exterior builds
up grandly to the rather severe crossing tower at the rear. Inside,
Cuijpers made the most of the difficulties of the site also. The east
end is conventionally Gothic in plan, and the choir here is
brick-vaulted, as is the Vondelkerk throughout. But the taller nave,
covered with a wooden roof of ogival section, is much more effective
spatially because of the way it is widened by triangular elements at the
front where the aisles are cut off owing to the narrowing of the site
(Plate 101B). The later painted decorations in this church are
harmonious in tone with the brickwork, and the whole has a breadth of
attack comparable to some of the best English churches of the seventies,
such as Pearson’s in Kilburn or Edmund Scott’s St Bartholomew’s,
Brighton, without resembling any of them very much.
Curiously enough for so dedicated a church-builder, Cuijpers’s secular
work is more conspicuous, and hence better known, than are his churches.
The two largest and most prominent nineteenth-century buildings of
Amsterdam are both by him. In these, the Rijksmuseum built in 1877-85
(Plate 101C) and the Central Station of 1881-9, he moved away from the
emulation of thirteenth- or fourteenth-century ecclesiastical Gothic
towards a more elastic sixteenth-century sort of design, rather similar
to the English mode of these decades known as ‘Pont Street Dutch’ (see
Chapter 12).
The similarity to the Northern Renaissance mode of this period in
Germany is nearly as great, as also to such somewhat later Scandinavian
buildings as Clason’s Northern Museum in Stockholm and Nyrop’s Town Hall
in Copenhagen (Plate 173A). But Cuijpers’s touch is lighter than that of
the Germans, and his precedent rather more Late Gothic than Mannerist,
while his two chief works precede those that they most resemble in
Sweden and Denmark by a decade or more. In both cases the frank
incorporation of iron-and-glass elements is notable, a vast shed at the
station and two almost equally vast covered courts in the museum. Above
all, being the Gothic Revivalist he was, Cuijpers saw to it that the
craftsmanship was excellent throughout; while his handling of scale,
though ambiguous as in much work of these decades everywhere, is
surprisingly successful. Both are very large buildings, placed in
isolation where they can be seen from a distance and with carefully
studied silhouettes varied by towers and other skyline features; yet the
membering is delicate and almost domestic, quite as in the rather
comparable English work of George (Plate 104B) or Collcutt (see Chapter
12).
In Italy projects of restoration led, as elsewhere, to the designing of
certain fairly ambitious new façades in Gothic to complete medieval
churches. The most conspicuous is that of the cathedral of Florence.
After many abortive earlier moves, this was finally begun by Emilio de
Fabris (1808-83) in 1866, when Florence became briefly the capital of
Italy, and completed only in 1887. The earlier and less successful
façade of Santa Croce in Florence had been carried out in 1857-63 by
Niccoló Matas (1798-1872). It is characteristic of the international
architectural scene in these decades that neither of these carefully
archaeological compositions in polychrome Italian Gothic comes alive in
the way that Italianate High Victorian Gothic often did in the hands of
English architects, or even American ones, in the fifties and sixties.
Churches were built for Anglicans in most of the principal cities of
Europe in the mid nineteenth century, usually by English architects and
always in Victorian Gothic. Sometimes, as in the case of the Crimean
Memorial Church by Street[256] at Istanbul and Shaw’s English Church at
Lyons, these were by the most distinguished English designers of the
day, but more often they were by hacks who lived abroad and specialized
in such work. Among the ‘English churches’ of this period that provided
good samples of the High Victorian Gothic for foreigners—many were still
to all intents and purposes Early Victorian—are two by Street[257] in
Rome, one for the English community, the other not ‘English’ at all in
fact but built for American Episcopalians. The former, All Saints’, in
the Via del Babuino, with a much later tower not by Street, provides
internally a moderately successful example of his later work, although
it is unimpressive and largely invisible externally. It was begun in
1880, a year before Street’s death, and opened in 1885.
Far finer is St Paul’s, the American church, prominently located among
the contemporary banks and blocks of flats of the Via Nazionale and
built in 1873-6. Boldly banded in brick and stone and with a tall square
campanile at the front corner, this is indeed a richer and more striking
example of an Italian Gothic basilica than the Middle Ages ever produced
in Rome (Plate 100). The interior, with a rich apse mosaic by
Burne-Jones on a glittering gold ground, has an originality and a
coherence that is quite lacking in such Italian churches as were
redecorated in the later nineteenth century. Late though this is in
Street’s _œuvre_, it remains one of his best works.
If the English High Victorian Gothic was to some extent an article of
export—and, of course, this account has hardly touched on the vast
outlying areas of the British Empire, notably including India, to which
it was exported in the greatest quantity—it was nevertheless largely
without real influence outside the United States and the British
Dominions. In the world picture, it was the British architectural
critics of this period, Ruskin and Morris, who would have a vital
influence, but that influence came for the most part rather later,
around 1890 (see Chapter 16). Cuijpers, however, was a reader of Ruskin
from the fifties.
Still to be discussed is the early work of one great architect, also
reputedly a reader of Ruskin, whose career began in the seventies with a
sharp revulsion from the Second Empire mode towards the Neo-Gothic. The
Spanish (or more precisely Catalan) architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet
(1852-1926) was one of the most intensely personal talents that either
the nineteenth or the twentieth century has produced. His style hardly
matured before the nineties, and what are generally considered his
typical works must be discussed later in connexion with the Art Nouveau
(see Chapter 16). But what he had accomplished already in the seventies
and eighties can be better appreciated here in relation to the
contemporary work of those decades in other countries.
Gaudí’s earliest work was at the Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona,
laid out in 1872, where he assisted the master of works Eduardo
Fontseré, while still a student, in various projects for its
embellishment. The elaborate Cascade there, incorporating an Aquarium,
on which he worked in 1877-82 derives in the main from Espérandieu’s at
the Palais Longchamps in Marseilles. But some of the detail, both
plastic and incised, has a flavour more comparable to that of the
wildest and most eclectic English and American Second Empire work of the
previous decade than to anything French.
The first commission for which Gaudí was wholly responsible is the house
of Don Manuel Vicens at 24-26 Carrer de les Carolines in Barcelona. This
was erected in 1878-80, immediately upon his graduation from the local
Escuela Superior de Arquitectura, and in it no trace of Second Empire
influence, French or international, remains. A large suburban villa
built of rubble masonry liberally banded with polychrome tiles, the Casa
Vicens passes beyond the extravagances of a Teulon or a Lamb in the
sixties into a world of fantasy that only one or two High Victorian
designers such as the Scottish Frederick T. Pilkington (1832-98) ever
entered. Yet Gaudí’s general inspiration came definitely from the
medieval past. In Spain that past included the semi-Islamic Mudéjar,
however, and much of the detailing which appears most original to
non-Spanish eyes is, in fact, dependent on local precedents of one sort
or another. For example, the floral tiles are merely what the Iberian
world knows as _azulejos_ and has continued to use down to the present
time, especially in Portugal and Brazil (see Chapter 25).
In all the flamboyance of the decoration of the Casa Vicens, the most
personal note is in the ironwork. This is naturalistic in theme and bold
in scale; it also includes curious linear elements that wave and bend in
a way which is more than a little premonitory of the Art Nouveau of the
nineties (see Chapter 16). The entrance grille is a masterpiece of
decorative art of this period, rivalled only by some of Morris’s
contemporary stained glass.
The very utilitarian industrial warehouse for La Obrera Mataronense of
1878-82 at Mataró, with its great arched principals of laminated wood,
should be mentioned to balance the Casa Vicens. Here Gaudí’s prowess as
an imaginative constructor—almost a straight engineer—was very evident,
as also the fact that the unfamiliar forms he continually used—the shape
of the arches here was parabolic not semicircular or pointed—were not a
matter of personal crankiness but selected for statical reasons: Gothic
in theory, that is, like some of Soufflot’s vaulting, though not very
Gothic in appearance.
In 1884, however, Gaudí was made director of works for a large new
Gothic church in Barcelona, and from this time forward a considerable
part of his activity, extending down through his restoration of the
cathedral of Palma on the island of Mallorca in 1900-14, was that of a
Gothic Revivalist, if an increasingly unconventional one. Towards such a
career his own intense religiosity inclined him quite as much as was the
case with Pugin and reputedly also with Cuijpers—Viollet-le-Duc, by
exception, was strongly anti-clerical. Unlike Pugin’s or Cuijpers’s,
however, Gaudí’s career as an ecclesiastical architect was rather
unproductive. Yet from the first he designed and executed church
furnishings and, while still a student in 1875-7, he assisted the
architect Francesc de Paula del Villar i Carmona (1845-1922) on a
project for adding a porch to the monastery church of Montsarrat.
In 1881 Villar was made architect of the proposed Expiatory Temple of
the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia),[258] for which a large square site
had been obtained between the Carrers de Mallorca, de Marina, de
Provença, and de Sardenya in an outlying part of Barcelona, and the
construction of the crypt of a great cruciform Gothic church was started
in 1882. Two years later Gaudí took over charge of the work, as has been
said, completing the crypt by 1891 almost entirely according to Villar’s
original and quite conventionally thirteenth-fourteenth-century Gothic
design. There followed the construction of the outer walls only of the
chevet; these were finished by 1893. The further history of the church
will be considered later; for Gaudí’s style underwent extraordinary
changes in the nineties as he designed and built one transept façade of
the church and its towers—which is about all that exists above ground
even today (see Chapter 17).
Contemporaneously with Gaudí’s construction of the crypt and the chevet
walls of the Sagrada Familia came four secular works, two of them also
quite Neo-Gothic in character and two others of very great originality.
The Bishop’s Palace at Astorga of 1887-93 and the Fernández-Arbós house,
known as the Casa de los Botines, in the Plaza de San Marcelo at León of
1892-4 might well be mistaken for provincial High Victorian Gothic done
in England or America twenty or thirty years earlier. But the city
mansion of Don Eusebio Güell at 3-5 Carrer Nou de la Rambla (now Conde
del Asalto) in Barcelona, built in 1885-9, is an edifice of the greatest
distinction, rivalled for quality in its period only by the very finest
late work of Richardson in America (see Chapter 13). The Teresian
College at 41 Carrer de Ganduxer in Barcelona is also quite remarkable
in its simpler way.
Far suaver than his earlier Casa Vicens, the Palau Güell is quite as
strikingly novel all the same. At the base yawn a pair of parabolic
arches, their tops filled above a plain reticulated grille with sinuous
seaweed-like ornament of the most extravagant virtuosity (Plate 96B).
The ‘Dragon Gate’ of the Finca Güell of 1887 in the Avenida Pedralbes is
still stranger, with a nightmare quality which those of the house in
town happily lack. On either side of the entrance arches and in the
projecting first storey the façade of the Palau Güell is no more than a
rather plain rectangular grid of stone mullions and transoms. In scale
this grid is more like Parris’s Boston granite fronts of the twenties
than like English window-walls, but it is detailed in a cranky
medievalizing way that is more comparable to Webb’s handling of
stonework (Figure 17). The rear façade towards the court includes in the
middle a broad bay-window with curved corners protected by sunscreens as
original but less fantastic than the grilles at the entrance. The most
extraordinary features of the exterior, however, are the chimney-pots
rising in profusion above the flat roof like an exhibition of abstract
sculpture and entirely covered with a mosaic of irregular fragments of
glass, rubble, or coloured tiles. In them the extravagance of his
earlier houses was continued, and such terminal features remained
characteristic of all his later secular work.
[Illustration:
Figure 17. Antoni Gaudí: project for Palau Güell, Barcelona, 1885,
elevation
]
The interiors of the Palau Güell are extremely sumptuous. There is much
use of marble arcades of parabolic arches carried on round columns, both
arches and columns being detailed with the greatest mathematical
elegance and simplicity, yet with considerable variety. Some of the
ceilings are of marble slabs carried by visible iron beams, but in the
principal apartments there are incredibly elaborate confections of
woodwork in the Moorish tradition.
The College of Santa Teresa de Jesús, built in 1889-94 immediately after
the Palau Güell, is naturally much more modest than that great
merchant’s palace, which continues the line of those that late medieval
and Renaissance magnates often built. Rubble walls banded and stripped
with brickwork are pierced alternately with ranges of narrow windows and
with small square ventilators closed with quatrefoil grilles. The widely
spaced windows are capped with steep parabolic ‘arches’ formed by
cantilevering inward successive brick courses. The third storey is all
of brickwork panelled with blind ‘arches’ between the windows and
carried up into large, flat, triangular finials along the skyline. Less
ingratiating than the Palau Güell with its luxurious use of fine
materials inside and out, this college building is equally regular in
composition and no more Gothic in appearance to a non-Spanish eye; in
fact, however, it leans even more heavily on Mozarab and Mudéjar
precedent than does the Casa Vicens. A certain amount of relatively
plain wrought-iron grillework recalls that at the entrances of the
earlier houses.
Only perhaps in England and America did the line of descent from the
Gothic Revival lead so far away from the standard medievalism of the mid
century in the seventies and eighties. But these early works of Gaudí
represent only a part—to most critics the less important half—of his
production. For strangeness they can be matched in work of equal
consequence within this period only by Sullivan’s earliest commercial
façades in Chicago (see Chapter 14). Teulon and Harris had reformed by
the seventies; Lamb and Pilkington were forgotten. In character Gaudí’s
work of the seventies and eighties could hardly be more different from
the mature style of the English Shaw. Yet Shaw, at his occasional best,
could compete with Gaudí in the quality of his achievement; while his
influence, both at home and in the United States, was of very
considerable historical importance, as Gaudí’s was not, even in Spain
(see Chapters 12, 13, and 15).
For all that Gaudí was actually represented at the Paris Exhibition of
1878—by a glovemaker’s vitrine!—and later by pavilions designed for the
Compañía Transatlántica in the Naval Exhibition of 1887 at Cadiz and in
the Barcelona International Exhibition of the following year, his work
was hardly known at all except to his compatriots before the nineties.
In the mid twentieth century, however, his reputation is still rising,
as the flood of new publications of the last decade makes evident. The
reasons for this will be suggested later, since they apply chiefly to
the work that he did after 1900 (see Chapters 16 and 20).
In the European picture as a whole a less notable shift of direction
occurred around 1870 than in England and America. There was naturally
continuity in the Vienna of Francis Joseph, since the Imperial
government called the tune in Austrian architecture and the
King-Emperor’s reign went on without a break—indeed, it lasted for
another generation and more. What is surprising is that the end of the
Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic brought so little
change in France. There was, of course, a short hiatus in production
like that which followed the fall of the first Napoleon. As around 1820,
however, so around 1875 the story picks up again almost as if there had
been no break at all. Gradually interest in exposed metal construction,
in decline since the fifties, revived; by the time of the Paris
Exhibition of 1889 French feats of metal construction, not so much the
Galerie des Machines as the Eiffel Tower, became the talk of the world
(see Chapter 16).
In the fugue-like composition of nineteenth-century architectural
history different themes have differing durations. The English theme of
High Victorian Gothic, picked up in any case only by the Anglo-Saxon
sections of the orchestra, came effectively to an end with the early
seventies; the Second Empire theme, whether it be considered in a
specialized sense or in a broader one, was picked up at least
selectively by the whole western world and not least boldly by the
Anglo-American section; moreover, it continued in most countries, with
some modulation, for at least a decade longer than the High Victorian
Gothic. Yet both in England and America, the important new themes of the
seventies and eighties were rooted not in the Second Empire but in the
Victorian Gothic, even though they represent something much more
original than mere modulations of that earlier theme.
The third quarter of the nineteenth century is notable for the stylistic
diversity of its production. In principle there may, perhaps, be no more
difference between Visconti’s and Lefuel’s New Louvre and a Butterfield
church than between Nash’s Blaise Hamlet and his terraces around
Regent’s Park, to cite merely work by one early nineteenth-century
architect. Yet thanks to the fugal character of the general historical
development, which meant that new modes were added to the architectural
repertory—as they had been at least since the twenties—more rapidly than
old modes were dropped, the over-all picture became extremely
complicated after 1850. It belies the most valid and idiosyncratic
achievements of this period, however, to stress too much its apparently
limitless eclecticism.[259] The account given in the last four chapters
undoubtedly exaggerates the importance of certain modes, if that
importance be measured statistically in terms of quantity of production.
Qualitative considerations have led to a drastic selectivity,
emphasizing relatively limited but vital aspects of architectural
production at the expense of others that were far more ubiquitous but
generally very dull. With different criteria of selection, using
different standards of architectural quality—attainment of
archaeological plausibility, say; or success or failure in the
incorporation of new technical developments; or realization of
programmatic aims—several very different pictures could be, and indeed
frequently have been,[260] given of the architecture of the western
world in these decades.
At the expense of emphasizing architectural developments peculiar to the
Anglo-Saxon world in this same, possibly unbalanced, fashion the next
chapter is organized around the career, after 1870, of Norman Shaw,
whose early work in the High Victorian Gothic has already received some
attention. The chapter following that centres on the achievement of the
American architect Richardson, whose somewhat parallel beginnings have
also been described in this chapter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 12
NORMAN SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
IN England and America there followed immediately upon the ‘High Styles’
of the fifties and sixties phases of stylistic development that cannot
readily be matched in the other countries of the western world. This is
true both of the quality of the achievement and also of its significance
for what came after. Beginning just before 1870 in England and but
little later in the United States, these two phases developed in far
from identical ways. In both cases their conventional names, ‘Queen
Anne’ and ‘Romanesque Revival’, are misnomers. It was a long time before
the Queen Anne of the seventies actually became a revival of early
eighteenth-century architecture in the same sense as the Greek, Gothic,
or Renaissance Revivals. The supposed Romanesque Revival in America of
this period was not very archaeological either. It is therefore less
inaccurate to label these modes by the names of their principal
protagonists: ‘Shavian’ for Richard Norman Shaw (even though that proper
adjective refers more familiarly to George Bernard Shaw) and
‘Richardsonian’ for Henry Hobson Richardson. Shaw, however, shares
responsibility for the effectiveness of the mutation away from the High
Victorian with other men, notably his early partner Nesfield, Webb,
Godwin, and J. J. Stevenson.[261] Of all this group, Shaw was
unquestionably the most successful, the most typical, and the most
influential, though not the most original.
Except for Pugin, no architect since Robert Adam had so much effect on
English—and for that matter also on American—production. Moreover, his
influence lasted for some thirty-five years, rather longer than did
Adam’s. Yet it is not possible to define the Shavian mode clearly as it
is the Adamesque or the Puginian. An architectural Picasso, Shaw had
many divergent manners which he developed successively, but of which
none—except the High Victorian Gothic—was ever entirely dropped. Each of
these manners, down to the very end of his long practice, found in turn
a following. His latest and most conspicuous work, the Piccadilly Hotel,
built in London in 1905-8 between Piccadilly and the Regent Street
Quadrant (Plate 107), is more characteristic of the Edwardian Age of the
opening twentieth century than his early church at Bingley is of the
High Victorian. Outside church architecture the intervening Late
Victorian can hardly be defined better than in terms of his various
manners, and even in church architecture he had a real contribution to
make, if a lesser reputation than Pearson or Bodley.
Yet Shaw cannot be rated with Soane or Schinkel as a nineteenth-century
architect of absolutely the first rank; nor yet with his American
contemporary Richardson, even though Richardson’s career came to an end
a score of years before his. Shaw’s work reflects all too clearly,
despite his own vast and sanguine assurance, the general uncertainties
of the years after 1870. Webb, though less successful and famous,
eventually had more influence, not so much on English architecture in
general as on the more creative and original men of the next generation.
The later history of European architecture would be much the same—if not
that of American architecture—had Shaw never existed; but the modern
architecture that first came into being after 1900 in various countries
of Europe owed something directly, and even more indirectly, to Webb. In
this way Richardson also has more significance than Shaw, despite his
lack of influence abroad, for Sullivan and Wright in America both
learned much from him.
Norman Shaw was born in Edinburgh in 1831. Brought early to London, he
was taken on in his early teens by Burn, the Edinburgh architect then
settled in London, who had so great a success designing Jacobethan and
Scottish Baronial mansions for the high aristocracy in the forties and
fifties. Shaw also studied at the Royal Academy, winning in 1853 their
Silver Medal, and in the next year their Gold Medal, with the award of a
Travelling Studentship that took him to Germany, Italy, and France. The
project which won him the first medal was a surprising production for
its period, and quite without relation to his own High Victorian Gothic
work of the next decade that has been described earlier (see Chapter
11). A vast design for a college with central domed block and side
pavilions loaded with giant orders, this project is more Vanbrugh-like
than Second Empire. In some sense Shaw’s career was to come full circle
stylistically; but even in the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand in London of
1902-3 and the still later Piccadilly Hotel he would hardly be as
whole-heartedly Neo-Baroque again.
In 1858 Shaw published, as has been mentioned before, what is perhaps
the most attractive of High Victorian Gothic source-books,
_Architectural Sketches from the Continent_, based on his European
studies; doubtless on the strength of this book he became at this time,
or shortly after, Street’s principal assistant—chief draughtsman, one
might call it—in succession to Webb.[262] There he remained for four
years, leaving in 1862 to form a partnership with Nesfield, whom he had
first known in the early fifties in Burn’s office. As has already been
noted, Nesfield was the son of Barry’s collaborator in garden design for
all his major country house commissions. Younger than Shaw, Nesfield had
gone to Burn’s office in 1850 a year or two after leaving Eton, and in
1853 had moved to the office of his uncle Anthony Salvin, another
successful builder of aristocratic country houses. Nesfield, in this
year 1862, issued a book rather like Shaw’s of four years earlier as has
been mentioned in connexion with his work for Lord Craven at Combe
Abbey. Other aristocrats with whom he had connexions through his father
soon began to employ him on more modest jobs.
Building lodges and other accessories to great country estates, and in
1864 one in Regent’s Park where everyone might appreciate his highly
personal touch, Nesfield revived in effect the Picturesque Cottage mode
of half a century earlier. But the materials he used were more
various,[263] including tile-hanging and pargetting, and his designs had
a general finesse that was much more craftsmanlike than those of the
slapdash Nash and his rivals in this genre (Plate 50A). In Nesfield’s
first major work, Cloverley Hall in Shropshire, begun in 1865, several
characteristic features appear for which his lodges hardly prepared the
way (see Chapter 15). There a tall great hall provided the principal
interior, and the areas of mullioned windows in the Tudor tradition were
so extensive as to constitute real ‘window-walls’ (Figure 24). His very
refined and ingenious ornamentation at Cloverley, some of it of Japanese
inspiration, has been mentioned.
Even earlier, in 1862, when Japanese art was just beginning to be an
inspiration to advanced painters in Paris and in London and the Japanese
Government first sent examples of characteristic work to an
international exhibition, Godwin, who was just at that point throwing
off the influence of Ruskin, had stripped bare the interiors of his own
house in Bristol and decorated them only with a few Japanese prints
asymmetrically hung. By 1866 Godwin was designing wallpapers of notably
Japanese character for Jeffry & Co. and from 1868 ‘Anglo-Japanese’
furniture for the manufacturer William Watt.[264] But _japonisme_ is
only a minor theme of this period,[265] and it hardly influenced Shaw at
all.
Half a century earlier the prestige of a ranking novelist, Sir Walter
Scott, had helped to launch one of the most popular Picturesque modes,
the Scottish Baronial, when he asked Blore to imitate the old Border
castles in designing his house at Abbotsford. Now in 1861 Thackeray, a
novelist many of whose novels were set, not in the Middle Ages, but in
early eighteenth-century England and Virginia, designed for himself a
house in Palace Green in London opposite Kensington Palace, much of
which is more or less of that particular period. This house echoes the
modest red-brick manor houses of the time of Queen Anne on both sides of
the Atlantic, but it could hardly be less plausible. At the same time
Wellington College by John Shaw (1803-70), which was begun in 1856, was
reaching completion in a much richer, almost Second Empire, version of
the Wren style of 1700.
The serious adumbration of a Queen Anne mode really began a few years
later with a small public commission of Nesfield’s. His lodge at Kew
Gardens, designed in 1866 and built in 1867, though simple, is already
almost an archaeological exercise in early eighteenth-century[266]
brickwork (Figure 18). This Kew lodge he followed up a few years later
with a big but remote country house, Kinmel Park near Abergele in Wales,
built in 1871-4 though possibly designed a bit earlier. To this we will
be returning shortly. Shaw had nothing to do with Kinmel Park, since his
partnership with Nesfield came to an end in 1868; that was just after
the completion of Cloverley Hall on which he certainly collaborated even
if his personal contribution there cannot now be readily distinguished.
Already in 1866, before Shaw parted from Nesfield, however, his own
career had opened with the designing of the Bingley church (Plate 94A)
and of Glen Andred, near Withyham in Sussex, a house of great
originality of character (Plate 102B).
[Illustration:
Figure 18. W. Eden Nesfield: Kew Gardens, Lodge, 1867, elevation
]
Glen Andred is little more related to the new Queen Anne mode of the Kew
lodge than it is to the Gothic of the Bingley church. It does, however,
seem to derive somewhat from earlier Nesfield work, or possibly from
Devey. Where the High Victorian Gothic had rejected English precedent in
favour of Italian and French models, this first Sussex house of Shaw’s
is resolutely regional in character. The tile-hung walls above a
red-brick ground storey, the white-painted wooden casements, almost as
extensive as the ‘window-walls’ of Cloverley, the loose asymmetrical
organization of the massing are all related to a local Sussex and Surrey
vernacular of no particular period (Plate 102B). The entrance front is
more formal, carefully balanced if not precisely symmetrical, and here
the pargetting in the central gable is of Jacobethan character. But the
great stair-window and the graceful massing of the tiled roofs, quite in
the finest tradition of the Picturesque but handled with a new ease and
casualness, are more important elements of Shaw’s first manner, which
can be called ‘Shavian Manorial’. The hall across the front between the
two projecting wings is modest in size, with the principal living rooms
loosely grouped round it. Thus this may be considered an early example
of what I have rather clumsily called the ‘agglutinative plan’, but as
it was never published the extent of its actual influence must remain
uncertain.
There was little logic to Shaw’s regionalism. Already in 1868 he was
applying his Sussex vocabulary of materials and forms to the Cookridge
Convalescent Hospital at Horsforth near Leeds in stony Yorkshire. In
general, however, he kept this manner for work near London, using it
even as late as 1894 for a house called The Hallams near Bramley in
Surrey. He also introduced tile-hanging on some of his houses in London
such as West House, at 118 Campden Hill Road, of 1877 and Walton House
in Walton Street of 1885 as well as—rather more appropriately—on the
suburban Hampstead house that he built in the same year for Kate
Greenaway at 39 Frognal.
Shaw’s first client had been a painter, J. C. Horsley, R.A., for whom he
made some alterations in the early sixties and whose son later entered
his office. Glen Andred was for another painter, E. W. Cooke, later
R.A., and West House was for George Boughton, R.A. Kate Greenaway,
better known today than these forgotten academicians, was an illustrator
of children’s books much patronized by Ruskin. F. W. Goodall, R.A.
(1870), Marcus Stone, R.A. (1876), Luke Fildes, R.A. (1877), Edwin Long,
R.A. (1878, and again in 1888), Frank Holl, R.A. (1881), are other
successful painters and fellow academicians—Shaw became an A.R.A.
himself in 1872 and an R.A. in 1877—for whom he built houses (with the
dates of the commissions). All but Goodall’s house at Harrow Weald were
either in Melbury Road in Kensington in London or else in Fitzjohn’s
Avenue near his own Hampstead house of 1875 at 6 Ellerdale Road. Where
the prosperous artists, themselves presumably aping the aristocracy,
led, magnates and City men were now quick to follow. The Newcastle
steelmaster Sir William Armstrong had Shaw build Cragside near Rothbury
in Northumberland for him as early as 1870.
Leyswood, near Withyham in Sussex, begun in 1868 at the same time as the
Cookridge Hospital, was one of Shaw’s most influential works (Plate
123). More archaeologically manorial than Glen Andred, it provided a
mass of suggestions that English and American architects borrowed again
and again over the next twenty years and more. Because of Shaw’s later
leadership, it is natural for posterity to note what was new here;
contemporaries, used to the wild vagaries of the High Victorian Gothic,
saw Leyswood rather as a reaction against the ‘modernism’ of the fifties
and earlier sixties. Tile-hung upper storeys and barge-boarded gables,
richly half-timbered—the half-timbering a mere sham applied over solid
brickwork!—long banks of casements that approach the twentieth-century
‘ribbon-window’ and great mullioned bays providing ‘window-walls’ as
extensive as Nesfield’s at Cloverley clothed an interior that was not at
all medieval but a more developed example than Glen Andred of the
‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure 19). The main reception rooms were grouped
about a central hall, from one side of which rose elaborate stairs
arranged in several flights about an open well. Webb had already essayed
this sort of planning in a more orderly way at Arisaig begun in 1863
(Figure 23); but it was Shaw’s version, not Webb’s, that was generally
imitated (see Chapter 15).
[Illustration:
Figure 19. Norman Shaw: Leyswood, Sussex, 1868, plan
]
Shortly after Leyswood, and following fairly closely its manner although
with fewer Late Gothic elements of detail, came the house later called
Grim’s Dyke built at Harrow Weald in 1870-2 for F. W. Goodall,
afterwards the country house of the composer W. S. Gilbert, and Preen
Manor in Shropshire also designed in 1870. Then followed Hopedene, near
Holmbury in Surrey, and Boldre Grange, near Lymington in Hampshire, in
1873; Wispers, Midhurst, in Sussex, in 1875; Chigwell Hall in Essex, and
Pierrepoint, near Farnham in Surrey, in 1876; Merrist Wood near
Guildford in Surrey, and Denham at Totteridge in Hertfordshire, in 1877;
and so on down into the nineties.
After their showing each year at the Royal Academy Exhibition Shaw’s
brilliant pen-and-ink perspectives of these houses were published
photo-lithographically in the professional press; moreover, from 1874
the plans were usually given as well, the first published being that of
Hopedene. Not surprisingly these were the most influential of Shaw’s
works abroad, providing in the late seventies and early eighties one of
the most important sources of the American ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter
15). Beside them, moreover, Webb’s more prominent London works of the
late sixties, the house for George Howard, later Earl of Carlisle, built
in 1868 near Thackeray’s in Palace Green, Kensington, and the small
office building at 19 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, also of 1868, appear
somewhat cranky and overstudied, still rather too Gothic in detail and
lacking the comfortable air of his country-house work. However, the
modest London studio-house at 14 Holland Park Road, Kensington, which
was designed in 1864 and built in 1865 for Val Prinsep, like Morris and
Spencer Stanhope one of the crew of artists who worked on the decoration
of the Oxford Union, must have been more like the Red House and Benfleet
Hall before it was recurrently enlarged by Webb in the following
decades. Another London studio-house for the water-colour painter G. B.
Boyce at 35 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which was begun in 1869, is in rather
better condition today and quite exemplary in its quiet way despite some
changes by Webb and others.
At this point came Nesfield’s Kinmel Park. Shaw and other advanced
architects must have been aware of the character of the designs for this
house from 1870 or 71, even though it was neither shown at the Royal
Academy nor published then, and took some four years to complete. Kinmel
is much more complicated stylistically than Nesfield’s Kew lodge of
1866-7, but it offers the next step in the development of the new Queen
Anne mode. At first sight it might appear to be related rather to Second
Empire work, for the main block on the entrance side is symmetrical,
high-roofed, and dominated by a bold central pavilion. Moreover, the
detailing of the red-brick façades with their profuse light-coloured
stone trim is almost as French of Louis XIII’s time as it is English of
Queen Anne’s day. The garden front, which is carefully ordered but not
symmetrical, and the service wing to the south, much more loosely
composed and with a profusion of small-paned double-hung sash-windows
and dormers, are more definitely English and also more original.
Webb had been using such windows and even approaching the Late Stuart
vernacular in his houses for a year or two before Kinmel was begun. This
was most evident at Trevor Hall (Figure 25), built at Oakleigh Park near
Barnet in Hertfordshire in 1868-70, for that modest country house was
quite symmetrical in design although almost devoid of any sort of
‘period’ detail, whether Gothic or Late Stuart. To more acclaim, Webb
had also been responsible for designing with William Morris a little
earlier, in 1866 and in 1867, the Armoury in St James’s Palace and the
Refreshment Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former,
particularly, is a very original masterpiece of nineteenth-century
decoration, hardly at all related to the contemporary High Victorian
Gothic, yet reflecting the eighteenth century only as regards the
treatment of the wainscoting and the door and window casings (which may
be of eighteenth-century date). The Refreshment Room is also very fine
and now accessible to the public (Plate 97B).
Just after 1870, while Kinmel was still in construction, the main line
of development moved from the country into London. The Education Act of
1870 required the building of innumerable new schools, particularly by
the London School Board. Among the architects successful in the first
competitions that were held for designs for these schools were E. R.
Robson (1835-1917) and J. J. Stevenson (1831-1908); they used a
non-Gothic vocabulary in London stock bricks trimmed with red bricks cut
or moulded along seventeenth-century vernacular lines.[267] This mode
was not unrelated to the more definitely Queen Anne models provided by
the Kew lodge and by Kinmel, but the new London schools were more
irregular in composition and naturally much more cheaply built. Robson,
appointed architect to the London School Board in 1871, soon made this
mode the official one for schools in London County and this, of course,
before long influenced Board School design nationally.
In 1871 Stevenson, like Shaw a Scot out to make a London reputation,
built a new house for himself in what is now Bayswater Road. This he
named the Red House, like Morris’s at Bexley Heath of a decade earlier,
in order to call attention to the fact that its brickwork was not
covered with stucco but exposed like that of the Thackeray and Howard
houses in Palace Green. In fact, however, it was built like the Board
Schools of brownish stock bricks with red-brick detail elaborately
moulded, gauged, and cut in the Late Stuart way. Although Stevenson’s
house had little of the real elegance of Kinmel or the natural ease of
Shaw’s manors, its novelty and its fairly conspicuous location would
have attracted attention in any case. But Stevenson, a very accomplished
publicist, saw the advantage of proclaiming for this hybrid mode a name,
‘Queen Anne’, which was evidently no less applicable to Nesfield’s Kew
lodge and Kinmel or even to his friend Robson’s schools. Thus was a
revival formally launched.
Two new buildings in London by Shaw, begun in 1872 and in 1873, were
definitely in the new mode. Only at this point, indeed, does the term
Queen Anne begin to make any sense as applied to Shaw’s work. Despite
the valid claim to priority that Stevenson made for his Red House in a
paper read in 1874 at the Architects’ Conference ‘On the recent reaction
of taste in architecture’ in which he claimed the Queen Anne mode was a
‘Re-Renaissance’ (_sic_), and his own relative success from this time on
as a fashionable London house-architect, the Queen Anne became Shaw’s
from the moment that he first turned his hand to it in 1872. Whether the
original idea came to him from Devey or from Nesfield—he had probably
worked himself on the drawings for the Kew lodge—or was merely an
attempt to outbid a rival Scotsman on the London scene makes no real
difference.
New Zealand Chambers, the office building which Shaw erected in 1872-3
in Leadenhall Street in the City, was certainly totally unlike anything
the Age of Anne ever saw except for the cut-brick detailing of the
pedimented entrance. Boldly projecting red brick piers divided the tall
façade into three bays, while between them rose oriel windows broken by
ornately sculptured spandrels imitated from the mid-seventeenth-century
ones on Sparrow’s House at Ipswich. The small panes and thick white
sash-bars of these windows made the scale surprisingly domestic in
contrast to the usual boldness of High Victorian commercial work, and
the whole composition was effectively tied together by an ornately
pargeted cove cornice that ran straight across the top (see Chapter 14).
Above this the rather simple range of continuous dormers in the roof was
very much in the spirit of the ‘ribbon-window’ bands on his country
houses.
So dazzled were contemporaries by the lush exuberance of Shaw’s ornament
on the spandrels and the cove that they hardly noticed the way in which
the bold articulation of this façade by the brick piers, with the areas
between nearly all window, frankly reflecting the internal iron
construction, provided most satisfactory lighting for the offices; nor
that Shaw, while keeping his scale intimate in all the detailing, was
not afraid to stress the verticality of his façade by avoiding emphasis
on the storey lines. Only the weaker features of the design—the
arbitrary asymmetry of the entrance, the profuse ornamentation, and the
underscaling—were generally imitated.
Lowther Lodge, built in 1873-4, a large free-standing mansion in
Kensington Gore, still survives—it is now the home of the Royal
Geographical Society—as New Zealand Chambers does not. Here the
vocabulary of cut and moulded brick is more consistently Late Stuart,
although the general composition, with many gables, two tall polygonal
bay-windows, quantities of dormers, and tall fluted chimney stacks, is
as romantically complex as that of Shaw’s manors in Sussex and Surrey.
However, both the front and the rear façades, when studied, will be
found to approximate symmetry in their principal portions as does the
front of Glen Andred; and the main rooms inside, the hall at the front
and the drawing-room behind, are quite symmetrical and have recognizably
Early Georgian (rather than specifically Queen Anne) fireplaces and door
and window casings, although their grouping is still, so to say,
agglutinative.
In a Surrey house of the same date, 1873, like Trevor Hall unhappily
demolished, Webb moved rather farther in a similar direction. Joldwynds
near Dorking was quite as symmetrical as Trevor Hall but even less
Gothic. The vocabulary of tile-hanging on the upper storeys, with
weather-boarding in the gables, was as authentically regional as that of
Shaw’s nearby houses, but the vaguely eighteenth-century vernacular of
the detailing was much simpler than Shaw’s repertory of moulded and cut
brickwork at Lowther Lodge.
Nesfield, in designing what is now Barclays Bank in the Market Square of
Saffron Walden in Essex, remained more eclectic, staying closer to the
manorial mode of Cloverley Hall yet using again various Japanese motifs
in the rich decoration. This was built in 1874. Godwin, who had just
moved to London with the actress Ellen Terry and was now largely
occupied with designing stage sets, developed further in the rooms of
their rented house in Taviton Street in 1873-4 the Anglo-Japanese mode
of his interiors of ten years earlier in Bristol. In 1874 he also
arranged an exhibition of paintings in a similar spirit for his friend
the painter Whistler at the new Grosvenor Galleries.[268]
In the mid seventies, however, it was Shaw, not Nesfield or Godwin, who
occupied the centre of the architectural stage. In the Convent of the
Sisters of Bethany of 1874 in St Clements Road at Boscombe near
Bournemouth he disguised his use of concrete, then a relatively new
building material, with his familiar Sussex vernacular. He did the same
in a slightly later series of designs for cottages made of patented
prefabricated concrete slabs.[269] It is worth noting, moreover, that
the internal iron skeleton above the bold cantilever on the front of his
Old Swan House (Plate 103) of 1876 at 17 Chelsea Embankment in London
provides in effect an example of what would later be called ‘skyscraper
construction’, since it carries completely the weight of the brickwork
of the upper walls; this was a decade before the ‘invention’ of this
sort of construction in Chicago (see Chapter 14). Shaw’s interest in
technical developments and his enthusiasm for new materials and methods
was evidently very great, always provided that he could bend them to his
particular sort of retroactive pictorial vision. When he built the Jury
House for the Paris Exhibition of 1878 of patent cement bricks, for
example, he designed the façade very elegantly in his Late Stuart manner
just as if it were of cut and moulded clay bricks. Godwin and Whistler,
however, were showing at this same exhibition an Anglo-Japanese room of
highly original character in association with Watt the furniture
manufacturer.
Shaw’s excellent church of this period at Bournemouth, St Michael’s and
All Angels, Poole Hill, begun in 1873, is Late Victorian in the
crispness and clarity of its design but less archaeological than those
of this date by Bodley. It seems to indicate that he could have made a
great reputation as a church builder had he not been absorbed with
secular work. But by the seventies secular work once again provided the
field of major prestige in England, as it had hardly done since 1840,
and so Shaw concentrated on it. Having revolutionized country-house
design, he now turned, more definitely than at Lowther Lodge—by its size
and open siting more a country house set in the city—to urban and
suburban domestic work. In these his conquest was even more complete, at
least in England and, as regards the suburbs, in America.
The Old Swan House and its neighbour Cheyne House at the outer end of
the Chelsea Embankment, respectively of 1876 and 1875, are both mansions
rather than ordinary terrace houses. They also represent a considerably
further advance along the road towards a formal eighteenth-century
revival than Lowther Lodge. Old Swan House is completely symmetrical,
and the upper storeys are also quite regularly fenestrated in the early
eighteenth-century way (Plate 103). However, the total effect is still
highly Picturesque because of the way these upper storeys are
cantilevered forward; from the cantilever depend, moreover, elaborate
oriels of much earlier character very similar to those Shaw had
introduced at New Zealand Chambers. Such oriels he long continued to
employ; they are not only a principal feature of his own house in
Hampstead, built in this same year, but also of the much later Holl and
Long houses. Cheyne House occupies an irregular curving plot with the
entrance in Royal Hospital Road; but Shaw used all his considerable
ingenuity to give it symmetrical façades, even though the plan actually
has little of the orderliness of that of Lowther Lodge.
If these two Chelsea houses seem to presage an early return to the
serenity of Georgian street architecture, Shaw’s J. P. Heseltine house
of 1875 at 196 Queen’s Gate in South Kensington unleashed a flood of the
most individualistic house-design London had ever seen. Stucco-fronted
houses of builders’ Renaissance design were still being erected on
contiguous sites when this tall gabled façade rose, totally oblivious of
old and new neighbours. Cut brick, moulded brick, terracotta, all of the
brightest red, surround very large mullioned windows in a composition
that is gratuitously asymmetrical at the base but symmetrical in the
upper storeys below the crowning gable. For fifteen years such houses
proliferated in the Chelsea, Kensington, and Earls Court districts of
western London. The best are by Shaw himself, such as those at 68, 62,
and 72 Cadogan Square—the first of 1879, the others of 1882—and those at
8-11 and 15 Chelsea Embankment of 1878-9; but more are by other
architects, and the vast majority by builders. In the Chelsea Embankment
range River House at No. 3 is by Bodley; Nos 4-6 are by Godwin; and No.
7 is by R. Phéné Spiers (1838-1916), an architect whose Parisian
training did not restrain him from following Shaw.
Collingham Gardens of 1881-7 by Sir Ernest George (1839-1922) and his
then partner Harold A. Peto (?-1890), a sort of square with variously
designed houses, all gabled, opening on to a lawn in the centre,
provides a still more complete illustration of what may be called
Neo-Picturesque urbanism. Not at all Shavian, the detailing of many of
these houses is very similar to that of Cuijpers’s Rijksmuseum and none
of it Queen Anne. The contiguous mansions that George & Peto built in
1882 near by in Harrington Gardens, one for W. S. Gilbert at No. 19
(Plate 104B), the other for Sir Ernest Cassel, the banker, are the most
elaborate single London examples of their domestic work. The house of
the composer of the Savoy Operas approaches very closely the German
Meistersinger mode of the period, but the touch is much
lighter—intentionally whimsical perhaps?—and both the organization of
the whole and the execution of the profuse detail is very superior to
what one finds in most contemporary German work (see Chapter 9).
Stevenson’s best and most Shavian houses in London are two that he built
in 1878 in partnership with A. J. Adams in Lowther Gardens behind
Lowther Lodge; however, those he built at 40-42 Pont Street have a
certain interest because the mode that he exploited here is often called
‘Pont Street Dutch’, so ubiquitous is it in this part of Chelsea. This
name also emphasizes the characteristic tendency of the late seventies
and eighties towards varying the English late seventeenth-century
vernacular mode by the introduction of Dutch and Flemish elements of
detail, usually executed in terracotta, as George & Peto did in most of
the Earls Court houses mentioned above. Thus, by the late seventies, the
long-established London tradition of coherent terrace design came to an
end. That was, on the whole, a real urbanistic misfortune, however
excellent some of the best individual houses by the above-mentioned
architects may be.
Shaw’s venture into the suburbs initiated a new domestic tradition of
positive value and also a tradition of ‘planning’ that has continued
with some modification down to the present, both in England and abroad.
At Bedford Park, Turnham Green, then well beyond the western edges of
built-up London, Shaw laid out in 1876 and largely designed an early
‘Garden Suburb’ (see Chapter 24), in fact, almost a ‘new town’, similar
in some ways to the New Towns of the present post-war period, but
without any industries of its own. Small houses, mostly semi-detached,
i.e., in pairs, stand in their own gardens, simply and casually built of
good red brick with a certain amount of modest Queen Anne detailing. The
scheme is very complete, including a church by Shaw that is most
ingeniously styled to harmonize with the domesticity of the houses, a
club, a tavern, shops, and so forth.[270] Godwin’s assistant Maurice B.
Adams (1849-1933) and E. J. May (1853-1941) also worked here, as well as
Godwin himself; indeed, some of the best houses are not by Shaw but by
Godwin.
With characteristic versatility, while the construction of Bedford Park
was proceeding in this simplified version of his middle manner,
Picturesque but distinctly anti-Gothic, Shaw was also erecting at Adcote
in Shropshire in 1877 a large Tudor manor house in reddish stone. This
is notable for its restrained, almost ‘abstract’, detailing and for the
tall mullioned window-wall of the hall bay, more than rivalling that of
Cloverley Hall. Flete, a still larger house in Devon begun the year
after Adcote, is also Tudor. Dawpool in Cheshire, demolished in 1926,
was begun in 1882 in much the same mode but was even more extensive and
elaborate than Flete. J. F. Doyle (1840-1913) of Liverpool collaborated
on this.
The Bedford Park church of 1878, St Michael’s, is more or less Queen
Anne, at least not at all Gothic. But at Ilkley in Yorkshire Shaw’s St
Margaret’s of the previous year is a remarkably personal essay in the
Perpendicular, low and broad and elegantly detailed. In quality this is
well above his earlier Bournemouth church and rather more original in
its proportions than the standard work of Bodley and his imitators at
this time. Somewhat similar, and still more original, is St Swithin’s in
Gervis Road in Bournemouth, also of 1877; while All Saints’, Leek, of
1886 carries almost to the point of parody the Shavian stylization of
English Late Gothic proportion towards the broad and low—visually, that
is; ritualistically they are quite as ‘High’ as Bodley’s.
Next Shaw produced his finest and most creatively conceived church, Holy
Trinity, Latimer Road, comparable in quality to his early church at
Bingley but wholly different in character. This was built in 1887-9 for
the Harrow Mission in a poor district of western London. The interior of
Holy Trinity is a single vessel, very broad and moderately low, covered
by a flat-pointed wooden ceiling which is tied by vigorous horizontal
members of iron cased in wood and heavily buttressed externally (Plate
106A). Behind the chancel, which is no more than a square dais on which
the altar is raised, rises an ecclesiastical version of the Shavian
window-wall, broad and low like the space it terminates but arched and
lightly traceried at the top. The result could hardly be more different
from Shaw’s domestic Queen Anne of these years. It is on such things as
this church, in which his basic architectural capacities are revealed
unconfused by frivolous elaboration of detail, that his claim to high
talent, occasionally to genius, must be based.
If Shaw did not cease to design churches while continually extending the
range of his secular practice, it is a still more notable testimony to
the breadth of his approach that he built in 1879, in Kensington Gore
between the Albert Hall and Lowther Lodge—and with a characteristic
disregard for both—the first really handsome block of flats erected in
London; the first, that is, unless one prefers the Second Empire ones of
the late sixties in Grosvenor Gardens. The tall and extensive mass of
this block, like that of most of his houses of the period, is extremely
picturesque in silhouette because of the very tall and ornate gables
that face the Park. But these are quite regularly spaced and the walls
below them, with the multitudinous segment-arched, white-sashed windows
all evenly phrased in threes, illustrate Shaw’s Queen Anne of the
seventies at its most disciplined (Plate 104A).[271]
As has been noted, Shaw was by now the preferred architect of most of
his fellow Royal Academicians. Webb had built houses for several of the
Pre-Raphaelite painters who were his friends and associates. Less
successful and more advanced painters employed Godwin. Small though it
is and now much remodelled, the White House in Tite Street round the
corner from the Chelsea Embankment, which Godwin built for his friend
Whistler in 1878-9, has one of the most original façades of the decade.
As its name implies, although all of brick, it was not ‘red’ like
Morris’s and Stevenson’s famous houses, but ‘white’ because the walls
were so painted,[272] recalling perhaps the white-painted Colonial
farmhouses of Whistler’s New England youth. The sparse detail is related
in its vaguely eighteenth-century character to the Shavian Queen Anne,
but it is much more delicate and linear, indeed almost Late Georgian in
inspiration. Most significantly, the composition of the façade as a
whole, and even more evidently the asymmetrical placing of the door and
windows, owes a great deal to those abstract principles of Japanese art
which both Whistler and Godwin had been studying for almost twenty
years.
Whistler had to sell his house almost as soon as it was finished in
order to pay the costs of his unhappy libel suit against Ruskin, a legal
battle in which the Late Victorian and the High Victorian came to
violent grips. But Godwin went on to build several more studio houses in
Tite Street at Nos 29, 33, and 44 in the next few years and also the
Tower House in 1885. Similar, but inferior, is No. 31 by R. W. Edis,
which John Singer Sargent later occupied. Also in Tite Street is the
commonplace terrace house at No. 16, of which the interiors were
decorated by Godwin for Oscar Wilde,[273] the greatest aesthete of them
all. Wilde’s influential ideas in this field, carried to America on a
lecture tour in 1881-2, were largely derived from Godwin, it may be
noted.
When Shaw turned again to commercial work it was to design in 1881 the
offices for the bankers Baring Brothers at 8 Bishopsgate in the City of
London. This small building was as discreet, as orderly, and almost as
domestic as Cheyne House. But the next year, so chameleon-like was his
development, he gave the more conspicuous Alliance Assurance Building at
the corner of St James’s Street and Pall Mall opposite St James’s Palace
broad, low, banded arches of brick and stone below and elaborated the
vertical articulation of the upper storeys with profuse sculptural
ornament.[274] Very tall and scallopy gables provide a Neo-Picturesque
effect only too comparable to the most vulgar ‘Pont Street Dutch’ houses
designed by his rivals or even to contemporary Northern Renaissance work
on the Continent. To emphasize his variousness further, there is
diagonally across the street a later edifice for the same clients, built
in collaboration with his pupil Ernest Newton (1856-1922) in 1903, so
quietly academic in the Neo-Georgian taste of the early twentieth
century that one can hardly believe it is also Shaw’s.
His next important secular works after the first Alliance building, both
begun in 1887 like the Latimer Road church, contrast with each other
almost as markedly as they do with that. Characteristic of the
essentially private patronage—patronage from successful artists,
patronage from business, patronage from the professional
classes—responsible for the best English architecture of this period is
the fact that Shaw’s first public commission came only at this advanced
stage of his career. London’s Metropolitan Police Offices in New
Scotland Yard, of which the original block was built in 1887-8 and the
second block to the south added in 1890, have a splendid site on the
Thames Embankment. Remembering, it would seem almost for the first time,
his own Scottish birth—or possibly in apposite reference to the familiar
name of the London police headquarters—Shaw designed Scotland Yard
somewhat like a Scottish castle with corner tourelles and tall curved
gables, but using throughout heavy and rather academic later
seventeenth-century detailing of a much less regional sort (Plate 106B).
Red brick and stone in combination make it also as colouristic as the
Alliance building, the solidity of the proportions makes it weighty, and
the high gables and tower roofs give it great variety of outline. As a
result, the total effect is almost High Victorian in its vigour and its
massiveness. Shaw is said to have regretted the need to build a second
block; certainly it must have been more impressive when the original
block stood alone like an isolated riverside fortress.
Scotland Yard seems to look backward somewhat, at least in relation to
that gradual development towards orderliness and restraint of an
eighteenth-century sort which can be discerned in Shaw’s work of the
seventies despite all its variousness. On the other hand, the house that
he built in 1887-8 for Fred White,[275] an American diplomat, at 170
Queen’s Gate, so near to that strikingly aberrant terrace house of the
previous decade at No. 196, seems to look forward into the early
twentieth century, when the eighteenth-century Georgian would provide
the basis for a quite archaeological revival. This plain rectangular
block of red brick, orderly and symmetrical on the long façade towards
Imperial Institute Road and also on the end towards Queen’s Gate, with
three ranges of large sash-windows below an academic cornice, is
therefore as much a historical landmark, if not an original creation, as
was Glen Andred twenty years before (Plate #105:pl105). The suave and
well-scaled ornamentation is concentrated at the doorway in the
eighteenth-century manner, and the hip roof is unbroken except by
regularly spaced dormers. Yet, curiously enough, the plan is somewhat
less completely regular and symmetrical than one might expect from the
exterior; for example, the large drawing-room towards Queen’s Gate is
L-shaped.
Only the excellence of the craftsmanship here, based not on the Sussex
vernacular but on the most sophisticated work of around 1720, the
prominence of the tall chimneys, and the wide central dormer with its
curved top reveal Shaw’s hand and suggest, perhaps, an early date;
otherwise such a house might well have been built forty years or so
later by many other architects, English and American (see Chapter 24).
However, Webb at Smeaton Manor[276] in Yorkshire, built in 1877-9, had
already arrived at an almost identical regularity and formality of
design (Plate 102A). Characteristically, however, he did not elaborate
the exterior with borrowed eighteenth-century detailing, and the house
remains almost undatable on internal evidence, like much of his best
work.
Scotland Yard is an all but unique example of an English public building
of distinction erected in the eighties. Before continuing with the
account of Shaw’s work in the nineties, two prominent features of the
London skyline, the most striking additions made since Butterfield’s
spire of All Saints’ rose in Margaret Street in the fifties and the
Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament was completed in the sixties,
should be mentioned. Both the Imperial Institute, towering over Shaw’s
contiguous Fred White house in South Kensington, which was built in
1887-93 in honour of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee, and the Catholic
cathedral of Westminster, not begun until 1894, are especially notable
for their very tall dome-topped towers. The cathedral, which was
designed by J. F. Bentley (1839-1902), a pupil of Clutton, has also a
magnificent domed interior. The Institute, built by T. E. Collcutt
(1840-1924), was perhaps of less over-all interest but extremely refined
and elegant in its detailing compared to the contemporary work of George
& Peto, which it most closely resembles. Curiously enough, the very
underscaled membering and even so dainty a trick as the use of single
courses of red brick here and there in the stonework does not make the
280-foot tower petty. It may be compared to its own very great advantage
with Haller’s contemporary tower, in a somewhat parallel Northern
Renaissance vein, on the Hamburg Rathaus. Collcutt’s own earlier tower
on the Town Hall at Wakefield in Yorkshire of 1877-80 was less
successful than this London landmark, which has happily survived the
rest of the building.
Bentley’s tower has a similar silhouette, but is more boldly striated by
broad bands of brick and stone. The detail, partly Byzantine, partly
Early Renaissance despite his distinguished early career as a Late
Victorian Gothic church architect, is, like Collcutt’s, rather
underscaled. This goes still further to prove the extent to which this
period in England saw all architecture, even that of cathedrals, in
domestic terms. However, well before Bentley began his cathedral—it is
not even yet completed as regards the internal decoration—Shaw had
turned towards considerably more monumental forms at Scotland Yard, and
even to quite academic design.
At Bryanston, a large country house in Dorset begun in 1889 for Lord
Portman, Shaw modelled the main block on Sir Roger Pratt’s Coleshill
House of the mid seventeenth century; the side wings here are quite
Gibbsian. This is the earliest example of what the English call
‘Monumental Queen Anne’—to distinguish this sort of work henceforth from
the freer and more vernacular Queen Anne of the seventies and
eighties—and the Americans ‘Georgian Revival’. Two years later Shaw
built Chesters in Northumberland. This mansion is equally academic, if
less derivative from particular sources; but it is also highly original
in plan and conception. The composition of the incurved façade planes,
moreover, is as knowing and as ingenious in its formal way as anything
he ever built in a more rambling vein.
Later in the nineties Shaw’s stylistic uncertainty—or, if one wishes to
call it so, his versatility—was notably illustrated in two large
commercial buildings built in Liverpool. The façade of Parr’s Bank in
Castle Street, built in 1898 in collaboration with W. E. Willink
(1856-1924) and P. C. Thicknesse (1860-1920), is of the suavest academic
order. Its proportions are surer than in any of his other works except
Chesters, and yet he striated its light-coloured stonework with bands of
green marble in a way few later architects working in this vein would
ever have thought of doing. Two years later, in the offices that he
built in collaboration with Doyle for Ismay, Imrie & Co., later the
White Star Line—for whom he also designed the interiors of the liner
_Oceanic_—he provided what was externally almost a copy of Scotland
Yard, and yet inside he exposed the riveted metal structural members in
a fashion at once frank and highly decorative.
If Shaw had had the opportunity to rebuild Nash’s Regent Street Quadrant
completely according to the designs that he prepared in 1905 the loss of
the original work might not be so serious. Approaching seventy-five, he
turned here to a Piranesian Classicism. The colonnaded section finished
in 1908, which forms the northern front of the Piccadilly Hotel, though
flanked at both ends by an emasculated version of Shaw’s design carried
out in 1923 by his disciple and biographer Sir Reginald Blomfield
(1856-1942), rivals in boldness anything English architecture had
produced since the days of Vanbrugh and Hawksmore. Even more
spectacular, and also incomplete, since the gable at the east end was
never built, is the Piccadilly façade of the hotel with its tremendous
open colonnade raised high against the sky (Plate 107). The Classical
serenity of this feature is characteristically contrasted with the
voluted silhouette of the tall gable over the projecting wing at the
west end, and the exuberance of the whole puts most other Edwardian
Neo-Baroque to shame.
To summarize Shaw’s achievement or even to epitomize his personal style
is almost impossible. He was, for example, in no ordinary sense of the
word merely an eclectic; yet his modes were very various, more various
than those of almost any other nineteenth-century architect of equal
rank. After his first borrowings from Nesfield, however, they were all
his own—his own, at least, until hordes of other architects in England
and America took them up, one or two at a time, often vulgarizing them
beyond recognition. He was probably not the most talented English
architect of his generation and certainly not the most original. How
much he owed to Nesfield at the start it is impossible to estimate, even
though at least two of the characteristic Shavian modes seem to have
been originally of his invention—if not, indeed, of Devey’s!
Yet ironically Nesfield’s own later work appeared to contemporaries
almost like an echo of Shaw’s if it was known at all. He never had any
such success as did Shaw, and died relatively young in 1888. Godwin also
was somehow never able, after 1870, to repeat the public triumphs that
had been his in the competitions of the early sixties. In his later life
he turned more and more to designing sets and costumes for the theatre
and died in 1886, two years before Nesfield. Webb lived on till 1915,
although he retired from practice in 1900; his spirit, moreover, lived
on in a quite different way from Shaw’s. It was through emulation of the
craftsman-like integrity of Webb’s work that the attitudes, rather than
the forms, of Pugin’s earlier Gothic Revival were transmitted to the
first modern architects quite as much as through study of the writings
of his friend and close associate Morris.
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CHAPTER 13
H. H. RICHARDSON AND McKIM, MEAD & WHITE
THE story of Shaw’s career is a fascinating one, far more interesting in
fact than the general history of English architecture in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. It was a success-drama in four or
five acts, of which the last was by no means the least brilliant.
Richardson’s career was less eventful, even though, at its peak in the
mid eighties, it was at least as successful as Shaw’s. It was also
incomplete, since death brought his production to an end at that peak
when he was only forty-eight. Yet Richardson’s achievement must be
considered greater than Shaw’s, qualitatively if not quantitatively,
because his work was better integrated and his development more
intelligently directed. Moreover, his influence operated on two levels:
on one it was as wide, if more evanescent, than Shaw’s—say, what Shaw’s
might have been if _he_ had died at the age of forty-eight, that is, in
1879—on another level it was more like that of Webb, affecting deeply
several of the most creative American architects of the next two
generations.
Henry Hobson Richardson was born in 1838 near New Orleans in
Louisiana. Upon graduation from Harvard in 1858 Richardson, bilingual
on account of his Louisiana birth, not unnaturally proceeded to Paris
to the École des Beaux-Arts, entering there the atelier of L.-J. André
(1819-90), a pupil of Lebas who had become a professor at the École in
1855. But after two years the outbreak of the Civil War in the United
States cut off his remittances from home and he had to find work in
order to maintain himself. His experience in the office of Théodore
Labrouste, notably in working on the designs for the Asile d’Ivry
outside Paris, was perhaps of more ultimate value to him than what he
learned in André’s atelier and at the École. Several of his earliest
works in America, designed immediately after his return from Paris in
1865, have been discussed already (see Chapter 11). It was with the
Brattle Square (now First Baptist) Church on Commonwealth Avenue at
Clarendon Street in the new Back Bay residential district of Boston,
the commission for which he won in a competition held in 1870, that
his career seriously began. During the years that this was in
construction, 1871-2, he had in his office a young assistant, Charles
F. McKim (1847-1909), who had returned from Paris at the outbreak of
the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. It may well be that the forceful
McKim helped Richardson to crystallize the divergent elements evident
in his earlier work into a coherent personal style. The Brattle Square
Church somewhat resembles in its round-arched medievalism such a Paris
church of the sixties as Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge, which
Richardson himself may have seen and admired in the early stages of
its construction. But the squarish T-shaped plan, without aisles but
with transepts, would have been as unusual in France at this period as
in England. The material is the richly textured Roxbury Puddingstone
rising in broad plain surfaces to the medium-pitched gables. The
detail strikes a sort of balance between the French Romanesquoid and
the English High Victorian Gothic, the forms being more French, the
execution more English. The varied polychromy of the deep voussoirs of
the arches is certainly English, but with a personal note in the great
variety of the coloured banding. The corner placing of the tall tower,
with its fine frieze by the French sculptor Bartholdi, is English in
spirit, but its shape is rather more campanile-like than any English
church tower had been since the forties.
A similar stylistic crystallization can be seen in the very extensive
plant of the State Hospital at Buffalo, N.Y., a commission also won by
Richardson in competition in 1870. This was largely re-designed before
construction began in 1872 and was in building throughout the whole
decade. It was, functionally, the sort of commission for which
Richardson’s French training best prepared him, and the planning is
French. The other sources of the design seem to have been mostly
English, particularly the projects of Burges.
Two buildings in Springfield, Mass., where Richardson had been working
on and off since his return from Paris, are even more significant than
the Buffalo asylum for the rather definite evidence they offer as to his
chief contemporary sources of inspiration at this point. The spire of
the North Congregational Church there—commissioned as early as 1868, but
built in 1872-3, after being re-designed in 1871 or 72—is a rather squat
pyramid of quarry-faced brownstone with four corner spirelets rising
from the same square base, apparently a version of the spire Burges
designed for his Skelton church begun in 1871 or that of Street’s St
James the Less. The tower of the Hampden County Courthouse of 1871-3
also comes from Burges, in this case from the project that he entered in
the London Law Courts competition of 1866. The general composition owes
more to the slightly earlier English town halls at Northampton and
Congleton by Godwin, who was also Burges’s collaborator on the Law
Courts project. But the magnificent scale of the random ashlar walls of
quarry-faced Monson granite, their coldness relieved by bright red
pointing, is as personal to Richardson as the similar brownstone masonry
of the North Church and the Buffalo Hospital.
Richardson’s American Express Building,[277] his first work in Chicago,
which was begun in 1872, and his contemporary Andrews house in Newport,
R.I., both showed comparable evidence of generic influence from
contemporary England (see Chapters 14 and 15:ch15#). In this same year,
1872, Richardson won the competition for Trinity Church[278] in Boston,
which was to occupy a conspicuous site on the east side of Copley
Square, the principal open space in the new Back Bay district. Preceding
by a year the Panic of 1873, which slowed building almost to a
standstill, this commission and that for the Buffalo Hospital kept him
busy through five lean years. As Trinity rose to completion over the
years 1873-7, this big Boston church established Richardson’s reputation
as the new leader among American architects (Plate 108A). Even before
Trinity was finished others were producing crude imitations of it; and
over the next twenty years many prominent American churches,
particularly in the Middle West, followed in some degree the paradigm
that it provided.
Trinity is in plan an enlarged and modified version of the Brattle
Square Church. A deep semicircular chancel provides a fourth arm, and a
great square lantern rises over the crossing. The elaborate porch, so
archaeologically Provençal Romanesque, was added by Richardson’s
successors, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, in the nineties, as were also the
tops of the western towers; the present decorations of the chancel are
much later and by Charles D. Maginnis (1867-1955).
The materials of Trinity are pink Milford granite in quarry-faced random
ashlar for the walling and the Longmeadow brownstone that he had first
used on the Unity Church in Springfield for the profuse trim. The detail
changed in character as the work proceeded; in the earliest portions
executed it is heavy and crude, with the foliage carved in a
naturalistic High Victorian Gothic vein. But the logic of the round
arches that Richardson had been consistently using since he designed the
Brattle Square Church in 1870 led him to study Révoil’s _Architecture
romane du midi de la France_,[279] and such a characteristic feature as
the polychromy on the outside of the apse is specifically Auvergnat.
Moreover, the executed lantern was rather closely based on that of the
Old Cathedral of Salamanca in Spain—a model that Richardson’s assistant
Stanford White (1853-1906), who succeeded McKim in his employ in 1872,
seems to have suggested.
Most contemporaries, supposing all worthy nineteenth-century
architecture to be necessarily derivative from this or that style of the
past, believed that Richardson had initiated a Romanesque Revival here.
But Richardson remained really as responsive to contemporary English
ideas as he had been earlier. For example, the curious double-curved
wooden roof with kingpost trusses derives from published examples of
similar roofs built or projected by Burges. Equally symptomatic of
English influence is the use of stained glass by Morris and Burne-Jones
in the north transept windows. That glass, however, is inferior in
richness of tone to the small windows in the west front designed by the
American artist John LaFarge. LaFarge was also responsible for the
painted decoration on the walls and the roofs.
To take over Fuller & Laver’s New York State Capitol at Albany when
already partly built in the way that Richardson and Eidlitz—a
foreign-born exponent of Romanesque of the earlier _Rundbogenstil_ sort,
it will be recalled—were asked to do in 1875 was a thankless job; but
this call for Richardson’s aid illustrates the rapidity with which he
achieved a national reputation. More important, both historically and
intrinsically, than what he was able to carry out in Albany—chiefly the
Senate Chamber—were a second house that he built in Shepard Avenue in
Newport, R.I., in 1874-6 and a building in Main Street in Hartford,
Conn., of 1875-6 (see Chapters 14 and 15). The Sherman house is the
first example of a Shavian manor successfully translated into American
materials; the Cheney Block (now Brown-Thompson Store) is not Shavian at
all, but very similar to the arcaded façades common in England since the
late fifties (Plate 116A).
To the late seventies belong two remarkably fine buildings, still
obviously related to slightly earlier English work, but more personal
than either the Newport house or the Hartford commercial building. With
the Winn Memorial Library in Woburn, Mass., of 1877-8 Richardson
initiated a line of small-town public libraries that reached its climax
in the Crane Library in Quincy, Mass., of 1880-3 (Plate 110). The high
window-bands of the stack wings, a monumental stone version of Shaw’s
‘ribbon-windows’, and the stone-mullioned ‘window-walls’ at the ends are
more significant than the round stair-turrets and the cavernous entrance
arches—Early Christian from Syria[280] in origin, not Southern French
Romanesque, it should be noted—that romanticize their generally compact
massing. The highly functional planning is asymmetrical yet very
carefully ordered, perhaps the one remaining trace of his Paris
training.
In building Sever Hall, a classroom building for Harvard College in
Cambridge, Mass., in 1878-80 Richardson abandoned rock-faced granite and
brownstone, materials whose common use would, a little later, mark the
extent of his influence on other architects, for the red brick of the
nearby eighteenth-century buildings in the old Harvard Yard. He even
imitated the plain oblong masses of these Georgian edifices under his
great red-tiled hip-roof; but the front, with its deep Syrian arch and
two tower-like rounded bays, and the rear, with a broader and shallower
central bow, are wholly Richardsonian. There is a rather Shavian
pediment over the centre of the front, however; while the moulded brick
mullions of the banked windows and the very rich cut-brick panels of
floral ornament seem to reflect current English work by Stevenson and by
Godwin as well as by Shaw. Yet the whole has been amalgamated into a
composition quite as orderly as anything the English ‘Annites’ had
produced. At the same time Sever Hall is almost as vigorous and manly in
scale as his contemporary libraries of granite and brownstone.
Two domestic buildings of 1880, one entirely shingled, the other of
rough glacial boulders, are even more personal works; and both,
particularly the former, represent the American domestic mode of this
period now called the ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter 15). The John Bryant
house in Cohasset, Mass., of 1880 first illustrated his emancipation
from the direct Shavian imitation that had begun with the Sherman house
and continued in several projects—probably mostly White’s work in actual
fact—that were prepared in the later seventies but never executed. Quite
a series of later shingled houses by Richardson followed the Bryant
house between 1881 and 1886 (Plate 124B).
The contemporary Ames Gate Lodge[281] in North Easton, Mass., has a sort
of antediluvian power in the bold plasticity of its boulder-built
walls—a theme exploited once before in Grace Church in Medford, Mass.,
of 1867 it will be recalled—as remote from the Romanesque as from the
Queen Anne. A similarly absolute originality of a more gracious order
can be seen in the Fenway Bridge of 1880-1 in Boston; its tawny
seam-faced granite walls happily echo the easy naturalistic curves of
the landscaping by his friend F. L. Olmsted (1822-1903),[282] of which
it is a principal feature.
1881 saw the initiation of a more monumental building for Harvard,
Austin Hall,[283] then the Law School, which was completed in 1883. Rich
Auvergnat polychromy and a great deal of rather Byzantinesque carved
ornament somewhat confuse the direct structural expressiveness of the
thoroughly articulated masonry walls; as a result Austin Hall provided a
multitude of decorative clichés for imitators to abuse. Much more modest
and also much more significant was the station at Auburndale, Mass.,
also of 1881, built for the Boston & Albany Railroad. This was the first
and the finest of a series of small suburban stations notable for the
simplicity of their design and for the compositional skill with which
the open elements, carried on sturdy but gracefully shaped wooden
supports, were related to the solid masonry blocks of granite and
brownstone beneath sweeping roofs of tile or slate. If Shaw was called
on in the nineties to design the interiors of an ocean liner for the
White Star Line, Richardson had already provided in 1884 a railway
carriage for the Boston & Albany. This was neither Romanesque nor Queen
Anne in inspiration, but had domestically scaled interiors lined with
small square oaken panels and no carved ornament of any sort.
Stations, libraries, and houses form the bulk of Richardson’s production
from 1882 until his death. But two much larger buildings, which he
himself judged to be his master works, were also fortunately initiated,
one in 1884 and the other in 1885, well before his last illness began,
though both had to be finished by his successors Shepley, Rutan &
Coolidge after his death. The Allegheny County Buildings[284] in
Pittsburgh, Penna., consist of a vast quadrangular courthouse dominated
by a very tall tower that rises in the centre of the front and a gaol
across the street to the rear. Except for the courtyard walls,
interesting for the variety and the openness of their ranges of granite
arcading, the courthouse offers on the whole only a sort of summary of
his talents; the detail, above all, is afflicted with an archaeological
dryness that must be due to the increasing dependence of his assistants
on published documents of medieval carving. The courthouse provided,
however, the model for many large public buildings in the next few
years. Among these, the City Hall in Minneapolis, Minn., begun by the
local firm of Long & Kees in 1887, is not unworthy of comparison with
the original, particularly as regards the tower. That of Toronto in
Canada, built by E. J. Lennox in 1890-9, is less interesting but even
more monumental; it also signalizes the supersession of English by
American influence in Canadian architecture at this point, as does the
almost equally Richardsonian Windsor Station in Montreal begun by the
American architect Bruce Price in 1888.
The Pittsburgh Jail is a masterpiece of the most personal order,
Piranesian in scale, nobly expressive of its gloomy purpose, and as
superb an example of granite masonry as exists in the world (Plate
108B). It epitomizes Richardson’s genius where the courthouse merely
summarizes his talents.
Richardson’s highest achievement, however, was in the field of private
building not in that of the public monument. By a happy coincidence his
ultimate masterpiece rose in Chicago where, at this very moment,
technical advances in construction were being made that would soon bring
to a climax the whole story of nineteenth-century commercial
architecture (see Chapter 14). Chicago retains Richardson’s last great
masonry house, that of 1885-7 for J. J. Glessner, almost as perfect a
domestic paradigm of granite construction as the Pittsburgh Jail. To her
shame, however, Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store, built
during the same years, was torn down a generation ago to provide a car
park.
The Field store occupied an entire block with a dignity and a grandeur
no other commercial structure had ever attained before (Plate 116B).
Internally it was of iron-skeleton construction; externally the arcaded
masonry walls represented a development from those of the Cheney
Building of ten years earlier (Plate 116A). Segmental arches covered the
broad low openings in the massive ground storey, all built of great
ashlar blocks of rock-faced red Missouri granite. The next three
storeys, built of brownstone, were combined under a single range of
broad arches, yet also articulated within these arched openings by stone
mullions and transoms. Above this stage the rhythm doubled, with the
windows of the next two storeys joined vertically under narrower arches.
The scale of the quarry-faced ashlar was graded down as the walls rose,
quite as were the window sizes, and the non-supporting spandrels were
filled with small square blocks. The full thickness of the bearing
masonry walls was revealed at all the openings. Finally there came a
trabeated attic of somewhat Schinkel-like character over which appeared
almost the only carved detail on the building, a boldly crocketed
cornice. That was ‘Early French’, i.e., of twelfth-century Gothic rather
than Romanesque or Byzantine inspiration.
The result was a monument as bold and almost as Piranesian in its scale
and its forcefulness as the Pittsburgh Jail; but the walls were also as
open, as continuously fenestrated, as those of the court of the
Pittsburgh Courthouse. The logical and expressive design of commercial
buildings with walls of bearing masonry could hardly be carried further.
But in the very year that the Field Store was finished Holabird & Roche,
in designing the Tacoma Building, also in Chicago, first showed how the
exterior of such edifices might express instead a newly developed sort
of construction that allowed the internal metal skeleton to carry the
external cladding of masonry (see Chapter 14).
In one last commercial building, much more obscurely located and built
of far less sumptuous materials, which was started just before
Richardson’s death—it was only commissioned after his last illness had
begun—he carried the logic of the design of the Field Store one step
farther. It was almost as if he had already sensed, like Holabird &
Roche, the implications of the Home Insurance Building in Chicago of
1883-5 by their former employer William Le Baron Jenney, in which the
new sort of construction was first used but not at all expressed. On
Richardson’s Ames Building in Harrison Avenue in Boston a tall arcade
rose almost the full height of the wall beneath a machicolated attic;
the depth of the reveals around the sash at the sides of the brick piers
was minimized; and above the ground storey the spandrels were of metal
panels set almost flush with both piers and sash.
When Richardson died in 1886 the evidence of his great late works
indicates that his powers were at their highest. His office, moreover,
had never been busier. How Richardson might have developed further it is
impossible to say. In the hands of his imitators the Richardsonian mode
did not grow in any very creative way during the decade or more that it
continued a favourite for churches, public buildings, and even houses
built of masonry. Those who had been closest to Richardson when his
style was maturing, McKim and White, rarely imitated him; even before
his death, in fact, they had already set under way a reaction against
the Richardsonian. Their buildings and not his provide the real American
analogue to the later work of Shaw in England. Moreover, their
leadership succeeded his in many professional circles from coast to
coast almost before he was dead.
Leaving aside the modes inherited from the sixties, in any case
transmuted almost beyond recognition by the early eighties if not yet
entirely superseded, there were at the time of Richardson’s death three
main currents in American architecture as against the four or five more
or less Shavian modes then popular in England. One was the
Richardsonian.[285] This was practised with some success by various
Boston firms such as Peabody & Stearns and Van Brunt & Howe. It had been
carried to Kansas City, Missouri, by Van Brunt, moreover, and it was
being developed with some originality by other Middle Westerners such as
George D. Mason (1856-1948) in Detroit, D. H. Burnham (1846-1912) and
his partner J. W. Root (1850-91), H. I. Cobb (1859-1931) and his partner
Frost, and several other firms in Chicago. The very able designer Harvey
Ellis (1852-1904),[286] working for L. S. Buffington (1848?-1931) in
Minneapolis, should also be mentioned. Another current was represented
by the development leading towards the Chicago skyscrapers of the
nineties, in Richardson’s last years more in the hands of technicians
than of architects (see Chapter 14).
The third, and for the next few years the most expansive, current was
what can already be called the Academic Reaction. This was parallel to,
yet already pushing well ahead of, Shaw’s somewhat coy approach to a
programmatic revival of eighteenth-century forms; and McKim, Mead &
White were its acknowledged leaders.[287] During the years that White
was working for Richardson he seems to have been devotedly Shavian.
Certain unexecuted house projects from the Richardson office which White
signed, done for the Cheney family of Manchester, Conn., the clients for
Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, make this particularly evident.
When White replaced Bigelow in the firm of McKim, Mead & Bigelow, on his
return from the European trip that he took after leaving Richardson in
1878, he found McKim designing Shavian houses with a considerably less
sure decorative touch than his own. The McKim, Mead & White country
houses that followed, however, such as that for H. Victor Newcomb in
Elberon, N.J., of 1880-1 (Plate 125A), that for Isaac Bell, Jr, in
Newport, R.I., of 1881-2 (Plate 126), and that for Cyrus McCormick in
Richfield Springs, N.Y., of the same years, represent in several ways a
real advance over Richardson’s Sherman house.[288] Such an advance is
equally to be observed in various houses built around Boston in these
years by W. R. Emerson (1833-1918) and by Arthur Little (1852-1925), the
very earliest of which doubtless influenced Richardson when he designed
the Bryant house (see Chapter 15).
For McKim, Mead & White’s Tiffany house in New York of 1882-3, all of
tawny ‘Roman’ brick with much moulded brick detail, the inspiration was
largely Shavian also; only the rock-faced stone base and the broad low
entrance arch were at all Richardsonian. In the New York house that they
began the next year, however—really a group of houses arranged in a U
around an open court across Madison Avenue from the rear of St Patrick’s
Cathedral—for the railway magnate Henry Villard an entirely different,
even quite opposed, spirit appears (Plate 109B). The Villard houses,
although on Villard’s insistence still built of brownstone rather than
of light-coloured limestone, are as much a High Renaissance Italian
_palazzo_ as anything Barry or his contemporaries on the Continent ever
designed in the preceding sixty years. Reputedly Joseph M. Wells
(1853-90), an assistant in the McKim, Mead & White office who later
refused membership in the firm, was responsible for the decision to
follow Roman models of around 1500, most notably the Cancelleria Palace,
as that was known to him—he had never been abroad—through the plates of
Letarouilly’s _Édifices de Rome moderne_.
This type of design represented a conscious reaction against the
Neo-Picturesque, whether Richardsonian, Shavian, or _François I_, a
return to formal order of the most drastic sort. It represented also a
return to close archaeological imitation of a style from the past such
as had ended in America, on the whole, with the decline of the Greek
Revival a generation earlier. Curiously enough this turn was also
something of a declaration of independence from Europe, since the
American Academic Reaction as initiated in the design of the Villard
houses seems to have had no contemporary sources abroad. However much
Shaw’s Queen Anne had, for about a decade, been moving towards an
equivalent formality—of a more eighteenth-century sort—Shaw had neither
gone as yet so far in this direction nor did he ever turn to the High
Renaissance for his models. Continental parallels in the eighties are
not hard to find in the work of such men as Balat in Belgium, Koch in
Italy, and Wagner in Austria; but their current production was probably
not known in the United States, whose foreign relations in architecture
had always been largely restricted to England, France, and Germany.
This American return to order was at first more significant for its
absolute aspect than for its archaeological bent. Although McKim, Mead &
White used a Renaissance arcade at the base of their Goelet Building
erected in Broadway at 20th Street in New York in 1885-6, the upper
storeys of this modest skyscraper offer a very free, and at the same
time a highly regularized, expression of the hive of offices behind, and
even of the metal grid of the internal skeleton. Certain houses by
McKim, Mead & White in New York of these years were even freer from the
imitation of specific Italian precedents; while their Wm. G. Low house
of as late as 1886-7, on the seashore south of Bristol, R.I., is a
masterpiece of the ‘Shingle Style’ despite the tightness and formality
of its plan (see Chapter 15). Carefully ordered under its single broad
gable, which even subsumes the veranda at the southern end, the Low
house is yet quite without reminiscent detail or, indeed, much of any
detail at all (Plate 127). In a group of small houses at Tuxedo Park,
not at all academic in their exterior treatment, Bruce Price (1845-1903)
was reorganizing the open plan of the Americanized Queen Anne in a
schematically symmetrical way at just this time also (Plate 125B; Figure
28).
The possibility of a revival of the American Colonial and Post-Colonial
in all their successive phases from the medievalism of the
seventeenth-century origins to what can be called the ‘Carpenters’ Adam’
of 1800 had been in the air ever since the early seventies, when McKim
had added a Neo-Colonial room to a real Colonial house in Newport, R.I.
In the local Colonial architecture Americans found obvious parallels to
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedent that Shaw was
exploiting in England.[289] The ‘Shingle Style’ employed various
features and treatments—such as the all-over covering of shingles
itself—that recall American work of the periods before 1800. But because
of the continued strength of inherited Picturesque ideals there was no
programmatic imitation of formal eighteenth-century house design before
the mid eighties. Even such a highly orderly example as Little’s
Shingleside House at Swampscott, Mass., of 1880-1 was still quite
un-archaeological. Interestingly enough, this seems to have been about
the first up-to-date American house to be published in a foreign
magazine[290] since the _Allgemeine Bauzeitung_ in 1846 presented
examples of Greek Revival terrace-houses in New York.
Following on the completion of the Bramantesque Villard houses in New
York in 1885, McKim, Mead & White built in Newport, R.I., in 1885-6 the
H. A. C. Taylor house, lately destroyed, which was as Neo-Georgian, in
its American Colonial way, as the Fred White house Shaw began in London
two years later. For this the American architects adopted the
symmetrical Anglo-Palladian plan of the mid eighteenth century and
capped the resultant rectangular mass with the special gable-over-hip
roof of Colonial Newport. Elaborately embellished with Palladian windows
and with much carved detail of a generically Georgian order, the Taylor
house provided a new formula of design for domestic work that soon
superseded almost completely the ‘Shingle Style’. From the Taylor house
stems that mature Colonial Revival which was to last longer in the end
in America than had the Greek Revival.
Down to the early nineties, however, McKim, Mead & White were rarely so
programmatic in their Neo-Colonial work, and their principal public
building of the late eighties, the Boston Public Library, was entirely
Italianate (Plate 111). In 1887 they were commissioned to build this
major monument on the west side of Copley Square. There it was to face
the Trinity Church that had initiated the Richardsonian wave more than a
decade earlier—a monument in whose designing, moreover, both McKim and
White had actually participated. The Library as built in 1888-92 was a
major challenge to the Richardsonian, at least as contemporaries then
generally understood and employed what they thought was Richardson’s
mode. The contrast it offers to the church opposite is almost as great
as to the prominent but low-grade High Victorian Gothic structures that
flanked the new site to north and south, the New Old South Church by
Cummings & Sears of the mid seventies, still standing across Boylston
Street, and the contemporaneous Museum of Fine Arts by John H. Sturgis
(?-1888) and Charles Brigham (?-1925) which long occupied the south side
of the square.
Trinity is dark and rich in colour, a complex pile rising massively to
its large central lantern. Moreover, it was flanked at the left on the
Boylston Street side, where Richardson took Picturesque advantage of the
corner cut off his site by Huntington Avenue, with an asymmetrically
organized and domestically scaled parish house. The Library is light
coloured and monochromatic, all of a smooth-cut Milford granite ashlar
originally almost white and even today much lighter than the rock-faced
pink Milford granite of Trinity. It is, moreover, a simple quadrangular
mass, capped by a pantiled[291] hip-roof of moderate height; the scale
throughout is monumental and the detail sparse but eminently suave. Yet
if the contrast with Richardson’s Trinity of 1873-7 is so great—and even
greater with the ponderous vernacular Richardsonian as that was long
illustrated south of the Library in the all-brownstone S. S. Pierce
Store just built by S. Edwin Tobey in 1887—the continuity with
Richardson’s work of the mid eighties is equally notable.
For example, none of Richardson’s own late work was polychromatic. Three
of his more prominent edifices, the Allegheny County Buildings in
Pittsburgh and the Glessner and MacVeagh houses in Chicago, were all of
light-coloured granite, while the Warder house in Washington is of
smooth-cut limestone such as Wells had wished to use for the Villard
houses. Above all, the quadrangular block of the Boston Library with its
regular arcuated fenestration parallels rather closely the design of
Richardson’s just completed masterpiece, the Marshall Field Store. Thus,
in fact, Richardson’s former assistants, for all the Renaissance
precedent of their detailing—and the courtyard of tawny Roman brick is
almost more Bramantesque in treatment than the Villard houses—were to a
very notable extent only proceeding farther in a direction that he
himself had already taken.
Since most contemporaries, in their innocence, thought the Richardsonian
merely a Romanesque Revival, it is understandable that they saw in such
things as the Villard houses and the Boston Public Library an
alternative—and anti-Richardsonian—Renaissance Revival. Nor can it be
denied that the handling of the exterior of the Library derives from the
sides of Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini almost as directly as
the arcade in the court is copied from that of the Cancelleria Palace in
Rome.[292]
The stair-hall, the reading-room, and even the minor corridors reveal
clearly their Letarouillian origins when they are studied in the
architects’ drawings, drawings which imitate the very style of
draughtsmanship of Letarouilly’s plates. The stair-hall, executed in
yellow Siena marble, has walls decorated allegorically by the French
painter Puvis de Chavannes, generally considered the greatest muralist
of the age; the delivery room has an entirely different sort of
illustrative Shakespearean frieze painted by Edwin A. Abbey; the hall in
the top storey contains John Singer Sargent’s most ambitious murals. The
associated sculpture by Augustus St Gaudens and others is less
interesting; but these notable decorative increments from the hands of
painters and sculptors of considerable reputation help to explain why
for a generation this building was thought to have initiated a real
‘American Renaissance’ in which all the arts participated. Of this
‘Renaissance’ an international exhibition represented the moment of
early triumph.
When, in 1891, it was decided to hold in Chicago the first American
international exhibition in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the
discovery of America by Columbus, the initial architectural
responsibility lay with the Chicago firm of Burnham & Root. They were
working at that very moment on two of the most remarkable of early
Chicago skyscrapers, the Reliance Building (Plate 115B) begun in 1890,
which eventually offered the frankest expression of the new all-skeleton
construction, and the Monadnock Building begun the next year, which was
the last very tall building to have exterior walls of bearing masonry
(see Chapter 14). The more representational Chicago skyscrapers of this
period by Burnham & Root, the Women’s Temple and the Masonic Building,
were of generically Richardsonian character; and Richardsonian influence
was never stronger and more general in Chicago than in the five years
following his death. But the principal buildings of the World’s
Columbian Exposition,[293] as they rose in 1892-3, proved to be neither
Richardsonian nor at all expressive of metal construction in the way of
those at the Paris Exhibitions of 1878 and 1889 (see Chapter 16).
Burnham in 1891 called in various leading Eastern architects to assist
him in designing the World’s Fair, as the Chicago exhibition was usually
called. Then in that same year his partner Root, the designer of the
pair, died. So it came about that the Easterners, not so much the ageing
Hunt, dean of the profession, as the energetic and executive McKim,
called the tune; McKim even provided Burnham with a new designer in the
person of Charles B. Atwood (1849-95) to replace Root. The Fair, with
the landscape architect Olmsted to collaborate on the planning, came out
a great ‘White City’, the most complete new urbanistic concept[294] to
be realized since the replanning of Paris and of Vienna in the third
quarter of the century (Figure 20).
The metal-and-glass construction of the regular ranges of vast
exhibition buildings was almost entirely hidden by the elaborately
columniated façades of white plaster that were reflected, dream-like, in
Olmsted’s formal lagoons. The architects’ inspiration was generically
academic, not specifically Italianate or Classical, and only one or two
small State pavilions followed Colonial Revival models. The dominant
scale was very large indeed, and the façades of the various buildings,
although by many different architects both Eastern and Western, were
surprisingly harmonious. The young men back from the École in Paris must
have worked overtime to bring up to McKim’s increasingly academic
standards the projects of various well-established architects who had
been doing more or less Richardsonian work for the last decade.
[Illustration:
Figure 20. D. H. Burnham and F. L. Olmsted: Chicago, World’s Fair,
1893, plan
]
Despite the major importance of the Shavian influence in America around
1880, after the designing of the Villard houses in 1883 American
architects moved far more rapidly than Shaw himself along the path
towards abstract order and stylistic discipline. The H. A. C. Taylor
house introduced, in an American version, the formal eighteenth-century
revival—whether one calls it ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ or
‘Neo-Georgian’—before Shaw began his house for Fred White. It is even
perhaps significant that this was done for an American client. The
World’s Fair of the early nineties brought to the fore a more Classical
and ordered sort of Neo-Academicism than Shaw ever reached. By the
standards of the next generation, for example, Atwood’s Fine Arts
Building at Chicago (Plate 109A), though based on a Prix de Rome project
of 1857, was more advanced than Shaw’s Piccadilly Hotel of 1905-8 (Plate
107). The Paris Exhibition of 1889 was notable for its great feats of
metal construction, Eiffel’s Tower (Plate 130A) and Contamin’s Galerie
des Machines (see Chapter 16). But the façades of the Grand Palais built
for the Paris Exhibition of 1900, executed permanently in stone, seem
merely a solider realization of the plaster ‘dream-city’ that Burnham
and McKim had conjured up on the Chicago lake-front earlier in the
decade.
Whether or not there was really influence from Chicago on Paris in the
late nineties, there can be no question that the influence of the Fair
in America was very great indeed. While the buildings of the Fair were
rising in 1892 the young Frank Lloyd Wright built his Blossom house in
Chicago in rather obvious emulation of McKim, Mead & White’s Taylor
house (see Chapter 15). The following year he submitted in competition a
completely academic project for a Museum and Library in Milwaukee.
Moreover, this project, based on Perrault’s east front of the Louvre,
was more suave in its academicism than the buildings that Richardson’s
successors, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, who had already gone over like
almost everyone else to the McKim camp, were erecting that year for the
Chicago Public Library and for the Chicago Art Institute on Michigan
Avenue.
It is the great historical paradox of this period in Chicago that at the
very time the academic triumph of the Fair was being prepared,
nineteenth-century commercial architecture was also reaching its climax
there. Even before Richardson died, his tradition had split in the mid
eighties. One side of it, that related to his own French training and
his dependence on various styles of the past, limited though that was,
as also his growing concern with architectonic order, went forward under
the leadership of McKim (see Chapter 24). The other side, derived from
his sense of materials, at once intelligent and intuitive, and his
interest in functional expression—the qualities that were most notable
in his shingled houses and his commercial buildings—provided the
platform from which first Sullivan and then Wright in the late eighties
and the nineties advanced to the creation of the first modern
architecture (see Chapters 14 and 15).
If the importance of Richardson and, indeed, that of Shaw—as regards the
development of domestic architecture—are to be fully appreciated the
stories of the general development of the commercial building and of the
dwelling-house in England and America down to 1900 must be known. Of the
two, that of commercial architecture is the simpler and also the more
dramatic. The culmination of this story in the American skyscrapers of
the nineties has been recognized, from the time when so many foreign
visitors came to Chicago in 1893 on account of the Fair, as one of the
major and most characteristic architectural achievements of the whole
period with which this volume deals.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 14
THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA
THE line of technical development which runs from the cast-iron-framed
textile mills of the 1790s in England to the steel-framed skyscrapers of
the 1890s in America seems to posterity a simple and obvious one. But,
in fact, various lags and cul-de-sacs make the story long and complex.
The most significant technical advances in iron construction of the
first half of the century were not in the commercial field, and the
account in this chapter is by no means merely a repetition and a
continuation of the story of iron construction down to 1855 that has
been provided earlier (see Chapter 7).
The great difference between the Benyons, Marshall & Bage mill of 1796
at Shrewsbury, which initiated metal-skeleton structure, and Sullivan’s
Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y., of a century later is that the
English mill is purely and simply a technical feat of construction quite
without architectural pretension. If not literally anonymous, the mill
was certainly the work of a millwright rather than an architect; the
skyscraper, on the other hand, is a prime architectural monument of the
long period of a century and a half that this book covers, and the
masterpiece of one of the greatest and most creatively original
designers that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have produced
(Plate 119). But the skyscrapers of the 1890s do represent also the
culmination of developments in the field of construction that began with
the English mills of the 1790s, even if those developments are far from
being the whole story of nineteenth-century commercial architecture. How
office buildings were gradually received into the realm of architecture
and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had risen so high in that
realm that few productions of the 1890s in other fields of building can
compare in quality of design with the great early skyscrapers is perhaps
more significant for western culture in general than the purely
technical aspect of the story. The weaving together of these two strands
makes the full story one of the most interesting and complex in the
history of nineteenth-century architecture.
Nineteenth-century commercial building need not be very precisely
defined. It includes several slightly different sorts of edifices
suitable for the needs of business, all consisting of a succession of
identical upper storeys subdivided into offices or storerooms, with or
without shops or representational premises below. Highly specialized and
very lucrative concerns such as banks and insurance companies, to whom
prestige of various sorts increasingly appeared a major desideratum,
were the first to seek dignity and architectural display by employing
architects of established reputation. Such agencies also desired
buildings that were fire-resistant quite as much as did contemporary
mill-owners. Already in Soane’s earliest work at the Bank of England he
emulated, as has been noted, certain French technical advances that had
just been employed by Louis in the Théâtre Français in Paris before
these advances were first adopted in an English textile mill (see
Chapters 1 and 7). Along Regent Street, around 1820, Nash and others
housed less pretentious types of business in structures of mixed
character and of less completely fireproof construction. But the
premises on the ground floor here generally required very wide
shop-windows of the sort that the use of iron supports made possible,
even though the upper storeys were still nearly identical with those of
domestic terraces.
In Boston in the mid twenties Parris was designing for the streets
flanking his Market Hall commercial façades of a much more novel
character, using not iron but granite in monolithic posts and lintels to
provide a masonry skeleton filled with wide and close-set windows in all
the storeys (Plate 112B).[295] In later Boston work of the next two
decades in this tradition architects such as Isaiah Rogers and various
builders employed iron for internal supports and sometimes also on the
exterior at ground-floor level. But the granite ‘skeleton’ front
preceded the skeletonized all cast-iron front in America by precisely a
quarter of a century.
In England in the forties complete internal skeletons of iron carrying
jack arches of brick or tile, hitherto used chiefly in textile mills,
were increasingly adopted for superior commercial work, but the
characteristic exteriors of commercial buildings[296] remained entirely
of bearing masonry construction. However, in one case at least, a small
block at 50 Watling Street in London which was probably built before
1844, the iron came through to the outer surface in the continuous
window-bands of the upper storeys, even though the corner piers and the
sections of wall between the storeys were of solid brickwork.
From C. R. Cockerell, titular Architect of the Bank of England after
Soane’s retirement in 1833, and other architects such as Hopper, banks
and insurance companies in London and other large cities obtained in the
thirties and forties distinguished buildings all of masonry. In one
especially fine edifice, erected in 1849-50 purely for use as offices,
Bank Chambers behind Cockerell’s monumental Branch Bank of England of
1845-8, in Cook Street in Liverpool, he closely approached the
directness of trabeated masonry expression of the contemporary Boston
architects and builders (Plate 112A). The fireproof construction was of
vaulted masonry throughout, moreover, with iron used only for the
skylights over the stair-wells.
For the general character of commercial architecture down to the late
fifties, however, A. & G. Williams’s Brunswick Buildings of 1841-2, also
in Liverpool, were more significant. In this very large quadrangular
block of general offices they followed the _palazzo_ model provided by
Barry’s newly completed Reform Club almost as closely as George
Alexander had already done in his Bath Savings Bank the year before. The
_palazzo_ mode soon became the favourite one for imposing commercial
architecture in Britain and, before long, in the United States as
well.[297] With its regular rows of good-sized windows and its special
prestige of having housed a commercial aristocracy in Renaissance times,
this had certain aspects of suitability, both real and symbolical, to
the needs of business-men. It also had serious disadvantages which soon
led to a gradual modulation away from the earlier formulas of design.
The wide spacing of the windows demanded by correct _palazzo_ precedent
was awkward for offices requiring that maximum of natural light which
was so readily provided by Parris and others in their granite buildings
in Boston and by the unknown designer of 50 Watling Street in London.
Therefore windows were soon much enlarged and also set closer together.
Sometimes, moreover, as in a large cotton warehouse built in Parker
Street in Manchester in 1850 by J. E. Gregan (1813-55), the increasingly
heavy frames were applied only to every other opening. Properly, such
‘palaces’ ought not to be more than three storeys high, but the rapidly
rising value of good sites in urban business districts made it ever more
desirable to carry office buildings to four and five storeys like the
terrace houses of the period.
Already in the Sun Assurance Offices in Threadneedle Street in the City
of London, designed in 1839 and built in 1841-2, which do not in fact
conform at all closely to the standard _palazzo_ formula, Cockerell not
only opened the ground floor with an arcade of haunched-segmental arches
but also linked his two topmost floors behind an engaged colonnade in
order to reduce the apparent height of the façade to three storeys.
Across the street in the Royal Exchange Buildings of 1844-5 Edward
l’Anson (1812-88) in 1844-5 lifted his whole palace front above a tall
glazed arcade and tied the top-storey windows into a sort of frieze as
Barry had already done in the second storey of the Reform Club (Plate
35B). In Manchester l’Anson’s cousin Edward Walters (1808-72) in the
Silas Schwabe Building of 1845 at 41 Mosley Street linked the windows of
the first and second storeys by an applied arcade.
The building with an exterior entirely of cast iron that James Bogardus
(1800-74) designed and built for his own use in New York in 1848-50 was
well publicized at the time,[298] and is still famous although long
since demolished. On the corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New
York another Bogardus building, the Laing stores erected in two months
in 1849, is still extant (Plate 67B). Although there was never any such
general use of cast-iron fronts in Great Britain as in America in the
fifties and sixties, it seems probable from contemporary evidence that
some architect, probably Owen Jones, built one at 76 Oxford Street in
London a year or so before 1851. However that may be, an ironfounder
named McConnel provided the structural elements for an office building
that still stands[299] in Jamaica Street, Glasgow, in 1855 with an
exterior all of cast iron. A curious feature of the design of this
structure is the delicate iron membering that forms a series of arcades
between the major structural piers. This decorative device, structurally
meaningless in iron except for bracing although employed by Paxton at
the Crystal Palace, is probably an imitation of the masonry arcading
that was, in the mid fifties, gradually modifying the earlier _palazzo_
paradigm quite beyond recognition.
In 1849 Wild used two ranges of Italian Gothic arcades on his St
Martin’s Northern Schools in London, and the perspicacious Street
remarked in an article on the obvious suitability of the theme for
commercial fronts, as has already been noted. In Manchester in 1851
Starkey & Cuffley in a pair of shops employed ranges of three arches on
each of the two fronts in the four storeys, binding them in with coupled
columns marking the ends of the party walls.
The lifting of the window tax in 1851 encouraged great increases in
window area. In jubilant recognition of this H. R. Abraham the next year
made all his windows triplets in the first and second storeys of the W.
H. Smith Building at 188-192 Strand in London, but without using any
arches at all. Two years later, however, in a building for Heal’s
furniture store in Tottenham Court Road in London, James M. Lockyer
(1824-65) carried a _quattrocento_ arcade all across the first storey.
By this time architects and public alike had become aware of a different
High Renaissance formula from Barry’s (see Chapter 4). Beside the Reform
Club in Pall Mall Sydney Smirke’s new front of the Carlton Club,
designed in 1847, was coming to belated completion in the mid fifties.
Moreover, its Sansovinesque arcades were already echoed in the first
storey of Parnell & Smith’s Army and Navy Club of 1848-51 across the
way. These London models were closely followed by William B. Gingell
(1819-1900) in his West of England Bank in Corn Street, Bristol, of 1854
and quite outranked by the great Venetian _palazzo_ that David Rhind
(?-1883) erected in 1855 in Prince’s Street in Edinburgh for the Life
Association of Scotland.
Possibly the fine warehouse at 12 Temple Street in Bristol with three
groups of triplet arches in each of the upper storeys is by Gingell and
of this date. There is none of the Sansovinesque lushness of his bank
here, but the fine workmanship of the quarry-faced Pennant stone walls
laid up in random ashlar, with smooth-cut Bath stone trim and coloured
voussoirs banding the arches, bears some resemblance to the Bristol
General Hospital he was building in 1853-7, notably in the very bold
rustication of the ground-storey arches.
However that may be, two London buildings of 1855 advanced nearly as far
towards the all-arcaded front. Hodgson’s Building by Knowles in the
Strand at the corner of Chancery Lane had the general character of a
_palazzo_, but all the windows were arched, as in buildings of the
_Rundbogenstil_; moreover their trim sank into the wall rather than
projecting from it, so that the wall sections between were reduced
visually to mere piers, even though they had no imposts. The Crown Life
Office, in New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, was built in 1855-7 by
Ruskin’s friends Deane & Woodward, with whom he was most closely
associated precisely in those years. The round-arched medieval arcading
of this façade, with the piers hardly narrower than on Knowles’s
building yet articulated by bases and imposts, may surely claim
Ruskinian sanction. Here, at any rate, was the first important contact
between advanced High Victorian Gothic and the commercial world, a
contact destined to be very fruitful over the next fifteen years or so.
Henceforth even architects of no aesthetic pretension were ready to
exploit arcading.
The English development of arcaded masonry façades can be closely
matched in America, specifically in Philadelphia.[300] There S. D.
Button (1803-97), Napoleon Le Brun (1821-1901), and others in buildings
of 1852-3 in Chestnut Street—that at 239-241 by Button is still
extant—consistently used arched openings between slim piers; and Notman
in 1855 provided for the Jackson Building at 418 Arch Street a façade
even more completely articulated by arcading in all its four floors than
the Crown Life Office. By this time, moreover, the trabeated design of
Bogardus’s first iron fronts had likewise given way to ornate arcading
in emulation of masonry fronts.[301]
Iron remained behind the scenes in most of the English arcaded
buildings. In Waterhouse’s Fryer & Binyon Warehouse in Manchester of
1856, however, whose upper walls had the polychrome diapering of the
Doge’s Palace so much admired by Ruskin, the first storey was opened up
by an arcade carried on coupled iron columns. In the Wellington Williams
Warehouse of 1858 in Little Britain in London, the obscure City firm of
J. Young & Son used arcades in all the five storeys with iron columns to
support the outer orders; thus the width of the piers could be
considerably reduced, and the effect of over-all articulation was much
enhanced as in the Philadelphia buildings.
Deane & Woodward’s very Ruskinian project of 1857 for the new Government
Offices, with its endless Italian Gothic arcading, and a small warehouse
in Merchant Street in Bristol of 1858 by Godwin gave some impetus to the
use of pointed instead of round arches. But on the whole the best
designed among the innumerable arcaded façades in England retained the
rounded form, however Gothic their other detailing may be. In one of the
largest and finest examples of the early sixties, moreover, Kassapian’s
Warehouse in Leeds Road, Bradford, perhaps by Lockwood & Mawson, the
detailing is academically Roman (Plate 114B).
Different as they are, this Bradford façade and that of Godwin’s
contemporary warehouse at 104 Stokes Croft in Bristol, so much more
subtly Ruskinian than anything by Deane & Woodward, are the two
masterpieces of the genre at its best moment (Plate #113:pl113). Of very
high quality also is 60 Mark Lane in the City of London built by George
Aitchison in 1864-5. There the existence of a complete iron skeleton,
presumably but not certainly present in most of the other examples, is
fully documented. Moreover, on the rear the metal comes through to the
outer face of the wall much as it did at 50 Watling Street, built some
twenty years earlier.
In Philadelphia William Johnston had begun in 1849 the seven-storey
Jayne Building in Chestnut Street,[302] introducing a new vertical
formula of design for commercial façades. Above a conventional ground
floor, narrow granite piers in the forms of clustered colonnettes rise
the full height of the building, merging into Venetian Gothic tracery
below a terminal parapet. Whether or not Samuel K. Hoxie, the contractor
who provided the Quincy granite for this and other Philadelphia
buildings, was familiar with the ‘granite-skeleton’ work of Parris,
Rogers, and others in Boston is not clear. But in the next few years a
good many façades with a similarly vertical and ‘skeletonized’ treatment
were built in Philadelphia by J. C. Hoxie and his sometime partner
Button. That across the street from the Jayne Building has already been
mentioned, since the openings between the piers are covered with
segmental arches throughout. Button’s building at 723-727 Chestnut
Street of 1853 and his extant Leland Building at 37-39 South Third
Street are even more ‘proto-Sullivanian’, so to put it. Louis Sullivan
probably saw and admired such things as the Jayne Building and the
Leland Building when he was working for Frank Furness in Philadelphia in
the seventies; certainly they are very premonitory of his characteristic
work of the eighties and even the nineties.
Various other ways of reducing the wall to little more than a masonry
cladding of the iron structural members were also in use in England as
well as in America by this time. A notable small edifice in the City of
London, of uncertain date and authorship but probably by Thomas Hague
and of 1855, is at 22 Finch Lane, with another front to the court at the
side. On both these façades the two lower storeys are joined together
visually by setting back the horizontal spandrel between them, and the
moulded stonework of the very narrow piers is of almost metallic scale
and crispness.
Still more striking is Oriel Chambers[303] in Water Street in Liverpool,
built in 1864-5 by Peter Ellis (fl. 1835-84), and another smaller
building by him at 16 Cook Street of a year or two later. On the front
façades of these the masonry is scaled down quite as much as at 22 Finch
Lane but given a more decorative treatment, in both cases of rather
metallic character. At Oriel Chambers, oriels of plate glass held in
delicate metal frames are cantilevered out in every bay of all the upper
storeys, producing a regular rhythm broken only by the clumsy cresting
on the top (Plate 114A). At 16 Cook Street all the stone spandrels are
set back, thus emphasizing even more strongly than at Oriel Chambers the
continuous vertical lines of the mullions. The over-all pattern is once
more somewhat confused, however, by the arches across the top that link
the mullions together. The rear walls of both of Ellis’s buildings are
even more open in design and directly expressive of the metal skeleton.
Towards the narrow court at the side of Oriel Chambers only every third
iron pier is clad with masonry; those between rise free behind the glass
of the horizontally sashed windows whose upper planes are slanted
inward. This is, in effect, an early example of the ‘curtain-wall’ (see
Chapter 22).
If in some technical respects the Chicago skyscraper of the nineties
seems almost to have come to premature birth in Liverpool in the
sixties, as in some other respects it had done in the Philadelphia
commercial buildings of the fifties, the immediate influence of these
buildings by Ellis seems to have been almost nil. Eventually Owen Jones,
in a façade at Derby of 1872, and Thomas Ambler, in a corner building at
46-47 Boar Lane in Leeds of 1873, did come to use only iron and glass,
omitting all masonry; but more characteristic commercial work of these
years is to be seen in such warehouses by unknown hands as the one at
1-2 York Place in Leeds, with an arcade crisply detailed in moulded
brick rising through all the upper storeys, somewhat as on the
Philadelphia buildings of the fifties, or a larger example in Strait
Street in Bristol, with a much heavier arcade subsuming several upper
storeys, handsomely executed in stones of different colours and textures
and very boldly and simply detailed. Such things, however, very soon
seemed to the English not advanced but retardataire as contemporary
attention focused on the Queen Anne of Shaw’s New Zealand Chambers of
1872-3.
Richardson’s very un-Shavian American Express Building[304] in Chicago
of 1872-3 first brings that Mid-Western metropolis into this story. That
had no arcading, but the windows were very closely set, sometimes (it
would appear) with only light metal colonnettes as mullions between
them. There was also a directness and a ‘realism’ of treatment
throughout comparable to that of Richardson’s more monumental work of
this date, notably the Hampden County Courthouse and the Buffalo State
Hospital, both designed the previous year and at this time still in
construction. But Richardson’s dependence on English commercial work of
the preceding fifteen years became closer still in his first really fine
business building, the Cheney Block (now the Brown-Thompson Department
Store) built in Hartford, Conn., in 1875-6 (Plate 116A). Here the wide
ground-storey arcade, including a mezzanine, and the narrower arcade
above, subsuming several storeys—as on the very proto-Richardsonian
warehouse in Strait Street in Bristol—are carried out with typically
Richardsonian stoniness in quarry-faced brownstone. But the banded
arches introduce a bold note of High Victorian Gothic polychromy, and
the carved detail is in the harsh but richly naturalistic vein—also High
Victorian Gothic in spirit—of the ornament on the earliest executed
portions of Trinity Church in Boston, probably of a year or two before.
Already, in New York, the skyscraper[305] had been born by this date,
and leadership in commercial architecture had crossed the Atlantic for
good and all. None of the structures dealt with so far in this chapter
except the Jayne Building were more than five or six storeys high, since
it could not be expected that business clients would climb more than
four or five flights of stairs. But the average height of buildings in
the financial districts of cities had, even so, almost doubled since the
eighteenth century, partly because of the general rise in the number of
storeys, partly because of much increased storey heights. Vertical
transportation of human beings, which would allow the erection of office
buildings considerably more than five storeys high—industrial buildings
were often much taller already—became increasingly feasible during the
forties and fifties. Hoists for goods were a commonplace of English
warehouse design after 1840, and in 1844 the Bunker Hill Monument had a
passenger-hoist operated by a steam engine. In New York the Haughwout
Store on Broadway had in 1857 the first practical passenger lift or
elevator to be installed in an ordinary urban structure. This was of the
type developed by Elisha G. Otis. A lift of another sort was introduced
in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York later that year. Those of 1860 in
the Westminster Palace Hotel in London apparently did not function, at
least for some years. The Equitable Building, for which Arthur Gilman
and Edward Kimball, with George B. Post (1837-1913) as the associated
engineer, won the competition in 1868, was the first office building in
New York to have a lift from the time of its completion in 1871.
Immediately after this lifts were introduced in several other comparable
structures, and one- or two-storey mansards were often added to the tops
of existing buildings. A great change was thus at hand in New York in
the early seventies.
Despite the Panic of 1873, the mid seventies saw the construction of
what may properly be considered the first skyscrapers, the nine-storey
(260-foot) Tribune Building and the ten-storey (230-foot) Western Union
Building. Both were therefore about double the height even of the
tallest office structures, such as the five-storey (130-foot) Equitable
Building erected during the preceding boom period. These first
skyscrapers rose to altitudes reached hitherto in America only by church
spires, as general views of the New York skyline around 1875 make
evident. Neither Hunt’s New York Tribune Building, extant but since
carried many storeys higher, nor Post’s Western Union Telegraph
Building, long since demolished, incorporated any other technical
innovations;[306] nor was their design at all closely related, like that
of Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, to the advanced English
commercial work of the previous decade. Paradoxically, the
French-trained Hunt’s building is somewhat the more English of the two
in character; but, for all the direct expressiveness of the window
grouping in triplets in each bay, the detail throughout is coarse and
gawky, and the silhouette of the very tall mansard and the
asymmetrically placed tower was from the first overbearing. The later
addition of many more storeys has made the building even more top-heavy
in appearance. The Tribune Building was of interest chiefly for its
relatively great height, now unnoticeable among the much taller
skyscrapers built around it later. Its almost complete avoidance of any
sort of archaeological styling, however, such as the Romanesquoid of
Richardson’s Cheney Block or the violently polychromatic and spiky
Gothic of Hunt’s own Divinity School at Yale, on which construction was
still at this date proceeding, is certainly worth remark also.
The Western Union Building of Post was only nominally French, for its
rather heavy-handed Second Empire treatment owed more to earlier English
and American designs in this mode than to anything Parisian (Plate
115A). But the exterior was more orderly, if less expressive, than that
of Hunt’s skyscraper and the mansards on top piled up as grandly to the
centrally placed tower as on the big contemporary Post Office near by.
Yet stylistically both Post’s and Hunt’s buildings were out of date
almost as soon as they were finished; and after the hiatus caused by the
depression of the seventies the locus of the skyscraper story moved
westward to Chicago.
Chicago, already the metropolis of the Middle West, had almost no
architectural traditions at this time. First developed as a city in the
thirties, the need for rapid building in timber had led to the invention
or development of what is called ‘balloon-frame’ construction, in which
relatively light studs or scantlings, rising wall high, form a cage or
crate whose members are fastened together by a liberal use of
machine-made nails. Balloon-frame construction, thus, is a typical
offshoot of the industrial revolution, becoming feasible only with the
mechanization of the saw-mill and of the manufacture of nails.
Theoretically, there might be thought to be some analogy between this
New World method of carpentry, so different from the heavy framing of
the Old World, hitherto always used in America as well, and metal
construction. There is no evidence, however, that Chicago took to iron
with any greater enthusiasm in the fifties and sixties than did New York
or various other cities; indeed, St Louis seems to have had more and
finer examples of cast-iron fronts, particularly in the early seventies.
As late as that, moreover, the new cities of the American Northwest were
obtaining cast-iron fronts prefabricated from Britain, just as San
Francisco had obtained many of her warehouses and immigrant dwellings in
1849-50.
At the opening of the seventies a terrific conflagration[307] all but
wiped out Chicago. The need for rapid rebuilding drew thither ambitious
architects and engineers from all over the East, but the immediate
results of their activities were anything but edifying. Architectural
leadership was still centred in Boston and New York; in any case, that
leadership had rarely been more confused than in the early seventies
when even Richardson was only just maturing his personal style.
Richardson’s own Chicago building for the American Express Company was
doubtless too indeterminate in character to attract a local following;
nor did he build again in Chicago until the mid eighties, by which time
various versions of the Richardsonian were already reaching Chicago at
second or third hand.
If the Chicago architectural scene had any virtues around 1880 they were
largely negative ones: no established traditions, no real professional
leaders, and ignorance of all architectural styles past or present.
Among the architects who had settled in Chicago in the seventies was a
Dane, Dankmar Adler (1844-1900). Into his office in 1879, first as chief
draughtsman but soon as partner, came the young Bostonian Louis
Sullivan. As has been noted before, Sullivan had been trained first in
Ware’s school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later,
until he revolted against its rigid doctrines, at the École des
Beaux-Arts in Paris. Having worked for Frank Furness, wildest of
American High Victorians, Sullivan picked Chicago not alone for its
evident professional opportunities but also because he liked the idea of
working where there were no hampering traditions. (Moreover, his parents
had moved there from Boston.)
The earliest building of any real originality designed by Sullivan, the
Rothschild Store in Chicago of 1880-1, seems at first a turgid
compilation of barbarisms. Examined more closely, however, and compared
with the Leiter Building on its right, which was built two years earlier
by the engineer-architect William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907), the two
sorts of innovation that Sullivan essayed here can be readily
recognized. On the one hand there is the ornament,[308] undefinable in
historic terms yet with a kind of similarity—almost certainly
accidental—to the Anglo-Japanese detail of Nesfield and Godwin. At this
stage in Sullivan’s career the originality of his ornament must be
remarked but can hardly be admired. Below his elaborate ornamental
cresting, on the other hand, Sullivan handled the main architectonic
elements of his façade with considerable novelty and most admirable
logic. Although the building is not tall—no skyscraper, that is, even by
the modest standards of 1880—Sullivan did not hesitate to follow the
lead of the Philadelphia commercial architects of the fifties in
emphasizing the vertical. This he accomplished by continuing the
mullions that subdivide his bays across the spandrels, somewhat as Ellis
had done fifteen years before in his buildings in Liverpool, rather than
by using a multiplicity of masonry piers.
Sullivan’s next Chicago building, the Revell Store erected for Martin
Ryerson in 1881-3, continued the theme of the Rothschild Store, but
extended it over a much larger corner block with considerable chastening
of the ornamental treatment at the top. The Troescher Building of 1884,
which came next in sequence, is very much finer. Widely-spaced piers of
plain brickwork rise the full height of the façade above a slightly
Richardsonian ground-storey arcade of rock-faced stone; between them
there are no oriels, as on Ellis’s Oriel Chambers or his Ryerson
Building[309] of the previous year, but broad horizontal windows
separated by recessed spandrels. These spandrels are rather like Ellis’s
on his other building at 16 Cook Street, but their actual prototypes are
to be found, more probably, in Philadelphia buildings by Button such as
the one at 723-727 Chestnut Street. The ornament here, now still further
chastened, is largely confined to these spandrels. The curved cresting
across the top, however, recalls a little the turgid crown of the
Rothschild façade.
Sullivan’s early buildings were not very tall, and they did not advance
the technical development of the skyscraper. In these same years,
however, other Chicago architects were doing so to notable effect. For
the ten-storey Montauk Block of 1882-3, tall, but no taller than the
first New York skyscrapers of ten years before, Burnham & Root
introduced spread foundations to carry its great weight on the muddy
Chicago soil, out of which earlier buildings had, literally, to be
hoisted every few years. In design they were content, however, with a
range of ten almost identical storeys of plain brick pierced by
regularly spaced segmental-arched windows. Obvious as this treatment may
seem, it took courage to use it at a time when most architects were
still trying to disguise the embarrassing height of buildings only half
as tall by grouping their storeys together in twos and threes.
The Home Life Insurance Building begun in 1883 was also only ten storeys
tall.[310] But in building it Jenney invented, or at least introduced in
Chicago, what is specifically called ‘skyscraper construction’, that is
a method of carrying the external masonry cladding on metal shelves
bolted to the internal skeleton. Jenney, however, probably thought he
was merely tying together his metal skeleton and his brickwork, not
carrying the latter entirely, though this was found to be the case when
the structure of the building was carefully examined during its
demolition. The Home Insurance Building, in any case, looked far more as
if its external walls were bearing than do any of Sullivan’s early
works. Jenney, moreover, fought shy of the frankness of Burnham & Root’s
treatment of the Montauk Block; instead he phrased his storeys in
groups, almost as if several buildings of normal three- or four-storey
height had been casually piled one on top of the other.
Before the Home Insurance was finished in 1885 two more major commercial
monuments were rising in Chicago, Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale
Store (Plate 116B), last but one of the large buildings erected in
Chicago with walls entirely of bearing masonry, and Burnham & Root’s
Rookery Building (see Chapter 13). Both were begun in 1885, Richardson’s
being finished in 1887 and Burnham & Root’s a year earlier in 1886. The
exterior of the eleven-storey Rookery Building is not an example of the
stripped ‘functionalism’ that these architects had introduced in their
Montauk Block but rather a provincial imitation of the Richardsonian. In
the court walls, however, the architects used—and with complete
awareness of its implications—the new structural method of Jenney’s Home
Insurance Building, carrying the brickwork above the sides of the
central glass-roofed lobby entirely on the internal metal[311] skeleton.
With the advent of Richardson in 1885, the main lines of development in
commercial architecture, both as regards design and as regards
construction, might seem to have been concentrated in Chicago. It is
well therefore to note again that McKim, Mead & White in their Goelet
Building on Broadway in New York of 1885-6 provided almost as frank an
expression of the skyscraper, or tall office building of many identical
storeys, at least above their Renaissance ground-floor arcade, as did
Burnham & Root in the Montauk Block. Their windows, however, were
phrased in triplets like Hunt’s on the Tribune Building and also grouped
vertically within tall bay-width panels of moulded brick rising with
only one break to the cornice. This was a quite frank solution of the
problem, and is hardly to be castigated as ‘traditional’ or even as
‘un-functional’. Moreover, another New York building, Babb, Cook &
Willard’s De Vinne Press of 1885 in Lafayette Street, is not altogether
unworthy of comparison with the Field store. It lacks the regularity and
the grandeur of scale of Richardson’s masterpiece, but George F. Babb
used his fine red brick in a belated _Rundbogenstil_ way, and not
without some conscious reminiscence, one may presume, of Durand’s
exemplars of the beginning of the century.
Richardson’s last commercial work, the Ames Building in Harrison Avenue
in Boston of 1886-7, on which the arcade was carried the full height of
the building and the reveals much reduced, had no immediate influence in
Chicago (see Chapter 13). Sullivan’s first really great work, the
Auditorium Building (now Roosevelt College) in Chicago, derived for the
most part straight from the Field store, at least as regards the
exterior. Designed in 1886 and built in 1887-9, this is a vast and
complex edifice, or group of edifices, with a hotel on the Michigan
Avenue front, an opera-house entered in the middle of the Congress
Street side, and offices along Wabash Avenue at the rear. The walls are
all of bearing masonry still. In order to incorporate more storeys than
Richardson had ever done, Sullivan carried up his heavy rock-faced
granite base through two mezzanine levels and increased the number of
floors subsumed by the main arcade which rises from the first storey
(Plate 117A). He also used light stone throughout, instead of the red
granite and the brownstone of the Field store, with its surfaces all
smooth-cut above the mezzanines.
This flattening of the wall-plane was carried even further on the tower
which rises above the portal of the opera-house in Congress Street. On
that wide arched panels of very slight projection are filled with
articulated screens of stone in which the windows are arranged in a
continuous grid with no evident storey lines. The eaves gallery at the
top of the tower, a stubby colonnade set in a long horizontal panel with
a continuous ribbon-window behind—the window in fact of the Adler &
Sullivan office—is so like Thomson’s on the front of his Queen’s Park
church of the sixties in Glasgow that it is hard to believe Sullivan did
not know it. Yet other evidence indicates that he continued to abjure
all European influence at this point in his career.
In the interiors, particularly the bar and the banquet hall at the top
of the hotel, Sullivan’s ornament changed even more markedly than his
exterior design. Here also there is possibly Richardsonian influence,
but coming from the Byzantinizing detail worked out by John Galen Howard
of the Richardson office for the MacVeagh house of 1885-7 in Chicago
rather than from the Field store.
However, one cannot entirely discount the possibility of a contribution
in the field of ornament by a brilliant young man of twenty, Frank Lloyd
Wright, whom Sullivan and Adler had just taken on as a draughtsman in
1887 and who was soon given charge of the innumerable detail drawings
that this vast project required. Nurtured on Owen Jones’s _Grammar of
Ornament_,[312] which the Paris-trained Sullivan claimed not to have
known, as well as on the writings of Ruskin, Morris, and Viollet-le-Duc,
Wright may perhaps have encouraged Sullivan to move away from the bold
coarseness of his earlier ornament towards the lush elaboration of
intricately plastic surface decoration henceforth characteristic of his
work. It is tempting, even, to believe that Jones’s page of Celtic
ornament particularly attracted the Irish Sullivan’s fancy.[313]
Together with the Auditorium, though commissioned a year later, there
was also rising in Chicago in 1887-9 the Tacoma Building of William
Holabird (1854-1923) and Martin Roche (1855-1927), two young architects
trained in Jenney’s office. Here the exterior walls on the two fronts
were entirely carried by the metal skeleton within, only the rear walls
and some of the interior partitions being of bearing masonry like the
walls of the Auditorium. Moreover, this fact was made evident in the
frank if not particularly distinguished treatment of the two fronts.
Vertical ranges of oriels were carried the full height of the building,
and there was only a minimal brick and terracotta sheathing of the
structural verticals and horizontals. A more or less Richardsonian
cornice capped the whole, but the general effect was closer to Ellis’s
Oriel Chambers of the sixties in Liverpool or to some of Sullivan’s
earlier buildings than to the Field store.
Despite the general swing of Eastern architects towards the Neo-Academic
in these years, some who were doing commercial work were not out of step
with what was happening in Chicago. For example, there are office
buildings and warehouses in Boston and New York of relatively modest
height built in the late eighties and early nineties that emulate in
brick the arcading of the Field store with almost as much success as
Sullivan. Similar things can be seen in many Middle and Far Western
cities, but these derive more probably from Sullivan or Burnham & Root
than directly from Richardson.
In the Middle West, moreover, McKim, Mead & White were building in
1888-90 two very large business buildings, still with bearing masonry
walls, for the New York Life Insurance Company, one in Omaha, Nebraska,
and one in Kansas City, Missouri, of effectively identical design.
Unlike the already characteristic Chicago ‘slabs’—the quadrangular plan
of the Rookery Building is exceptional—these are U-shaped, and each has
a tower rising above the main mass at the rear of the court. The
treatment of the walls with tall arcading follows as evidently from the
Field store as does Sullivan’s at the Auditorium; like that of the
contemporary Boston Public Library, however, the fairly simple detailing
is of High Renaissance rather than Richardsonian Romanesque character.
Before these towering blocks were finished in the West the new
‘skyscraper construction’ had been introduced in New York by Bradford
Lee Gilbert (1853-1911). His Tower Building of 1888-9, as its name
implies, was a tower, not a slab, with more or less Richardsonian
detailing. It is worth noting that the Tower Building—ten storeys, 119
feet—was _not_ as tall as the first New York skyscrapers built in the
early seventies with bearing walls. Indeed, Post’s World or Pulitzer
Building of 1889-90 in New York with twenty-six storeys, the tallest
built up to then—309 feet—still had bearing walls. Of course, the Eiffel
Tower, completed in 1889, exceeded in height by a great deal all the
skyscrapers of its day whatever their construction; indeed, it was not
overtopped until the Empire State Building in New York rose from the
designs of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon in the early 1930s at the end of the
second wave of skyscraper building following the First World War.
Post’s Western Union Building of the early seventies was in the Second
Empire mode; his World Building was still French, but what can better be
called ‘Beaux-Arts’. It is designed like a series of three- or
four-storey Renaissance palaces, one on top of the other, and crowned
with a large and ornate dome. The next New York skyscrapers all followed
the new structural method introduced by Gilbert in the Tower Building;
but Post, Price, and the other architects who designed them used an
ornate paraphernalia of Renaissance ornamentation with none of the
discretion of McKim, Mead & White on their Kansas City and Omaha
insurance buildings. Characteristic of the period are Price’s American
Surety Building at Broadway and Wall Street, begun in 1894, and his St
James Building of 1897-8 at 1133 Broadway, both in New York, and Post’s
Park Building in Pittsburgh, completed in 1896. The latter’s Havemeyer
Building in New York, completed earlier, in 1892, was still somewhat
Richardsonian however.
The maturing of an original sort of skyscraper design around 1890 is a
Middle Western, and almost specifically a Chicago, story to which New
York architects made no contribution. Boston’s architectural leadership
had ended with the death of Richardson; despite the prominence of McKim,
Mead & White and their large Eastern following, leadership in this field
passed almost at once to Chicago. It was most appropriate that
Richardson’s masterpiece, the Field store, should have been built there;
the inspiration it provided, as we have already seen in the case of the
Auditorium Building, played an important part in the succeeding Middle
Western development.
In 1889-90 Jenney built for Levi Z. Leiter a large building on South
Clark Street in Chicago now occupied by Sears, Roebuck & Company. In
this he not only used the new ‘skyscraper construction’ for the exterior
walls but also—with the presumptive aid of his assistant and later
partner William Bryce Mundie (1863-1939)—arrived at an expression of its
structural character almost as logical as that of the Tacoma Building
yet much more monumental. Like most other Chicago designers in these
years, Jenney and Mundie were influenced here by the Field store. The
uncompromisingly block-like shape of this tremendous building, with its
heavy plain entablature and pilaster-like corner piers, is Richardsonian
both in its scale and in its simplicity (Plate 117B). The various
groupings of stone mullions that clad the main piers and subdivide the
bays, lithe and light though they are, were clearly envisaged as
Romanesque colonnettes and even carry modest foliate capitals. Despite
the dichotomy of the solidly Richardsonian silhouette and the open
screen-like treatment of the walls, the effect is coherent and
dignified. In this respect the Sears, Roebuck Building is superior to
Sullivan’s very Richardsonian[314] Opera House Building in Pueblo,
Colorado, of 1890 which was burned in the 1920s. The Walker Warehouse in
Chicago of 1888-9 better displayed his great talent.
Three buildings of the early nineties, two in Chicago by Daniel H.
Burnham’s firm and one in St Louis by Sullivan, illustrate the wide
range of creative possibilities in skyscraper design at this point. The
most advanced is surely the Reliance Building, at least in terms of
direct structural expression. This was carried up only four storeys in
1890, though extended to its present thirteen storeys by D. H. Burnham &
Company in 1894. As completed, this is a refined and perfected version
of Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building (Plate 115B). The light-coloured
terracotta cladding of the vertical members, particularly on the flat
oriels, is reduced to a minimum; the terminal member is a thin slab, not
a cornice or an entablature; and the only stylistic reminiscence is in
the cusped panelling—neither Romanesque nor Renaissance, but slightly
Late Gothic in character—of the spandrels. What we see was presumably
designed as well as built in 1894.[315]
Burnham & Root’s other significant skyscraper of this particular moment,
the sixteen-storey Monadnock Building begun in 1891, the last tall
Chicago building with bearing walls of brick, was and still remains more
famous than the Reliance; doubtless it is also finer, although much
mid-twentieth-century critical opinion has favoured the Sears, Roebuck
Building of Jenney & Mundie and the Reliance because they are more
advanced technically. The smooth shank of the Monadnock, varied only by
the slight projection of the recurrent oriels, has a most subtle and
elegant taper or reverse entasis. The final bending outward of the
brickwork to provide a cove cornice unifies the whole formal concept
with extraordinary effectiveness. Few large buildings have ever achieved
such monumental force with such simple means. There is almost literally
no detail of any sort, whether derivative or original.
Sullivan’s Wainwright Building of 1890-1 in St Louis, Missouri, in which
he and Adler used ‘skyscraper construction’ for the first time, no
longer dominates two- and three-storey neighbours as it did when newly
built; thus the prominence that the relatively great height gave it in
the city picture of the nineties can hardly be realized today. But
Sullivan undoubtedly sought to emphasize what seemed to contemporaries,
as they do not to posterity, its very tall proportions (Plate 118).
Continuous pilaster-like piers of brick, quite like those on his
Troescher Building of 1884, clad the vertical elements of the steel
skeleton, yet identical brick piers with no major structural members
behind them also serve as intervening mullions. But at the base the wide
windows of the ground storey and the mezzanine reveal the true width of
the actual bays of the steel skeleton as the treatment of the shank of
the building does not. The piers are considerably broader than most of
those on the Sears, Roebuck Building; but they are also topped, like
Mundie’s, with ornament that forms a sort of capital. Moreover, the
attic storey above is quite hidden behind a deep band of the richest
Sullivanian ornament elsewhere restricted, as on the Troescher Building,
to the recessed spandrels. The ‘cornice’ above this frieze-like attic is
merely a slab, but a much thicker one than that which caps the Reliance
Building. Nothing of Richardson’s direct influence is left; but by now
Sullivan had learned from the Field store the basic lessons of scale and
order, applying them here in a visually sure but not particularly frank
way to the new type of metal-skeleton construction. The plan is
U-shaped, like those of the McKim, Mead & White buildings in Kansas City
and Omaha, but the court is to the rear, so that the block appears
unified from the surrounding streets.
In Sullivan’s next important work, the Schiller Building in Chicago of
1891-2, he adopted—exceptionally for him—a truly tower-like shape. Here
the masonry piers that clad the structural steel stanchions are not
doubled by identical mullions between; instead these piers are linked by
arches below a sort of frieze. The ‘frieze’ is really a very ornately
arcaded eaves-gallery, not a flat band as on the Wainwright Building,
occupying a whole storey below the thick slab cornice.
Interchange of ideas was continuous in these years between the various
Chicago architects’ offices, while the influence of the Academic Revival
in the East, dominant in almost all the buildings at the World’s Fair of
1893 save Sullivan’s own Transportation Building, was still negligible
in the commercial field. Thus Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building of
1893-4 in Chicago borrowed its rather clumsy ground storey and
mezzanine, with a cavernously Richardsonian arched entrance, from
Burnham’s Ashland Block of 1892 and its oriels from the Tacoma or
possibly the Reliance Building. These oriels alternate with horizontal
openings of the type known as ‘Chicago windows’ sharply cut through the
smooth light-coloured terracotta of the wall plane. ‘Chicago windows’,
with a wide fixed pane in the centre and narrower sashes that open on
either side, were used by most Chicago architects in this decade and the
next. A heavy moulded cornice, not just a thick slab, crowns the whole
above a colonnaded eaves-gallery somewhat like the one at the top of the
Auditorium tower.
What should probably be considered Sullivan’s masterpiece, the Guaranty
Building in Buffalo, N.Y., followed in 1894-5 (Plate 119). One of the
most significant new themes in the design of this skyscraper, whose
premonitory character can only be fully appreciated in relation to the
use of _pilotis_ in later modern architecture (see Chapter 22), is
already to be found in a project of Sullivan’s of the previous year for
the St Louis Trust & Savings Bank. This is the treatment of the ground
storey, where the terracotta sheathed piers were isolated from the wall
plane by bending back the tops of the shop-windows. The piers are thus
nearly free-standing and seem to lift the shaft of the building above
them right off the ground. This allows circumambient space to penetrate
under the main volume of the building. Thus the fact that the edifice is
a hollow cage is very strongly suggested, and the wide shop-windows do
not appear to undermine the walls above them as in so much commercial
work of the nineteenth century.
There are several reasons, not intrinsic to Sullivan’s design, that
explain why the Guaranty remains the most effective of all the early
skyscrapers. Since downtown Buffalo has not filled up with buildings of
equal or greater height in the way of downtown St Louis and the Chicago
Loop, the Guaranty still rises high above most of its modest neighbours,
in effect a tower as well as a slab, although actually of U-shaped plan
like the Wainwright. In this city, moreover, which has in the last sixty
years remained considerably cleaner than Chicago, the colour of the
tawny terracotta sheathing has not been so much obscured by grime as on
the Stock Exchange Building. These were happy local conditions that
Sullivan could not foresee.
The plastic handling of the crown of the Guaranty was perhaps suggested
to Sullivan by the effectiveness of the cove at the top of Burnham &
Root’s Monadnock Building. Here the crowns of the arched façade bays—two
to each structural bay, as the wide spacing of the piers at
ground-storey level so clearly reveals—are related to the outward curve
of the top of the wall below the terminal slab. The profuse and
melodious curvilinear ornament, subsuming the round attic windows,
echoes and complements the plastic theme. This is an example, rare even
in Sullivan’s most mature work of the mid and late nineties, of the
successful integration of architectonic and decorative effects. The
treatment of the terracotta cladding throughout the exterior of the
Guaranty, moreover, covered all over as it is with lacy geometrical
ornament in very low relief, seems to lighten the whole. The cladding is
read as a mere protective shell carried by the underlying steel
structural members and not as solid brickwork like the piers of the
Wainwright Building.
Just as the Wainwright Building may be contrasted on the one hand with
the still greater solidity of the Monadnock Building—in that case
justified by the bearing-wall construction—and on the other with the
openness of the Reliance, so it is of interest to compare the Guaranty
with two other big business buildings of 1895 by other Chicago
architects. In the Ellicott Square Building, also in Buffalo, Burnham
was strongly influenced by his close association with McKim at the
World’s Fair. With the assistance of his designer Atwood, whose short
life ended this same year, he adopted the elaborate Renaissance
membering and the heavy masonry vocabulary of the New York skyscraper
architects, although he retained the quadrangular plan and the
glass-roofed central court of the Rookery. On the other hand, in Chicago
Solon S. Beman (1853-1914) in the Studebaker (now Brunswick) Building
came very close to providing an all-glass front, despite the profusion
of Late Gothic frippery with which he detailed his very restricted
terracotta cladding.
Adler had parted from Sullivan in 1895, but Sullivan’s career as a
skyscraper builder continued for a few more years at a very high level.
In his next skyscraper, the Condict Building in New York of 1897-9, he
reduced very considerably the width of the mullions between the piers so
that they became mere colonnettes, and even these are omitted in the
first storey. But this highly logical differentiation between pier and
mullion, related to the treatment of his Rothschild Store of 1880-1,
still gets lost at the top in a flurry of ornamentation almost as turgid
in its very different and almost _quattrocento_[316] way as the top of
that very early façade. The treatment of the ground storey was
originally like that of the Guaranty, but has been modified by later
shop-fronts.
The next year Holabird & Roche built three contiguous buildings on
Michigan Avenue in Chicago for Harold McCormick (Plate 120). The two
southerly ones are excellent examples of the work of the Chicago School;
they are a little less extensively glazed than Beman’s Studebaker
Building or Holabird & Roche’s own McClurg Building of 1899 but with
crisp and simple, if quite conventional, moulded brick detail on the
piers and rather plain cornices of wholly academic character. Standard
Chicago windows are used throughout. The third façade on the north, that
of the Gage Building at 18 South Michigan Avenue, while fronting a
structure also by Holabird & Roche, is itself by Sullivan. A different
arrangement of the windows, a bolder moulding of the terracotta cladding
of the piers—there were no intervening mullions now, any more than on
his Troescher Building of 1884—and a strategic spotting of the
chicory-like ornament—as well as, originally, a rich picture-frame-like
band around the ground-storey shop-window—produce an entirely different
effect. This effect is no less expressive of the underlying structure,
but it represents a fuller and subtler deployment of architectural
resources than Holabird & Roche provided on the façades next door.
The Gage Building was Sullivan’s penultimate major work. With the
Carson, Pirie & Scott Department Store his career as an architect of big
commercial buildings came to an end. This was designed in 1899 and the
original three-bay and nine-storey section on Madison Street built in
1899-1901 for Schlesinger & Mayer; it was completed in 1903-4 for the
present owners with the erection of the twelve-storey section that runs
along State Street.[317] This building, which was Sullivan’s swan song,
has also seemed to many critics his masterpiece (Plate 121). It lacks,
however, the unity of the earlier Guaranty Building, having been built
in two—indeed actually in three—successive campaigns. Despite the
prominence of its site in the Chicago Loop, the store is inevitably
overshadowed today by later and taller neighbours; nevertheless, it
occupies a very high place in the Sullivanian canon.
There is no vertical emphasis except on the rounded pavilion at the
corner, where continuous colonnettes rise the full height between the
rather narrow bays; this feature was intended from the first but not
built until 1903-4. The wide Chicago windows are crisply cut through the
white terracotta sheathing just like the windows between the oriels on
the Stock Exchange Building. The underlying grid of the structural steel
frame—always more horizontal than vertical in effect, as the Reliance
Building so clearly reveals—completely controls the surface pattern of
the fenestration. On the Guaranty Building Sullivan emphasized the
structural piers at their base by bending back the shop-windows of the
ground storey; here it was the topmost storey that he set back,
revealing the tops of the piers like little free-standing columns
beneath the terminal slab in the spirit of his earlier eaves galleries.
This treatment—most unfortunately replaced in 1948 by a flush
parapet—increased very notably the effect of volume in much the same way
as the parallel treatment at the base of the Guaranty.
At the base here, however, the shop-windows are carried up two storeys
and given picture-frame-like surrounds, somewhat as on the Gage
Building. In the cast-iron ornamentation of these frames, now much
simplified, as also in that of the canopy on the north side and around
the entrances in the rounded corner pavilion, Sullivan reached a peak of
virtuosity in the lush decoration that has seemed to later critics quite
at odds with the severe rectangularity of the façades above. There can
be no question, however, that Sullivan considered ornament of the
greatest importance in architecture and gave to its invention and
elaboration his best thought and energy. It is certainly an interesting
coincidence, moreover, rather than a matter of influence either way,
that in these very years in Europe the newest architectural mode, the
Art Nouveau, also put heavy emphasis on a somewhat similar sort of
curvilinear decoration, often in association with exposed metal
construction, and most notably on department stores (see Chapters 16,
17).
Sullivan’s ornament never had much influence either at home or abroad.
Although Sullivanian skyscrapers of varying size and quality exist in
many Middle Western and Far Western cities, most of them built in the
first two decades of the new century, only the Rockefeller Building in
Cleveland, built in 1903-6 by Knox & Elliot and extended laterally in
1910, really employs ornament, although of a drier and more geometrical
order deriving from Owen Jones’s _Grammar_, in anything like Sullivan’s
way. On Sullivan’s own late buildings, mostly tiny banks in small Middle
Western towns, and in comparable work by his former assistant George G.
Elmslie (1871-1952)[318] and William G. Purcell (b. 1880) the ornament
tends to get more out of hand than on any of his skyscrapers of the
nineties except perhaps the Condict Building. The best of Sullivan’s is
the National Farmers’ Bank at Owatonna, Minn., of 1908; but Purcell &
Elmslie’s Merchants’ National Bank in Winona, Minn., completed in 1911,
might easily be mistaken for Sullivan’s work, for it is of comparable
quality.
In the skyscrapers of the late nineties and the first two decades of the
twentieth century designed in other Chicago architectural offices, such
as D. H. Burnham & Co., Jenney & Mundie, and Holabird & Roche, there was
rarely any attempt to vie with Sullivan as an ornamentalist but rather a
continuance of the straightforward sort of design of the last-named
firm’s Michigan Avenue buildings of 1898-9. A particularly fine and very
large example is their Cable Building in Chicago of 1899. In the Fisher
Building of 1897, also in Chicago, the Burnham firm more or less
repeated the formula of the Reliance Building, but with a profusion of
rather archaeological Late Gothic detail, eschewing the New York
influence apparent in the Ellicott Square Building of 1895. Jenney &
Mundie, rather more than the others, tended to follow the leadership of
the New York architects of the day in using academic detail.
On the whole, the Chicago School continued to be vigorous, if not
especially creative, down to the First World War, all the way through a
period during which New York skyscrapers, still usually conceived as
shaped towers rather than as plain slabs, received a succession of
different stylistic disguises as they rose higher and higher. The
forty-seven-storey (612-foot) Singer Building[319] of 1907 by Ernest
Flagg (1857-1947) with its curious bulbous mansard—’Beaux-Arts’ of a
quite aberrant sort—was followed by the campanile-like 700-foot
Metropolitan Tower in Madison Square of 1909 by Napoleon LeBrun &
Sons;[320] and that in turn by the cathedral-like Late Gothic
elaboration of the Woolworth Building[321] of 1913 by Cass Gilbert
(1859-1934), fifty-two storeys and 792 feet tall, which is still one of
the major landmarks of downtown New York (Plate 178). A new flurry of
skyscraper building followed in the twenties (see Chapter 24). The story
with which this chapter is concerned, however, had reached its climax
with the Chicago skyscrapers of the nineties, even though they were soon
overshadowed in height and in contemporary esteem by the taller and more
spectacular towers of Manhattan. Moreover, most of the big cities of the
country, including Chicago, eventually sought to imitate the New York
mode. But size is not, even in this period, a measure of quality, and
the tallest skyscrapers are not the best, any more than the longest
bridges are the most beautiful. So far the results of the revival of
skyscraper building in the last fifteen years have rather confirmed this
judgement (see Chapter 25).
A difficult question remains to be asked, even if it cannot be very
satisfactorily answered: Why was the nineteenth-century development of
commercial architecture, from Nash’s Regent Street to Sullivan’s
skyscrapers, so completely an Anglo-American achievement? A few reasons
may at least be suggested. On the Continent business activity was less
concentrated in special urban districts in the nineteenth century, and
was hence less likely to develop its own architectural programme. The
big new nineteenth-century blocks in cities like Paris and Vienna and
Rome generally serve a variety of purposes and almost always consist of
residential flats in the upper storeys. In England and in America, on
the other hand, most dwellings were still not flats but houses before
1900, and these fled farther and farther from the commercial areas as
the nineteenth century progressed. The high property values in the
central urban districts of the big Anglo-American cities, rising very
rapidly in the second half of the century, encouraged the exploitation
of their sites with taller and taller buildings. These values also
helped to drive out the earlier inhabitants, leaving such areas as the
London City and the Chicago Loop all but deserted after office hours.
Neither the office blocks of London and the big provincial English
cities of the fifties and sixties nor, _a fortiori_, the skyscrapers of
New York of the seventies and those of Chicago of the nineties can
readily be matched elsewhere—except, of course, to some extent in the
British Dominions and Colonies. Yet European cities do offer certain
nineteenth-century commercial structures that are of real interest. The
covered _passages_ and _galeries_, from the modest ones of the early
decades of the century in Paris to Mengoni’s great Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele II in Milan (Plate 75B) of the sixties, offered an urbanistic
device of real significance. This is barely to be appreciated in the
various extant English and American examples, such as the still
flourishing Burlington Arcade in London or the Arcade in Providence,
R.I., which is maintained as a historic monument though all but deserted
by commerce.
Related to these structures serving multiple business purposes was the
gradual development of the department store, a grouping together of
various separate shops under one management and one roof, of which the
Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie in Paris of 1838 were a
relatively early example (Plate 62A). Exploiting like the _galeries_ the
possibilities of iron-and-glass roofing, the early Continental examples
of the department store had their more modest English and American
counterparts such as Owen Jones’s Crystal Palace Bazar of 1858 in London
or the Z.C.M.I. in Salt Lake City, founded by the Mormon leader Brigham
Young himself and housed in cast iron in 1868.
The most notable later nineteenth-century department stores were in
Paris and Berlin. In Paris the still extant Bon Marché of 1876 in the
Rue de Sèvres by L. C. Boileau (1837-?), son of the builder of several
Second Empire churches of iron, and the engineer Eiffel and the
Printemps at the corner of the Rue de Rome and the Boulevard Haussmann
of 1881-9 by Paul Sédille (1836-1900) were remarkable in conception if
without much distinction of design. However, the Bon Marché is now
completely masked externally by a masonry façade of the 1920s, and
little of interest remains visible inside the Printemps. Of the portion
of the Wertheim Department Store in Berlin built by Alfred Messel
(1853-1909) in 1896-9 nothing survives.
Just after 1900, when the metal-and-glass construction of the interiors
of department stores came to be generally exposed externally, this line
of development came to its climax (Plates 131B and 133). This climax is
so closely associated with the decorative and architectural development
called Art Nouveau that the later Continental department stores may
better be discussed in connexion with that (see Chapters 16, 17). Being
of exposed metal, however, not of masonry-sheathed ‘skyscraper
construction’ and relatively low, these stores are closer in character
to the cast-iron commercial buildings of the third quarter of the
century in America and Britain than to the tall Chicago structures of
1890-1910.
Steel construction of the American type, with the internal skeleton
carrying a protective cladding of masonry, has gradually spread since
the opening of the century to all parts of the world that produce or can
afford to buy structural steel. It was, for example, introduced into
London by the Anglo-French architects Mewès & Davis in building the Ritz
Hotel there in 1905. Yet it remains typically American. In most other
countries reinforced concrete rivals or completely takes its place as
the characteristic material for building large structures of all sorts.
The story of reinforced concrete had its technical beginnings in the mid
nineteenth century; but it was not before the nineties that it first
began to be exploited on a large scale and for conscious architectural
effect. The first important reinforced concrete buildings, French like
most of the best department stores of around 1900, will be mentioned
later (see Chapter 18).
The whole picture of architecture in the twentieth century, so different
from the picture of architecture before 1850, was modified by the
developments that culminated in the Chicago skyscrapers. However
important this has been for all later architecture both technically and
aesthetically, it is important to stress here, as with the mid-century
monuments of iron and glass, that the successive stages in the
development are not solely, or even primarily, of premonitory and
historical interest. From Parris’s granite buildings in Boston of the
twenties, through the arcaded English commercial work of the fifties and
sixties, to Richardson’s Field store and Sullivan’s skyscrapers in
Chicago, St Louis, Buffalo, and New York, enlightened commercial patrons
demanded and often received the best architecture of their day. The
functional and technical challenges of commercial building seem to have
brought out the creative capacities of three generations of architects
as no other commissions did so consistently. Compare Parris’s Grecian
temple church, St Paul’s in Boston, with his granite ‘skeleton’ fronts
beside the Quincy Market (Plate 112B); set Godwin’s Stokes Croft
Warehouse beside his town halls (Plates 113 and 92A); measure
Richardson’s Field store even against his Pittsburgh Jail (Plates 116B
and 108B). Then the strictly _architectural_, as well as the technical
and social, significance of the major commercial monuments of the
nineteenth century will be evident.
This chapter has summarized what was probably the greatest single
innovation in nineteenth-century architecture, the rise of a new type of
building to a position of prestige and of achievement comparable to that
of churches and palaces in earlier periods. The same cannot be said of
domestic architecture. The house was hardly a nineteenth-century
invention like the office building. It was, however, modified almost
beyond recognition as the century progressed, at the hands of several
generations of creative architects. Around 1900 there are few if any
churches, for example, to rival Sullivan’s skyscrapers in quality; but
there are some houses, especially several by his disciple Wright and by
his English contemporary Voysey.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 15
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DETACHED HOUSE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA FROM 1800
TO 1900
IN the long story of man’s dwellings from prehistory to the present, the
Anglo-American development that took place in the hundred years between
the 1790s and the 1890s is of considerable significance, particularly as
it provides the immediate background of the twentieth-century house.
Architectural history has generally been little concerned, in dealing
with periods earlier than the eighteenth century at least, with the
habitations of any but the upper classes. The study of rural cottages in
various regions of the world has been more a matter for anthropological
investigation; the housing of the urban poor, when that was other than
the makeshift adaptation of grander structures fallen into decay,
remains for most early periods a matter of mystery. We know that ancient
Rome had its blocks of middle-class flats of many storeys; although the
links are not easy to recover, there was certainly some continuity in
Mediterranean lands between that form of urban housing in antiquity and
what can be traced from the medieval period down to the nineteenth
century. Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages saw rather the
development of individual urban dwellings with party walls, ancestors of
the terrace-houses that first appeared in England in the seventeenth
century.
The detached house of moderate size, so familiar today, the principal
type of dwelling to undergo notable development in the nineteenth
century in Anglo-Saxon countries, has no such remote Classical origins
as the Continental flat or apartment. It made its appearance as the
dwelling of the yeoman when economic conditions in late medieval England
encouraged the rise of a class between the feudal landowner and the
peasant parallel to the skilled artisan class in the towns. The
conditions of settlement of the British colonies in America,
particularly in New England, encouraged the continuation through the
seventeenth century of this type of dwelling almost to the exclusion of
any other sort, since towns were then small and large estates rare.
Around 1700 in America, though considerably earlier in England,
relatively advanced contemporary modes began to have some influence on
the design of such houses. With a lag of as much as a quarter of a
century, the architectural developments of the home country were
generally followed in the colonies; nor did political independence much
affect the dependent cultural relationship in this field after the
American Revolution.
The effects of the Picturesque point of view on the development of the
house in England around 1800 were several (see Chapter 6). On the one
hand, the newly fashionable attitude gave prestige to modest detached
dwellings, raising the social status of the ‘cottage’ from an
agricultural labourer’s hovel to a middle-class habitation or even on
occasion a holiday ‘retreat’ for the upper classes—at first by adding
the French adjective _orné_ (Plate 122A). At the same time the status of
the ‘villa’ tended to be reduced from a large Italianate mansion on its
own estate to a moderate-sized house at the edge of town. In much of the
prolific architectural literature of the period, the hierarchy of
residential building types was Rousseauistically inverted as rustic
models, both native and Italian, were proposed for emulation in edifices
of fairly considerable size. Thus several modes of informal design that
had made their eighteenth-century debut in garden ornaments received
more serious attention from architects as they came to be considered
suitable for medium-sized dwellings and even sometimes for quite large
mansions. As we have already seen, the towered Italian Villa was first
introduced as a modest detached house by Nash at Cronkhill in 1802. It
was similarly utilized by Schinkel (Plate 14A) and Persius at Potsdam a
generation later, although Royalty still preferred to dwell there in
Grecian dignity or Castellated pomp (see Chapter 2). Somewhat later,
however, the Italian Villa provided (none too happily) a Royal retreat
when Prince Albert decided on this mode for Osborne House on the Isle of
Wight in the mid forties.
Not all Picturesque modes were equally adaptable to middle-class
dwellings. The Indian found its most notable realizations in a large
country house, S. P. Cockerell’s Sezincote, and a Royal folly, Nash’s
Brighton Pavilion (Plate 48). There were, however, considerably later
American examples[322] on a somewhat more modest scale, such as
Iranistan at Bridgeport, Conn., built for Barnum in 1847-8, and
Longwood, near Natchez in Mississippi, designed by Samuel Sloan in 1860
that have been mentioned earlier. But the Indian mode contributed the
veranda, henceforth an integral feature of American domestic
architecture, though rare after the Picturesque period in England.
Verandas very early lost the Oriental detail, however. In front of
Rustic Cottages they were often supported by bark-covered logs, but they
could also acquire the formal character of Italian loggias, Tudor
arcades, Swiss galleries or, most frequently, Classical porticoes and
‘pilastrades’ when adapted for use with other current modes.[323] In
some cases the veranda, carried on occasion to two storeys in height,
became the main theme of the exterior, yet was detailed so simply that
no modish name properly applies (Plate 122A).
Even the Castellated mode, although used mostly for rather large houses
(Plate 49), encouraged loose asymmetrical massing of the sort that is
still more characteristic of the towered Italian Villa.
The Picturesque was thoroughly eclectic, in both possible senses of the
word, as well as occasionally original. On the one hand, the point of
view encouraged the parallel use of diverse modes. In theory, these were
to be chosen according to their suitability to various sorts of natural
settings, but in practice several were often employed side by side, as
in Nash’s Park Villages in London, begun in 1827, and in the
contemporary and later development of comparable suburban areas both in
England and in America. On the other hand, the combination in one design
of features derived from several different modes was allowable, even
praiseworthy—low-pitched roofs with very broad eaves borrowed from the
Swiss Chalet, towers from both the Castellated Mansion and the Italian
Villa, bay-windows from the Tudor Parsonage, and verandas from the
Indian were all part of a common repertory exploited rather
indiscriminately. Basic to the Picturesque point of view and often
determinant of choice of mode and even of individual features was the
preoccupation with the natural setting; verandas, loggias, bay-windows
and prospect towers were desirable, even necessary, features because
they made possible the fuller enjoyment of the circumambient scene.
[Illustration:
Figure 21. T. F. Hunt: house-plan
(from _Designs for Parsonage Houses_, 1827)
]
All these features affected house-plans in detail; but domestic planning
in general was not as consistently re-organized as might have been
expected, if only because the Picturesque point of view was so
predominantly visual rather than practical in its usual concerns.
Asymmetrical massing allowed, even forced, asymmetrical planning,
however, thereby encouraging functional differentiation of the
disposition and the sizes of various rooms (Figure 21). Yet very often,
behind irregular exteriors, the plans were only slightly dislocated from
the formal patterns of the preceding Palladian period. Although the
increased articulation of most house-plans allowed the introduction of
windows on several sides of many rooms, more significant at this stage
was the frequent use of irregular shapes for the larger rooms, their
main rectangular spaces complicated by external oriels and by internal
ingle-nooks. None of these individual changes can be very precisely
dated, at least in the current state of knowledge of the development of
the house-plan in this period. Almost all of them were generally
familiar in England by 1810. Tudor Parsonages, whether or not occupied
by members of the clergy, were likely to be most adeptly planned.[324]
In them the well-defined needs of a family of relatively high social
status but low income encouraged a more efficient grouping of the rooms
and a clearer distinction of separate functions—entrance hall,
drawing-room, dining-room, study, kitchen, scullery—than had been common
earlier in such medium-sized dwellings.
In the first third of the century the various Picturesque modes of
house-design were very widely exploited in England for middle-class
habitations in the new suburbs, having generally made their first
appearance a decade or so earlier in lodges or other accessories to
large private estates. They were also popular at the new seaside
resorts, such as Sidmouth in Devon and Bournemouth in Hampshire, where
they often housed more exalted clients. At Sidmouth, for example, what
is now the Woodlands Hotel was remodelled from a barn into a
barge-boarded Cottage Orné by Lord Gwydyr in 1815; the nucleus of the
Knowles Hotel there was Lord Despenser’s cottage of a few years earlier;
and the Royal Glen Hotel, a modest Castellated house then known as
Walbrook Cottage, was built early enough to house Queen Victoria as a
baby. Although the prestige of the Picturesque declined rapidly in high
aesthetic circles after 1840, the rigorous principles of Pugin and the
ecclesiologists had little effect on the operations of suburban
builders, who continued for decades to follow the various
well-established modes of a generation earlier.
As Latrobe’s ‘Gothick’ Sedgley, built outside Philadelphia in 1798, and
various other Neo-Gothic structures in Philadelphia and Boston of the
first decade of the new century make evident, the Picturesque came early
to the United States. Yet it was hardly before the thirties that the
various Cottage and Villa modes began to compete at all with the Greek
temple and the formal post-Palladian house modernized by the use of
Grecian detail; only with the appearance in 1842 of _Cottage Residences_
by A. J. Downing (1815-52)[325] were they enthusiastically propagated.
Earlier, new developments in the planning of the ubiquitous
moderate-sized free-standing houses were not very notable in America. In
the 1790s the influence of Adam, and possibly of the French, encouraged
some experimentation with variously shaped rooms; but this largely died
out as the necessary rectangularity of the Greek temple house, only
extended by one or more wings in the largest examples, reimposed the
formal Anglo-Palladian plan with central stair-hall and four nearly
equal-sized corner rooms. For smaller houses with pedimented fronts,
however, a sort of terrace-house plan was increasingly popular, with
stair-hall at one side, two principal living rooms one behind the other,
and a narrower kitchen wing extending to the rear. A planning innovation
that first appeared in America in the 1790s, by no means unknown earlier
in England but rare except in terrace-houses, was the opening together
of two rooms—front and back parlours—by means of broad sliding doors.
This became increasingly common after 1800. Moreover, the temple portico
provided the equivalent of a shallow veranda across the front of the
house and was sometimes replaced or supplemented by a deeper colonnaded
porch at the sides or rear. The veranda, indeed, had reached the
southern states fairly early in the eighteenth century, arriving from
the East via the West Indies. In its usual two-storeyed form it was
easily merged with the monumental colonnades demanded by the Grecian
mode (Plate 38B).
Thus, even before a rather belated wave of strong Picturesque influence
began to drive out the temple house in the forties, early
nineteenth-century American houses had certain definitely post-Colonial
characteristics in their plans. Of later house-planning in the United
States in the forties and fifties almost everything that has been said
about English planning in the preceding decades applies (Figure 22). By
this time in England, however, newer planning ideas were being
introduced by leading architects in relatively large houses. At
Scarisbrick, for example, where the remodelling and extension of the
existing Georgian house began in 1837, Pugin revived the medieval great
hall (see Chapter 6). A few years later in his own house, The Grange of
1841-3 at Ramsgate,[326] by no means a mansion in size or scale, the
more modest two-storey hall incorporates the staircase and also
provides, with the galleries above, the central core of communication.
Parallel with these examples, which were of Gothic inspiration, Barry at
Highclere adapted the glass-roofed central _cortile_ of the Reform Club
to domestic use, associating with it the main staircase rising in a
contiguous vertical space.
At the hands of High Church architects the parsonage, by definition no
mansion but a modest free-standing gentleman’s residence, was also
undergoing a characteristic development. No longer Tudor, of course, it
was still not forced to be archaeologically decorated in its planning,
since there were few if any relevant medieval models to imitate. The
doctrine of ‘realism’ condemned the shabby construction and careless use
of materials that had too often been characteristic of Picturesque
house-building in the previous decades, while the need for economy
discouraged the ornamentation common on contemporary churches.
Such a vicarage as that which Butterfield built in 1844-5 to go with his
‘first’ church, St Saviour’s at Coalpitheath, Gloucestershire, is a
model of simple masonry construction. In the random ashlar walls are set
wide banks of plain mullioned windows, Gothic only in the arching of
their heads, where they can serve best to light the various rooms (Plate
122B). The massing also is irregular yet orderly with several high
gables, a porch, many tall chimney stacks, and a broad bow-window
elaborating the basically rectangular block. But, in the language of the
ecclesiologists, ‘the true Picturesque derives from the sternest
utility’, and so all these projecting features were such as could be
readily justified functionally, like the ritualistic articulation of
contemporary churches. The plan of Butterfield’s vicarage has the
virtues of those of the Picturesque Tudor Parsonages in the variety of
room-sizes and shapes provided and also in the opportunities that the
windows offer to enjoy surrounding nature. There is also at Coalpitheath
a very modest version of Pugin’s stair-hall at The Grange, not a mere
lobby but a central space designed for easy horizontal and vertical
communication.
Any serious revival of medieval craftsmanship in masonry was all but
impossible in America; in any case it was largely irrelevant in a land
where most houses were built of wood. But in reaction to the
white-painted clapboards and the smooth Grecian trim of the previous
decades, echoing however humbly the marble of Greece, Downing in the
early forties proposed and many at his behest adopted variant treatments
for the exterior sheathing of Picturesque villas and cottages that were
rather more expressive. The distinguished native craftsmanship evident
in the more monumental edifices of the Greek Revival executed in fine
ashlar of granite or other light-coloured stone, or else in smooth red
brick, died out. Such materials had no more appeal than did crisp
white-painted wood to a generation indoctrinated with the Picturesque
point of view. Yet clapboards remained the usual surfacing material for
wooden houses, even if they were now painted, not white, but in the
stony hues—grey or beige—that Downing recommended in his books with
actual coloured samples.
[Illustration:
Figure 22. A. J. Downing: house-plan (from _Cottage Residences_, 1842)
]
The treatment Downing preferred was board-and-batten.[327] This he made
a constituent element of the very original Bracketted mode that he
offered as an American alternative to the imported Italian Villa and
Tudor Parsonage which he was energetically engaged in nationalizing.
Board-and-batten provides a stronger pattern of light and shade, and
also the verticalism that appealed increasingly to mid-century taste.
This sheathing also offers a sort of symbolic expression of the light
‘balloon-frame’[328] construction that was beginning to come into
general use by the fifties, though this method of wooden framing was
apparently never known to Downing, since he died in 1852 before it
reached the eastern states where he lived and worked.
With their board-and-batten walls, their ample verandas, and their
bay-windows, what are still usually called ‘Downing houses’ constitute a
largely original American creation in spite of the frequent use of
Tudoresque detail on barge-boards and veranda supports and even of
elaborately moulded terracotta chimney pots. Yet in their planning the
houses designed by Downing and his architect friends Davis and Notman do
not advance much beyond the models published in the English books of the
previous decades that were their immediate prototypes (Figure 22). The
verandas are usually wider and more prominent, however, and the front
and rear parlours are likely to open into one another, as sometimes also
into a modest central hall.
In America as in England, the Picturesque period came to no sudden end.
The recurrent publication of Downing’s books even after the Civil
War[329] indicates how long his models remained favourites with American
builders and their small-town and suburban clients. However, even before
the Civil War a mansarded Second Empire mode was beginning to become
popular (see Chapter 9). With the wide acceptance of this and of the
High Victorian Gothic there developed a rather sharp split between
autochthonous and imported types of house-design, drastically though the
imported types were usually Americanized outside the bigger eastern
cities. To this situation we must return later.
Something has already been said of the major turn that took place in the
development of the English house around 1860 (see Chapters 9 and 12).
When seen in relation to the parsonages that his master Street and also
Butterfield had been building in the previous fifteen years, Webb’s Red
House built in 1859-60 for William Morris is considerably less
revolutionary than has sometimes been supposed. Had this been built in
Gloucestershire rather than in Kent, it would certainly have been of
stone like Butterfield’s Coalpitheath Vicarage; as it is, the entrance
porch is no simpler or less Gothic than Butterfield’s. The particular
window forms, moreover, can be matched in Butterfield’s Clergy House and
School at All Saints’, Margaret Street, and the somewhat rustic ease of
composition in his cottages at Baldersby St James. Yet the planning here
is highly individual, suited to the special needs of a client who was an
artist and a writer, not a parson.
The next house that Webb built, now known as Benfleet Hall, Cobham,
begun in 1860 for the painter Spencer Stanhope, has been less
publicized, and it never had the rich furnishings that Morris and his
associates designed and executed for the Red House. Yet it is perhaps
more significant in the general history of the Anglo-American house.
There is here, for example, a small stair-hall of the order of Pugin’s
at the Grange or Butterfield’s at Coalpitheath around which the other
ground-storey rooms are loosely grouped. The particular character of the
plan can, in fact, best be matched at Hinderton, a small country house
in Cheshire that is hardly more of a mansion than Benfleet, which
Waterhouse built in 1859. This house is in Waterhouse’s gawkiest High
Victorian Gothic, with none of the simplicity and delicacy of Webb’s
early houses. It is rather unlikely that Webb was actually emulating it,
but the plan was twice published[330] and hence soon known abroad.
Webb’s Arisaig in Inverness-shire was begun in 1863 (Figure 23). Built
of local stone, it is somewhat more conventionally Gothic externally;
moreover, it is of country-house size, a mansion rather than a modest
artist’s dwelling like the Red House or Benfleet Hall. The plan has two
major aspects of interest: the two-storeyed hall, with gallery above,
occupies a central position and the principal rooms on both storeys are
very efficiently grouped about it within the bounding rectangle of the
main block of the house. In other words, Arisaig’s hall seems to derive
as much from the Highclere sort of glazed central court as from Pugin’s
revival of the medieval great hall.
Cloverley Hall, which was built by Nesfield and Shaw in 1865-8,
attracted much favourable contemporary attention largely because of the
superb craftsmanship of the brickwork and the originality of the
_japoniste_ ornament (see Chapter 12). It is destroyed now except for
the extensive service and stable wings and the gate lodge; but the
amount and the character of the fenestration, providing in some areas
what amounted to window-walls of stone-mullioned and transomed lights,
and the character of the plan make it still memorable. It was also the
first of the many notable Late Victorian manor houses which both
Nesfield and Shaw would build when working alone.
[Illustration:
Figure 23. Philip Webb: Arisaig, Inverness-shire, 1863, plan
]
Like Arisaig, Cloverley was a large country house. The medieval great
hall, first rather modestly revived by Pugin at Scarisbrick, here
returned at full scale; but it was placed in a corner of the main
block—as was occasionally its position in the sixteenth century—so that
it might receive light from one end as well as from the side (Figure
24). From the entrance, however, one passed by this hall through the
‘screens’ under a gallery to arrive at a stair-hall, more in the manner
of Waterhouse’s and Webb’s, around which the other principal rooms were
compactly grouped. There was also here a very skilful play with levels,
the hall being lower than the rest of the main floor, and therefore
part-way down to the basement—containing a billiard room and so
forth—which was entirely above ground at the rear of the house.
[Illustration:
Figure 24. Nesfield & Shaw: Cloverley Hall, Shropshire, 1865-8, plan
]
While Cloverley Hall was still in construction, Shaw had begun his own
personal career as a house-builder at Glen Andred in 1866-7 (Plate
102B), where he introduced a more vernacular manner (see Chapter 12).
Following this came his Leyswood in 1868-9, a mansion as large as
Cloverley Hall and in some of its decorative features more
archaeologically Late Medieval. As at Cloverley Hall, the amplitude of
the fenestration, however, arranged here in long mullioned bands as well
as in tall window-walls, has seemed more significant to posterity than
the stylistic detailing[331] (Plate 123). Above all, Leyswood marked a
further stage in the development of the ‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure
19), of which the first well-publicized example was Waterhouse’s at
Hinderton. Here the great hall and the stair-hall of Cloverley are
combined to form a central spatial core of communication, somewhat as at
Webb’s Arisaig, but the shape of this is quite irregular and the
reception rooms are grouped very loosely about it, more as at Benfleet
Hall. Projecting well out of the main block, the dining-room and the
drawing-room both receive light from three sides. Moreover, the space of
these rooms is articulated, as in certain Picturesque houses of forty
and fifty years earlier, by ingle-nooks, oriels, and various other
irregularities. Perspectives of Leyswood—not the plan[332]—were
published in the supplement to the _Building News_ of 31 March 1871 and
made at once a tremendous impression both in England and in America
(Plate 123).
[Illustration:
Figure 25. Philip Webb: Barnet, Hertfordshire, Trevor Hall,
1868-70, plan
]
In a house by Webb of the same date as Leyswood, Trevor Hall at Oakleigh
Park, Barnet, in Hertfordshire, the arrangement of the rooms about the
central hall was much more compact (Figure 25). The whole formed a
square and allowed a quite symmetrical treatment of the three principal
fronts. This house is now destroyed except for the gate lodge. Less
interesting in plan but significant for its very modest size is Webb’s
Upwood Gorse, Caterham, Surrey, built for Queen Victoria’s dentist Sir
John Tomes also in 1868. The consistency and the simplicity with which
the local vernacular of brick below and tile-hanging above is handled in
connexion with plenty of white-painted Queen Anne sash-windows regularly
but not symmetrically spaced offers a curiously close prototype of the
American ‘Shingle Style’, although the initiators of that mode a decade
later can hardly have known of this house, since it was never published.
It was rather Shaw’s houses of the next decade, of which his drawings
were exhibited each year at the Royal Academy and given great prominence
in the professional Press, that provided the exemplars which architects
generally imitated both at home and abroad; from 1874 on the plans were
usually illustrated as well as Shaw’s own very virtuoso pen-drawn[333]
perspectives (Plate 123).
Webb’s houses for the painters Val Prinsep and G. B. Boyce in Kensington
and Chelsea, of 1865 and 1869 respectively, were the first English
‘studio-houses’—houses, that is, in which the studios, naturally
equipped with very large windows, were the principal rooms. These
provided a more livable alternative to the great halls that Shaw
generally provided in his country houses; but it was the larger artists’
houses of the seventies and eighties which Shaw built for his fellow
academicians that received contemporary publicity.
By the mid seventies Shaw was moving in the formal and symmetrical
direction initiated by Webb at Trevor Hall and soon carried much further
by Nesfield at Kinmel Park as regards both the planning and the external
organization of his larger London houses. Lowther Lodge in Kensington
Gore of 1873-4 is the first of his domestic commissions that may
properly be called Queen Anne rather than Manorial. The even more
formally designed Cheyne House and Old Swan House, of 1875 and 1876
respectively, on the Chelsea Embankment followed shortly after (Plate
103); but he long continued to build more loosely composed houses in the
country, as has been noted earlier.
Before turning to the results of Shaw’s very notable influence in the
United States in the seventies, something should be said of the
situation there in the preceding decade. The Second Empire mode had been
increasingly popular for houses from the mid fifties and was especially
fashionable during the boom period that followed the Civil War. It had
no positive contribution to make to the general Anglo-American
development in these decades, however. In the domestic field more or
less Gothic modes were its significant rivals; first Downing’s
wide-veranda-ed version of the Tudor Cottage; then, after 1860, what
Vincent Scully has christened the ‘Stick Style’.[334]
On houses in this mode, which is really hardly Gothic at all, a sort of
imitation half-timbering panels the exterior walls, suggesting, like
Downing’s board-and-batten sheathing, the underlying wooden
stud-structure of balloon-frame construction. This construction came to
be generally used in the East as well as in the Middle West, where it
originated, after it had been explained by William E. Bell in his
_Carpentry Made Easy_ in 1858. More striking is the open stickwork of
the ubiquitous verandas. This can be seen in an early form on the
Olmsted house in East Hartford, Conn., of 1849 by the English architect
Gervase Wheeler,[335] who obviously derived it from Picturesque models
in England dating back at least to the thirties. In the J. N. H.
Griswold house of 1862 in Bellevue Avenue in Newport, R.I., by the
French-trained Hunt, now the Newport Art Association, the ‘sticks’ of
the wall surface are so sturdy that they may well be the actual framing
members.
Very characteristic of the maturity of the mode is the Sturtevant house
at nearby Middletown, R.I., built by Dudley Newton (1845?-1907) a decade
later in 1872. Here the gawky vigour of the Stick Style, its intense
woodenness, and its descent from several different Picturesque modes—not
least the Swiss Chalet—is very evident (Plate 124A). Extensive
surrounding verandas are of the very essence of the mode; but the
internal planning, while informal and often asymmetrical, is rarely very
open. Several books by Eugene C. Gardner (1836-1905)[336] of
Springfield, Mass., give a sophisticated architect’s rationale of the
mode. But the exemplars that G. E. Woodward[337] offered in the sixties
are more typical, and were more widely imitated in actual production;
for the Stick Style had almost run its course by the time Gardner began
to present his excellent house designs. Woodward was no architect, and
for the most part the Stick Style should not be considered an
architect’s mode. It represented rather a popular attempt, remarkably
successful for a few years, to create an American domestic vernacular,
suited to the materials in general use and to the current methods of
building, comparable to Downing’s earlier Bracketted mode. Like the
Second Empire vogue the Stick Style died out, at least in the East,
during the general hiatus in building production after the financial
Panic of 1873.
By that time Shaw’s influence had begun to reach America.[338] Moreover,
the possibilities of agglutinative planning about a great hall had been
realized by Richardson well before a Shaw plan—that for Hopedene—was
first made available in the _Building News_ in 1874. It is, of course,
possible that McKim, in passing through England on his way home from
Paris in 1870, had seen (or merely heard of) the character of Webb’s,
Nesfield’s, and Shaw’s houses of the sixties and transmitted that
information to Richardson.
An undated project of about 1871 by Richardson for a house to be built
in Newport, R.I., for Richard Codman includes his first great hall[339]
of the Shavian sort; but the Codman plan is already in advance of, or at
least rather different from, those of Shaw. This hall, out of which the
stairs would rise in an L-shaped at the rear, was to be very large in
relation to the other rooms, and thus definitely a principal living area
not a mere foyer or centre of circulation. The drawing room and dining
room were to open out of the hall through wide doorways so that some
sort of spatial continuity would have extended through all the reception
rooms of the ground storey. There was to be a large veranda at the rear
in the well-established local tradition. The exterior as shown in the
elevations is not at all Shavian but rather related to the Stick Style,
like Richardson’s own house at Arrochar on Staten Island of 1868.
Richardson’s first executed country house, the F. W. Andrews house of
1872-3 at Newport, R.I., was much more Shavian in plan. Four or five
rooms were grouped about a relatively smaller central stair-hall and
most of these were articulated by bay-windows and ingle-nooks. But the
main block was also surrounded by verandas, features which are rare and
always of modest extent on Shaw’s houses. The Andrews house was burned a
long time ago, but from the existing elevations it would appear that the
external treatment represented a sort of transition between the Stick
Style, then at its apogee, and Shaw’s Surrey vernacular translated into
American materials. The verandas were still detailed in a Stick Style
way, and flat stickwork interrupted the continuity of the wall surfaces;
but the clapboarding of the lower walls evidently took the place of the
brickwork Shaw used—it was almost certainly painted red—and the wooden
shingling of the upper walls was a happy substitute for English
tile-hanging. Shingles were, of course, an old though largely forgotten
American sheathing material long used especially for roofs.
By the time Richardson came to design his next large house, that for
William Watts Sherman on Shepard Avenue in Newport in 1874, the
perspectives of several of Shaw’s manors had appeared in the _Building
News_ and the plans of two. As a result, probably, of his assistant
Stanford White’s Shaw-like skill with the pencil, the Sherman house was
notably Shavian externally. Above the ground storey, which is of
Richardsonian random-ashlar masonry in pink Milford granite with
brownstone trim, the walls and the high roofs are covered with shingles
cut in various decorative shapes suggested by those of Shaw’s
tile-hanging. Many of the casement windows are grouped to form
window-walls in the ground storey and arranged in long horizontal bands
above. The half-timbering of the front gable, with painted decoration on
the intervening plaster, was taken straight from Shaw’s Grim’s Dyke; the
carved ornament on the barge-boards is almost Nesfieldian in its
suggestion of _japonisme_. Thus the whole is as perfect a specimen of
Shaw’s Manorial mode as anything any architect other than he or Nesfield
ever produced in England. The house has since been much enlarged, partly
by White in 1881, partly by Newton very much later, but always with due
respect for the character of the original design.
The plan has more of the independent virtues of that of the Codman
project. The hall provides a principal portion of the living area, and
the other main rooms open into it through wide doors; thus there is some
flow of space throughout the whole original block. The original library
at the rear corner, later replaced by a large ballroom, ended in a
Shavian rounded bay with a continuous window band, a feature Wright
would copy later. Yet otherwise the house was less articulated than
Shaw’s earlier ones, having rather the compactness though none of the
symmetry of Webb’s Trevor Hall.
The mid seventies saw many other American reflections of Shaw’s Manorial
mode and soon of his Queen Anne also, none of them so successful as the
Sherman house. But the deep business recession that followed the Panic
of 1873 led to a general mood of repentance after the extravagances,
architectural and otherwise, of the post-war boom. From the resultant
nostalgia for the simpler ways of the American past there began to
develop at this time a great interest in the houses of the Colonial
period, an interest that readily merged, however, with the current
English preoccupation with the vernacular of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. To an extent difficult for posterity to
appreciate, the nascent ‘Shingle Style’,[340] which crystallized towards
the end of the decade with the revival of building production, was to
its protagonists already a sort of Colonial Revival. Although its
origins are partly Shavian, it represents above all a reaction, as did
Shaw’s Manorial mode in England, against the ‘modernism’ of the High
Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire, now grown thoroughly
unfashionable except in the West.
Boston was still the architectural metropolis of the United States, and
it was around Boston, especially in the work of Emerson and Little, the
latter a serious early student of old Colonial work, that this
crystallization of the Shingle Style first took place (see Chapter 13).
But it was at once taken over and given a somewhat more Shaw-like
elaboration by the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, formed in 1879.
From the early eighties, and for over a decade, the Shingle Style was
widely practised by architects from coast to coast, and not least
happily in the Far West. The characteristic use of shingles as an
all-over wall-covering emphasized the continuity of the exterior surface
as a skin stretched over the underlying wooden skeleton of studs, in
contrast to the way the preceding Stick Style had echoed that skeleton
in the external treatment. The shingles properly provide the name for a
most characteristically American domestic mode; but it was in planning
that American architects made the really original contribution in what
was the most significant development of the detached house since the
Picturesque period.
[Illustration:
Figure 26. W. R. Emerson: Mount Desert, Maine, house, 1879, plan
]
One of the first mature examples of the Shingle Style, a house built by
Emerson on Mount Desert in Maine in 1879, well illustrates the
virtuosity of the new planning (Figure 26). Rooms of varied shape and
size are loosely grouped about the hall and open freely into one
another. The various levels of the different areas are related to the
landing levels of the elaborate staircase. Above all, it should be noted
that the verandas are not mere adjuncts or afterthoughts, as they were
even on Richardson’s Andrews house, but major elements, both space-wise
and visually, of the whole composition. Such houses parallel in their
three-dimensional complexity the massing of the Italian Villas of the
earlier nineteenth-century decades with their loggias, pergolas, and
prospect towers, yet they bear little or no visual resemblance to them,
since the later houses are always much more sculpturally plastic and
less articulated in composition. The windows are generally of
double-hung small-paned sashes of a type at once Queen Anne and
Colonial, but they are frequently grouped in the Shavian way, as well as
being ingeniously placed in order to vary the internal lighting effects,
so that the pattern of fenestration is not at all of an
eighteenth-century order.
Richardson certainly did not initiate the Shingle Style; but he took it
over in 1880 and made it very much his own, using it for all his later
country and suburban houses. Dropping all detail, whether Richardsonian
Romanesque, Shavian Manorial, Queen Anne, or American Colonial, he
retained much of the ease and casualness of Shaw’s best early houses.
But there is also a great deal of similarity to the simple massive
effects of the old Colonial houses also. Spiritually, so to say, if not
so much visually, Richardson’s shingled houses most resemble Webb’s best
work; of these Richardson presumably had no knowledge, although it is
just possible that he might have seen some when he was in England in
1882, well after the Shingle Style was fully established.
Richardson’s Stoughton house in Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., of
1882-3 is perhaps his best shingled one, at least in the relatively
untouched form in which it, almost alone, alas, has come down to us
(Plate 124B). It certainly shows little evidence of the interest that he
is known to have taken in Burges’s and Shaw’s work while he was abroad
just before this. The entrance, originally, was through the loggia
recessed into the main mass of the house (it is now from Ash Street on
the left). The living-hall extends, as in the Sherman house, from front
to back and the stairs sweep up in a quarter-circle over the entrance.
The drawing room at the corner and the dining room behind the loggia
both open into the hall through wide doors; only the small library is
isolated from the general flow of space. Externally, the shingled
surfaces, broken only by banks of double-hung windows, model the complex
mass into a unified composition, the almost submerged stair-tower
successfully linking the two gabled wings at right angles to one another
by its rounded form. There is no ornament of any sort, and the weathered
grey of the shingles is varied only by the dark-green paint of the
window sash.
McKim, Mead & White’s houses of the early eighties, several of them
equally fine, are usually rather more elaborate in their massing and are
likely to be enlivened with much imaginative detail.[341] Some of the
detail recalls this or that style of the past, but all of it is
thoroughly personalized by White’s delicate hand. One of their best
houses is the one for Isaac Bell, Jr, built in 1881-2 in Bellevue Avenue
in Newport, R.I. (Plate #126:pl126). This is less unified externally
than the Stoughton house but more open in plan (Figure 27). A wide
veranda, with very elegant bamboo-like supports, extends around two
fronts, expanding into a two-storeyed open pavilion on the right. This
pavilion provides a semicircular void to balance the round tower at the
rear left corner. The patterns of the original cut shingles on this
house, although obviously suggested by English tiling, are much softer
and more graceful, almost bringing to mind birds’ plumage.
Inside, the hall is articulated by a wide ingle-nook, rather dark and
low, in sharpest contrast to the great flight of stairs beyond down
which floods light from the window-wall at the half landing.
Twenty-five-foot sliding doors, hung from above, make it possible to
open the drawing room through almost its entire length into the hall.
The Bell dining room, connecting at its end through French windows with
the curved portion of the veranda, has some of the finest of White’s
orientalizing detail. This is much more original than that in the new
library he decorated at this time in the Sherman house or the dining
room he added to Upjohn’s Kingscote, both also in Newport.
McKim, Mead & White’s slightly earlier H. Victor Newcomb house of 1880-1
in Elberon, N.J., is at once clumsier and more Shavian externally than
the Bell house; but the spatial treatment of the living-hall is most
original and very significant for later developments (Plate 125A). The
main rectangular space, of which the shape is emphasized by the ceiling
beams and by the abstract geometrical pattern of the floor, seems to
flow out in various directions into other rooms and into several bays
and nooks; but the actual room-space is sharply defined by a continuous
frieze-like member that becomes an open wooden grille above the various
openings. There can be little question that the major influence here is
from the Japanese[342] interior, but from the Japanese interior
understood as architecture. This is not just a superficial matter of
Nesfieldian _japonisme_ such as White was employing so much in his
ornament in these years. The Kingscote dining room has somewhat similar
spatial qualities but more eclectic detailing and richer materials:
marble, Tiffany glass tiles, cork panels, stained glass, etc.
[Illustration:
Figure 27. McKim, Mead & White: Newport, R.I., Isaac Bell, Jr, house,
1881-2, plan
]
In 1879 Cyrus McCormick had his Chicago mansion built by the local
architect Adolph Cudell (1850-1910) and his partner Blumenthal in the
form of a very corrupt Second Empire _hôtel particulier_. It is good
evidence of the rapidity with which taste changed at this time that two
years later he called on McKim, Mead & White to build for him in
Richfield Springs, N.Y., one of the finest and most carefully composed
of all their Shingle Style houses. This house is notable not only for
the subtly Japanese character of the various sorts of veranda supports
but even more for the way the composition is unified under the broad
front gable by the long horizontal line of the veranda roof repeating
that of the stylobate-like stone wall of the terrace below. It is most
unfortunate that this house is now in a state of near-collapse.
Little’s contemporary Shingleside House of 1881 in Swampscott, Mass.,
has been mentioned already. Soberer than the Bell or the McCormick
houses in its rectangular shape and almost total lack of exterior
detail, this had a galleried two-storey hall with a window-wall as the
principal living area. In the combining of different levels this house
recalled a little Cloverley Hall, but it was completely Americanized in
scale and in detail without being archaeologically Neo-Colonial.
By the mid eighties J. Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913) had introduced the
Shingle Style to Chicago, and other Eastern architects were building
good houses of this order in such Western towns as Cheyenne, Idaho;
Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Pasadena, California. In Philadelphia
Wilson Eyre (1858-1944) developed the mode with a very characteristic
personal difference, often eschewing the use of shingles. If his
exteriors are rather English in their frequent use of brick and real
half-timbering, his plans are most original. The long rooms of varied
and irregular shape are strung out on either side of halls from which
rise stairs within grilled enclosures of a sort that appeared in England
only in the houses of the nineties by Voysey and his contemporaries.
The heyday of the Shingle Style was brief, even though it continued in
use well down into the nineties. The Colonial Revival implications,
present from the first, soon encouraged more and more comprehensive use
of eighteenth-century detail, and this supported the general tendency of
the mid eighties in America away from the irregular and towards more
formal order (see Chapter 13). Something of this change could be seen in
Richardson’s latest houses in masonry such as the Glessner house of
1885-7 at 18th Street and South Prairie Avenue in Chicago, which still
stands, and the contemporary Mac Veagh house, long since destroyed, also
in Chicago, both of which were almost symmetrical as regards their front
façades. The most drastic examples, of course, of this Academic Reaction
were such houses as McKim, Mead & White’s Villard group in New York
(Plate 109B) and their H. A. C. Taylor house in Newport with its formal
Anglo-Palladian plan of central hall and four corner rooms. Despite its
even tighter plan, however, their extant W. G. Low house in Bristol,
R.I., of 1887—a year later therefore than the demolished Taylor
house—can properly be cited again as a masterpiece of the Shingle Style
(Plate 127). This illustrates very well how the loose massing of the
houses of the early eighties could be organized into a carefully
balanced composition without succumbing to any historical mode of
design, whether Italian Renaissance or American Colonial.
Particularly interesting in this connexion are the small houses at
Tuxedo Park, N.Y., which Price designed for Pierre Lorillard in 1885-6,
some years before he began to build Renaissance skyscrapers (see Chapter
14). Lorillard’s own house has a rather tight plan of the Neo-Colonial
sort; but the exterior with its paired chimneys on the front, a
Richardsonian entrance arch between them, and the verandas and terrace
treated as voids carefully related to the solid mass behind is still in
the earlier tradition (Plate 125B). In such other houses by Price at
Tuxedo as those for William Kent and Travis C. Van Buren, the loose open
plans of the immediately preceding years were organized into T and X
patterns, and the verandas and terraces were even more formally treated
as important elements in compositions made up of well-defined voids and
solids (Figure 28).
This brings us to the beginning of the career of Frank Lloyd Wright,
already introduced as an important coadjutor of Sullivan from 1887 to
1893. Although Wright’s mature career begins only about 1900 (see
Chapter 19), his apprentice years as a builder of houses provide a very
significant episode that is closely related to the earlier story of the
nineteenth-century house in England and America. By the late eighties a
full-dress Colonial Revival was under way in the East. But it was the
particular combination of freedom and order that had been achieved by
Richardson in his latest houses, by McKim, Mead & White in their Low
house, and by Price in his Tuxedo houses which was the immediate
tradition from which Wright’s domestic architecture grew far more than
the work of Sullivan.
[Illustration:
Figure 28. Bruce Price: Tuxedo Park, N.Y., Tower House, 1885-6
]
Born in 1867, Wright had had some two years in the Engineering
School—there was no architectural school—at the University of Wisconsin
when he came to Chicago at the age of twenty in 1887. He first found
work in the office of Silsbee whom Wright’s uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones had
brought to Chicago a year or two earlier to design All Souls’ Unitarian
Church, of which he was minister. The young architect’s first work,
nominally a Silsbee commission, was the Hillside Home School built in
1887 for his aunts near Spring Green, Wisconsin. This was a rather
provincial specimen of a Shingle Style house and was later demolished by
Wright himself.
Shifting over the following year to the Adler & Sullivan office, Wright
by 1889 was married and ready to build a house for himself on the
strength of a five-year contract with his new employers. This house, at
428 Forest Avenue in Oak Park, Ill., still extant but much pulled about,
derives almost entirely from Price’s cottages at Tuxedo except that the
plan is much less formal. In the interior, the wide openings between the
rooms are not framed by architraves but seem to have been produced by
pulling back the walls beneath the continuous frieze. In this treatment,
rather Japanese in concept, Wright would seem to have been influenced by
White’s handling of the hall of the Newcomb house, even though that is
rather Japanese also in some of the detailing and Wright’s is not.
Wright’s next important work is the James Charnley house at 1365 Astor
Street in Chicago, built in 1891-2. This was actually a commission of
the Adler & Sullivan firm, but one of which he had entire charge. A city
house built of tawny Roman brick like that used for the court of the
Boston Public Library, this is as formal[343] as anything McKim, Mead &
White had yet designed. But there is no High Renaissance or Colonial
reminiscence whatever in the external detailing. The Charnley house is
rather a conscientious attempt to emulate in a modest three-storey
residence the highly original design of Sullivan’s newly completed
Wainwright Building in Saint Louis.
Wright was also accepting various private commissions on the side,
mostly very small ones, by this time. The George Blossom house of 1892
at 4858 Kenwood Avenue on the south side of Chicago, however, is of more
consequence. Externally, this follows rather closely McKim, Mead &
White’s Taylor house in the curved Ionic entrance porch and the
recurrent Palladian windows, not to speak of the use of yellow-painted
clapboards and white-painted trim of simplified academic character. Even
the plan is for the most part symmetrically ordered. But behind the
formal range of entrance lobby and two small corner rooms at the front
the whole centre of the house opens up as a single great living-hall. In
this living-hall a wide ingle-nook is lined up on axis with the
entrance, the elaborate staircase rises in several flights across one
end, and wide openings connect with the library and the dining room. The
dining room, which ends in a curved bay with a continuous window-band,
is almost a copy of the original library of Richardson’s Sherman house.
In another Wright house of 1892, that for A. W. Harlan, also on the
south side of Chicago, at 4414 Greenwood Avenue, which Sullivan happened
to see, he recognized his assistant’s hand and this brought about the
break between the two before Wright’s contract ran out.
When Wright set up for himself in 1893 there were two paths open to him.
That he actually considered following the path of Academic Reaction, so
heavily publicized by the success of the World’s Fair, is evident from
his project of this year for a Library and Museum in Milwaukee (see
Chapter 13). But when Burnham at this point offered to send Wright to
Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and then to the new American
Academy which he and McKim were planning to start in Rome, in
preparation for taking him on as designing partner, the young architect
turned the opportunity down.
The W. H. Winslow house of 1893 in Auvergne Place in River Forest, Ill.,
always considered by Wright his ‘first’, shares many qualities with the
Blossom and Harlan houses, but is altogether a much more mature and
original work (Plate 128A). The front is completely symmetrical and as
formal as that of the Charnley house of two years before.[344] Broad and
low, of fine Roman brickwork with a rich band of moulded terracotta the
full depth of the upper-storey windows below the wide eaves, the general
effect of this has usually been considered very Sullivanian. But as
Wright himself was responsible for the Adler & Sullivan work that this
house most resembles—the Charnley house, certainly; and the Victoria
Hotel of 1892 at Chicago Heights, probably—it is more accurate to
consider that the Winslow house represents a continuation of his own
manner of the previous year or two. The plan is more axial and less open
than that of the Blossom house, the still rather Richardsonian dining
room with its rounded bay being placed here at the centre of the rear.
The staircase, still so prominent in the Shingle Style way at the
Blossom house, is here pushed out of sight between walls.
[Illustration:
Figure 29. Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, Isidore Heller house, 1897,
plan
]
Wright’s next important house, that of 1897 for Isidore Heller at 5132
Woodlawn Avenue on the south side of Chicago, perhaps shows some
Japanese[345] influence in the succession of eaves-lines, one above the
other. It is the development of the plan, however, that is most
significant, as also the effect of the planning on the treatment of the
exterior (Figure 29). The two principal living rooms are linked by a
stair-hall into which they both open through wide apertures—no more mere
doorways than in his own house of 1889, but tall breaks in the
continuity of the walls. Although these rooms have ingle-nooks, they are
not casual and cosy in the Shingle Style way but carefully ordered;
both, indeed, are of regular cruciform shape. This shape, moreover, is
given external expression in the plastic articulation of the external
massing, an articulation that the multiple eaves echo above.
Two years later, in the Joseph W. Husser house, now destroyed, in Buena
Park on the north side of Chicago, Wright’s personal development of
domestic planning was carried much farther (Figure 30). Here the main
living rooms were all raised to the first storey in order to have a good
view of Lake Michigan, and the interior space was continued
uninterrupted along the main axis of the house from the dining-room
fireplace across the landing and through to the living-room fireplace.
But the dining room was also articulated along a cross axis, extending
outward into a large polygonal bay facing the lake, somewhat like the
more Richardsonian bays of the Blossom and Winslow dining rooms.
[Illustration:
Figure 30. Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, J. W. Husser house, 1899, plan
]
Between the two houses just described, in which Wright’s planning
developed so rapidly and so boldly towards unified but articulated
space, came the River Forest Golf Club in River Forest, Ill. The front
wing of this, built in 1898,[346] showed a comparable maturing of his
vocabulary of wooden construction. The two Chicago houses were both of
brick with rather lush Sullivanian terracotta decoration below the eaves
not unlike that on the Schiller Building. At the Golf Club the
characteristic feeling of the Shingle Style for rough natural wood
surfaces was revived by Wright but made more architectonic in scale.
Below continuous window bands protected by his characteristic hovering
eaves, the lower walls and the terrace parapets were sheathed with
boards and battens, not applied vertically as by Downing, but
horizontally. Uncovered terrace, covered veranda, glazed foyer, all were
closely related spatial areas, the last two unified by the continuous
roof. The only solid element was the broad stone chimney marking the
point where the main axis and the subsidiary axis of the low side-wings
crossed. In 1901 the building was much enlarged by Wright, but quite in
the original spirit (Plate 128B).
In 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, with which this
account of Wright’s beginnings may properly close, he built two houses
side by side in Kankakee, Ill. He also designed for the _Ladies Home
Journal_ ‘A Home in a Prairie Town’ which was published in February
1901. The larger of the two Kankakee houses, that for B. Harley Bradley
at 701 South Harrison Avenue, is a large, loosely cruciform composition
with low-pitched gables projecting in blunt points well beyond the ends
of the wings. The smaller Hickox house, next door at 687 South Harrison
Avenue, has a more advanced plan under similar roofs. Wood stripping
suggests the stud structure underneath the stucco of the walls as do
also, and rather more directly, the wooden window mullions (Plate 142A).
The living room here, flanked by semi-octagonal music and dining rooms,
extends across the ‘garden front’ and opens by french doors on to the
uncovered terrace (Figure 31). Here the articulated but unified space of
the Husser house was reduced in scale and simplified until it provided a
quite new concept of domestic planning, later to be widely influential
internationally (see Chapter 22). Towards that new concept much of the
development of the Anglo-American house since as far back as the 1790s
may seem—not too exaggeratedly—to have been tending.
[Illustration:
Figure 31. Frank Lloyd Wright: Kankakee, Ill., Warren Hickox house,
1900, plan
]
The _Ladies Home Journal_ project for a ‘House in a Prairie Town’, from
which the term ‘Prairie Houses’ for Wright’s characteristic production
of the next decade derives, is larger than the Hickox house, but the
living area was intended to be very similarly unified and articulated.
In one version Wright even proposed carrying this space up two storeys
in the centre, somewhat like one of Shaw’s manorial halls. As on the
River Forest Golf Club, the long lines of the low hip roofs shelter very
long window-bands—out of Shaw, via Richardson, presumably. Although the
_Ladies Home Journal_ house was intended to be stuccoed like the
Kankakee houses, the window mullions echo the underlying wooden stud
structure. As at the Golf Club, the chimneys would be the only really
solid elements, passing up through the crossing volumes defined by the
two levels of roof. The lower line of eaves extends, somewhat as on
McKim, Mead & White’s McCormick house, over the _porte-cochère_ on one
side and over the veranda on the other, a treatment Wright had already
tried out somewhat clumsily on the Bradley house.
In considering the significance of these Wright houses of 1900 it must
be recognized that even in America they were highly exceptional. Despite
the fact that the ‘Prairie house’ project was published in a general
magazine of national circulation, its immediate influence was very
slight indeed. For all the vigour of the two great Chicago achievements
of the nineties, Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Wright’s earliest houses,
the main direction of American architecture in 1900 was quite different.
So also in the England of these years, where Shaw’s house for Fred White
and his Bryanston had introduced by the nineties almost the same sort of
Academic Revival as had McKim, Mead & White’s Villard and Taylor houses,
the work of Voysey, the English architect most comparable to Wright, was
also almost as exceptional. The line of architectural development had
already split as sharply as in America, with the difference that the
longer-lived Shaw himself had taken the lead in the academic direction
that Richardson’s pupils, McKim and White, took in America.
Although Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941)[347] was ten years
older than Wright, it is understandable with English conditions that his
architectural career got under way little earlier. From 1874 to 1880 he
worked as a pupil in the office of Seddon; from 1880 until he set up for
himself in 1882 he was assistant to Devey.[348] In 1883 Voysey sold his
first designs for wallpapers and printed fabrics, but for several more
years he did little building. His first house, The Cottage at Bishop’s
Itchington in Warwickshire, was built only in 1888; in the next two
years various projects of his, increasingly original in character, were
published in the _British Architect_; of these the one for a house[349]
at Dovercourt of 1890 was the most advanced.
By the late eighties Nesfield and Godwin were both dead and leadership
in English architecture, particularly as regards the domestic field,
rested more firmly than ever in Shaw’s hands. The forces of innovation
in English art were concentrated in the decorative field, thanks in part
to Webb’s continuing activities with the Morris firm. But there is some
question how well younger men like Voysey really knew Webb’s
architectural work; almost none of it was published, and some of the
best is hidden in remote parts of Scotland and the North of England. The
work of A. H. Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was perhaps somewhat better known,
but he was much more active with furniture, chintzes, and wallpapers
than with building in the eighties. A project for a ‘House for an
Artist’ that he published in his magazine _The Hobby Horse_ in 1888 was
of considerable promise, however. In any case Voysey soon rivalled
Mackmurdo as a designer of furniture, wallpapers, and chintzes, and
quite outclassed him as an architect. Mackmurdo’s most significant
influence was probably abroad (see Chapter 16).
The existence of an earlier project dated 1888 for Voysey’s house for J.
W. Forster at Bedford Park has led to some confusion. The executed house
dates from 1891. Sometimes known as the Grey House, it is very different
indeed from its neighbours, by this time some fifteen or more years old,
by Godwin, Shaw, and their pupils. For one thing, its walls are covered
with roughcast, already used by Voysey on The Cottage at Bishop’s
Itchington; for another, it is a three-storey rectangular box, severe
and rather formal beneath its low hipped roof, not quaint and irregular
like even the simplest of the earlier houses. The casement windows are
arranged in bands between stone mullions, regularly but not
symmetrically, and the eaves troughs are supported by delicately curved
iron brackets. Otherwise there is no external detail.
The plan of the Forster house is also compact and regular, with entrance
on the left side and living room across the front. In other words this
house represents as much of a reaction against the picturesqueness of
the earlier Queen Anne as does Shaw’s Fred White house, yet is quite
without eighteenth-century reminiscence.[350]
More interesting and more prominent than the contemporary
storey-and-a-half house known as The Studio at 17 St Dunstan’s Road in
West Kensington are a pair of terrace-houses, also designed in 1891 but
begun only the next year, at 14-16 Hans Road off the Brompton Road in
London. Here Voysey dropped the roughcast he had originally proposed and
used Webb-like red brickwork with the windows characteristically
arranged in bands between plain stone mullions. The elegantly original
detailing of the projecting stone porches and the curved line of the
parapets at the top are related to his contemporary decorative work and
in notable contrast to the almost ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ treatment of
Mackmurdo’s slightly later house next door at No. 12.
A moderate-sized country house, Perrycroft, Colwall, near Malvern, begun
in 1893, may be considered Voysey’s first mature production, introducing
in executed work the personal mode of design for which the Ward project
of 1890 had already shown the way, and from which he never moved very
far in later years. This is comparable, not to Wright’s ‘first’ house in
River Forest of the same date, but to his more advanced work of the end
of the decade, the River Forest Golf Club and the Hickox house.
Roughcast walls, windows arranged in bands between plain mullions,[351]
a regular composition approaching but not quite reaching symmetry, these
all follow from the Grey House and the Studio. But, being in the
country, the house could spread out more. Moreover, the roofs were
raised to a medieval pitch—45 degrees—so that their conspicuously heavy
slating is as much a part of Voysey’s simple craftsman-like mode as are
the off-white roughcast walls. The planning is closer to Webb’s than to
Wright’s, the rooms being less symmetrically shaped and not opening at
all into one another in the way of the Ward project.
A rather larger house, begun in 1896 on the Hog’s Back near Guildford in
Surrey for the American Julian Sturgis, presumptive original of
Santayana’s _Last Puritan_, has a somewhat less balanced composition
with a prominent cross gable near one end (Plate 129A). The
characteristic stone-mullioned lights of several of the rooms are here
so extensive in their grouping as to constitute window-walls of the
earlier Shavian sort.
In what is doubtless Voysey’s finest work, Broadleys on Lake Windermere,
designed in 1898, the roofs are lower once more, and the window-walls
are concentrated in three rounded bays along the lakeside terrace (Plate
129B). Here the hall in the middle is carried up two storeys, quite as
Wright proposed to do in one version of his first _Ladies Home Journal_
house (Figure 32). In its horizontality, its concentration of
fenestration, and its avoidance of medieval feeling, this house
represents the extreme point of innovation and originality in Voysey’s
work.
His own house, The Orchard, at Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, was
completed in 1900. Externally this resembles closely his earlier houses,
but The Orchard has two cross gables and hence a stronger feeling of
symmetry. Towards this the more regular and carefully balanced spacing
of the window bands further conduces. In studying the vocabulary of this
house, a vocabulary destined to be parodied _ad infinitum_ by architects
and then by builders in the next twenty-five years, one can understand
his feeling that he was a reformer not an innovator—the last disciple of
Pugin, so to say, to whose secular work a line can be traced back via
Webb, Street, and Butterfield. In Voysey’s special sense of continuity,
which grew on him in later years, lies his great difference from Wright;
for Wright was certainly determined, from the time he designed the
Winslow house, to be as great an innovator—as much of an architectural
creator—as was Sullivan in his skyscrapers. None the less, to look
forward a little, such a house by Voysey as that now called Little Court
at Pyrford Common in Surrey, built in 1902, is quite worthy of
comparison with Wright’s masterpieces of that year (see Chapter 19). It
shows little further development beyond his houses of the late nineties,
however, except for a certain increase in horizontal emphasis.
[Illustration:
Figure 32. C. F. A. Voysey: Lake Windermere, Broadleys, 1898-9, plan
]
Just before and just after 1900, Voysey’s work was very much better
known and more influential in England, and increasingly in other
countries,[352] than was Wright’s either at home or abroad at that time.
Moreover, many contemporaries in England were building rather similar
houses. One of them, M. H. Baillie Scott (1865-1945), who also worked a
good deal on the Continent, developed his planning much farther in the
direction of Wright-like openness along the lines suggested by Voysey’s
project of 1890 for the Ward house. The many houses, both executed and
projected, that Baillie Scott published in _Houses and Gardens_ in 1906
made his planning known to the young architects of the Continent (Figure
33). Characteristic is his Blackwell house on Lake Windermere of about
1900 with an enormous two-storey living-hall elaborated spatially by
various ingle-nooks and so forth. The plan was published by Muthesius in
1904, and may well have influenced Adolf Loos in Vienna and other
Europeans even before his own book appeared (see Chapters 20 and 21).
After 1906 Baillie Scott’s work became quite ‘traditional’, and it is
hard to believe that the projects published in the later version of his
_Houses and Gardens_ in 1933 are by the same man.
[Illustration:
Figure 33. M. H. Baillie Scott: Trevista, _c._ 1905, plan
]
The name of W. R. Lethaby (1857-1931), later the biographer of Webb and
an influential writer on architecture, should also be at least mentioned
here. When Lethaby left Shaw’s office, where he had been chief
assistant, he began his career by building Avon Tyrrell in Hampshire in
1891, a large brick country house closer to Webb’s than to Shaw’s in
character. But his main contribution was not in the field of domestic
architecture.[353]
Already by the mid nineties, the most successful English house-builder,
more than rivalling Voysey in the quantity and occasionally even in the
quality of his domestic work, was Sir Edwin L. Lutyens (1869-1944).
Beginning like Voysey in the late eighties by building cottages, his
first house of real distinction was the one he built for his cousin and
frequent collaborator, the garden-designer Gertrude Jekyll, at Munstead
Wood near Godalming in 1896. Several other good houses followed shortly,
including notably The Orchards, Godalming, in 1898; but this early
period of his work really culminates in Deanery Gardens at Sonning in
Berkshire of 1901 (Plate 182B). In these houses are preserved all the
best of the Shavian Manorial—the great timber-framed bay-window of the
two-storeyed hall at Deanery Gardens is exemplary—simplifying and
regularizing that mode under the influence of Webb and even approaching
Webb’s standards of craftsmanship in the execution.
Like Webb in his later work, Lutyens used almost from the first a good
deal of stylistic detail in interiors; he also turned back towards the
‘traditional’ in his exteriors considerably earlier than Baillie Scott
when designing such houses as Overstrand Hall in Norfolk and Tigbourne
Court at Witley in Surrey, both built in 1899 two years before Deanery
Gardens. Lutyens became from about 1906 the leading architect of his
generation in England, and his later work will be treated elsewhere (see
Chapter 24). His increasing material success after the opening years of
the century, rivalling Shaw’s in the previous generation, is to a
certain extent the measure, though not the cause, of Voysey’s decline in
popularity.
C. R. Ashbee (1863-1942) and George Walton (1867-1933)[354] were other
domestic architects active in the nineties and the early years of the
new century. The latter belongs to the Glasgow School, of which
Mackintosh was the principal figure, and like Mackintosh he was more
decorator than architect (see Chapter 17). One house in England, The
Leys at Elstree of 1901, may be mentioned here. The interiors are fine
examples of the Arts and Crafts mode, as it is sometimes called, more
stylized than Voysey’s but less original than Mackintosh’s. The plan is
organized symmetrically around a large two-storey hall rivalling Baillie
Scott’s of the period in its complex spatial development.
Ashbee was one of the first Europeans to appreciate the significance of
Wright, and was appropriately chosen by Wasmuth to write the
introduction to his second publication of Wright’s work in 1911 (see
Chapter 19). Three houses by Ashbee side by side in Cheyne Walk in
London, No. 37 of 1894 and Nos 38-39 of 1904, represent the
chronological span of his significant architectural production and
illustrate clearly his characteristic progress from the Shavian to an
originality at least comparable to Voysey’s. Closely associated with the
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Ashbee was like most of these men
except Voysey[355] and Lutyens generally more active in the field of
decorative art than in building. Right through this period English
decorative art exercised a major influence on the Continent (see
Chapters 16 and 17). So close is Mackintosh’s tie with the Continent
that his schools and even his houses are better discussed in relation to
the Art Nouveau.
Of all these English architects who have just been mentioned, Voysey was
the most creative in the field of domestic architecture and, except for
Lutyens, the most productive down at least through the early years of
the twentieth century; after 1910 he built almost nothing at all. Yet
Voysey did not die until 1941, by which time a younger generation, to
his confusion, had accepted him as a father of a modern architecture
that he disapproved as strongly as did Lutyens. In 1940 he returned
almost from the grave to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute
of British Architects.
From the Picturesque cottages of the opening decades of the nineteenth
century to the early masterpieces of Wright and Voysey around 1900 is a
far cry, further perhaps in the drastic revision that it represented of
so old-established a building type as the dwelling-house than from
Parris’s Market Street buildings in Boston of 1824 to Sullivan’s Carson,
Pirie & Scott Store in Chicago as completed eighty years later in 1904.
Yet in Anglo-American domestic architecture, quite as was the case with
commercial architecture, real achievement recurred all through the
century.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART THREE
1890-1955
CHAPTER 16
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ART NOUVEAU: VICTOR HORTA
THE two preceding chapters, in entering the nineties, crossed what is
perhaps the major historical frontier within the century and a half
covered by this book. The skyscrapers of Sullivan and the early houses
of Wright and Voysey—despite Voysey’s own disavowal of modernism—are
among the first major manifestations of the period of architectural
history that extends down to and includes our own time. The
contemporaries of these men who were the new leaders on the Continent in
the nineties had as sharp a sense of the novelty of the innovations they
were making as did Sullivan or Wright, and the most characteristic
stylistic formulation of this decade in Europe was appropriately known
from an early date[356] as ‘Art Nouveau’. Before discussing the Art
Nouveau itself, two related developments that precede it must be
considered at least briefly. In France, various feats of metal
construction of the sixties, seventies, and eighties had prepared the
way for the Art Nouveau on the technical side, and these have, moreover,
considerable intrinsic interest in their own right. English innovations
in decorative art of the eighties and nineties are accepted by most
historians as providing one of the most important immediate sources of
the Art Nouveau,[357] and English architecture and architectural theory
of the later decades of the nineteenth century certainly offered a
generic stimulus to Europeans between 1890 and 1910 that was of vital
consequence to subsequent developments.
By the early nineties advanced English work began to be widely known on
the Continent. In 1888 the German architect Alexander Koch (1848-1911)
started to publish annually his _Academy Architecture_ bringing current
English production, and many significant projects also, to the attention
of designers abroad. _L’Architecture moderne en Angleterre_ by the
French architect Paul Sédille (1836-1900) appeared in Paris in 1890. The
architect Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927), who was stationed at the German
Embassy in London from 1896 to 1903 primarily to study low-cost housing,
issued two folio volumes devoted to _Die englische Baukunst der
Gegenwart_ in 1900-2, another on _Die neuere kirchliche Baukunst in
England_ in 1902 and, in 1904-5, three thick quarto volumes on _Das
englische Haus_. These richly illustrated books made much of the story
of the development of English architecture in the second half of the
century available in German long before it was pieced together by the
English (see Chapters 12 and 15).
Voysey never worked abroad; but his houses, known internationally from
an early date thanks to their publication in the _Studio_, an English
periodical founded in 1893, were soon much studied on the Continent, and
to a lesser extent in America. Voysey’s contemporaries Baillie Scott and
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), however, both received foreign
commissions as early as 1898; in fact, Mackintosh and his highly
original ideas—he was no Voyseyan ‘reformer’ but a very bold
innovator—received more support abroad than at home and were much more
influential on the Continent than in Great Britain.
Historians of modern architecture have generally emphasized, and
rightly, the special importance of the advances in metal
construction[358] that were made in France in the later decades of the
nineteenth century. The great name of the period is not that of an
architect but of an engineer, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923). At the
International Exhibition of 1855 in Paris and again at the World’s Fair
of 1893 in Chicago the vast metal-and-glass structures were masked
externally by real or imitated masonry façades. Between these dates,
however, came a series of French exhibition buildings that were
increasingly bold in scale and frank in design; with the construction of
most of them Eiffel was directly concerned. Yet his bridge over the
Douro at Oporto in Portugal of 1876-7 quite overshadowed the Galerie des
Machines that he and Krantz built for the Paris Exhibition of 1867, as
his later Pont de Garabit of 1880-4 outclassed the pavilion that he
designed for the Exhibition of 1878 and that portion of the Bon Marché
Department Store on which he collaborated in 1876 with the younger
Boileau. In the exhibition buildings the metalwork was completely
exposed and in that of 1878[359] a serious attempt was made to develop
appropriate embellishments, quite as Wyatt had done for Brunel at
Paddington Station in London twenty-five years earlier. The rather
tawdry result helps to explain why innovations in architectural design
had so little public support in France in this period—a period, of
course, when the bold innovations of the Impressionists were
revolutionizing another art in Paris.
Beside Eiffel’s gallery, the Anglo-Japanese room[360] which Whistler and
Godwin showed at this same exhibition must have seemed infinitely
sophisticated, and even the Late Stuart detailing of the cement-brick
front of Shaw’s Jury House most agreeably urbane. Such things might well
have turned the attention of foreign architects towards England earlier
than was generally the case. Sédille, one of the less tradition-bound
French professionals of this period, did visit England in the eighties,
publishing his book on current English architecture, which has just been
mentioned, ten years before Muthesius’s. His selections, however, were
not very discriminating, nor is there evidence that he profited much
from what he saw. The Printemps department store of 1881-9, designed of
course well before his trip, certainly shows no English influence.
For the Paris Exhibition of 1889[361] Eiffel early proposed and, in
1887, was commissioned to build the tremendous all-metal tower[362]
which still dominates Paris (Plate 130A). As has been noted, this
984-foot edifice was, down to the erection of the Empire State Building
in New York by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon more than forty years later, the
tallest structure in the world. The Eiffel Tower, which appropriately
carries its designer’s name, is no more a building in the ordinary sense
than are his great bridges, however. Although scraping so much higher
skies than did Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building in Chicago, which was
erected in precisely the same years, the Paris tower was far less
significant either technically or functionally. Except the painter
Seurat, most contemporaries disliked it, considering it a monstrous
blemish on the Parisian skyline; today of course, it is rightly deemed a
nineteenth-century masterpiece, but a masterpiece of engineering rather
than of architecture.
As with Eiffel’s pavilion at the Exhibition of 1878, there is
considerable ambiguity in the design of the Eiffel Tower. Seen from a
distance its four legs have much of the vigorous spring of his bridges
and the tapered shaft of criss-crossed metalwork seems—but in fact is
not—an almost inevitable expression of large-scale construction in
metal. Seen from nearer to, however, the arbitrarily arched forms that
link the legs are very conspicuous and also the coarse ornamentation of
curvilinear strapwork—recalling a little Wyatt’s at Paddington Station
of nearly forty years before, but much less just in scale—with which the
basic forms are bedecked. The close similarity of this mixture of frank
construction and applied decoration to the Art Nouveau approach to the
design of metal structures will shortly become evident. Over-impressed,
perhaps, by the more functional engineering feat of construction at the
1889 Exhibition provided by the wide-spanned metal-and-glass Palais des
Machines of the engineers Contamin (1840-93), Pierron, and Charton—in
which the contribution of the associated architect C.-L.-F. Dutert
(1845-1906) was relatively unimportant—certain later critics have
preferred that structure to the Eiffel Tower. Yet it is the tower which
clearly has more of the magnificence of Eiffel’s bridges despite its
irrelevant and (from a distance) almost invisible ornamentation. The
tower, moreover, is premonitory of the Art Nouveau; the Galerie des
Machines rather of later modern architecture (see Chapters 20 and 22).
One other line of innovation in France in these decades deserves
mention. In 1871 Jules Saulnier built a factory for Chocolat Menier near
Paris at Noisiel, S.-et-M., with an exposed metal skeleton. The iron
frame consists of diagonally set members rather similar to the late
medieval timber-framing of France, and the infilling of the panels is of
varicoloured bricks and tiles. This structure attracted the attention of
Viollet-le-Duc, who saw in it a realization of certain of his
theoretical ambitions for nineteenth-century architecture. He not only
mentioned it very favourably in the second volume of his _Entretiens_,
which appeared in 1872, but in several illustrations suggested similar
and variant combinations of iron and masonry. In a colour plate, for
example, he showed a striking urban façade with its visible iron
framework filled with brilliantly coloured glazed tiles. By the nineties
quite a few buildings in France had exploited very successfully this
structural system;[363] it is perhaps more important, however, that
Viollet-le-Duc’s text and illustrations made the idea familiar
internationally.
When one learns that Horta or Gaudí or various Americans ‘read
Viollet-le-Duc’ in the seventies and eighties one must assume that the
_Entretiens_, of which the first volume appeared in 1863, is meant—and
perhaps even more specifically the second volume of 1872 with its
accompanying set of plates. These last could be ‘read’ by architects to
particularly good purpose. The _Entretiens_ were available to most
Europeans in the original language and to the English and the Americans
in translation.[364]
The characteristic employment of metal by Art Nouveau architects in the
nineties and the first decade of this century undoubtedly owed a great
deal both to the inspiration of Eiffel’s large engineering structures,
culminating in his tower of 1887-9, and to the vigorous critical support
of Saulnier’s ideas which Viollet-le-Duc provided, not to speak of the
projects of his own that he published in 1872. The knot is tied
tighter—although with a different sort of structural development—when
one notes that de Baudot, of all French architects most particularly the
disciple and heir of Viollet-le-Duc as well as a former pupil of Henri
Labrouste, was the first to exploit ferro-concrete architecturally and
not merely technically (see Chapter 18). Moreover, he employed as his
contractor to construct his epoch-making concrete church of St Jean de
Montmartre in Paris of the nineties (see Chapter 17), Contamin, one of
the engineers responsible for the Galerie des Machines at the Exhibition
of 1889. But the European Art Nouveau was even less a matter of
structural innovation, pure and simple, than Sullivan’s contemporary
skyscrapers in America (see Chapter 14).
This brief and curious episode in the history of art,[365] starting in
the early nineties and subsiding little more than a decade later, has
always been called in English by a French name, perhaps because it never
became acclimatized in England but was always considered a dubious
import from Belgium and France. Despite the diffidence of the
English—which Americans fully shared—the Art Nouveau was an
international mode. It was as frequently called in France by the English
name ‘Modern Style’, while to the Germans it was ‘Jugendstil’ and to the
Italians ‘stile Liberty’. The German term comes from the magazine
_Jugend_, whose illustrations and typography were fairly consistently in
the new mode; the Italian from Liberty’s, the shop in London whose
orientalizing fabrics became widely popular at this time (but with
overtones from the obvious pun involved). In Italian it is also, and
much more descriptively, the ‘stile floreale’.
The Art Nouveau is not primarily an architectural mode. Many of the
finest and boldest of the large edifices built between 1890 and 1910,
however, beginning with Sullivan’s skyscrapers, are certainly related to
its ethos; and the Art Nouveau leaders produced quite a few buildings of
real distinction that can be defined by no other term. Like the Rococo
of the early and mid eighteenth century—which the Art Nouveau sometimes
closely resembled and to whose revived forms it was often vulgarly
assimilated—it was most successful as a mode of interior decoration.
Generally linear rather than plastic,[366] the Art Nouveau was also very
closely associated with the graphic arts; indeed they provide many of
the most characteristic examples, as well as the earliest items that can
be considered possible prototypes.
How far back the ultimate sources of the Art Nouveau should be sought,
and precisely where, continues to be a subject of active research. In
the graphic arts there are certainly significant similarities to be
noted in William Blake’s[367] way of designing book pages. Through the
Pre-Raphaelites, moreover, a line of descent from Blake can be traced
down to the eighties and nineties when, indeed, his characteristic pages
were sometimes reproduced in facsimile. But oriental,[368] specifically
Japanese, influence certainly played some part also in the gestation of
the mode. There is early evidence of that influence on western
architecture in the decorative work of Godwin and Nesfield in England,
beginning already in the sixties, as also in the painting of the
Impressionists in France (see Chapters 10 and 12). But the earliest
designs that can be readily mistaken for Continental work of 1900 are
certainly by the English architect-decorator Mackmurdo and date from
just after 1880. Many of the textile and wallpaper patterns that
Mackmurdo, Heywood Sumner (1853-1940), and others created for the
Century Guild, founded in 1882, already have the characteristic
semi-naturalistic[369] forms, swaying lines, and asymmetrical
organization of the mature decorative mode of the nineties. Even more
striking is the design of Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883 for his book on
the London churches of Sir Christopher Wren[370]—a curious conjunction,
this, of two opposed stylistic developments of the eighties, the one
towards the Baroque and the ‘Monumental Queen Anne’, the other towards a
wholly novel mode of ornamentation.
English products, such as were shown by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition
Society from its foundation in 1888, soon reached the Continent.
Moreover, even before the _Studio_ began publication in 1893 Koch’s
_Academy Architecture_ (from 1888), which has already been mentioned,
and (from 1890) his review _Innendekoration_, as well as less
specialized English magazines such as (from 1884) Mackmurdo’s _Hobby
Horse_ and (from 1891) _The Yellow Book_, with its highly stylized and
very curvilinear illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, were eagerly studied
all over western Europe. The younger men were reading William Morris,
too, and responding enthusiastically to his ethical and social demands
for a reform of the household arts. At the same time the novel styles of
the most advanced Post-Impressionist painters offered a powerful
stimulus to architects.
This matter of the relationship between advanced painting and advanced
architecture in the nineteenth century, a relationship destined to be of
rather greater importance in the early twentieth, deserves some broader
comment and recapitulation here. A hundred and fifty years before, when
Romantic Classicism was being born in Rome, painters, sculptors, and
architects shared common ideals and worked with a full understanding of
each other’s problems (see Chapter 1). The backgrounds of David’s
bas-relief-like early paintings show architecture in the most advanced
taste of the day, and no more beautiful Romantic Classical furniture was
actually produced than that which he invented for his Classical scenes
and occasionally introduced in his modern portraits. The Classical
sculptor Thorwaldsen at the Glyptothek in Munich and later at the
Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen collaborated closely with the
architects Klenze and Bindesbøll. Schinkel was himself a Romantic
painter of some distinction before he matured as a Romantic Classical
architect, and he collaborated later on the mural for the front of the
Altes Museum with the painter Peter Cornelius, as did Klenze on the
decorations of the Glyptothek in Munich.
With the gradual decline of Romantic Classicism architects and painters
had more difficulty in developing parallel programmes; and the results
of collaboration between them in the decoration of buildings were rarely
as happy as the backgrounds the architects sometimes supplied to the
painters. Ingres’s stained-glass windows of the forties in the Chapelle
d’Orléans at Dreux and the Chapelle Saint-Ferdinand at Neuilly have been
mentioned. More successful are the murals by Delacroix in Joly’s library
at the Chambre des Deputés in Paris; but there is hardly that real
visual harmony between picture and setting that the previous period had
often achieved. However, the rising interest in architectural polychromy
and the extension of the range of acceptable stylistic models to include
the Early Renaissance and even the Middle Ages were both encouraged by
the turn that the art of painting was beginning to take on the Continent
around 1815. Hübsch, for example, was a sort of Nazarener among
architects. Later Ingres was a close friend of Hittorff, even though he
never collaborated with him to any good purpose (see Chapter 3), much
less with Viollet-le-Duc, with whom he was also on good terms. The
degree of stylization that Early Christian, Romanesque, or Gothic
architectural modes properly demanded was not yet acceptable in figural
art. Indeed, the rather _quattrocento_ early pictures of Ingres were
much too ‘Gothic’ for most of his contemporaries and are generally less
esteemed than his more Classical work even today.
Above all, the ever-rising importance of landscape in the painting of
all countries was necessarily without real parallels in architecture,
except in so far as the increasing desire to open up houses towards the
circumambient view reflects a similar preoccupation with the natural
scene. As to Realism, the principal artistic movement of the mid century
in French art, that could only be echoed in architectural theory.
Impressionism may seem even more difficult to relate to
architecture.[371]
In England in the fifties, however, a loose alliance did exist between
the new Pre-Raphaelite painters and some of the leading High Victorian
Gothic architects, both supported for a time by the critic Ruskin. In
the sixties and seventies Morris on the one hand, developing as a
decorator out of the Pre-Raphaelite _milieu_ of Rossetti and Ford Madox
Brown, and Whistler on the other hand, chiefly nurtured in the advanced
artistic world of Paris but also influenced in England by Rossetti,
collaborated closely with architects—Morris with Webb and with Bodley,
Whistler with Godwin. As has been noted, the strikingly novel results of
the latter collaboration were displayed in Paris in their Anglo-Japanese
room at the Exhibition of 1878. Europeans became generally aware of
Morris’s decorative work only somewhat later.
In France in these decades fewer painters than in England commissioned
talented individualists of the order of Shaw or Webb or Godwin to build
their houses.[372] If they were Realists or Impressionists they could
not have afforded to do so; if they were prosperous Academicians they
would not have wished to. Even in England, Millais, after he became
really successful, preferred to build a dull house in South Kensington
of quite conventional character rather than to employ Shaw or Webb or
Godwin.
In the eighties the most advanced European painters, not merely those of
France but more generally, turned away from Realism and even from
Impressionism in order to concern themselves more with pattern or with
expression. The two French leaders of this reaction whose art seems to
posterity most architectonic, Cézanne and Seurat, did not affect
architecture or design at this time at all. Even Van Gogh and Gauguin,
whose styles have a more decorative inflection, were less influential
than such almost forgotten painters as the Dutch Toorop and the Belgian
Khnopff, the better-known Belgian Ensor, or the Swiss Hodler and the
Norwegian Munch, not to speak of the English Beardsley.
The general admiration in _avant-garde_ circles for the work of these
artists—with which went paradoxically a continuing and even growing
estimation of the anti-architectonic pictures of the Impressionists and
Neo-Impressionists both French and native—ran parallel everywhere with
the rapid rise and spread of the Art Nouveau. In some sense, indeed, the
Art Nouveau may be considered the equivalent as a mode of design of what
is somewhat ambiguously called Impressionism in music—the work of
Debussy, Delius, etc. Some of the chief critical supporters of the new
painters in the nineties such as Julius Meier-Graefe were also active
proponents of the Art Nouveau. Yet advanced painting, in fact, provided
little more than a sympathetic atmosphere for the birth of the Art
Nouveau, somewhat as the young painters and critics of the third quarter
of the eighteenth century had done in Rome for the gestation of Romantic
Classicism in architecture.
Why the Art Nouveau should have been initiated full-fledged by Victor
Horta (1861-1947)[373] in Brussels in 1892 remains a mystery. The rather
similar stylistic crystallization in Sullivan’s architectural ornament,
henceforth almost equally organic and sinuous in character, had begun
several years earlier even before the interiors of the Auditorium were
designed in 1887-8. These will hardly have been known in Belgium, for
few foreigners were aware of Sullivan’s work at all until they came to
Chicago to visit the World’s Fair in 1893. Illustrations of the
remarkable ironwork on Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona are not likely
to have reached Brussels either, though several of its interiors were
published in _The Decorator and Furnisher_ in New York in 1892. In any
case Gaudí’s ultimate style was only beginning to take form in the early
nineties. A certain amount of quite original decoration was being done
in New York from the beginning of the eighties by Louis Comfort Tiffany
(1848-1933), but it is unlikely that it was known abroad. Tiffany’s
‘Favrile’ glass came a good deal later and is precisely contemporaneous
with the Art Nouveau,[374] of which it continued to be for a decade and
more one of the most internationally distinguished products.
It is generally assumed that Horta knew the rather similar glass
designed earlier by Émile Gallé (1846-1904) in France and that he
already had some familiarity with the work of such painters as Ensor,
Khnopff, and Toorop, if not with that of Hodler, Munch, or Beardsley.
Yet such familiarity would hardly by itself have counter-balanced the
academic training he received from his master and later employer Balat
(see Chapter 9). This explains, however, the very Classical character of
his Temple des Passions Humaines, erected in 1884 in the Parc du
Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Horta did no building on his own between
1885 and 1892. Presumably, however, it was knowledge of the theories and
the projects of Viollet-le-Duc acquired in those years that encouraged
him to make frank and expressive use of iron in association with masonry
when he really began to practise. Yet the influence of Viollet-le-Duc
hardly provides an explanation for the specific character of his
innovations in ornament or the consistency of style that he achieved
almost at once.
Against such rather negative assumptions, a more positive one may be
set. In the Tassel house in Brussels, completed in 1893, Horta’s first
mature work, he introduced an English[375] wallpaper between the exposed
metal structural elements of the dining-room walls. It is highly likely,
therefore, that the new English decorative products were already known
to him the previous year[376] when he designed and began this
epoch-making house.
The Tassel house at 6 Rue Paul-Émile Janson, just off the Avenue Louise,
initiated a new architectural mode as definitely as one modest
terrace-house could possibly do. How long before 1892, when the Tassel
house was begun, Horta may have been designing on paper in this way does
not seem to be known. When one considers how important the innumerable
projects of the second half of the eighteenth century are to our
understanding of the architectural revolution that established Romantic
Classicism as the successor to the Baroque, the absence of such clues
concerning the gestation of the Art Nouveau is most exasperating; but
considerable research by students of the period has so far brought
little that seems relevant to light.
In plan there are no very great novelties in the Tassel house, although
the interior partitions of the principal floor are bent to give varying
shapes and sizes to symmetrically disposed spaces that open rather
freely into one another. The major innovation lay in the frank
expression of metal structure and in the characteristic decoration,
particularly that of the stair-hall (Plate 130B). There at the foot of
the stair an iron column rises free and svelte out of which iron bands
branch at the top, like vines from the trunk of a sapling, to form
brackets under the curved openwork beams of iron above. Other lighter
and less structural bands interlace to form the stair-rail. The organic,
swaying, and interweaving lines of the metalwork, both structural and
decorative, were originally rather boldly echoed in purely ornamental
curvilinear decoration painted on the walls, and they are still so
echoed in the patterns of the extant floor mosaic.
These patterns in the stair-hall are each unique, not repeated like
those on the English chintzes and wallpapers they so much resemble. The
lines, whether moving freely in space like those of the ironwork,
painted on the curved wall, or inlaid in the flat floor plane, all form
part of complex organic motifs. The result is therefore more comparable
to Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883, or even to some of the repoussé
brasswork on his furniture. (Like the very few buildings Mackmurdo
designed, this furniture is quite rectilinear otherwise, it might be
noted.) During the brief life of the Art Nouveau hardly even Horta
himself, much less those who followed in his footsteps, achieved an
ensemble more exemplary than this stair-hall. It is truly a work of
interior architecture, not merely a matter of applied decoration as is
most of the ornament used in association with the English wallpaper in
the dining-room.
The façade of the house is much less striking than the interiors.
However, the linear curves of the internal structural elements are
reflected plastically, so to say, in the bowing forward of the entire
central window area. This is so extensive as to approach, but not to
equal, English window-walls of the preceding decades. In the upper
storeys the lights in this broad bay-window are subdivided only by iron
colonnette-mullions and topped with exposed iron beams. There is no
archaeological reminiscence of any past style here; yet it must have
been from local stucco-work of the Rococo period that Horta drew the
inspiration for his carved stone detail. It certainly does not derive
either from England or from Viollet-le-Duc. Horta was, and continued to
be, much less happy in devising such plastic ornament than in his
metalwork; but he felt obliged to apply it here and there on capitals,
cornices, brackets, and so forth, just as conventional architects of the
time used the common coin of the Renaissance or Gothic vocabularies.
The Tassel façade may be almost unnoticeable today unless one looks
carefully for its exposed metalwork and its rather original detailing,
but it evidently had an almost instant appeal in the Brussels of the
nineties. The somewhat similar Frison house at 37 Rue Lebeau was built
in 1893-4, and in 1895 three more houses were begun, of which the finest
is the much larger Hôtel Solvay at 224 Avenue Louise.[377] This house
was built, together with a laboratory started a year later, over a
period of several years for the famous chemist Ernest Solvay. It remains
the most complete of Horta’s domestic commissions, since it retains all
the original furniture designed by the architect, though now a _maison
de couture_. The broad façade is much more plastic than that of the
Tassel house with the walls curving forward in the first and second
storeys to enframe two tall flanking bays subdivided by metal
colonnettes and transoms (Plate 131A). The ironwork of the balconies is
especially rich and characteristic. In the interiors the exposed metal
structure and various elaborate incidental features, such as the
lighting fixtures, participate fully in the general pattern of organic
curvature. Although plant-like in feeling, Horta’s metalwork is quite as
abstract as Gaudí’s grilles in the entrance arches of the Palau Güell
(Plate 96B) and often achieves a comparable distinction considered as
craftsmanship.
The house of Baron Van Eetvelde of 1895 at 4 Avenue Palmerston—the
extension to the left numbered 2 is considerably later—has a quite
different exterior from the Solvay house. The front has an almost
Sullivanian range of arched bays consisting entirely of exposed
metalwork. Inside, the salon is even more of a masterpiece than the
stair-hall of the Tassel house. A circle of iron columns, curving up
into elliptical arches, supports a low dome of glass across which long
leaf-like bands of transparent colour continue the sinuous structural
curves below. In a happy floral metaphor the lighting fixtures bend and
droop, each electric bulb shaded by a coloured glass bell of over-blown
tulip shape. Not since Nicholas Pineau developed the _pittoresque_
version of the Rococo in the second quarter of the eighteenth century
had such elegant consistency and originality been seen in the decorative
exploitation of plant-like elements.
Horta’s other fine houses in Brussels range in date down to the Wiener
house of 1919 in the Avenue de l’Astronomie. After the very elegant and
restrained Hallet house of 1906 at 346 Avenue Louise they became so dry
and so formal that the term Art Nouveau hardly applies to them, however.
There are two much earlier examples at 23-25 Rue Américaine, built in
1898, which are of special interest because Horta occupied them himself.
The virtuoso elaboration of the interwoven structural and decorative
ironwork of the oriel on the one to the left and the continuous
ribbon-window set behind iron mullions in the top storey of the other
are among the most striking and original external features he ever
designed. These years at the very end of the century undoubtedly
represent the peak of his career. His most advanced domestic planning
was to be seen in the Aubecq house of 1900 at 520 Avenue Louise,
demolished in 1950 (Figure 34). There the interflow of space between the
interlocking octagonal reception rooms of the ground storey comes very
close to that found in certain early houses by Wright (see Chapters 15
and 19).
Certainly Horta’s most important single work is the Maison du Peuple of
1896-9. This was built for the city authorities of Brussels on a
curiously-shaped site of which Horta took the fullest advantage.
Extending around a segment of a circular _place_ and part way along two
radial streets, the façade forms a continuous but irregular series of
curves, mostly concave, but with the main entrance placed in one of the
shorter convex portions. The greater part of the exterior wall consists
of a visible skeleton of iron with solid masonry sections defining the
ends and the entrance bay. The vertical stanchions are not curved, but
many of the horizontal members are slightly arched. Decorative metal
elements at some of the intersections attempt, not altogether
successfully, to give to the structural grid the over-all organic
quality so happily achieved in the Van Eetvelde entrance hall. As in his
houses, Horta had difficulty in assimilating the carved detail of the
stonework, here associated with wall panels of brick, to the metalwork;
where the two come close together, as in the entrance arch of mixed
materials, the result is very awkward indeed.
[Illustration:
Figure 34. Victor Horta: Brussels, Aubecq house, 1900, plan
]
Comparison with Sullivan’s work of these years is inevitable—there is
really nothing else of the precise period with which the Maison du
Peuple can properly be compared. With Sullivan the main structural
members of metal are always covered with terracotta and the visible
metalwork is almost entirely decorative. Yet there is considerable
similarity in the way Sullivan handled the metal mullions at the
entrances of the Carson, Pirie & Scott Store, mullions which rise into
and interweave with the ornament above, to Horta’s attempt to merge the
structural and the decorative in his framework of visible metal elements
here.
His greatest success at this was certainly in the auditorium at the top
of the Maison du Peuple. In this the openwork iron beams that support
the roof, forming a sort of hammerbeam system with the side galleries,
have graceful and expressive but essentially structural curves (Plate
132B). To these the decorative railings of the galleries provide a
delicate and harmonious counterpoint in their intricately plant-like
detailing. Around the structural frame the auditorium is enclosed only
by glass or by very thin panels held in metal frames, rather like the
‘curtain-walls’ of the mid twentieth century; thus there is in this
permanent edifice a good deal of the volumetric lightness previously
associated with temporary exhibition buildings only.
Among Horta’s commercial buildings in various Belgian cities the most
conspicuous was the Innovation Department Store of 1901 in the Rue Neuve
in Brussels (Plate 131B). The front, almost entirely of metal and glass
though set in a granite frame, was a remarkable example of Art Nouveau
decorative design at fully architectural scale. The Innovation
completely overshadowed the equally bold but extremely coarse and clumsy
Old England Department Store just off the Place Royale in Brussels, also
almost entirely of iron and glass, that was built by Paul Saintenoy
(1832-92) two years earlier. In the Gros Waucquez Building in the Rue de
Sable of 1903-5 and the Wolfers Building of 1906 in the Rue d’Arenberg,
as in his houses of those later years, Horta’s treatment is much more
restrained than in the department store. Stone piers subdivide their
façades, curves are fewer and more structural, and there is much less
ornament and almost no exposed iron.
It is a historical paradox that Horta’s architectural career should have
continued long after the Art Nouveau was forgotten, bringing him in the
end such public esteem and material success as few other innovators of
his generation ever knew. Yet his later work, beginning with his Palais
des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, designed in 1914 just before the First World
War but begun only in 1923, and continuing down to his Central Station
there, begun in 1938 and only lately completed, is of purely local
significance. What brought him a peerage and a street named after
him—that at the side of his Palais des Beaux-Arts—was not his early work
of the Art Nouveau years, standing with Sullivan’s skyscrapers like a
landmark at the beginning of modern architecture, but this later
official work which is almost totally without intrinsic interest and, in
the case of the station, actually rather monstrous. The contrast with
Sullivan’s barren later years after 1904 is very striking.
Despite the poetic justice that there might be in ignoring a Belgian who
long falsely claimed the credit for the invention of the Art Nouveau,
one cannot turn to other countries without mentioning the name of Henri
Van de Velde (1863-1957).[378] In 1892, when Horta designed the Tassel
house, Van de Velde had not even begun to practise architecture. His
first work, which is his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle near Brussels,
though still rather conventional externally in a simple, almost peasant
way perhaps influenced by Voysey, included furniture more functional
than Horta’s, if much less elegant and imaginative. He also brought to
Brussels—and later to Paris, Berlin, and Weimar—an interpretation of
Ruskin’s and Morris’s sociological approach to the arts that had a wide
and growing influence, for he pursued his mature career as decorator,
architect, and educator largely outside Belgium[379] (see Chapters 17
and 20).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 17
THE SPREAD OF THE ART NOUVEAU: THE WORK OF C. R. MACKINTOSH AND ANTONI
GAUDÍ
THE initiation of the Art Nouveau by Horta in 1892 was sudden and its
spread extremely rapid. Almost concurrently forms very similar to those
he had invented began to appear in other European countries. Rarely has
a new idea in the visual arts been taken up internationally with so
little lag. Advanced artistic circles at this time were evidently
thoroughly prepared to accept major innovations and new periodicals,
starting up almost one a year, provided vehicles for their transmission:
_Pan_ in 1895, for example, _Jugend_ in 1896, _Dekorative Kunst_ in
1897, and _Die Kunst_ in 1899, to mention only German magazines. Had the
Art Nouveau not already been invented by Horta the year before, three
works of art dated 1893, Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Cello Player’, an
illustration in black and white, Toorop’s picture ‘Three Brides’, and
Munch’s ‘The Cry’, first a painting but widely available as a
colour-lithograph the following year, might well have supplied the
impetus for other designers to do so; doubtless such inspiration did
encourage rivalry rather than direct imitation of Horta. In Germany a
Munch exhibition in Berlin in 1892 and a Toorop exhibition in Munich in
1893 called attention to the long waving curves and the general
linearity of style of these artists. In 1893, moreover, the _Studio_
began to bring to designers and architects everywhere well-chosen
illustrations of current English decorative work.
England itself was least responsive to the new Continental mode. It is,
indeed, improper to call the Bishopsgate Institute in Bishopsgate in the
City of London, built in 1893-4 by C. Harrison Townsend (1850-1928), Art
Nouveau. Yet, despite its evident dependence on Webb, the way in which
Townsend took the characteristically stylized but basically naturalistic
patterns of contemporary English wallpapers and chintzes and used them
in relief at architectural scale is as drastic an innovation as are the
bits and pieces of more abstract stone carving that Horta used on his
Brussels houses of these years. Townsend remained a ‘fellow-traveller’
rather than a member of the international Art Nouveau group for a
decade. For example, the façade of his Whitechapel Art Gallery in the
Whitechapel Road in the East End of London, designed in 1895 and built
in 1897-9, is an improved version of that of the Bishopsgate Institute
(Plate 134B). The broad and almost Richardsonian arch is placed off
centre, the ornament is freer and bolder, and the few windows are
organized in a continuous band below the plain wall of the upper
portion.
Less successful, though perhaps more advanced, is Townsend’s Horniman
Museum of 1900-1, a free-standing edifice in London Road, Forest Hill,
south of London. This has less external ornamentation, except for the
façade mosaic by Anning Bell, but there is a very plastically conceived
tower with rounded corners placed at one side of the front façade. His
church of St Mary the Virgin, consecrated in 1904, at Great Warley in
Essex, is very simple, indeed rather Voysey-like as regards the
buttressed and roughcast exterior. However, the elaborate decorations
inside by Sir William Reynolds-Stephens (1862-1943) offer the most
virtuoso example of Art Nouveau in England—at least they are about as
close to the Continental mode as the English came.[380] No other English
architect came nearer the Art Nouveau than Townsend; in quality,
moreover, his work excels most of that done on the Continent by the
various imitators and emulators of Horta, even if it lacks the humble
integrity of Voysey’s best houses of these years.
The earliest and, later, the most versatile Art Nouveau architect of
France[381] was Hector Guimard (1867-1942). But his first work of
consequence, the complex block of flats in Paris called the Castel
Béranger[382] at 16 Rue La Fontaine, which was completed after several
years of construction in 1897, still represents a very ambiguous
exploitation of the new ideas coming from Brussels. It must be
remembered, however, that the original design almost certainly antedates
by a year or two all other Art Nouveau work outside Belgium. Also
notable is the fact that the façade of the Castel Béranger was premiated
by the City of Paris in 1898, since this indicates the rapidity with
which the new mode won approval in France.
In 1896, while the Castel Béranger was building, Siegfried Bing, a
Hamburg art-dealer whose wares included Japanese prints—now even more in
demand than at any time since their introduction to Europe in the late
fifties—and also the new English decorative products, decided to open a
shop in Paris. Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau at 22 Rue de Provence was
designed for him by L.-B. Bonnier (1856-1946) in the Belgian mode, which
thereby acquired its familiar name. This shop was of no great
architectural interest, however, except that it was the first of the
multitude that were produced in the next ten or fifteen years. Not only
in Paris but in most Continental cities large and small, and even in
England and in America, where the Art Nouveau otherwise hardly
penetrated, these shop-fronts can still be noted; one of the finest has
even been transferred from Paris to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in
America.
Bing also enlisted the services of Van de Velde, still quite immature as
a designer compared to Horta, but very articulate as a critic.
Influenced more intellectually than visually by the English, Van de
Velde’s personal development as a decorator now proceeded very rapidly.
The lounge he designed for the Dresden Exhibition of 1897, for example,
was an accomplished if somewhat heavily scaled example of an Art Nouveau
interior and much more elaborate than those completed in his house at
Uccle the year before.
By the time the Maison du Peuple in Brussels opened three years later in
1899 and Horta’s early career reached its apex of achievement, the Art
Nouveau was already a favourite mode with young French designers and
generally in rising favour in _fin de siècle_ Paris. As a result even
established architects were not averse to introducing its curves in
interior decoration and for the detailing of exposed metal structural
elements, although most of them had little understanding of its real
possibilities. The giant stone colonnades of the Grand Palais in Paris,
designed in 1897 and built in 1898-9 for the Exhibition of 1900, were
presumably intended to rival those of the plaster palaces of the Chicago
World’s Fair of 1893; but behind them the architectural team of H.-A.-A.
Deglane (1855-1931), L.-A. Louvet (1860-1936), both pupils of
Richardson’s master, André, and A.-F.-T. Thomas (1847-1907) provided a
vast iron-and-glass interior detailed in a coarse sort of Art Nouveau
way that is quite unrelated to the academic treatment of the
exterior.[383]
The entrance feature, designed by René Binet (1866-1911), and the
Pavilion Bleu by E.-A.-R. Dulong (1860-?), the principal exhibition
restaurant in the Champ de Mars, were even more whole-heartedly _à la
mode_. One can hardly regret, however, that these gaudy structures,
unlike the Grand Palais, were only temporary. A much superior example of
Art Nouveau decoration, Maxim’s Restaurant in the Rue Royale, remains
intact as it was redecorated in 1899 by Louis Marney. This is full of
period flavour and still splendidly maintained, but it has no real
existence as interior architecture. Soon the Art Nouveau would be
vulgarized in dozens of cafés, large and small, all over Europe. Of
these the Brasserie Universelle in the Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris by
Niermans, carried out two or three years after Maxim’s and lately
demolished, was perhaps the most sumptuous; there, however, the new mode
was eclectically combined with a lush Neo-Rococo.[384]
The architect Charles Plumet (1861-1925), working with the decorator
Tony Selmersheim (b. 1871), built in 1898 at 67 Avenue Malakoff the
first of a series of houses in which Art Nouveau decoration was grafted
on to a general scheme of design that was more or less Late Gothic. This
has also been demolished. Such eclecticism, based more usually on
eighteenth-century models, is characteristic of the rapid Parisian
dilution of the Art Nouveau and doubtless played a great part in its
early descent into the obsolescence of the _démodé_. Yet Auguste Perret
(1874-1954), in a large block of flats built in 1902 at 119 Avenue de
Wagram, exploited in masonry a heavier and richer sort of Art Nouveau
than Plumet’s with considerable success (Plate 134A). This edifice is in
curious contrast to the flats of ferro-concrete at 25 bis Rue Franklin,
designed by Perret in 1902 also, with which his career is generally
considered to begin. Even the latter, moreover, have considerably more
Art Nouveau feeling in their panels of faience mosaic than is usually
recognized (see Chapter 18). The block in the Avenue Wagram is quite
typical of French production in these years but of much higher than
average quality.
The most accomplished French Art Nouveau designer remained Guimard, the
first to take up the mode. His most conspicuous works, however, the
Paris Métro entrances of 1898-1901, lie outside the normal realm of
architecture (Plate 137B). These are executed entirely in metal of the
most sinuous and vegetable-like character, and their extreme virtuosity
is the more surprising in that they consist of metal castings produced
in series. His no longer extant Humbert de Romans Building of 1902 in
the Rue Saint-Didier in Paris, on the other hand, illustrated the usual
difficulties of Art Nouveau architects when working with masonry. The
exterior was neither Neo-Rococo nor Neo-Flamboyant but curiously crude
and gawky in its originality, like his Castel Béranger, with none of the
Art Nouveau grace that even Plumet sometimes evoked with success, or the
rather lush ornamentation of Perret’s block of flats in the Avenue
Wagram. The auditorium inside, however, employed curved structural
members even more boldly than Horta had done in that of the Maison du
Peuple. Here Guimard succeeded in giving a masculine vigour to the
rather feminine forms of a mode already passing its brief prime.
As late as 1911, however, Guimard remained faithful to the Art Nouveau
in an extensive range of contiguous blocks of flats that he built at
17-21 Rue La Fontaine near the Castel Béranger. For his own flat there
he designed ironwork as boldly abstract as advanced mid
twentieth-century sculpture in metal, but also as suavely elegant as
comparable Rococo detail of the eighteenth century. The exteriors,
moreover, which are entirely of stone, have a great deal of the
refinement and restraint of Horta’s Hallet house of 1906 in Brussels.
They are, however, more plastically treated with boldly moulded bay
windows and attic storeys. Except for Perret’s, few Parisian blocks of
flats of the period rival these in interest or in quality of design and
execution.
Three Paris department stores of the early years of the century
continued to use the metal-and-glass interior structure of Boileau and
Eiffel’s Bon Marché, with notable success. In presumable emulation of
Horta’s Innovation in Brussels, moreover, the architects of two of these
extended considerably the external use of exposed metal introduced by
Sédille at the Printemps in the eighties. These two stores remain, with
Guimard’s Métro entrances, the most prominent Parisian examples of the
Art Nouveau. The main branch of the Samaritaine[385] in the Rue de la
Monnaie near the Pont Neuf was built in 1905 by C.-R.-F.-M. Jourdain
(1847-1935). This has several fine galleried courts inside in the
tradition of the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie of the 1830s,
but it is even more distinguished for the sturdy scale and the
straightforward design of the external metal frame (Plate 133). The
actual structural members are hardly bent at all by the exigencies of
the mode; but they were characteristically ornamented not only with
decorative metalwork but also with inset panels of polychrome faience,
now painted over. On the north front, however, other panels, here of
faience mosaic, remain visible; these are of even greater delicacy and
elegance than Perret’s foliate panels in his block of flats of 1902-3 in
the Rue Franklin.
The contemporary Grand Bazar de la Rue de Rennes, now the Magasins
Réunis, at 134-136 Rue de Rennes by H.-B. Gutton (b. 1874) is generally
fussier in design than the Samaritaine. Gutton achieved, however, a more
completely volumetric expression, emphasizing the lightness and the
thinness of metal-and-glass construction somewhat as the early monuments
of the 1840s and 1850s in England had done. New shop-windows below and
the removal of the open grillework that once rose against the sky have
now much diminished its effectiveness. Binet’s earlier galleried court
of 1900 at the Printemps was burned out in 1923, unfortunately. With the
lifts rising in the corners and the staircases swooping down in great
splashing curves, this court was altogether superior to his Entrance to
the Exhibition of 1900 and even to Frantz Jourdain’s small later courts
in the Samaritaine. It seemed somehow to epitomize what a great
metropolitan department store _ought_ to look like somewhat as Garnier’s
Opéra epitomizes what later generations came to expect of an
opera-house. If Prince Danilo supped with the ‘damen’ of Maxim’s, we can
be sure the ‘Merry Widow’ and the ‘Pink Lady’ did their shopping here.
It was the Art Nouveau structures at the Exhibition of 1900 which first
focused public attention on the new mode, occasioning also that rapid
Parisian vulgarization which brought its early end. At the exhibition,
besides the crude but conspicuous things designed by Binet and Dulong
that have been mentioned, there was the Pavillon Art Nouveau Bing by
Georges de Feure (1868-1928), a designer rather than an architect, which
had rooms by Edward Colonna, back from working for Tiffany in America,
and others of the best artists and craftsmen employed by Bing; but their
exhibits represented decoration, not interior architecture properly
speaking. However, by 1900 the Art Nouveau was not at all the strictly
Parisian manifestation that it must have seemed to most of those who
visited the exhibition. The Germans, notably, had already taken it up
with great enthusiasm, beginning about 1897.
The Studio Elvira of 1897-8 in Munich by August Endell (1871-1925) had a
plain stucco façade cut by a few strategically placed windows of varied
shape; but this façade was splashed across the centre with a very large
abstract relief of orientalizing character resembling something half-way
between a dragon and a cloud. Endell’s studio, if not the first
manifestation of the Art Nouveau in Germany, was certainly the most
striking; moreover, it followed immediately upon the showing of Van de
Velde’s Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of 1897. Already, however, in
that portion of the Wertheim Department Store in Berlin in the
Leipzigerstrasse which was begun in 1896, Alfred Messel (1853-1909) had
used a great deal of exposed metal and glass and even perhaps modified
the detail a bit towards the Art Nouveau. This was five years before
Horta designed the Innovation Department Store in Brussels and ten years
earlier than Jourdain’s Samaritaine in Paris. Messel made the spacing of
his heavily moulded masonry piers quite wide and opened up completely
the bays between. The result was at least as close to Sullivan’s Gage
Building of 1898-9 as to the Paris department stores of a decade later.
In those portions of this department store that Messel added in 1900-4,
however, the façades, although highly stylized, were of rather Late
Gothic character and certainly quite remote from the Art Nouveau.
In 1899 Van de Velde moved from Paris to Berlin. There he designed the
Hohenzollern Kunstgewerbehaus, a shop parallel to Bing’s Maison de l’Art
Nouveau in Paris in its interests and its activities. In the next year
he carried out the Haby Barber Shop and the Havana Cigar Store, two of
the most extravagant of all Art Nouveau shop interiors. With the opening
of the new century, however, in his full-scale architecture Van de Velde
moved almost as rapidly away from the Art Nouveau as did Messel,
although in a different direction (see Chapter 20). By this time strong
counter-influences were reaching Germany from Glasgow and Vienna.
Although not disdaining the Art Nouveau as completely as did the English
and the Americans, the Austrians showed little of the enthusiasm of the
French and the Germans. There is in Vienna one block of flats[386] of
about 1900 so completely Art Nouveau that it might well have been
designed by Horta himself. But the leading Austrian architects, old and
young, reflected the new Belgian mode only with considerable diffidence
and restraint. Otto Wagner (1841-1918), long a well-established academic
architect and indeed Professor of Architecture at the Akademie,
introduced more and more Art Nouveau detail in the Stadtbahn stations
that he built over the years 1894-1901, most notably in the one at the
Karlsplatz with its curved metal frame and inset floral panels. However,
even this seems tentative and hardly rivals in interest Guimard’s
contemporary Métro stations in Paris.
Wagner’s so-called Majolika Haus, a block of flats at 40 Linke Wienzeile
designed about 1898, is far more distinguished and original (Plate
138A). Although the ironwork of the balconies is here and there
curvilinear in detail and the faience plaques that completely cover the
wall are decorated with great swooping patterns of highly colourful
flowers, the architectonic elements of the façade are nevertheless very
crisp, flat, and rectangular. That Vienna would very shortly become the
focus of a reaction against the Art Nouveau does not seem surprising in
the light of this façade. Moreover, on an office building erected in the
Ungargasse for the firm of Portois & Fix in 1897 by Max Fabiani (b.
1865), who had been Wagner’s assistant in 1894-6, the coloured faience
slabs which sheathe its surface are arranged in a purely geometrical
chequer-board pattern; only the ironwork has a slightly Art Nouveau
flavour. In the late nineties it would be hard to say whether Art
Nouveau influence was arriving or departing but for the projects other
Viennese architects were publishing in the review _Ver Sacrum_ started
in 1898.
The design of the art gallery built in the Friedrichstrasse in Vienna in
1898-9 for the Sezession, a newly founded society of artists in revolt
against the Academy, by J. M. Olbrich (1867-1908) seems more influenced,
however, by the façade of Townsend’s Whitechapel Art Gallery—only just
begun but already published as a project in the _Studio_ in 1895—than by
the work of the Belgians or the French, which had affected him strongly
in the immediately preceding years. The pierced dome of floral metalwork
alone vies in virtuosity with Horta or Guimard, and the pattern of this
is actually quite English in character. The bronze doors are by Gustav
Klimt, an Austrian Post-Impressionist who can be grouped, up to a point,
with the Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, and Swiss Post-Impressionists
mentioned earlier (see Chapter 16). Olbrich was called to Darmstadt in
Germany to work at the artists’ colony sponsored there by the Grand Duke
Ernst Ludwig in 1899 and Darmstadt, like Vienna, soon became a centre of
reaction against the Art Nouveau under his leadership (see Chapter 20).
Both in Vienna and in Darmstadt the influence of the Scottish designer
Mackintosh helped most to crystallize an alternative mode. Mackintosh
first exhibited a room on the Continent at Munich in 1898, the same year
that Baillie Scott was called by the Grand Duke to decorate an interior
in the palace at Darmstadt. In 1900 Mackintosh was invited to design a
room in the Sezession Exhibition in Vienna. That exhibit undoubtedly
encouraged Viennese architects, already diffident towards the Art
Nouveau, to turn very sharply away from it. This Adolf Loos (1870-1933)
had already done in designing a completely rectilinear shop interior in
Vienna in 1898. Loos, Wagner after about 1901, and Wagner’s pupil Josef
Hoffmann (1870-1956) were all leaders in the international reaction
against the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 20). The position of Mackintosh,
however, is rather hard to state so categorically and must be considered
here in more detail.
At home in Scotland Mackintosh’s early decorative work of the mid
nineties approached Continental Art Nouveau more closely than that of
any other Briton, not excluding Townsend. Indeed, he was castigated by
his compatriots and his English contemporaries for participating in so
exotic a movement. But Mackintosh also came nearer to possessing genius
than most of the men of his generation associated with the Art Nouveau,
not even excluding Horta. That genius, all the same, was of so
ambivalent a nature that he could seem for a few years to go along with
the general stream of Continental fashion and yet, almost at the very
same time, provide also a real protest against its excesses and its
superficialities by the craftsmanlike integrity and the almost ascetic
restraint of his best work. That protest the Austrians and the Germans
were not slow to heed.
Mackintosh made his first mark in Glasgow, which had earlier been the
home of the highly original ‘Greek’ Thomson (see Chapter 4). By the
nineties, moreover, interest in contemporary French painting was
probably livelier there than it was in London. But Glasgow was also as
notorious as Chicago, that major focus of architectural achievement in
the America of the nineties, for its presumed philistinism. Touches of
Mackintosh’s hand can be distinguished in work of the office of John
Honeyman (1831-1914) and his partner Keppie, where the young architect
was employed at the start of his career, notably in the Martyrs’ Public
School in Glasgow of 1895. But it was in the decoration of the first of
a series of Miss Cranston’s ‘tea-rooms’ (_scottice_, restaurants), the
one in Buchanan Street remodelled by him in 1897-8, that Mackintosh’s
personal talents were first effectively exploited. His very earliest
decorative compositions and the murals that he and his wife provided
here, full of heavy and presumably Gaelic symbolism, are parallel to,
rather than derivative from, the work of the Belgians. They are, in
fact, much closer to the drawings of Beardsley and the paintings of
Toorop and Munch than to the plant-like ironwork and almost Neo-Rococo
carved stone ornament characteristic of Horta. But the same long
swinging curves are present, the same linearity, and the same rejection
of all stylistic influence from the past.
In this same year 1897 Mackintosh’s firm had the good fortune to win the
limited competition for the Glasgow School of Art with a project that
was entirely their young designer’s (Plate 132A). Thus he very soon had
an opportunity to prove himself architect as well as decorator in a way
that only two or three of the Europeans associated with the Art Nouveau
had been able to do up to this point. The school was built during the
next two years, just as Horta was finishing his Maison du Peuple in
Brussels. The only element in the design that relates to the
contemporary Art Nouveau of the Continent is the ironwork. This is quite
incidental to the major architectonic qualities of the building,
moreover, since it is purely decorative, not structural. It is also
extremely restrained in its abstract curves, like Fabiani’s of this date
in Vienna, and almost totally devoid of vegetable or floral
reminiscence.
The entrance to the Glasgow Art School seems to derive from Webb, but,
like that of Townsend’s contemporary art gallery in London, it is rather
less traditional in character than Webb’s work of this period. The
somewhat wilful asymmetry and the plastic elaboration of the central
part of the façade contrast nevertheless with the straightforwardness of
the general treatment. There are two ranges of very wide studio
windows—reputedly derived from a Voysey project—like ‘Chicago windows’
but larger, with the reinforced-concrete lintels above them frankly
exposed, and little else in the whole composition. To later eyes this
façade, expressing so clearly the uncomplicated plan that it fronts,
tends to appear deceptively simple and obvious. But Mackintosh’s very
sensitive proportions and the delicate touches of linear detail provided
by the ironwork create a design at once very direct and very subtle.
The north end of the building is a tall plain wall of rather
small-scaled random ashlar broken only by a few strategically spotted
windows of various shapes. At once medievally dramatic and quite
abstract, this façade makes one appreciate all the more the almost
classical serenity and horizontality of the main front. The Art School
is clearly the manifesto of an architectural talent of broad range and
great assurance—very different indeed from that of Voysey.
Mackintosh was not alone in Glasgow in these years. A real ‘school’
existed, chiefly in the field of decoration, of which George Walton was
another notable exponent.[387] Like Baillie Scott and Ashbee, Walton had
some success as an architect in England (see Chapter 15) as Mackintosh
did not, even though he executed a few interiors below the Border. But
local support was not what it should have been for any of them in either
Scotland or England. While the Art School was in construction, however,
Mackintosh was asked in 1898 to provide the already-mentioned room in
Munich, first of many that he showed at various exhibitions in Germany
and Austria. This interior was very different indeed, both in the basic
rectangularity of the forms and in the delicacy of the membering, from
Van de Velde’s Art Nouveau Lounge at the Dresden Exhibition of the
previous year. Thus, even before Van de Velde reached Berlin in 1899, a
new line of influence from Glasgow into Germany—and soon into Austria
also—was established whose general tendency was in sharp opposition to
the lusher currents flowing from Brussels and Paris.
When Olbrich settled in Darmstadt—just _before_ Mackintosh’s room was
shown at the Sezession—he also rejected almost completely in the work he
carried out at the Grand Duke’s Art Colony the still slightly Art
Nouveau leanings—in any case already closer to the English Townsend than
to Horta or Van de Velde—of his newly completed Sezession Building (see
Chapter 20). Only his Pavilion of the Plastic Arts of 1901 at Darmstadt
retained curved elements, and those were structural rather than merely
decorative. The general rectangularity and the broad horizontal windows
of the Ernst Ludwig Haus, a block of artists’ studios also completed by
Olbrich in 1901, suggest comparison with Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of
Art. Whether or not, in fact, Olbrich knew Mackintosh’s building—he may
well have seen drawings if not photographs of it—his approach here was
certainly very similar.
Mackintosh had a good many further opportunities as a decorator, both at
home and abroad, but only too few commissions to design whole buildings.
However, his two houses near Glasgow, Windy Hill at Kilmacolm of
1899-1901 and Hill House at Helensburgh of 1902-3, are both very
notable. Externally they have a certain generic similarity to Voysey’s,
with their moderate pitched roofs of dark slate, roughcast walls, and
plain stone trim. His prototypes are not English but Scottish,
however—the simple seventeenth-century houses of the minor lairds. As
one would expect from his interiors, moreover, the façades of
Mackintosh’s houses are much more carefully and abstractly composed than
Voysey’s; they even include some simple geometrical features that are
not at all reminiscent of the past in their design. Like Voysey’s
houses, Mackintosh’s show no real novelties in planning, although the
disposition of the rooms is always straightforward and commodious. The
interiors are very original and rather less forced than those he was
producing for exhibitions on the Continent.
Mackintosh built very little after 1903 except the Scotland Street
School of 1904 in Glasgow, the north wing of the Glasgow Art School in
1907-8, and the finest of the various tea-rooms that he remodelled for
Miss Cranston. This was the Willow Tea Room in Sauchiehall Street of
1904, for which he remade the façade as well as reorganizing the
interior. Internally this tea-room was arranged on several interrelated
levels subdivided by ingenious screenwork; the exterior was a flat
surface of white stucco cut by broad horizontal openings, one to a
storey. The Scotland Street School is equally straightforward in design,
the rather plain façade with its ranges of horizontal windows being
flanked by rounded stair-towers articulated into continuous stone grids
by mullions and transoms, like the bay windows of Voysey’s Broadleys but
much taller.
The north wing of the Glasgow Art School is more remarkable, quite
worthy of the original front but much more stylized (Plate 135A). Where
the front is strongly horizontal the new end façade, like that on the
south, is markedly vertical, in part because of the way the ground falls
off. But the tall oriels, glazed at the outer plane of the stonework,
are striking features, and the whole composition is tense and dramatic.
The library inside is a _tour de force_ of spatial subdivision somewhat
like the Willow Tea Room. Most notable is the way the rectangular
stick-work makes manifest the complex articulation of the total volume.
This sort of handling of interior space was unique up to this time as a
product of conscious design, although already present inside Paxton’s
Crystal Palace in the mid nineteenth century. Certainly there is no
evidence here of a decline in Mackintosh’s creative powers; indeed,
quite the contrary. Yet this library proved to be his swan song; for
want of further commissions Mackintosh’s career all but closed at much
the same time that the Art Nouveau was coming to an end on the
Continent. Not since Ledoux perhaps had so great a talent been thus
thwarted by circumstances, although just what the thwarting
circumstances were, other than Mackintosh’s own temperament, is not so
evident as in the case of the revolutionary French architect.
The Art Nouveau, so extensively propagated by exhibitions, is often
thought to have terminated with an exhibition, that held at Turin in
1902. This is more than a slight exaggeration, as various already
mentioned buildings executed as late as 1911 will have made evident. Yet
after the early years of the century the decline of the Art Nouveau was
almost universal except in provincial places and in outlying countries
such as those of Latin America and eastern Europe. At Turin the Belgian
section had characteristic Art Nouveau interiors by Horta. Mackintosh,
wholly detached by now from the Art Nouveau, contributed a Rose Boudoir,
typically light in colour and delicate in line with the predominant
verticals and horizontals relieved by little abstract knots, so to say,
of curvilinear decoration. Raimondo D’Aronco (1857-1932), the Italian
architect responsible for the principal pavilions, wavered between a
rather plastic, somewhat Neo-Baroque, version of the Art Nouveau, not
unrelated to the seventeenth-century work of the great local architect
Guarino Guarini, and a crisper mode much influenced by Mackintosh and
the Viennese.
D’Aronco’s finest building, however, was not at Turin but the Pavilion
of Fine Arts that he designed for the Udine Exhibition the next year.
Moving sharply away from the turgidity of much of his work at the
earlier exhibition, he produced for Udine a façade that was unified in
design, frankly impermanent in its materials, and at once festive in
spirit and dignified in tone. This was a most distinguished piece of
exhibition architecture in a period when leading designers gave a great
part of their attention to such rather ephemeral things—largely,
doubtless, because so few opportunities to build permanent structures
came their way. In Istanbul, D’Aronco built a small mosque in 1903,
prominently located by the Galata Bridge, and also several blocks of
flats that signally fail to maintain the promise of his Italian
exhibition buildings. The very awkwardly sited mosque, raised on top of
an existing structure, is as Viennese in character as the Udine
pavilion.
Other Italian architects, however, remained faithful for a few years to
the _stile floreale_, their version of the Art Nouveau. In Milan the
Casa Castiglione, a _palazzo_ or mansion-like block of flats at 47 Corso
Venezia built by Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867-1917) in 1903, is a very large
and ponderous example. The detail is extremely bold, inside and out, the
materials rich, and a very large part of the interior is given up to a
monumental stair-hall of almost Piranesian spatial complexity. A
Milanese hotel at 15 Corso Vittorio Emmanuele of 1904-5 by A. Cattaneo
and G. Santamaria is of a comparable extravagance. Finer perhaps,
certainly simpler, is the Casa Tosi of 1910 at 28 Via Senato in Milan by
Alfredo Campanini (1873-1926).[388]
To judge from the rather _stile floreale_ character of some work of this
period in Latin America, Italians as well as Iberians may well have
carried the Art Nouveau there. In Cuba and Brazil, especially, memories
of Colonial exuberance encouraged a profusion of carved or moulded
ornament beyond even the excesses of the French around 1900. The most
prominent example, but not the most characteristic, is the Palacio de
Bellas Artes in Mexico City begun for President Diaz by Adamo Boari
after 1903 and completed in 1933 by Federico Mariscal; this is
‘Beaux-Arts’—not inappropriately, perhaps—in all except its detailing;
in the latest portions this reflects the Paris of the Exposition des
Arts Décoratifs of 1925 rather than the Art Nouveau Paris of 1900.
In Spain itself the international current of the Art Nouveau was not
very influential outside Barcelona. Gaudí, whose earlier work of the
seventies and eighties has already been described (see Chapter 11),
continued to be as much apart from the contemporary Spanish
architectural scene as he was from the international Art Nouveau. His
finest late works, moreover, all but post-date the demise of the Art
Nouveau in the major European capitals. Nor is there any such close, if
ambivalent, linkage between Gaudí’s career and the general rise and fall
of the mode as in the case of Mackintosh. One can only say that his
personal style is more closely related to the Art Nouveau than to the
new stage of modern architecture that was already succeeding it by the
time he produced his final masterpieces. The premonitory character of
his early ironwork has been discussed and illustrated already (Plate
96B).
Gaudí’s work on the church of the Sagrada Familia[389] in Barcelona went
on more or less continuously from 1884 to 1914 and began again in 1919
after the First World War. The most conspicuous portion that has so far
been executed, one of the transept façades, was designed and largely
built in the nineties. Dominating Barcelona with its four extraordinary
towers—not finally completed until after Gaudí’s death in 1926—this
façade, begun in 1891, breaks quite sharply with the Neo-Gothic of
Villar’s crypt and his own chevet. The portals with their steep gables
have a generically Gothic _ordonnance_; but the extraordinary profusion
of sculpture, mostly executed after 1903, gives a highly novel flavour.
While conventional enough as regards the figures, this is otherwise
either naturalistically floral or else meltingly abstract. It resembles
the Art Nouveau in many minor details, but is generally bolder in scale,
more fully three-dimensional, and, in places, somewhat nightmarish.
Although only about two-thirds as tall as the cluster of towers intended
by Gaudí to rise over the crossing, the four openwork spires above this
façade—with the two in the centre taller than those on the sides—reach a
wholly disproportionate height in relation to the roof that should
ultimately cover the still unbuilt transept. At the top they break out
into fantastically plastic finials whose multi-planar surfaces are
covered with a mosaic of broken tiling in brilliant colours. The
prototypes for these finials are the chimney-pots of the Palau Güell,
but here their note of free fantasy is raised to monumental scale. The
inspiration of the towers, so remote in character from anything that the
Art Nouveau ever produced, came from certain native buildings which
Gaudí had seen in Africa: these strange primitive[390] forms he first
exploited in a project of 1892-3 for the Spanish Franciscan Mission in
Tangier which was never executed.
_In posse_ the Sagrada Familia is perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical
monument of the last hundred years; beside it such a suave late example
of monumental Neo-Gothic in England as Liverpool Cathedral, begun by Sir
Giles Gilbert Scott in 1903, lacks both vitality and originality of
expression, if not nobility of scale. However, Gaudí’s church still
remains a fragment, and a very incoherent one at that, even though he
prepared in 1925, the year before his death, a brilliant new project for
the nave. Gaudí really stands or falls by the few secular buildings that
he was able to carry to completion, beginning with the Palau Güell of
1886-9 (Plate 96B), and not, as many compatriots assume, by the
unrealized—perhaps unrealizable—plans for the Sagrada Familia.
(Construction has gone slowly forward, however, on the other transept
for a decade now.)
Gaudí’s next Barcelona mansion after the Palau Güell, that built at 48
Carrer de Casp for the heirs of Pedro Mártir Calvet in 1898-1904, is
much less impressive. Baroque rather than medieval in its antecedents,
this is interesting chiefly for the detailing of the ironwork; but even
that is no more remarkable here than that at the Palau Güell of a decade
earlier. It is of interest, however, as illustrating the support which
Gaudí received all along from his fellow citizens, that the Casa Calvet
was awarded a prize in 1901 as the best new façade in Barcelona, quite
as Guimard’s Castel Béranger was premiated three years earlier in Paris.
A wholly new spirit, quite comparable in its total originality to the
Art Nouveau, first appears in the work that Gaudí did for Don Eusebio
Güell at the Park Güell (now the Municipal Park of Barcelona), carried
out over the years 1900-14, and in the walls and the gate he built in
1901-2 for the suburban estate of Don Hermenegildo Miralles in Las Corts
de Sarriá. In the latter all the forms are curved and no stylistic
reminiscence whatsoever remains, but it is a production of minor
importance compared to the park. The park is mostly landscaping, but
partly architecture in that it includes several small buildings and much
subsidiary construction. A sort of Neo-Romantic naturalism, exceeding in
fantasy that of the most exotic landscape gardening of the eighteenth
century, controls the whole conception. Sinuous and megalomaniac
near-Doric colonnades of concrete support a sort of flat vault that is
of great interest technically;[391] yet these colonnades also suggest
artificial ruins of the eighteenth-century sort raised to giant scale.
The other porticoes and grottoes, however, recall no architecture of the
past. Their rubble columns seem rather to emulate slanting tree-trunks,
but in fact their profiles were worked out statically with the most
careful study of the forces involved.
The ranges of curving benches surrounding the great open terrace over
the Doric hypostyle, although covered with a mosaic of the most
heterogeneous bits and pieces of broken faience, seem like congelations
of the waves of the sea; the roofs of the lodges, also tile-covered,
toss in the air like cockscombs. A strange biological plasticity, rather
like that of the small-scale carved detail of Horta’s or Guimard’s
buildings very much enlarged, turns whole structures into malleable
masses as in some Gulliverian dream of vegetable or animal elements
grown to monumental size. Everything but the ironwork is moulded in
three dimensions, and even the ironwork tends towards a heavy scale more
comparable to that of the structural members of metal used in Belgian or
French work of the day than to the delicacy of Art Nouveau decorative
detail.
Gaudí’s major secular works belong to the same years as the execution of
the park. It is hard to believe that the Casa Batlló at 43 Passeig de
Gracia in Barcelona, a small block of flats, is not a completely new
structure but a remodelling carried out in 1905-7. This fact perhaps
explains the relative flatness of the façade. Yet Gaudí made the lower
storeys extraordinarily plastic and open, using a bony articulation of
curvilinear stone members, and the high roof in front that masks the
roof terrace is of even more cockscomb-like character than those on his
park lodges (Plate 136). The upper storeys of the façade glitter with a
fantastic plaquage of broken coloured glass considerably more subtle in
tonality than his usual mosaic of faience fragments.[392] But
architecturally the façade is handled more like Horta’s, with most of
the windows nearly rectangular even though bulging balconettes of metal
project at their bases. The effect, as with Horta, is slightly
Neo-Rococo. But the sort of Rococo which this façade recalls is not
circumspect French eighteenth-century work but the lusher mode that was
exploited in Bavaria and Austria—and still more appositely in Portugal
and Spain. The entire wall surface seems to be in motion, and all its
edges waver and wind in a way that even interior panelling did rarely in
eighteenth-century France. This effect of total motion is even more
notable in the interiors, which seem to have been hollowed out by the
waves of the sea.
The rear façade of the Casa Batlló is remarkable for its openness. The
wide window-walls in the paired flats open on to sinuous balconies
extending all the way across. Above, there is a simpler plastic cresting
than on the front; over this the curious forms of the chimney-pots
provide a range of abstract sculptural features covered with polychrome
tiling, always a favourite terminal theme of Gaudí’s.
[Illustration:
Figure 35. Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Casa Milá, 1905-10, plan of
typical floor
]
Much larger than the Casa Batlló is the edifice built for Roser Segimon
de Milá in 1905-7 at 92 Passeig de Gracia, appropriately known in
Barcelona as ‘La Pedrera’ (the quarry). Surrounding two more or less
circular courts, this large block of flats occupies an obtuse corner
site, and the entire plan is worked out in curves as well as all the
elements of the exterior (Figure 35). The façade of the Casa Milá is not
a thin plane, curling like paper at the edges and pierced with squarish
holes like that of the Casa Batlló; instead ranges of balconies heavier
than those on the rear of the Casa Batlló sway in and out like the waves
of the sea beneath the foamlike crest of the roof, making the whole
edifice a very complex plastic entity (Plate 137A). From a distance La
Pedrera looks as if it were all freely modelled in clay; in fact, it is
executed in cut stone with boldly hammered surfaces that appear to
result from natural erosion.
There is no external polychromy of glass or tile here, and the frescoed
colour used on the court walls has suffered such serious deterioration
that it is difficult to know what it was like originally. On the other
hand, Gaudí’s detail was never more carefully studied nor more
consistent; there are no straight lines at all, and in the forms of the
piers rising from the ground to support the balconies of the first
storey he suggested natural formations with real success (Plate 135B).
These elements look as if they had been produced by the action of sea
and weather rather than by the chisel, quite as does much of the
mid-twentieth-century sculpture of Henry Moore.
The marine note is seen at its strongest and most naturalistic in the
ironwork however. Strewn over the balcony parapets and across various
openings, like seaweed over the rocks and sand of the seashore, the
railings and grilles are full of intense organic vitality with none of
the graceful droopiness of Guimard’s Métro entrances. Gaudí’s metalwork
frequently suggests the work of various mid-twentieth-century sculptors
in welded metal, quite as his handling of masonry does later sculpture
in stone. Indeed, his iron grilles often exceed such sculptors’
metalwork in richness and variety of form, as also in the fine
hand-craftsmanship of the execution.
The detailing on the Casa Milá, whether of the masonry or the ironwork,
avoids the nightmarish overscaling of the somewhat similar elements at
the Parc Güell, and also the coarseness of the broken faience mosaic
surfaces that he used so much there and elsewhere but here restricted to
the roof-tops. As regards the masonry, moreover, it is really wrong to
speak of detailing, for the very fabric of the structure, not just its
edges and its trimmings as on the Casa Batlló, has been completely
moulded to the architect’s plastic will. Whether or not it be correct to
consider the Casa Milá an example of the Art Nouveau—and technically it
is not—La Pedrera remains one of the greatest masterpieces of the
curvilinear mode of 1900, rivalled in quality only by the finest of
Sullivan’s skyscrapers (Plate 119), which it does not, of course,
resemble visually at all.
Despite the esteem in which his work has always been held by his
fellow-citizens of Barcelona, Gaudí had few local imitators of
consequence. However, such detailing on early twentieth-century
buildings there as may appear at first to be conventionally Art Nouveau
is often in fact a bit Gaudian. Only his assistants Francisc Berenguer
(1866-1914) and J. M. Jujol Gibert (1879-1949) seem to have understood
Gaudí’s mature style. At least the house by Jujol at 335 Diagonal in
Barcelona, though quite small and simple, and the Bodega Güell at Garraf
of 1913 by Berenguer are of a quality worthy of comparison with Gaudí’s
own best work.[393] The big Palau de la Musica Catalana, built by Luis
Domenech Montaner (1850-1923) in 1908, is a very extravagant example of
the architecture of the period, bold and coarse and rich, but with none
of Gaudí’s personal flair and integrity.
In Glasgow Mackintosh after 1908 was a prophet with far less honour than
‘Greek’ Thomson had received there in an earlier day. But the
countercurrent that he had helped to set going on the Continent was in
full swing, particularly in Austria and in Germany (see Chapters 20 and
21). Even in Horta’s own Brussels, Josef Hoffmann had been called from
Vienna as early as 1905 to build the suburban Stoclet mansion (Plate
154A) at 373 Avenue de Tervueren (see Chapter 21).
Despite the ephemeral nature of much of its production and the
completeness with which it was ultimately rejected everywhere, the Art
Nouveau has very great historical importance. The Art Nouveau offered
the first international programme for a basic renewal of architecture
that the nineteenth century actually set out to realize. Most earlier
programmes, moreover, even if not primarily revivalistic, aimed chiefly
at the reform of architecture; this was still true of Voysey and his
English contemporaries in these very years, though not, of course, of
Sullivan and Wright, working in isolation in the American Middle West.
Thus the Art Nouveau was actually the first stage of modern architecture
in Europe, if modern architecture be understood as implying, before
anything else, the total rejection of historicism.
The proto-modernity of earlier stages of nineteenth-century
architectural development is almost always ambiguous, since the leaders
of the various successive movements rarely intended to break with the
past entirely. The characteristic ideal of nineteenth-century
architects, as of their late eighteenth-century predecessors, had been
to react against what they considered the decadence of the building arts
current in their day by returning to the principles of some earlier and
supposedly purer or more vital age. The very considerable amount of
innovation that many European architects before Horta introduced in
their work was not exactly unconscious; but it was rather a matter of
achieving personal expression by adapting old forms to new needs, new
materials, and new methods of construction than of creating a wholly
original modern style.
Well before the nineties a very few men had consciously sought absolute
originality and total freedom from the disciplines of the past. But such
architects found little or no public support for their programmes of
architectural revolution nor even fellow-artists to share in their
highly individualistic campaigns. After the relatively universal
acceptance of the doctrines of Romantic Classicism there had followed
chiefly a succession and a multiplication of divergences; now, in the
nineties, a real pattern of convergence appeared. But this convergence
was premature. The renewal of ornament and of the accessories of
architecture outran the renewal of the more basic elements of the art of
building towards which the technical developments of the nineteenth
century had been so inevitably leading.
Thus the Art Nouveau stands apart both from the architecture of the
preceding hundred years and from the modern architecture of the
following sixty which extends down to the present. It did not bring the
one to an end, as the profusion of so-called ‘traditional’ buildings of
the early twentieth century makes very evident (see Chapter 24), nor did
it provide much more than a preface to the major new developments that
mark the early decades of the present century (see Chapters 18-21). That
the Art Nouveau was completely rejected on principle by
‘traditionalists’ is not surprising: it was the first serious attack on
the position they continued to maintain. But the very rapidity with
which the Art Nouveau rose to popularity and descended to vulgarization
encouraged its denigration in the name of ‘taste’ by almost all other
architects soon after it reached its climax around 1900. In recompense,
interest in the Art Nouveau began to revive early, by the early
thirties, after a much shorter period of neglect than other phases of
nineteenth-century architectural development have undergone and are
still undergoing.
The place of the Art Nouveau in the story of modern architecture, if
only as an episode of youthful wild-oat-sowing, is now well established.
Most of its exponents actually lived long enough to receive in their
later years embarrassing praise for youthful work they had quite
disowned if not forgotten. It is a curious paradox that although most of
the leaders of the Art Nouveau survived for decades—and Van de Velde
died only in 1957—not one except Gaudí[394] maintained after 1910 the
position of relative pre-eminence that had been his in 1900. A wholly
new cast of characters, many of them no younger, came to the fore in the
first decade of the twentieth century; they constitute the first
generation of modern architects, properly speaking.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 18
MODERN ARCHITECTS OF THE FIRST GENERATION IN FRANCE: AUGUSTE PERRET AND
TONY GARNIER
NO better name than ‘modern’ has yet been found for what has come to be
the characteristic architecture of the twentieth century throughout the
western world, well beyond its confines also in Japan, India, and
Africa, and increasingly in most of the Communist countries. Alternative
adjectives such as ‘rational’, ‘functional’, ‘international’, or
‘organic’ all have the disadvantage of being either vaguer or more
tendentious. Whether the Art Nouveau or such things as Sullivan’s
skyscrapers and Voysey’s houses all truly belong, in their rather
sharply differing ways, to a first stage of modern architecture or are
transitional and prefatory may still be debated; but from the earliest
years of this century several continuous lines of development can
certainly be traced. These lines were in the main convergent through the
twenties, if increasingly divergent in the middle decades of the
century. By stressing generic changes rather than specific achievements
the development can be presented almost anonymously, somewhat as the
nineteenth-century development of commercial architecture was outlined
earlier in this book (see Chapter 14). But it is more humanistic, and at
least as true to the detailed facts, to consider modern architecture as
deriving from the individual activities of a few leaders rather than
from some Hegelian historic necessity. Of those leaders one group, born
in the late 1860s, constitutes the first generation; a group born some
twenty years later forms a second generation; since the 1930s still
another generation has come to the fore.
A somewhat similar succession of three generations could be
distinguished in the case of Romantic Classicism, the last universal
style in architecture. What sets the twentieth-century situation apart
from that of the earlier period has been the marked prolongation of the
activity of the first generation, two of whose leading members, Wright
and Perret, lived on and remained active well beyond 1950. Wright
continued in vigorous production down to his death in 1959. The leaders
of the second generation, who first moved towards the centre of the
stage in the early twenties, are mostly still alive; two of them at
least, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, have been rather more
productive since 1946 than they were earlier in their careers (see
Chapter 21).
While some influence from their juniors can be noted in the later work
of the modern architects of the first generation, a real difference
between their approach to architecture and that of the second generation
has continued. Those who have come forward since the mid thirties owe
much to the first generation as well as to the second, yet they have
also manifested some significant characteristics that are their own. The
modern architecture of the last sixty years may well be presented
historically in terms of the work of two generations of leaders (see
Chapters 18-23), and then of the production of the decade following the
Second World War (see Chapter 25). But modern architecture, even very
broadly interpreted, includes only a small fraction of all building
production down to the war; the work of those supporters of the
‘tradition’ in the twentieth century bulked much larger in quantity,
even if it very rarely rivalled the modern work in interest or quality
(see Chapter 24). An Epilogue will touch on the current scene in the
early sixties.
The leaders of the first generation of modern architects remained great
individualists to the last. It is therefore not easy to draw any general
stylistic picture from their production, even for the years before the
twenties when they were the only modern architects. The leaders of the
second generation drew their inspiration, in most cases, not from one
but from several of the older men; yet their work was so convergent that
by the mid twenties a body of doctrine had come to exist deriving partly
from their theories and partly from their few executed buildings and
their many projects. With the increasingly wide acceptance of this body
of doctrine critics were soon ready to recognize the existence of a new
style as coherent, as consistent, and almost as universally employed by
younger architects everywhere as the Romantic Classical style had been
at the opening of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 22).
Towards the constitution of this new style each of the great architects
of the first generation had made notable contributions; yet their
executed work, and even more their theories, remained independent of it.
To appreciate that work only in the light of what they had in common
with their juniors is to miss much of the richness and all of the
idiosyncrasy of their achievement. In considering the work of these
older architects for its own sake, what sets it apart from the Art
Nouveau, whose protagonists were in many cases their exact
contemporaries, must first be indicated and evaluated. For example,
their rejection of ornament, at most but relative, provides only a minor
and negative point of differentiation. In their positive preoccupation
with structure and its direct architectonic expression, and also their
reform and revitalization of planning concepts, however, they went much
further than most of the Art Nouveau designers of 1900. It is true that
such architects as Horta and Jourdain, when working with metal and
glass, were concerned with the expression of structure, but that
expression was usually more decorative than architectonic (Plates 132B
and 133). Traditional materials, such as stone and brick, in the hands
of Art Nouveau architects and their spiritual brothers often lost all
their natural character, being treated like so much clay. The sense of
materials, both new and old, and the determination of their proper use
preoccupied all the leading architects of the first generation,
something for which only the English and the Americans prepared the way
in the nineteenth century.
The new importance of structure and its expression, the preoccupation
with a particular building material, is nowhere more evident than in the
work of Auguste Perret (1874-1954), the only great French architect of
this generation. Associated as he was with the family contracting firm
of A. & G. Perret, which specialized early in the use of reinforced
concrete, he saw as his principal task the development of formulas of
design for concrete as valid as those so long established in France for
building with stone. The other architects of his generation came more
gradually and less whole-heartedly to the exploitation of new
materials—it is paradoxical, for example, that the characteristic Art
Nouveau interest in exposed metal construction came generally to an end
about 1905—and their work as a result is more various and less
doctrinaire. Because of Perret’s clear definition of his goal and his
single-minded advance along a predetermined line, his somewhat limited
architectural achievement may well be considered before the protean
many-sidedness of Wright’s in America and the ambiguity of Peter
Behrens’s in Germany, not to speak of the important contributions of
Wagner and Loos in Austria, and of Berlage and de Klerk in Holland (see
Chapters 19, 20, and 21).
Auguste Perret came of Burgundian stock, but by the accident of his
father’s exile from France after the Commune he was born in Brussels.
His education was entirely French. He left the École des Beaux-Arts to
enter the family’s building firm without waiting to receive the
Government’s diploma, somewhat as Wright went out into the practical
world with but two years of engineering school behind him. His career
began almost at once, for he built his first house at Berneval in 1890.
Several blocks of flats and an office building in Paris followed in the
next eight years; the Municipal Casino at St-Malo, built in 1899, was
the first work of any real consequence. There he and his brother Gustave
(1876-?) used reinforced concrete for an unsupported slab floor of
54-foot span. Executed otherwise in local granite and wood, this
building has a certain bold simplicity as remote from ‘Beaux-Arts’ as
from Art Nouveau work of the period.
Reinforced concrete,[395] that is concrete strengthened by internal
reinforcing rods of metal, seems to have been invented by a French
gardener named Joseph Monnier in 1849, but he used it only for flower
pots and outdoor furniture. In 1847 François Coignet (1814-88) built
some houses of poured concrete without reinforcement; in 1852 for a
house at 72 Rue Charles Michel in St-Denis, Seine, Coignet first
employed his own system of _béton armé_, to use his term. That term has
since remained current in French—the German term is _Eisenbeton_, the
Italian _cimento armato_. During the next four decades ferro-concrete,
to give it its simplest English name, was developed very gradually by
Coignet and by François Hennebique (1842-1921) with no very notable
architectural results. Detailed research is gradually revealing many
instances of its early use by various men in different countries; but
neither in the scale of its employment nor in the achievement of new and
characteristic modes of expression does its history in these decades
rival that of iron in the first half of the nineteenth century (see
Chapter 7).
In 1894, just as the Art Nouveau was reaching France, ferro-concrete was
used for the first time in a structure of some modest architectural
pretension by J.-E.-A. de Baudot[396] (1836-1915) for a school in the
Rue de Sévigné in Paris. This is overshadowed in interest, however, by
the church he began to build in 1897. Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre at 2
Place des Abbesses in Paris has very little connexion with the Art
Nouveau except for its drastic novelty. On the contrary, de Baudot
employed for his structural skeleton very much simplified Gothic forms.
Actually, it is incorrect to call the material used here _béton armé_;
it is more properly _ciment armé_ since there is no coarse aggregate as
in concrete. Like his master Viollet-le-Duc’s projects, Saint-Jean is
curious rather than impressive and not at all to be compared in
intrinsic interest with Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. Worth noting, however,
is the use of faience mosaic to decorate the concrete structural
members, something de Baudot had already tried out on his earlier
school. The authorities were dubious of the strength of de Baudot’s
structure, as well they might have been considering the iron-like
delicacy of the membering, and a hiatus of several years held up the
construction after 1899, the church being completed only in 1902-4. As
has been mentioned already, the contractor was Contamin working with
Soubaux, his partner of the period.
Before Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre was finally finished in 1904, Perret had
already demonstrated the architectural possibilities of the new material
rather more effectively in the block of flats that he built in 1902-3 at
25 bis Rue Franklin in Paris. Despite the echo of the Art Nouveau
already noted in the foliage patterns of faience mosaic filling the
wall-panels on the exterior, most of the interest of the building
resides in its structure and its planning. Like that of Anatole de
Baudot’s church, the structure is visibly a discrete framework, but made
up entirely of vertical and horizontal elements with no curved members
of either Gothic or Art Nouveau inspiration. However, the concrete is
nowhere exposed but always covered with glazed tile sheathing. Within
the wall-panels the windows are crisply outlined by plain projecting
bands of tile; this provides an early instance of that _encadrement_, or
framing, on which Perret came to insist in all his work after the mid
twenties.
The skeletal structure of 25 bis Rue Franklin allowed great freedom in
planning (Figure 36). Around a small court, sunk into the front of the
building, the principal living areas of each flat all open into one
another, somewhat as in Wright’s Hickox house of 1900 but with less
spatial unification (Figure 31); the result is closer to Horta’s
treatment of the main floor of his Aubecq house of 1900 in Brussels
(Figure 34).
The next year Perret built another block of flats at 83 Avenue Niel in
Paris with an internal skeleton not of concrete but of metal, and
façades of stone treated somewhat like those of his Art Nouveau flats of
the previous year in the Avenue Wagram (see Chapter 17). He returned,
however, at once to the use of ferro-concrete and rarely deserted it
again.
The Garage Ponthieu, which was built in 1905-6 in the Rue de Ponthieu in
Paris, is a much more striking example of the possibilities of the new
material than the earlier blocks of flats; moreover, the concrete is
here exposed (Plate 139A). Inside, galleries carried along both sides of
the L-shaped space provide a second level for parking motor cars and the
whole interior is almost as light and open as if it were built of metal,
thus recalling a little de Baudot’s church. The façade, likewise, is as
skeletal as if executed with a metal frame. But Perret’s determination,
somewhat comparable to Sullivan’s in the Wainwright Building in St Louis
of fifteen years before, to organize the expression of a new type of
construction along basically Classical lines is as evident as the
maximal fenestration. The thin slab which projects at the top provides a
sort of cornice and the range of small windows underneath it a sort of
frieze, while the arrangement of the elements of the façade below is
very formal indeed. The rose-window-like glazing of the big central
panel is somewhat rudimentary and rather less Classical in feeling than
the rest, but the essentials of Perret’s concrete aesthetic are all
adumbrated here as they were not in the more tentative block of flats in
the Rue Franklin.
In the solid, marble-sheathed façade of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées
in the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Perret’s largest and most conspicuous
early work, his classicizing intentions are even more evident, but the
expression of concrete-skeleton structure is much less complete; these
intentions are underlined, moreover, by the large stylized reliefs by
Antoine Bourdelle that provide the only external decoration. Originally,
in late 1910, the commission for this theatre was given to Van de Velde.
He at once proposed that it should be built of ferro-concrete with the
Perret firm as contractors. During the course of the following year
Perret proposed various changes in the plan to make more practical its
construction with a concrete skeleton. When he later offered an
alternative design for the façade this was preferred by Van de Velde
because it seemed then so expressive of the underlying structure, as it
hardly does to posterity. By September Van de Velde made a final report
as consulting architect and withdrew completely. Needless to say, there
has been controversy ever since as to the degree of Perret’s
responsibility for this major monument of twentieth-century Paris; as
built, however, there can be little question that it is very largely of
his design. How different a theatre by Van de Velde would have been is
at least suggested by the one that he erected in 1914 for the Werkbund
Exhibition in Cologne (see Chapter 20).
[Illustration:
Figure 36. Auguste Perret: Paris, block of flats, 25 bis Rue Franklin,
1902-3, plan
]
The foyer of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées expresses the possibilities
of ferro-concrete in a more architectural way than do the interiors of
the earlier block of flats and the garage. The actual structural members
of the skeleton are visible in the free-standing columns, as are also
the beams that they support; the walls are very evidently only thin
panels between the piers. A few simple mouldings are used to assimilate
the new expression to the conventions of academic design—too few to
satisfy contemporaries, though too many for later taste.
There is less clarity of expression in the great auditorium because of
the profusion of murals contributed by various Symbolists and
Neo-Impressionists—Maurice Denis and K.-X. Roussel most notably—and by
the over-all gilding of the principal structural members, which are also
elaborated by semi-Classical detailing. Even so, the fact that the dome
is carried on the four pairs of tall slender columns is very evident,
and the swinging curves of the successive balconies give early evidence
of the ease with which ferro-concrete lends itself to bold
cantilevering.
The presumed necessity of achieving monumentality undoubtedly
compromised the purity of Perret’s expression of structure throughout
the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. During the War, which followed so soon
after the inauguration of the theatre in 1913, an important industrial
commission of Perret’s produced what would be for the next generation of
architects a more exemplary work. The warehouses built at Casablanca in
North Africa in 1915-16—there are also others there of 1919—required no
representational display; they are almost ‘pure’ engineering in
concrete. But the lightness of their walls, pierced with abstract
patterns formed by ventilating holes, and the elegance of their thin
shell vaults of segmental section displayed the potentialities of a
quite new structural aesthetic, at once delicate and precise, with no
echoes at all of the massive masonry buildings of the past.
The interior of the Esders Clothing Factory at 78 Avenue
Philippe-Auguste in Paris, erected just after the War in 1919, and
several smaller industrial buildings for the metal-working firm of
Wallut & Grange at Montataire, Oise, of 1919-21 were more readily
studied by younger architects and, in the case of the Esders factory,
much grander in scale than the North African warehouses. Even more
elegant than the warehouses, and equally ‘pure’, was the atelier of the
decorator Durand built in Paris in the Rue Olivier-Métra in 1922. This
has a shell vault rising from the floor broken, along one side only, by
a long skylight over widely spaced ribs that continue the curve of the
vault.
By this time, of course, ferro-concrete was in general use for
industrial building throughout most of the western world. In France the
vast parabolic-vaulted aircraft hangar at Orly, Seine, designed by the
engineer Eugène Freyssinet (1879-1962) in 1916, overshadowed in size and
boldness anything built by Perret. This very exceptional utilitarian
construction, magnificent in form yet quite without architectural
pretension, was destroyed during the Second World War. To Tony Garnier’s
work in Lyons we shall turn later.
In America Frank Lloyd Wright used ferro-concrete for his modest E.Z.
Polish Factory in Chicago in 1905, just as Ernest L. Ransome was
completing the first mature example of a large plant of ferro-concrete
frame construction, the United Shoe Machinery Plant in Beverly, Mass.,
begun in 1903.[397] All over the Middle West, moreover, grain
elevators[398] were rising in the form of gigantic linked cylinders. In
Switzerland the great engineer Robert Maillart (1872-1940) in his
factories and bridges was using concrete in several new ways as
different from the elevators as from the usual timber-like frames of the
French and the Americans or the shell vaults of Perret and Freyssinet.
Everywhere the importance of ferro-concrete as the prime building
material of the twentieth century was receiving increasing recognition;
for it was a material more universally available than structural steel
and also so elastic in its potentialities that these have hardly even
yet been adequately explored.[399] In the early twenties, when a younger
generation of architects all over Europe turned their major attention to
ferro-concrete as the most modern of building materials, Perret was the
architect who had the most to offer them—how limited had been Wright’s
exploitation of concrete up to this time we shall shortly see (see
Chapter 19). When Perret erected the church of Notre-Dame at Le Raincy,
S.-et-O., near Paris in 1922-3 concrete came of age as a building
material in somewhat the same way that cast iron had done in a series of
major English and French edifices of the 1840s (see Chapter 7).
[Illustration:
Figure 37. Auguste Perret: Le Raincy, S.-et-O., Notre-Dame, 1922-3,
plan
]
The Le Raincy church is not revolutionary in plan, being a basilica with
aisles and an apse; unlike de Baudot’s church, however, it has no
specific elements of Gothic reminiscence in the interior (Plate 141).
Instead it provides what the medieval builders of Saint-Urbain at Troyes
or King’s College Chapel in Cambridge had obviously sought to achieve, a
complete cage of glass supported by a minimal skeleton of solid
elements. The broad segmental shell vault of the nave, with smaller
vaults running crosswise over the aisle bays in the Cistercian way, is
carried on no walls at all but only on the slightest of free-standing
columns reeded vertically by the forms in which they were cast (Figure
37). Quite separate from this supporting skeleton is the continuous
enclosing screen of pre-cast concrete units, pierced and filled with
coloured glass designed by Maurice Denis. This is carried round the
entire rectangle of interior space and bowed out at the east end in a
segmental curve to form a shallow apse behind the altar. Only at the
front is the clarity of the conception compromised by the awkward
impingement of the clusters of columns that shoot up to form the tower.
Deserting the dilute Classicism that was his natural bent, Perret
allowed the clustered piers of his tower to rise into the sky,
supporting nothing at the top, in order to approximate the outline of a
Gothic spire. Even more than in the interior, where one is aware only of
the lowest stage, the verticalism and the medieval suggestion of this
feature, so over-ingeniously composed of standard ferro-concrete
elements, seems quite at odds with the severe concrete-and-glass box
that provides the body of the church. Few other ferro-concrete
churches[400] of the twenties, least of all Perret’s own Sainte-Thérèse
at Montmagny, S.-et-O., of 1925-6 and other French ones by his
imitators, rival Notre-Dame at Le Raincy. The largest and boldest, Sankt
Antonius at Basel in Switzerland, built by Karl Moser (1860-1936) in
1926-7, seems somewhat heavy and factory-like. Its plain rectangular
tower, however, rising free at one corner of the church, is much simpler
and more original than Perret’s spire and has been frequently and
successfully emulated by other architects. Of quite a different order
are the Expressionist churches of the German Dominikus Böhm, which have,
in the long run, had at least as wide an influence (see Chapters 20 and
25).
Two remodelled Paris banks, one of 1922 for the Société Marseillaise de
Crédit in the Rue Auber and another of 1925 for the Crédit National
Hôtelier, gave evidence of Perret’s capacity to extend the implications
of ferro-concrete design to more conventional problems. These interiors
are almost wholly devoid of ornament, and they largely depend for their
effectiveness, like the foyer of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, upon
the careful proportioning of the exposed elements of the skeleton
construction. In 1924 the Palais de Bois, a temporary exhibition
building at the Porte Maillot in Paris, showed how this sense of direct
structural expression could be exploited in a building all of timber.
This was much more successful than the theatre that Perret built in
1924-5 for the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. Of a quite
different order was the Tour d’Orientation at Grenoble, also of 1924-5.
Here Perret was far happier in achieving something comparable to the
richness of medieval spires with standard structural elements and
pre-cast panels than in the tower of his church at Le Raincy, for this
is much more structurally conceived and quite devoid of Gothic
reminiscence in the outline.
The mid twenties also brought to Perret, by this time widely recognized
in advanced circles as the leading French architect, several commissions
for houses, chiefly for artists, in France and even as far afield as
Egypt. Characteristically French in his preoccupation with large, not to
say monumental, problems, house-design was not Perret’s forte in the way
it was that of his American and Austrian contemporaries Wright and Loos.
Moreover by this date certain younger architects, particularly Le
Corbusier and two or three others in Paris, had set under way a
revolution in domestic architecture as drastic as Wright’s of
twenty-five years earlier (see Chapter 22).
Perret’s best houses, such as the Mouron house at Versailles of 1926 or
the Nubar house in the Rue du 19 Janvier at Garches of 1930, have an
almost eighteenth-century dignity and serenity. The ‘stripped-Classical’
apparatus of terminal cornices, _encadrements_ around the openings, and
occasional free-standing columns is doubtless logical as an expression
of the construction, but it is also very conservative in effect. Yet the
ferro-concrete construction encouraged Perret to introduce very wide
openings leading out on to surrounding terraces and to open up the main
living areas even more than he had done in the flats of 1902-3 in the
Rue Franklin. Such treatments were still rather advanced for Europe,
however common they may have been in America for a quarter of a century
and more. The characteristic quality of Perret’s domestic work is seen
at its best in a small block of flats at 9 Place de la Porte de Passy in
Paris facing the Bois de Boulogne that he built in 1930 (Plate 139B).
This has a façade towards the park so superbly proportioned that it
might almost be by Schinkel and a flow of space inside the individual
flats that is worthy of Wright, although much more formal in
organization.
Now Perret began to receive the official commissions that are generally
given in France only to men well on in years. The building designed in
1929 that he erected for the technical services of the Ministry of
Marine in the Boulevard Victor in Paris is one of the largest and most
typical of his later works (Plate 140B). The complex rhythms and subtle
three-dimensional play of this façade are entirely produced by the
actual structural elements. The skeleton divides the long façades into a
series of horizontal panels within which are set the vertical frames of
the windows separated by pre-cast slabs; in one storey the windows even
extend the full width of the bays.
To a considerable extent Perret had succeeded in achieving what he had
long consciously sought, that is, a vocabulary of design in concrete as
direct, as expressive, and as ordered as the masonry vocabulary of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a _style Louis XX_, so to say—still
very French in a quite traditional way, yet unmistakably of this
century. In the Garde Meuble or National Furniture Storehouse in the Rue
Croulebarbe in Paris, begun the next year, the vocabulary is—from
principle—all but identical; yet fewer windows and more solid panels
were necessary here so that the general effect is flatter and blanker.
The curved colonnade across the open side of the court is almost
archaeologically reminiscent of the eighteenth century, despite the
breadth of its spans and the ingenuity of its detailing. The small
concert hall of 1929 in the Rue Cardinet for the École Normale de
Musique is less pretentious but also less impressive.
Concrete to Perret, after all these years of employing it, was not a
crude or a substitute material. By the use of coloured aggregates which
he found various means of exposing he was able to vary the texture and
colour of his poured and pre-cast elements with considerable subtlety
and elegance. In the later buildings the workmanship is usually of the
highest quality—it was by no means so in the early twenties—with arrises
brought to a sharp edge in pure cement and such classicizing details as
the flute-like facets on piers and the capital-like treatment of their
tops carried to a finish comparable to that of chisel-cut freestone.
Thus Perret was eventually able to avoid the industrial brutality of
much work in concrete where the material is left as it comes from rough
timber forms with crumbling arrises and pockmarked surfaces. Such lack
of finish is acceptable in large-scale engineering work but certainly
awkward when seen close to as in Notre-Dame at Le Raincy. On the other
hand, Perret kept well away also from that slickness of
surface—especially popular with younger architects in the twenties—that
is produced when concrete is covered with a smooth stucco rendering and
painted.[401] Such slickness is, of course, generally very soon lost as
the original surface grows cracked and stained; only too rarely is it
properly maintained by frequent patching and repainting. Concrete was to
Perret a worthy material, like stone, and therefore deserved the effort
and the cost required to give it an expressive finish requiring little
or no maintenance.
The reticulated wall system of the big government buildings was also
used for a block of flats at 51-55 Rue Raynouard, built in 1932, where
Perret himself lived and also maintained his atelier. The necessary
adaptation of his formalized open planning to a trapezoidal site
produced suites of interior space of considerable complexity yet perfect
orderliness. Though Perret was still without a governmental diploma, the
atelier[402] he ran here was associated with the École des Beaux-Arts.
It almost seemed now as if he wished to demonstrate how much truer a
representative he was of real French tradition than those who were its
official, though unworthy, custodians. Thus the older he grew the
farther his work drew away from that of the more revolutionary modern
architects of the second generation. By 1930 it had definitely begun to
date; yet it was only in the last twenty-five years of his life that
there came to him the greatest opportunities of realizing his ambitions
for French twentieth-century architecture.
In comparison with Perret’s own pioneering of 1902-22 his late work
seems to lack vitality. For all the thought that went into its finish,
for all the virtuosity of certain features—such as the self-supporting
curve of the broad stair that spirals down into his atelier in the Rue
Raynouard—his very ambition to create a new French tradition gave his
later buildings something of the banality of those designed by the more
conventionally ‘traditional’ architects of his generation. This applies
in particular to his principal work of the thirties in Paris, the still
unfinished Musée des Travaux-Publics in the Avenue du Président-Wilson
which he began in 1937. Here the ingeniously pseudo-Classical—yet also
truly structural—apparatus of external engaged columns and the intricate
plan spreading out from a circular auditorium at the apex of the site
are quite in the Beaux-Arts manner. But the grandeur of scale in the
interiors and the exciting upward sweep of the boldly curving stairs
lend value, and even novelty, to a scheme that is in many ways extremely
conservative.
After the Second World War Perret was asked to provide plans for the
rebuilding of several bombed cities: Le Havre in 1945; Amiens in 1947;
and the Vieux-Port district of Marseilles in 1951. For Amiens he
designed a skyscraper, long physically complete but still unoccupied,
that derives more from his decorative Tour d’Orientation at Grenoble
than from the skyscrapers of the New World. This is one of his few
complete failures, if for no other reason than the competition its tall
and awkward silhouette offers to the cathedral, whose towers had so long
dominated the city’s skyline. The executed Marseilles buildings are not
of his design any more than are most of those at Amiens.
At Le Havre, however, his control of the rebuilding was more complete.
The Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, or at least the three sides completed
between 1948 and 1950 by his associates, outweighs by a great deal the
failure of the Amiens skyscraper (Plate 140A). Ranges of four-storey
buildings, all carried out in the reticulated vocabulary of his
Government buildings of the early thirties in Paris, surround a large
sunken plaza; the Hôtel de Ville in the near-Beaux-Arts manner of his
Musée des Travaux Publics occupies the fourth side. Shops open towards
the square under a continuous colonnade. Behind, rising out of small
courts, are taller towers occupied by flats; these lend great
three-dimensional interest to the formal and absolutely symmetrical
layout of this section of the rebuilt quarter. Since his death similar
ranges of buildings have been carried out along the quais to the south.
On the whole the extensive work of the team[403] is superior to the
public monuments by their captain, the Hôtel de Ville and the church of
St Joseph, both designed in 1950 and completed before Perret’s death in
1954.
Impressive as is Perret’s Le Havre in the international roster of
post-war urban rebuilding, it seems curiously out of date today, a mere
realization in the 1940s and 1950s, one might almost say, of the
aspirations of the early decades of the century. Since that period had
few such opportunities as was Perret’s here to realize urbanism on this
scale, however, what he accomplished there is a welcome addition to the
city-building achievements of this century.
Until the second generation appeared on the scene in the twenties France
produced little modern architecture of much interest besides Perret’s
work. The department stores of the early years of the century, still
strongly under the influence of the Art Nouveau, have already been
mentioned (see Chapter 17). After Perret the most important architect
was Tony Garnier (1867-1948), and he is of more significance for a vast
project that he prepared in his youth than for the executed work of his
maturity. In the later decades of the eighteenth century, when the
Romantic Classical revolution in architecture was getting under way,
projects were often of more interest than executed buildings for their
premonitions of what was to come, and this was particularly true in
France. It was true again in the early decades of the twentieth century,
down at least to Le Corbusier’s project for the Palace of the League of
Nations of 1927-8.
Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’ summarized his own aspirations and also provided
a wealth of ideas from which later generations of Romantic Classical
architects could draw inspiration. So, at the opening of the twentieth
century, Garnier’s very complete scheme for a ‘Cité Industrielle’[404]
contained a wealth of ideas on which architects drew well into the
1920s. Like that of the ‘Ville Idéale’, the interest of the ‘Cité
Industrielle’ is threefold: sociological, urbanistic, and architectural.
Henceforth the industrial city would be more and more accepted as normal
and not exceptional. Its needs both general and specific—so notably
recognized by Garnier, all the way from the provision of adequate
workers’ housing to various sorts of industrial plants—would become more
and more important preoccupations of most modern architects. In coping
generally with the manifold needs of an industrial community Garnier
also faced in detail many very different individual architectural
problems with considerable ingenuity.
Garnier’s solutions in the main were very simple and direct, but they
often had a merely negative character, as of buildings of academic
design scraped of all surface paraphernalia, rather than displaying any
fresh and creative approach. But an important part of the main
architectural development for some twenty years was to be such a purging
of inherited excess. Garnier reduced architecture to basic, if not
particularly unfamiliar, terms; on his foundations the next generation
began, in the twenties, to build something much more positive; thus his
influence was parallel to that of Loos (see Chapters 20 and 21). His
contribution to the twentieth century’s repertory of forms was less than
Ledoux’s had been to that of the nineteenth a hundred years earlier;
notably inferior in quality to Ledoux’s was his own actual production,
moreover.
Garnier’s appointment as Architect of the City of Lyons in 1905, a
position which he retained until 1919, might seem to have provided the
perfect opportunity to realize his dreams as, but for the Revolution,
should Ledoux’s appointment by Louis XV to build the Royal Saltworks at
Arc-et-Senans. But neither the Municipal Slaughterhouse of Lyons at La
Mouche, executed in 1909-13, the Herriot Hospital at Grange-Blanche,
designed in 1911 and begun in 1915, nor the Olympic Stadium of 1913-16
at Lyons realize much more than the obvious practical implications of
the detailed projects for various buildings in his ‘Cité
Industrielle’.[405] The slaughterhouse is bold structurally but clumsily
industrial in its handling, with none of the refinement of Perret’s
factories; the more highly finished stadium has irrelevant Classical
touches in the detailing, simple though it is, of the concrete elements.
Garnier’s work after the First World War began with the hospital, which
was completed only in 1930, and included a large low-cost housing
project in the États-Unis quarter of Lyons designed as early as 1920 but
executed only in 1928-30. Both are quite overshadowed by the comparable
work of the next generation in these years—that in other countries at
least, if not that in France. The Moncey Telephone Office at Lyons of
1927, the Textile School at La Croix-Rousse of 1930, and the Hôtel de
Ville of the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt of 1931-4, on which
another architect, J.-H.-E. Debat-Ponsan (b. 1882), a pupil of Victor
Laloux, collaborated, differ very little from the scraped academicism of
most French public architecture of this period. The houses Garnier built
in 1909 at St-Rambert and in 1910 at St-Cyr (Mont d’Or) are among his
best executed works; all the same, except for their early date, they are
hardly very notable.
Two blocks of flats built by Henri Sauvage (1873-1932) in 1925 in the
Rue des Amiraux and in the Rue Vavin in Paris, faced with glazed white
brick and stepped back in section to provide terraces for the upper
floors, are well above the level of quality of Garnier’s later work
without approaching that of Perret’s. That in the Rue des Amiraux, being
for working-class occupancy, is more significant of the international
aspirations of the period. Although less drastically novel than the
low-cost housing of the twenties in Holland and Germany, this has
survived very well because of its permanent grime-proof surfacing. It
has been rather unjustly forgotten, largely because it lies off the main
line of international development (see Chapter 21).
Most French production in the twenties remained completely subject to
academic discipline although it was often tricked out with the sort of
modish decoration that flourished particularly at the Paris Exposition
des Arts Décoratifs of 1925. Yet at the same time Paris, as the world
capital of modern art, was one of the three great foci of architectural
advance. The linkage between advanced painting and the Art Nouveau in
the nineties was discussed earlier (see Chapter 16). Perret employed
Symbolist and Neo-Impressionist painters as collaborators, beginning
with the Théâtre des Champs Élysées before the First World War. But
there is no real parallel between his architecture and that of Garnier
or Sauvage on the one hand and the art of the great twentieth-century
masters of the École de Paris on the other. Picasso, Gris, Braque,
Matisse, and Derain had no effective influence on architecture.
Characteristically Perret employed Bourdelle, not Maillol, when he
needed sculpture. With the next generation the situation entirely
changed; but the new architects of the twenties, not only in France but
everywhere, for all their greater sophistication and their close
association with advanced painters and sculptors, still owed at least as
much to Perret and to Garnier if not to Sauvage.
To the most creative new architects who appeared around 1920 Garnier’s
project for the ‘Cité Industrielle’ offered both a challenge and an
inspiration, but Perret was by far the more important influence.
Somewhat later, towards 1930, that influence became almost ubiquitous in
France, and its effect grew increasingly banal as the ferro-concrete
Classicism of Perret’s later work gradually replaced the official and
inherited tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts, by that time nearly
obsolete even in France.[406] As has so often happened in France before,
a youthful rebel, after being accepted late in life by the academic
authorities, was only too ready to support a new discipline that had
itself already become academic. Thus is cultural continuity maintained
in France at the expense of variety and recurrent new growth. The
situation was rather different in America, as we shall soon see.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 19
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND HIS CALIFORNIA CONTEMPORARIES
WRIGHT in America found himself, in his seventies, as generally accepted
a master as did Perret in France, but his influence never became at all
academic in the way of Perret’s after 1930. There could hardly be a
greater contrast between the careers of two contemporaries in the same
field. Both were very productive over a length of time that is more than
a third of the whole period covered by this book, but this is about all
that they did have in common. Perret’s career progressed gradually over
several decades to general and even official acceptance. Wright’s
career, on the other hand, had very notable ups and downs, and he only
once received a governmental commission.
After the years of preparation discussed earlier (see Chapter 15) there
followed some ten years of great success. But this success was largely
restricted to a particular region, the Middle West, and to a particular
field, the building of good-sized suburban houses. Following that, in a
decade interrupted by the First World War, Wright’s influence rapidly
increased, not at home but abroad, although he had considerably fewer,
if much larger, commissions. Then, paradoxically, in the twenties, while
the United States swung into the biggest building boom in history, there
began a decade in which Wright’s production all but ceased. Many assumed
that his career had closed and that his work had passed into history as
had Voysey’s and Mackintosh’s by that time. This, of course, was not at
all true. In the mid thirties Wright’s activity revived, and his
production continued at a rising rate until his death. Moreover, there
was little sign of any decline into personal academicism such as marked
the late work of Perret in the same decades.
Where Perret had, in effect, only a double architectural career, being
largely occupied on the one hand with industrial commissions close to
the dividing line between architecture and engineering, and on the other
hand with public buildings, Wright’s career was increasingly
multifarious. Beginning chiefly as a domestic architect, he never ceased
to build houses; but by the 1950s there were few fields, including that
of urbanism, which he had not entered, if only to present challenging
projects and announce controversial theses. Disciple of a great
skyscraper architect, author of a succession of skyscraper projects,
Wright had to wait a full half century after Sullivan completed his last
skyscraper in Chicago before he built his first, the Price Tower in
Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1953-5. Some of his planning projects may yet
come to posthumous execution, and his work at Florida Southern College
at least was of urbanistic scope.
Perret consciously summarized and continued earlier French tradition;
but Wright wished to initiate a new tradition, one which he preferred to
call ‘Usonian’ rather than American. Perret’s disciples, emulators, and
imitators in his later years were able to take control of French
architecture to a quite considerable extent. Wright’s disciples, despite
the fifty years during which he maintained offices that were also
training ateliers in Oak Park, in Chicago, in Tokyo, in Wisconsin, and
in Arizona, have only rarely made any significant mark of their own; nor
has his influence had much more specific effect on the character of
modern architecture in America than it has had generically on that of
the world outside. Where Perret’s influence, particularly outside
France, has been largely restricted to architects working with
ferro-concrete, the material that he was the first to master
architecturally—and even in concrete construction this influence has
inhibited as often as it has liberated—Wright’s influence has been
protean on the international scene. From the day when the German
publisher Wasmuth first made Wright’s work available to Europeans at the
opening of the second decade of the century this has been true, down to
the time, a decade ago, when the Italian architect, critic, and
historian Bruno Zevi (b. 1918) tried to invert chronology so that
Wright’s ‘architettura organica’[407] might seem to succeed rather than
to precede the ‘funzionalismo’ or ‘International Style’ of the second
generation of modern architects.
Before turning to a more detailed consideration of Wright’s work after
1900 one further comparison with the _œuvre_ of Perret may be made.
Although Wright never confined himself to one material or to one method
of construction—indeed, his versatility in this respect continued to
increase right down to his death—he was from the first especially
interested in the possibilities of concrete. He published in _The
Brickbuilder_ for August 1901 a project for a small village bank, still
very Sullivanian in its rich detailing, that was intended to be executed
entirely in concrete. This was only two years after Perret had first
used the material with little or no attempt to develop its architectural
possibilities and a year before his block of flats in the Rue Franklin
was designed. His E.-Z. Polish Factory of 1905 at 3005-17 West Carroll
Avenue in Chicago has already been mentioned. The Unity Church in Oak
Park of 1906 (Plate 143B), entirely of concrete surfaced with a special
pebble aggregate and decorated with integral ornament, precedes by many
years Perret’s church at Le Raincy (Plate 141). Perret’s ultimate
development of various refined finishes for exposed concrete came still
later. Admittedly, however, the Oak Park church is a much smaller and
less striking edifice than Perret’s; and the work of Kahn and other
industrial architects soon overshadowed Wright’s modest factory.
Moreover, it was only with the twenties that Wright, like the Europeans,
really gave major attention to building in concrete.
Wright’s creative powers in the first decade of this century were
largely concentrated on his ‘Prairie Houses’. Their essentials were
already present in the two Kankakee houses of 1900 (Plate 142A) and the
first house designed for the _Ladies Home Journal_ (see Chapter 15). But
these essentials received more masterly—one might well say more
classic—expression two years later. The large W. W. Willitts house at
715 South Sheridan Road in Highland Park, Ill., of 1902 is of
wooden-stud construction, but covered like the Kankakee houses with
stucco (Plate 142B). The C. S. Ross house off the South Shore Road on
Lake Delavan in Wisconsin, also of 1902, has the rough board-and-batten
sheathing of the River Forest Golf Club (Plates 143A and 128B). Both
offer versions of the cruciform plan (Figure 38) with the interior space
‘flowing’ round a central chimney core and also extended outward on to
covered verandas and open terraces quite as in Price’s Tuxedo Park
houses of fifteen years earlier (Figure 28).
[Illustration:
Figure 38. Frank Lloyd Wright: Highland Park, Ill., W. W. Willitts
house, 1902, plan
]
Another major work of 1902 is the Arthur Heurtley house at 318 Forest
Avenue in Oak Park, Ill. There the principal living areas, which are on
the upper floor as in the Husser house of 1899, form an articulated
L-shaped within the basic square that is defined by the overhanging
roof. The brick walls of the lower storey have broad projecting
horizontal bands and the wide, low entrance arch remains quite
Richardsonian. The upper storey consists largely of continuous ranges of
wooden-mullioned casement windows.
No notable progression is observable in the series of suburban houses
built during the remainder of this decade before Wright went to Europe
in 1909; but he produced many other brilliant illustrations of both the
cruciform and the square plan as well as a more elongated sort extending
along a single axis. Of the many fine examples of the Willitts or Ross
type around Chicago, the small house for Isabel Roberts at 603 Edgewood
Place in River Forest of 1908 is one of the best; there the living room
in the front wing is carried up two storeys, as was proposed for one
version of the _Ladies Home Journal_ house. The larger F. J. Baker house
at 507 Lake Avenue in Wilmette of 1909 also has a two-storeyed living
room; but here the tall cross element of the plan which this feature
provides was moved to one end of the house so that the plan is of a T or
L shape rather than cruciform.
The E. H. Cheney house at 520 North East Avenue in Oak Park of 1904 is
square like the Heurtley house near by. It is raised off the ground on a
sort of extended square stylobate so that the living area, which runs
all across the front as at the Hickox house, can open freely through
french doors on to the walled terrace in front. In the T. P. Hardy house
at 1319 South Main Street in Racine, Wis., of 1905 a declivitous
lakeside site encouraged a vertical rather than a horizontal
organization of the interior with a two-storey living room as the
spatial core.
A very different feeling pervades the small, squarish house at 6
Elizabeth Court in Oak Park that Wright built for Mrs Thomas Gale in
1909. Here flat slabs—which had been proposed as early as 1902 in a
project (perhaps for execution in concrete) for the Yahara Boat Club in
Madison, Wis.—replace the low-pitched hip or gable roofs of the
characteristic Prairie Houses. Moreover, parapeted balconies and other
simple rectangular features elaborate plastically the composition in a
fashion that suggests the abstract sculpture of a decade later in Europe
(see Chapter 21).
The W. A. Glasner house of 1905 at 850 Sheridan Road in Glencoe, Ill.,
on the contrary was extended longitudinally and the living area for the
first time not at all articulated but completely unified (Figure 39).
Something of the same longitudinal extension marks the much larger F. C.
Robie house at 5757 Woodlawn Avenue in Chicago of 1909. But there the
living room and dining room are separated by the chimney core and raised
above the ground level. Built of fine Roman brick, this is the most
monumental of these early houses. The long horizontal lines of the
balcony below and the roof above dominate the composition; yet a cross
element comes forward in the upper storeys to provide, less
symmetrically than in his houses of cruciform plan, something of the
abstract plasticity of the Gale house.
[Illustration:
Figure 39. Frank Lloyd Wright: Glencoe, Ill., W. A. Glasner house,
1905, plan
]
Another large house of the end of the decade, the Avery Coonley house at
300 Scottswood Road in Riverside, Ill., of 1908, offers a quite
different and much more extended plan. The square block containing the
living room rises above a terrace and a reflecting pool as the main
element of the design, but from this block two long wings project. That
to the left includes a large dining room and also very extensive service
facilities at the rear; in the one to the right are the master’s suite
and other bedrooms. Thus the house is, in a later phrase of Wright’s,
‘zoned’ according to function. The upper walls of this house are covered
with a geometrical pattern produced by setting coloured tiles into the
stucco. Wright never did quite the same thing again, but this led the
way to his use of patterned concrete blocks a few years later.
Two of Wright’s non-domestic works of this period are of considerable
importance. Unity Church in Oak Park has already been mentioned; the
other was the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, N.Y., of 1904.
Massive and even sculptural externally, particularly at the ends, this
had a tall glass-roofed court running down the centre, around which the
upper ranges of offices extended on galleries carried by somewhat
Sullivanian piers. All the fittings of the offices, including the steel
furniture—probably the first to be designed by an architect—were
Wright’s. Thus he set here a wholly new standard of elegance,
consistency, and coherence in semi-industrial building.
Within the massive slab-roofed block of the Unity Temple (Plate 143B),
which is echoed beyond a low entrance link by the smaller block of the
Sunday School, Wright achieved even more notably than inside the Larkin
Building a new sort of monumental space-composition such as even his
biggest houses hardly provided room for. The square auditorium with
incut corners has double galleries on three sides and a pulpit platform
on the fourth, behind which rises the organ. The multiple spatial
elements seem to cross one another at different levels in a sort of
three-dimensional plaid. Moreover, this theme is echoed in all the minor
features, such as the wood stripping of the sand-finished plaster walls
and the prominent lighting fixtures. Of this spatial development there
had been some premonition in the auditorium block at one end of the
Hillside House School that he built for his aunts outside Spring Green,
Wis., in 1902; but there the masonry of the exterior walls and piers was
still rather Richardsonian and the internal gallery consisted of a
square set lozenge-wise.
Wright’s work down to 1910 was made available to Europeans by two
publications of Wasmuth, the Berlin publisher; and the end of the first
decade of the century does, coincidentally, mark a real turning point in
his career. He would not be so prolific again before the forties; and
henceforth, although he never ceased to build houses, these would no
longer constitute the bulk of his production.
The production of the next decade, after his return from Europe in 1911,
opens with two houses, however. Taliesin, which he built outside Spring
Green for his mother in 1911, was soon much enlarged when he moved there
himself and it always remained his principal residence. As a result of
the growing needs of his family and of his school—not to speak of two
major fires in 1914 and 1925—the Taliesin of today is very different,
above all in its endless ramification, from what he planned in 1911; but
the vocabulary of materials and design stayed more or less constant
through all the years. Where the Prairie Houses echoed in their
horizontal lines the flat Illinois terrain on which most of them were
set, Taliesin is wrapped around a hill-top just below the crest. The use
of various levels in the interior and a landscape-like elaboration of
the low-pitched roofs represent his response to this more interesting
site; after that the ‘Prairie’ master avoided flat sites for houses
whenever he could!
Taliesin, combining a house, drawing-office, living accommodation for
apprentices, and even farm buildings, had from almost the first a
complex plan not readily definable as square, cruciform, or unilinear.
But in a project of the same year 1911 in which Taliesin was originally
built, that for the S. M. Booth house at Glencoe, Ill.—never executed,
unfortunately, according to these plans—a new sort of organization
appeared, related to the elaborated cube of the Gale house and also to
the ‘zoned’ scheme of the Coonley house. A two-storey living-room was to
provide both the spatial and the plastic core; from this wings serving
different purposes would shoot out swastika-like.
The relative homogeneity of Wright’s production in the first decade of
the century, following after the gradual convergence of his early work
during the nineties, is explained by the nearly identical problems and
sites that he faced in designing the houses mentioned so far. This
homogeneity now gave way to an increasing variety that makes it
difficult to summarize the work of these years. The Coonley Playhouse,
built on the Coonley estate at Riverside in 1912, bears little
resemblance to the original house of four years earlier. The plan is
cruciform and symmetrical; but what is new here is the way the slab
roofs, set at two different levels and pierced through their wide
projections in order to let light reach the windows below, were used to
achieve an even more boldly sculptural quality than in the project of
1902 for the Yahara Boat Club or the Gale house of 1909. Wright’s
mastery of abstract decoration was wholly mature by this time. From the
first he had used leaded glass in simple geometrical patterns in his
windows,[408] but the windows in this playhouse are the finest of all.
Moreover, these festive compositions of circles of coloured glass
arranged asymmetrically resemble quite closely the abstract paintings
that such artists as Kupka, Delaunay, and the Constructivists would
shortly be producing in Europe.
Northome, the F. W. Little house at Wayzata, Minn., of 1913, is also
quite different from all the earlier houses, yet not at all similar to
the Coonley Playhouse. Raised on a ridge above the southern shore of
Lake Minnetonka, this house consists of a series of pavilions—some open,
some closed—strung along a single axis parallel to the water’s edge.
That containing the living room, which is of almost monumental size and
scale, dominates the whole. Wright seemed able now to invent a new mode
almost with every individual commission, each one with potentialities as
great as those of the Prairie Houses he had so thoroughly exploited in
the decade before 1910.
The major work of the immediate pre-war years, the Midway Gardens of
1913-14 on the Midway south of Chicago, is rather hard to define
precisely. Not quite a beer or _Heuriger_ garden, nor yet a music-hall
or cabaret in the ordinary European sense, the establishment consisted
of a large outdoor dining and entertainment area with raised terraces on
two sides, a stage and orchestra shed at the far end, and a closed
restaurant block towards the street. Here Wright’s ambitions as a
decorative artist could have free play. Abstract compositions of
coloured circles like those in the windows of the Coonley Playhouse
appeared here as wall-high murals at the ends of the covered restaurant.
Moreover, the sculptural implications of the general composition of the
playhouse were carried farther in the openwork ‘constructions’ that he
set on the tops of the towers. At the same time he introduced a great
deal of figurative sculpture stylized in a rather Cubist way. Thus
several different aspects of the abstract and near-abstract art which
was just coming into independent existence in Europe were closely
paralleled in the adjuncts to Wright’s architecture here.
More architectonic patterns produced by simple geometrical means also
ran riot at the Midway Gardens. Notable and significant was the use of
extensive areas of patterned concrete blocks; these were somewhat like
the patterned upper walls of the Coonley house of 1908 but all
monochrome. The early demolition of the Midway Gardens makes it
difficult to know whether this tremendous elaboration of the decorative
aspects of Wright’s architecture was symphonic or cacophonous in total
effect. Whatever the degree of their success or their failure, however,
they opened a sort of ‘Mannerist’ or ‘Baroque’[409] period in his career
that was destined to last for more than a decade.
During the First World War, in 1915, Wright was approached by emissaries
of the Japanese Imperial Household to design and build the Imperial
Hotel in Tokyo. Proceeding to Japan, Wright was largely concerned with
this commission for the next seven years, finally bringing it to
completion in 1922. This is the principal production of his ‘Baroque’
phase. It was also a notable engineering triumph, for his ingenious use
of concrete slabs carried on a multitude of concrete piles brought it
safely through the earthquake of 1923. Paul Mueller, the engineer of the
old Adler & Sullivan office, was his collaborator here.
Abstract ornament proliferated on the hotel; some of it, carved in
greenish lava, elaborates the garden courts of the vast H-shaped plan;
still more is painted in gold and colour on the ceilings of the
principal interiors. Moreover, the massive proportions of the masonry
walls produce an effect of castle-like solidity wholly inexpressive of
the method of their support and very far removed from the light and
floating character of the Prairie Houses. On the whole this hotel
represents, far more than the Midway Gardens, a cul-de-sac in Wright’s
development.
Overlapping the period of construction of the Imperial Hotel came a
series of houses in southern California in which the ‘Baroque’ element
was gradually restrained. The earliest of these, Hollyhock House in Los
Angeles and two smaller houses near by, were built for Aline Barnsdall
in 1920 on a large estate bounded by Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards,
Edgemont Street, and Vermont Avenue. These are of poured concrete very
massively handled and carry considerable abstract sculptural
ornamentation. For a slightly later series of four houses around Los
Angeles, beginning with the house of 1923 for Mrs G. M. Millard at 645
Prospect Crescent in Pasadena, Wright developed a type of concrete-block
construction with reinforcement in the joints that was of considerable
technical interest and also offered special decorative possibilities.
The idea of using concrete blocks cast with relief patterns of
geometrical character goes back to the Midway Gardens, however, and
walls covered with repeating ornamental units had first appeared at the
Coonley house.
[Illustration:
Figure 40. Frank Lloyd Wright: Pasadena, Cal., Mrs G. M. Millard
house, 1923, plans
]
In the Millard house, particularly, the scale of the moulded blocks and
the ingenious inclusion of pierced units—very similar to the pre-cast
elements that Perret was using for the screen walls of his Le Raincy
church at just this time—produced a masterpiece (Plate 144). This house,
however, is not solely of interest for its construction and its
decoration. In contrast to the horizontal composition of almost all his
earlier houses except that in Racine for the Hardys, this is a tall
vertical block, entered at the middle level, with the dining room and
kitchen below and the two-storey living room opening out to a balcony at
the front (Figure 40). The main bedroom is reached from a gallery
overhanging the rear of the living-room. Both organizationally and
visually this represents a surprising change, and the result closely
resembled what a leading architect of the second generation had just
then been proposing in Europe (Figure 45). There are, for instance, no
hovering eaves here; instead a parapet continues the wall plane upwards
and confines a roof terrace. This is as close as Wright ever came to
building a ‘box-on-stilts’, his term of abuse for the advanced European
houses of the twenties. It was as if, after the expansiveness of his
work from the Midway Gardens to Hollyhock House, Wright wished to prove
here his capacity to produce a house modest in scale and compact in
section as well as in plan.
In the next decade, from 1924 to 1934, Wright’s actual production
declined almost to zero although he was working on a series of important
projects, some of which later provided the basis for executed buildings.
Taliesin was rebuilt after a fire in 1925, however—it had already been
rebuilt once before after an earlier fire in 1914—and a large house of
concrete blocks, with almost no use of pattern except for occasional
pierced grilles, was erected for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones in 1929
at 3700 Birmingham Road in Tulsa, Okla. That is about all.
The small M. C. Willey house of 1934 at 255 Bedford Street, S.E., in
Minneapolis marked the beginning of what proved to be almost a second
career for Wright. Low and L-shaped, with practically no ornament
whatsoever, this modest brick house introduced a major change in
domestic planning. Not only are the living room and the dining room
completely unified, as was first done at the Glasner house in 1905, but
the kitchen—now re-christened ‘work-space’—opens into the main living
area behind a range of glazed shelves (Figure 41). Thirty years later
the full implications of this development are still not quite digested
in America or even fully apprehended abroad; on the contrary, a reaction
from open planning has perhaps begun.
It was not the Willey house, however, modest in size and very quiet in
expression for all its revolutionary plan, that signalized the renewal
of Wright’s activity. That he could take up his career again at the
highest level of creativity became apparent to everyone with the
construction of two much larger buildings both designed in 1936. Falling
Water, a large house in the Pennsylvania woods, is cantilevered over a
waterfall with a sense of drama even Wright had never hitherto
approached. The Administration Building for the S. C. Johnson Wax
Company at 1525 Howe Street in Racine, Wis., his first semi-industrial
commission since the Larkin Building of 1904, was built in 1937-9. Both
are as remarkable for the technical boldness of their use of
concrete—totally different in the two cases—as for their design.
[Illustration:
Figure 41. Frank Lloyd Wright: Minneapolis, M. C. Willey house, 1934,
plan
]
Falling Water has a rear section built of rough stone which rises like a
tower from the native rock on the banks of Bear Run. From this solid
vertical core are cantilevered out a series of concrete slabs bounded by
plain parapets at their edges. This produces a very complex horizontal
composition related to, but infinitely elaborated from, that of the Gale
house of 1909 (Plate 145A). The completely unified living space is
closed in by stone walls on the inner or dining side. It also extends
out over the waterfall; the all-glass walls on that side, with their
thin metal mullions, hardly seem to separate the interior space at all
from that of the open terraces outside. A similar relationship exists
between the bedrooms and their terraces on the upper floors.
Never before had Wright exploited the structural possibilities of
concrete so boldly. In this amazingly plastic composition—if ‘plastic’
be the word for anything so light and suspended in appearance—it seems
as if he had determined to outbid the European architects of the second
modern generation at their own games (see Chapter 22). His early work
has, in the clarity and axial character of the organization and the
serenity of its expression, a classic if hardly a Classical quality; his
work of 1914-24 shows a Baroque exuberance in the proliferation of the
ornament. Now that he was approaching seventy his Romantic or
anti-Classical tendencies—call them what you will—reached an intensity
of purely architectonic expression comparable to the musical intensity
of the late quartets of Beethoven that Wright so much admired. Falling
Water, which might easily have been the swan song of Wright’s career,
soon to be halted again by a second World War, proved in fact but the
opening _allegro_ in a new period of innovation and experiment.
The Johnson Building is very different from Falling Water. In it the
curve rather than the cantilever provides the principal theme, and
enclosure rather than interpenetration of exterior and interior space
controls both the planning and the design (Plate 146A). The main office
area is tall and unified, but it is filled with a forest of
inverse-tapered concrete piers rising from tiny bronze shoes to carry
circular slabs of concrete whose edges all but touch. The spaces between
these lilypad-like disks were filled with tubes of Pyrex glass, and
bands of similar tubes are carried around the building below the balcony
and at the top of the plain red brick walls to provide additional
natural light. In the more specialized adjuncts to the general office
area curved and diagonal plan-elements lend a machine-like elegance to
the shape of the building as a whole. Additional bands of glass tubing
interrupt the smooth and continuous masonry surfaces at intervals, thus
clearly indicating that these portions are of several storeys.
Falling Water and the Johnson Building were large and expensive
structures; so also was Wingspread, the H. F. Johnson house that Wright
built in Racine at the same time. This is zoned in the manner of the
Booth project of 1911 around a tall central core. But in 1937 Wright
also erected the first of what he called his ‘Usonian’ houses, the
Herbert Jacobs house at Westmorland, near Madison, Wis. This modest
L-shaped dwelling, with wooden ‘sandwich’ walls and a flat wooden slab
roof, carried farther than the Willey house the integration of the
‘work-space’ or kitchen with the main living area. Here this rises in a
masonry tower and is lighted by a clerestory, yet it is closely related
to the space of the interior as a whole. A very considerable range of
Wright’s later houses are variants of the Usonian model. Some were built
before the War, even more in the last decade; some are of modest
dimensions like the Jacobs house, others much larger. They exist in all
parts of the United States, including the East, where he had hardly
worked at all before this time.
The earlier Usonian houses were designed on a square module. This is
true, for example, of the version that he prepared for _Life_ magazine
in 1938,[410] which thereby received the same sort of national
circulation that the _Ladies Home Journal_ gave to three of his projects
more than a generation earlier.[411] But Wright was now interested also
in developing the hexagon and the triangle as basic units. Beginning
with the Hanna house of 1937 at 737 Coronado Street in Palo Alto, Cal.,
he continued in many others to explore the possibilities of planning
based on 60-30-degree angles.
In the most extraordinary house that he built in these pre-war years,
his own winter residence, Taliesin West, begun in 1938 in the desert
outside Phoenix, Ariz., 45-degree diagonals are used in the planning and
almost all the structural elements are battered or canted. However, it
is the materials which give this edifice—like Taliesin itself at once a
house, a working place, and a school—its unique qualities. The
substructure is of ‘desert concrete’, that is great rough blocks of
tawny local stone placed in forms and loosely stuck together, so to say,
with concrete; the superstructure is of dark-stained timber frames
mostly filled only with canvas to allow a maximum flow of air. As at the
original Taliesin in Wisconsin, Wright kept on enlarging Taliesin West,
not always to its advantage. Another example of ‘desert-concrete’
construction, the Rose Pauson house of 1940 in Phoenix, was destroyed by
fire. It was, in its very sculptural way, a masterpiece of this period
unlike anything else he ever built and is still an impressive ruin.
It was characteristic of Wright’s activity in his ‘second’ career that
the versatility of his invention knew no bounds. Many earlier ideas that
had existed only in projects could come to fruition now that his
services were in such demand. At the same time it is hard to believe
that in the plain white stucco walls, extensive window bands, and thin
roof slab of the E. J. Kaufmann guest house, built just above Falling
Water in 1939, or in the G. D. Sturges house of the same year at 449
Skyway Road in Brentwood Heights near Los Angeles, cantilevered out from
a hill-slope, Wright was not consciously rivalling the effects of the
European architects of the second generation whom he professed to
scorn—rivalling them, but also making very much his own such of their
effects as he cared to emulate.
Wright did not drop the novel methods of construction that he had
developed earlier as he tried out new ones. In his most extensive late
commission, the layout of a new campus for Florida Southern College at
Lakeland in Florida, begun in 1938, the plan is highly formal at the
same time that it is markedly asymmetrical. It thus elaborates upon the
angular themes of his project of 1927 for a desert resort at Chandler,
Arizona—incidentally the point at which his interest in 60-30-degree
angles began. The buildings at Florida Southern, starting with the Ann
Pfeiffer Chapel of 1940 to which many more were later added, are mostly
of concrete-block construction, but with much less use of patterned
elements than in the executed work and projects of the twenties.
The Second World War interrupted Wright’s career less than the First.
Various projects initiated in the war years came to fruition soon after
the war was over and gave evidence of the continuing vitality of his
powers of invention. The second house for Herbert Jacobs at Middleton in
the country west of Madison, Wis., was very different from the Usonian
one of 1937. Ever since an unexecuted house project of 1938 Wright had
been fascinated by the possibilities of using the circle in planning.
While he had tried out the form in the Florida Southern Library before
the war, the Jacobs house of 1948 was the first of a series of houses
that he built with curved plans. Its two-storey living area bends around
a circular sunken garden court with the bedrooms opening off a balcony
above (Figure 42). On the other side the house is half buried in the
hill-top, above which rise its walls of coursed rubble. A tower-like
circular core near one end of the convex side provides a strong vertical
accent.
Another house of the post-war years, also based on the circle, is quite
different in character. The Sol Friedman house in Pleasantville, N.Y.,
is roofed with mushroom-like concrete slabs; the two intersecting closed
circles of the actual dwelling are balanced at the end of a straight
terrace parapet by the open circle of the carport (Plate 145B). This was
completed in 1949 with battered walls of almost Richardsonian random
ashlar masonry below a strip of metal-framed windows. A still later
‘house of circles’ for his son David J. Wright was built near Phoenix,
Ariz., in 1952. This is of concrete blocks and raised off the ground,
with the approach up a gently sloping helical ramp to the various curved
rooms on the first storey. The circle and the helix appear also in an
urban building of these years, the shop for V. C. Morris in Maiden Lane,
San Francisco, completed in 1949. Here the street façade is a sheer
plane of yellow brick broken only by the entrance, which is a
Sullivanian—or Richardsonian—arch like that of the Heurtley house of
1902. Inside, a helical ramp rises around the central circular area
beneath a ceiling made of bubble-like elements executed in plastics.
[Illustration:
Figure 42. Frank Lloyd Wright: Middleton, Wis., Herbert Jacobs house,
1948, plan
]
A major work of these years, the extension of the Johnson Administration
Building in Racine, Wis., also completed in 1949, makes much use of
circles also (Plate 146A). North of the existing office building Wright
surrounded a square court with open carports whose outer walls of solid
brickwork shut out the surrounding city; inside these walls are ranged
short concrete columns with lily-pad tops like those in the section that
he built ten years earlier. In the centre of the ‘piazza’ thus defined
rises a laboratory tower of tree-like structure. The upper floors of
this, alternately square with rounded corners and circular, are all
cantilevered out from a central cylindrical core which contains the lift
and the vertical canalizations. Alternate bands of brickwork and Pyrex
tubing, such as were used on the original building, enclose the tower
except at ground level; there the space of the court continues under the
cantilevered floors above as far as the solid central core.
This relatively modest tower prepared the way for Wright’s skyscraper in
Bartlesville, Okla., of 1953-5, which has been mentioned earlier.
Actually, however, this Price Tower,[412] which is partly occupied by
offices and partly by flats, is the final realization of a project
originally prepared in 1929 for a block of flats for St Mark’s Church in
New York. This he had elaborated in the intervening years in projects
for blocks of flats in Chicago and for a hotel in Washington.
While Wright was continuing to employ in his houses of the late forties
and early fifties a variety of modes of design that go back to the
thirties, and also developing at Florida Southern and in Bartlesville
ideas dating from his inactive period in the late twenties, he continued
to strike out in other directions too. The Neils house at 2801 Burnham
Boulevard on Cedar Lake in Minneapolis, Minn., completed in 1951, is all
of coloured marble rubble provided by the client; the Walker house at
Carmel, Cal., completed in 1952, is a glazed polygonal pavilion
overhanging the sea. Where the Prairie Houses of the first decade of
Wright’s mature career may all seem in retrospect to have come out of
the same, or nearly identical, moulds, the many houses designed in his
seventies and eighties are notable for the great variety of their
siting, their materials, and the geometrical themes of their planning.
Nor was the domestic field anything like the sole area of his activity.
In addition to the college buildings, the shop, the skyscraper, and the
laboratory that have been mentioned, Wright built during the years
1947-52 a Unitarian church in Madison, Wis., of very original character.
The products of his multifarious activity in these years include,
moreover, many projects for all sorts of structures, some of which have
been completed—notably the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York
(Plate 188). A decade and more of designing and redesigning preceded the
initiation of this remarkable helical concrete building in 1956. Of
three other late projects, those for an opera-house in Baghdad and for
an Arizona state capitol in Phoenix, dating from 1957, are unlikely to
be built; but the county buildings for Marin County, Cal., are now well
advanced.
In spite of so much late activity, greater than that of his early
maturity, in spite (or perhaps, in part, because) of its kaleidoscopic
variety, Wright’s actual influence was less significant than forty years
before; at least it was of a very different order. He still outpaced his
juniors both of the next generation and the one after; but few if any
were able to follow with any success along the intensely personal paths
he opened.[413] Like Perret to the end of his life, Wright continued at
ninety to offer an inspiration to all architects, but there has risen no
school of imitators to vulgarize his manner as there was long a school
of imitators of Perret in France.
In creative power, in productivity, and, over the forty years and more
since 1910, in influence, Wright overshadowed all the other American
architects of his generation. Inspired by Wright as well as by Sullivan,
there flourished for a while a sort of ‘Second Chicago School’ to which
Purcell & Elmslie; George W. Maher (1864-1926); Schmidt, Garden &
Martin, and several other architects who were active in the Middle West
before the First World War may be considered to belong.[414] But this
school flickered out in the twenties as most of its members succumbed to
the dominant ‘traditionalism’ of the day or else ceased to find
clients.[415] Four rather more vital and original architects appeared
shortly after 1900 in California: the brothers Greene (Charles S.,
1868-1957, and Henry M., 1867-1954), Irving Gill (1870-1936), and
Bernard R. Maybeck (1862-1957).[416] But the productive careers of the
Greenes, of Gill, and, to a lesser extent, that of Maybeck came pretty
much to a close, like those of the Chicagoans, around 1915 with the
resounding success of the ‘traditional’ buildings designed by Bertram G.
Goodhue (1869-1924) for the San Diego Exhibition of that year.[417]
These were in the most ornate sort of Spanish Baroque, quite
archaeologically handled; and the emulation of them, which at once
became endemic in California, turned most local architects away from
innovation for almost twenty years.
Maybeck, who had been a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in the
eighties, contributed to the San Francisco Exhibition[418] of the same
year the still extant Fine Arts Building in an equally ‘traditional’ but
more Classical vein. Partly ruined today, his tawny stucco columns and
entablatures have the air of a painting by Pannini or Hubert Robert. For
all its charm, this was a surprising work to come from a man who had
earlier shown himself, in the Christian Science Church of 1910 in
Berkeley, Cal., almost as bold an innovator as Wright even though he
employed for that a fantastically eclectic vocabulary of reminiscent
forms (Plate 146B). Many Berkeley houses, moreover, ranging over several
decades in date, also prove Maybeck to have been an architect of great
originality and surprising versatility.
In Berkeley also are several houses by John Galen Howard (1864-1931) as
well as his building for the University of California’s School of
Architecture, of which he was for long the Dean. His building at the
University (which has in addition a Faculty Club and one or two other
things by Maybeck), the Gregory house of about 1904, and the architect’s
own house of 1912 are also notable examples of free design dating from
the first decades of the century. Howard’s informal work is more
directly related than are Wright’s houses to the Shingle Style of the
preceding period, though not specifically to that of Richardson, for
whom, however, Howard had actually worked in the mid eighties before he
came to California. Most of his work at the University, in fact, is in
an Italianate vein, and the campus is dominated by his tall,
campanile-like clock tower.
The production of the Greene brothers in this period, entirely domestic
and largely in Pasadena, offers a more coherent corpus than that of any
modern American architect of their generation except Wright. Related,
like the work of Howard, to the Shingle Style, which had been brought to
Pasadena and Los Angeles by Eastern architects in the eighties and
nineties, the Greenes’ houses are most interesting for their successful
assimilation of oriental influences. The best example is the Gamble
house at 4 Westmorland Street in Pasadena of 1908-9 (Plate 147A). But
the Pitcairn house of 1906 and the Blacker house of 1907, at 289 West
State Street and at 1157 Hillcrest respectively, as well as the later
Thorsen house of 1909, at 2307 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley, now a
fraternity house, are also excellent.
Shingled walls, low-pitched and wide-spreading gables, and extensive
porte-cochères and verandas of stick-work surpassing in virtuosity those
of the Stick Style, were combined by the Greenes in rather loosely
organized compositions. Less formal and regular than Wright’s Prairie
Houses, theirs are executed throughout with a craftsmanship in wood
rivalling that of the Japanese, whom they, like Wright, so much admired.
The Greenes’ plans are less open than Wright’s, but they made more use
of verandas and balconies than he. Superb woodwork and fine stained
glass combine with the specially designed furniture in the interiors to
produce ensembles of a sturdy elegance hardly matched by any of
Wright’s. Those in the Blacker and Thorsen houses, whose clients were
both in the lumber business, are especially rich.
Moreover, a ‘California Bungalow’ mode[419]—at worst but a parody at
small scale of the Greenes’ expensive mansions, at best sharing many of
their virtues of directness and simplicity if not of imaginative
craftsmanship—became widely popular thanks to national magazines,
pattern-books, and the activities of many builders. This was true not
alone in the West but throughout the country in the very years after
1910 when ‘traditionalism’, usually in Neo-Colonial guise, closed in
most completely on American domestic architecture.
The reputation of the Greenes today is less than that of the more
articulate but less consistent Maybeck. But when modern architecture
revived in California in the thirties the new men were fully aware of
what the Greenes had accomplished. Thus their work provided, together
with that of Maybeck and Howard, a background and a tradition for the
local development of a largely autochthonous domestic architecture in
the San Francisco Bay area. This was a truly living tradition[420] quite
unlike the abortive revival of the architecture of the Spanish Missions,
which it has now almost completely displaced. But the Mission influence
was not altogether a negative one in early twentieth-century California,
as the work of Irving Gill illustrates.
Gill was less prolific than the Greene brothers, and most of what he
built is less striking. Like Voysey, he was in principle a reformer not
a revolutionary, finding his inspiration consciously in the local
structural tradition of the early Spanish Missions and _haciendas_. As a
result some of his buildings, such as the First Church of Christ
Scientist of 1904-7 in San Diego or in Los Angeles the Laughlan house of
1907 and the Banning house of 1911, at 666 West 28th Street and 503
South Commonwealth Avenue respectively, with their elliptically arched
loggias and their grilles of ornamental ironwork, are almost as ‘Spanish
Colonial’ as the work of the outright traditionalists around him.
Gill’s most interesting and mature houses, thanks to their smooth stucco
walls, large window areas, and avoidance of stylistic detail, can also
have a deceptive air of being European rather than American and of a
period some years later than that in which they were actually built. In
his best work, such as the Dodge house (Plate 147B) of 1915-16 at 950
North Kings Road in Los Angeles or the Scripps house at La Jolla of
1917, now the Art Centre, the asymmetrically organized blocks, crisply
cut by large windows of various sizes carefully sashed and disposed,
with roof terraces or flat roofs above, more than rival the contemporary
houses of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos (Plate 155A) in the abstract
distinction of the composition. They even approach rather closely the
most advanced European houses of the next decade (see Chapters 21 and
22).
Gill’s interiors are especially fine and also quite like Loos’s. Very
different from the rich orientalizing rooms designed by the Greenes,
they are in fact more similar to real Japanese interiors in their severe
elegance. The walls of fine smooth cabinet woods, with no mouldings at
all, are warm in colour, and Voysey-like wooden grilles of plain square
spindles give human scale. The whole effect, in its clarity of form and
simplicity of means, is certainly more premonitory of the next stage of
modern architecture than any other American work of its period.
Gill continued to practise intermittently down into the thirties, but
his finest work was done in the second decade of the century. He had
little influence locally and still less nationally, yet his best houses
extend very notably the range of achievement of the first generation of
modern architects in America, even though his later production declined
sadly in quantity and even in quality. Wright alone was able to renew
his career successfully after the reaction against modern architecture
that dominated America from coast to coast during the twenty years from
the First World War to the mid thirties finally came to an end.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 20
PETER BEHRENS AND OTHER GERMAN ARCHITECTS
THE pattern of architectural development in Germany in the early decades
of this century was rather different from that in either France or the
United States. No academy, native or foreign, no influences from the
École des Beaux-Arts discouraged innovation; yet there was an early and
general reaction against the whimsicality and the decorative excesses of
the Art Nouveau at which most of the younger men had tried their hands
before 1900. After the First World War, however, the example of
Expressionism in painting and sculpture led many architects to excesses
of another sort. Expressionism in architecture,[421] or something very
close to it, is not restricted to Germany. The most extreme example of
any consequence, and probably the earliest, is Dutch, the
Scheepvaarthuis in Amsterdam of 1912-13 by van der Meij (see Chapter
21). In Germany around 1920 various architects who had earlier been
predominantly ‘traditional’ in their approach were influenced by
Expressionism, as well as others who were already programmatically
modern; nor was that influence restricted to the modern architects of
the first generation (see Chapter 22).
The boundary line between what, in retrospect, still seems definitely
modern and what now seems very similar to the ‘traditional’ work of
these decades in other countries is much less sharp than in America. And
no German architect of their own generation had the continuously
creative achievement of a Perret or a Wright to his credit. Nevertheless
Peter Behrens stands out among his contemporaries because of the
vigorous boldness of his industrial buildings. Moreover, the influence
of his factories of around 1910 was crucial on the next generation, and
several of the later leaders actually worked in his office at that
relevant period. Yet all but Behrens’s finest work can be matched in the
production of other German architects; while his own vitality as an
innovator was rather strictly limited to a few years and to what he did
for one corporate client. That client was the A.E.G. (German General
Electric Company), which had already employed Messel down to his death
in 1909.
Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann (1851-1932) dominated the architectural scene
in Berlin, where the latter was appointed City Architect in 1896 on the
strength of his vast academic Imperial Law Courts of 1886-95 in Leipzig.
In the early years of the century they both developed a formal mode that
was more ‘traditional’ than modern. Despite Messel’s and Hoffmann’s
usual preference for conventional sixteenth- or eighteenth-century
models, Behrens was certainly not uninfluenced by their mode of design,
even though his more positive sources of inspiration were of a less
conservative order. Yet, in so far as one can sort out the different
architectural camps in Germany in these years, Behrens must be
considered well to the artistic ‘left’ of Messel and Hoffmann.
Germany was certainly very receptive to new ideas in decoration when
Behrens’s architectural career began at the turn of the
century—receptive rather than creative. There were other Germans who
handled the Art Nouveau with considerable originality besides August
Endell, notably Bernard Pankok (b. 1872) and Richard Riemerschmid
(1868-1957); but two foreigners, neither of them very prolific builders,
seem to have been the most influential figures on the German
architectural scene at the opening of the new century. The Belgian Van
de Velde had moved from Paris to Berlin in 1899; the Austrian Olbrich
was called to Darmstadt by the Grand Duke in the same year. Olbrich
stayed at Darmstadt until his early death in 1908; Van de Velde,
however, left Berlin in 1902 when he was invited to Weimar to head the
School of Arts and Crafts there which later became the Bauhaus. Van de
Velde’s finest Art Nouveau furniture dates from his Berlin years around
1900. As late as 1906,[422] the Central Hall which he designed in the
Dresden Exhibition showed him still a competent if rather heavy-handed
decorator in the Art Nouveau tradition.
Van de Velde’s remodelling of the Folkwang Museum at Hagen of 1900-2,
quite Art Nouveau in its details, his Esche house at Chemnitz of 1903,
and his Leuring house at Scheveningen in Holland of the next year, both
very massive and heavily mansarded though unornamented externally like
his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle, hardly require particular mention.
However, for the school that he headed in Weimar he completed in 1906 a
building even more devoid of Art Nouveau elements and notably
straightforward in character. The plain white stucco walls below his
usual heavy mansards were very frankly fenestrated with ranges of wide
studio windows, perhaps in emulation of Mackintosh’s Glasgow Art School.
Indeed, the general effect is even simpler and more rectilinear than
that of its possible Scottish prototype. The problem of his
responsibility or lack of responsibility for the design of the Théâtre
des Champs Élysées in Paris of 1911-13 has already been discussed (see
Chapter 17).
Van de Velde continued to build occasionally throughout all his long
life—some portions of his Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo in Holland
were only completed in 1953—but his last pre-war work was the theatre
that he designed and executed in 1913-14 for the Werkbund Exhibition at
Cologne. Some trace of the massively plastic quality of his Dresden hall
of 1906—so different from the delicacy and grace of the Art Nouveau in
its best period—remained in the curved walls and roof of this edifice,
but the whole effect was lighter and plainer, more abstract one might
almost say.
The resemblance of Olbrich’s Ernst Ludwig Haus of 1901 at the Darmstadt
Artists’ Colony to Mackintosh’s Art School has already been noted (see
Chapter 17). At Darmstadt he also continued to build houses for some
years, and his work there culminated in the Exhibition Gallery and the
Wedding Tower on the Matildenhöhe, erected in 1907. The former was
blocky and somewhat classicizing in character, at once very plain and
very formal. The latter, of brick, had a more Hanseatic flavour because
of its arched and panelled gable; but it also included a novel motif,
bands of windows that seem to carry round a corner, that was destined to
be very influential everywhere in the twenties.
In the next and last year of Olbrich’s life—he died, it will be
recalled, at the early age of forty-one—two important commissions came
to him away from Darmstadt. The Feinhals house at Marienburg near
Cologne repeats the blocky symmetrical composition of the Exhibition
Building, the walls being articulated only with flat oblong panels. The
loggia between, however, has a range of Greek Doric columns, clear
evidence of the influence of Romantic Classicism that was growing
stronger in Germany all through this decade. But Olbrich had little real
appreciation of the subtle elegance of the work of Schinkel and his
contemporaries, or so it would appear from this house.
The buildings of the East Cemetery in Munich, designed by Hans Grässel
(1860-?) in 1894 and completed in 1900, are perhaps the first examples
of this sort of ‘Neo-Neo-Classicism’. Yet beside the contemporary
Neo-Baroque of the Munich Palace of Justice built in 1897 by Grässel’s
master, Friedrich von Thiersch (1852-1921), nearly as over-scaled and
aggressive as Wallot’s Reichstag in Berlin, the rather Schinkelesque
work at the cemetery appears, in its crispness and its relative
simplicity, almost as ‘modern’ as anything by Olbrich. As has been noted
earlier, Schinkel remained a major inspiration to such a leader of the
second generation of modern architects as Mies van der Rohe, so this
influence has a continuing significance.
A much larger building by Olbrich than the house at Marienburg, also
completed in the year of his death, the Tietz (now Kaufhof) Department
Store in Düsseldorf, repeats the reiterative verticalism of those
portions of Messel’s Wertheim store in Berlin that were built in 1900-4,
though Olbrich’s detailing is not medievalizing like Messel’s but rather
semi-Classical. Neither of these later things maintains the promise of
his Ernst Ludwig Haus; they rather illustrate that general recession
from bold innovation which characterized the architecture of this decade
in Germany, a recession corresponding more or less closely to the
general resurgence of ‘traditionalism’ in England and America that came
a few years later (see Chapter 24).
Peter Behrens (1868-1940), only a year younger than Olbrich, began his
career as an architect at Darmstadt. From 1896 on, before being called
there, he had only done decorative work of a markedly Art Nouveau sort.
In his own house in the Artists’ Colony of 1900-1—the only one not built
by Olbrich—the interiors are still quite Art Nouveau, but the clumsy
exterior has little interest except as a document of revolt. Yet the
plan is quite like that of Wright’s own house of 1889 in Oak Park,
allowing a real flow of space through wide openings between entrance
hall, living-room, and dining-room. By 1902 the ‘Hessian’ interior that
he contributed to the Turin Exhibition was wholly rectilinear,
presumably under the influence of Olbrich and Mackintosh. A similar
severity characterized the work that he did, much of it merely open
pergolas, for the Düsseldorf Garden and Art Exhibition of 1904.
By this time Behrens’s personal style was maturing, although his debt to
Olbrich remained very evident. The Art Pavilion for the North-West
German Art Exhibition held in Oldenburg in 1904 was a symmetrical
composition of cubical masses, the flatness of their surfaces even more
emphasized by linear panelling than in Olbrich’s work. The Obenauer
house of 1905-6 at Sankt Johann near Saarbrücken is rather more loosely
composed; indeed, its white stucco walls, slated roofs, and grouped
windows distinctly recall Voysey’s houses, which were by this time very
well known in Germany thanks to the _Studio_ and Muthesius’s book. The
garden front, however, is symmetrical and the plan not as open as that
of his own house of four years earlier.
In Behrens’s next two buildings, the small Concert Hall in the Flora
Garden at Cologne of 1906 and the large Crematorium at Delstern near
Hagen completed the following year, the geometrical panelling in black
and white, used both inside and out, recalls a little San Miniato in
Florence. But the blocky geometry of the Oldenburg pavilion and its
smooth flat surfaces were also repeated, so that both these buildings
have a curiously model-like look as if they were made of sheets of
cardboard.
Behrens’s two finest works up to this time, the Schröder house of
1908-9—no longer extant—and the Cuno house of 1909-10 in the
Hassleyerstrasse at Eppenhausen near Hagen, have a much more solid
appearance, with quarry-faced masonry below and roughcast walls above
(Plate 148B). The symmetrical façades, which correspond to completely
symmetrical plans, are at once more tightly and more subtly composed.
Here English influence seems to have been superseded by an attempt,
rather more successful than Olbrich’s at Marienburg, to emulate
Schinkel. A third early house by Behrens, the Goedecke house at
Oppenhausen of 1911-12, is equally formal but not symmetrical, recalling
thus a little Schinkel’s Schloss Glienecke near Potsdam.
Somewhat similar to Behrens’s work of this period in its evident
derivation from German Romantic Classicism, but more delicate in scale,
was the work of Heinrich Tessenow (1876-1950), notably his Festival
Theatre of 1910-13 and the other buildings he designed and erected for
the Art Colony at Hellerau near Dresden. But such German work, of which
a great deal was produced in the decade before the First World War,
corresponds rather closely, despite the frequent stylization of detail
and the serious concern with geometrical clarity in composition, to the
Neo-Georgian of England and America in the early twentieth century, and
also to much parallel work in the Scandinavian countries that is usually
of rather higher quality (see Chapter 24).
Moreover, those Frenchmen who castigated the Théâtre des Champs Élysées
as ‘Boche’ during the First World War because of the presumption that it
was designed by Van de Velde, born a Belgian but head of a German art
school, were not altogether wrong. In its scraped Classicism and rigidly
geometrical _ordonnance_ Perret’s façade was not at all remote from one
of the most characteristic German modes of the years just before 1914.
Perret’s industrial work was, of course, much more significant for the
future.
So also with Behrens it was the challenge that his position as architect
of the A.E.G. brought of working in the industrial field that made him
briefly a rival of Wright, and even more particularly of Perret, as a
major architectural innovator. Behrens’s first work for the A.E.G., the
Turbine Factory at the corner of the Hussitenstrasse and the
Berlichingenstrasse in Moabit, an industrial suburb of Berlin, was
erected in 1909 immediately upon his appointment as successor to Messel.
This broke new ground in several ways. It was built partly of poured
concrete, partly of exposed steel, with both materials very directly
expressed (Plate 149A). The side wall of glass and steel more than
rivals in its openness those of the department stores designed by Art
Nouveau architects (Plates 131B and 133). But Behrens’s façade, in
contradistinction to theirs, has no applied ornament whatsoever.
Moreover, he ordered the whole composition as carefully as Schinkel
might have done if either large factories or metal-and-glass
construction had come within his purview.
The end façade of the Turbine Factory is slightly less frank in design.
The concrete corners on either side of the central window-wall of metal
and glass are battered and striated horizontally as if to suggest
rusticated masonry. The gable of the multi-faceted roof is brought
forward to shelter the window-wall; this projects slightly in front of
the concrete corners, almost like a Shavian bay-window raised to
industrial scale. The treatment of the window-bands of the lower
concrete block to the left resembles that of Schinkel’s articulated
walls on the Berlin Schauspielhaus, but with all the Greek mouldings
omitted. Thus the functional elements of a factory executed throughout
in new materials were here for the first time in Germany
architectonically ordered with no dependence on decoration of any sort.
Wright had done much the same four years earlier in his little-known
E.-Z. Polish Factory in Chicago, but the scale of that is modest and its
walls are not extensively fenestrated. Perret had come closer to it in
his Garage Ponthieu in Paris, also built in 1905. There can be little
question, however, that Behrens’s is the finest building of the three.
In two more factories built in 1910 for the A.E.G., both much larger but
neither of them quite so striking, Behrens broadened his range as an
industrial architect. The High Tension Factory in the Humboldthain is of
brick, not concrete or steel. Except for a few minor elements somewhat
suggesting pedimented temple-fronts translated into an industrial
vocabulary, he handled the vast façades here with the same directness as
the side elevation of metal and glass at the Turbine Factory. The Small
Motors Factory in the Voltastrasse is similar but much finer (Plate
148A). There the brick piers have rounded corners and rise unbroken
almost the full height of the building. The effect is somewhat like that
portion of Messel’s Wertheim Store which was built in the late nineties,
but the scale is larger, and there is none of Messel’s rich,
half-traditional, half-Art-Nouveau detailing. Instead, the careful
proportioning and the suave but extremely straightforward treatment of
the structural elements again suggests Schinkel’s sort of ‘rationalism’
yet succeeds in doing so, as at the earlier Turbine Factory, with almost
no reminiscence of actual Romantic Classical forms.
Thanks to the widening range of responsibility that German industry was
now ready to give architects, Behrens not only built these big factories
for the A.E.G. and also redecorated their retail shops all over Berlin,
but he was soon asked in addition to provide some blocks of flats for
the company’s workmen at Hennigsdorf outside Berlin. This was a social
challenge which neither Wright nor Perret had to meet. (In fact,
however, Wright did in 1904 design terrace-houses that were never
executed for Larkin Company workers in Buffalo; while in France low-cost
housing had a very important place in Garnier’s projects for a ‘Cité
Industrielle’.) Henceforth, such housing would be a major preoccupation
of most modern architects. This is true not only in Germany but all over
the western world, and especially in Holland and Scandinavia. The
origins of low-cost housing go back to the 1840s in England when Henry
Roberts, whose Fishmongers’ Hall in London has been mentioned, became
the first architect to specialize in this field. But the early history
of housing[423] is of more sociological than architectural interest.
Moreover, what the nineteenth century esteemed to be ‘model’ low-cost
dwellings have too often had to be demolished as ‘sub-standard’ in the
twentieth. Even the interest and activities of present-day architects
may not spare the twentieth century the shame of building again as a
public service what posterity will consider slums.
Various small A.E.G. factories for making porcelain, lacquer, and other
specialized products were also erected by Behrens in 1910 and 1911, none
of particular interest. In 1911-12, however, there followed the Large
Machine Assembly Hall at the corner of the Voltastrasse and the
Hussitenstrasse near the Small Motors Factory. This rivals in quality
the Turbine Factory of 1909. Once more a great rectangular volume is
covered with a multi-faceted steel-framed roof, the structure below
being in this instance also of steel with no use of concrete. The metal
frame is largely filled with glass, but brick was introduced at the base
and on the ends. The scale of this unit is less monumental than that of
the Turbine Factory, though the size is much greater. The general
effect, particularly that of the interior with its travelling cranes, is
at once light and dramatic. A big A.E.G. plant was also built by Behrens
at Riga in Russia in 1913.
Three large non-industrial commissions of 1911-12 show how this work for
the A.E.G. affected Behrens’s approach to design. Although it is built
of stone not brick, the German Embassy (Plate 27A) opposite Monferran’s
St Isaac’s Cathedral in Petersburg is, at first sight, deceptively like
the Small Motors Factory. Actually, the façade has a range of engaged
Doric columns, but by their tall slim proportions and their lack of
entasis these were, so to say, ‘industrially’ stylized. The great scale,
the absolute regularity, and a certain coldness surely derived in part
from the factories of the previous two years; but these also recall
Romantic Classical monuments of Alexander I’s time in Petersburg.
Behrens’s enormous office building for the Mannesmann Steel Works on the
Rhine at Düsseldorf was less successful, as was also that for the
Continental Rubber Company in Hanover. The latter was designed in 1911
and begun in 1913, but not completed until after the First World War, in
1920; it was destroyed in the Second World War. The heavily reiterative
sort of scraped Classicism Behrens used for these overpowering masonry
blocks lacked the subtlety of composition of the Hagen houses yet
retained something of the directness of expression of the A.E.G.
factories. They were not untypical, however, of much large-scale German
building of the second and third decades of the century. This mode
developed fairly directly out of the Berlin work of Messel and Ludwig
Hoffmann, although it was usually much less specifically ‘traditional’
in its detailing and even more aggressive in scale; a not dissimilar
mode returned to official favour under Hitler in the mid thirties,
usually with very coarse detailing.
With these big office buildings by Behrens and others one may compare
the work of this period by various other German architects who preferred
less classicizing modes. Early buildings by Fritz Schumacher
(1869-1947), such as his crematorium in Dresden of 1908, also illustrate
the megalomaniac tendencies of the period that seem so expressive of the
expansive ambitions of William II’s Second Reich. The many schools that
Schumacher built in Hamburg just before the First World War are simpler,
although still rather heavily scaled, and more comparable in quality to
Behrens’s work. One in particular, built in 1914 in the
Ahrensburgerstrasse, almost echoes the elongated colonnade of Behrens’s
Petersburg Embassy, but the ‘columns’ are plain piers executed in dark
red brick[424] and strung along a front that is concave not flat. The
bath-house at Eppenhausen, also of 1914, is very like the schools; while
in the Kunstgewerbe Haus of the previous year on the Holstenwall in
Hamburg a similar mode was employed for what is, in effect, a large
office building. This seems to have initiated a local tradition of
design for commercial buildings which was maintained in the twenties
with little change, not only by Schumacher but by several other Hamburg
architects. Schumacher’s cemetery chapel, built as late as 1923, follows
much the same line.
In Stuttgart the railway station by Paul Bonatz (1877-1951) and F. E.
Scholer (b. 1874) is the finest though not the largest of several built
in Germany in these years. Designed in 1911, it was started only in
1914, just as the enormous and much less interesting one at Leipzig with
its six parallel sheds, begun by Wilhelm Lossow (1852-1914) and M. H.
Kühne in 1907, was reaching completion. That at Stuttgart was not
finished until 1927 because of the interruption caused by the First
World War. This structure has a rather Richardsonian flavour in its
extensive unbroken wall surfaces of rock-faced ashlar and its plain
round arches (Plate 152). But the influence here came rather from the
Munich architect Theodor Fischer (1862-1938). Fischer’s Romanesquoid
churches, such as that of the Redeemer in Munich of 1899-1901 and the
Garrison Church of 1908-11 in Ulm, were among the largest and most
strikingly novel built in the opening years of the century in Germany;
in the latter he even used ferro-concrete principals to carry the roof
of the nave. Fischer’s Art Gallery of 1911 in Stuttgart was both more
delicate in scale and rather more archaeological in its detailing;
Bonatz’s Stuttgart work is bolder, simpler, and quite as admirably
expressive of the traditional materials used.
With the Stuttgart Station may be contrasted the rather earlier one at
Hamburg that Heinrich Reinhardt (1868-?) and Georg Süssenguth (1862-?)
built in 1903-6. There the major sections—shed, concourse, etc.—designed
by the engineer Medling resemble rather closely Contamin and Dutert’s
Galerie des Machines at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. These great
constructions of iron and glass fortunately quite overshadow the low
ranges of accessory elements in masonry, with ornament still in the
Meistersinger mode of the eighties, contributed by the architects. The
differences between these two notable stations well illustrate that
reaction towards masonry construction and a more or less traditional
approach to design that was developing strength in the decade preceding
the First World War. In the history of the railroad station as a type
the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof represents, not a new beginning, but the end of
a line descending from the great shed-dominated stations of the mid
nineteenth century.
Intermediate in date between the Hamburg and Stuttgart stations was that
at Karlsruhe built by August Stürzenacker in 1908-13. Although masonry
construction and masonry forms dominate here as at Stuttgart, the
simplification of mass and space composition throughout, and above all
the elegant detailing, give evidence of the continuing leadership of
Olbrich at the time of his death. Olbrich never built a station himself,
but he won third place in the 1903 competition for that at Basel and
second place in the 1907 competition for Darmstadt.
In other specialized fields of building a forward line of development is
more evident. Two big circular halls, one in Frankfort built by Thiersch
in 1907-8, the other in Breslau built by Max Berg (b. 1870) in 1910-12
(Plate 149B), are more notable than the contemporary railway stations at
Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. Like Behrens’s industrial work for the A.E.G.,
these structures illustrate the vital stimulus that German architects
were obtaining in these generally somewhat reactionary years from the
use of engineering solutions and materials other than masonry—steel at
Frankfort, ferro-concrete at Breslau—to cover and enclose space. In the
case of Thiersch this is the more remarkable when one remembers the
ponderous traditionalism of his Neo-Baroque Palace of Justice in Munich
built ten years before. While Berg on the exterior of his vast hall
approaches the attenuated Classicism of Perret’s work of the next
decade, the superb interior reminds one at once of Piranesi and of the
much later structures of Nervi.
German architects of this generation were rarely able to carry over into
the designing of more conventional structures the boldness and freshness
of approach of their large-scale work. They seem to have felt no such
call to regenerate architecture as Wright had imbibed from Sullivan; nor
did they, like Perret, attempt to use the new materials and the new
structural methods consistently for all sorts of buildings whatever
their particular purpose. German production before and after the First
World War, as represented in the _œuvre_ of such then highly esteemed
figures[425] as Oskar Kaufmann (b. 1873), German Bestelmeyer
(1874-1942), and Wilhelm Kreis (b. 1873), to mention but three of the
best known, shades over almost imperceptibly from industrial and
semi-industrial buildings of bold and original character to a range of
structures in various tasteful modes that are, in retrospect, hardly
distinguishable from the traditional work of this period in other
countries. This has already been noted as regards Tessenow.
Characteristic examples of these men’s work were Bestelmeyer’s
extensions of the University and the Technical High School in Munich, of
1906-10 and 1922 respectively, both in the local tradition of Theodor
Fischer’s work. The Museum of Prehistory in Halle that Kreis built in
1916 with K. A. Jüngst was more traditional even than Bestelmeyer’s
work, although Provincial-Roman rather than Romanesque in inspiration.
As in England in the late nineteenth century, individual idiosyncrasies
were much cultivated, and architects tended to specialize in particular
types of buildings. Kaufmann, for example, had a very personal
Neo-Rococo manner, delicate and frivolous, that he employed with real
appropriateness in various Berlin theatres, notably the remodelling of
the Kroll Oper and the Komödie, both carried out in 1924. But Behrens
remains on the whole the most interesting and accomplished architect of
this generation, whose opportunities for building were often to be even
greater under the Weimar Republic in the early twenties than they had
been under the Kaiser.
No very great change is observable in Behrens’s work after the First
World War. The terrace-houses that he built in 1918 for A.E.G. workers
at Hennigsdorf, and the semi-detached dwellings of a low-cost housing
estate for which he was responsible at Othmarschen near Altona in 1920
are simple and solid in construction, quite like those of before the war
but more conservative in design. However, at this point comes a
characteristic, though brief, change of phase that illustrates his ready
response to influences from the new painting and sculpture of the day.
In the big complex erected for the I. G. Farben Company in 1920-4 at
Höchst Behrens gave up the direct expression of new industrial building
methods characteristic of his A.E.G. factories of 1909-11. The exterior
was massive and almost medievalizing, even though the ranges of arches
were of the unconventional parabolic form that seems to have appealed
especially to Expressionist taste. In the tall glass-roofed court inside
the angular forms of Expressionism were most strikingly evident; but he
also introduced wholly abstract wall paintings and a few rather
Constructivist lighting fixtures elsewhere in the reception rooms and
offices. The result was, to say the least, ambiguous and incoherent,
although the exterior was not unimpressive in its general effect.
Expressionist influence had first appeared a little earlier than this in
the work of other German architects, but it reached a peak in these
years of the early twenties. In his pre-war industrial work Hans Poelzig
(1869-1936) was not yet Expressionist. The chemical works that he built
at Luban near Posen in 1911-12 rivalled in size and even in directness
of expression—though not in distinction—Behrens’s factories for the
A.E.G. After the war, however, Poelzig became a principal exponent of
Expressionism in architecture. One of the earliest and most striking
examples of Expressionist design on a large scale was his remodelling of
the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1919. Here the cavernous,
stalactite-ceilinged interior round the central circular stage was
itself like an Expressionist stage-set and the planning implied a major
revolution in dramatic presentation that never, in fact, quite came off.
Yet his industrial work of the early twenties soon became much more
straightforward again, and he later reverted to something very
comparable to the stripped monumentality of Behrens’s Düsseldorf and
Hanover office buildings. The most prominent extant example of this is
the enormous I.G. Farben Company headquarters that he built in 1930 in
Frankfort.
One can hardly leave the subject of Expressionism in German
architecture, largely confined though its more extreme manifestations
were to a very short post-war period of three or four years, without
mentioning two more names, those of Fritz Höger (1877-1949) and
Dominikus Böhm (1880-1955).
The twenties saw a few skyscrapers erected in Germany, none of them of
the great height then current in America, but sometimes as conspicuous
above the existing skyline as the first skyscrapers in New York had been
in the seventies. The largest, though not the tallest, and certainly the
most impressive was the Chilehaus, built by Höger in Hamburg in 1923,
with its Schumacher-like piers of patterned brickwork and its upper
three storeys receding behind narrow terraces (Plate 153A). A large and
irregular site encouraged the employment of a long double curve on the
right-hand side of the hollow block, and the sharp angle at that end
produced automatically a silhouette of the shrillest Expressionist
order. Actually, however, Höger like other German architects was already
returning by this time from earlier and wilder Expressionist adventures.
To what extent he was aware of the skyscrapers of Sullivan is uncertain.
The emphatically vertical scheme of design he used here, with arches
linking the brick piers together below slab cornices, certainly suggests
some knowledge of them, even though they were by this time all but
forgotten in America.
Considerably taller than the Chilehaus, but not otherwise very
distinguished, were two other German skyscrapers of the twenties.
Kreis’s Wilhelm Marx Haus of 1924 in Düsseldorf, a thirteen-storey tower
crowned with curious openwork tracery of inter-laced brick, is still a
conspicuous feature of the local skyline; but the Planetarium and
associated buildings that he erected at the Gesolei there two years
later are better examples of the fairly restrained mode that he and
others usually employed in these years. The plainer and better
proportioned seventeen-storey Hochhaus am Hansaring in Cologne was built
in 1925 by Jacob Koerfer (b. 1875).
Although only a few skyscrapers actually rose in European cities in the
twenties, the theme nevertheless fascinated the younger architects. Many
bold designs for them were projected, some of them of real significance
for later developments in both the Old World and the New (see Chapter
22). The international competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower held in
1922, which many Europeans entered and the Finn Eliel Saarinen all but
won, signally focused attention on a type of building hitherto
considered unsuitable for the Old World, and generally accepted in
Europe only in the 1950s (see Chapters 21 and 25).
The churches of Böhm, all of them Catholic, have a suavity that Höger’s
work lacks, but at least equal forcefulness. The Suabian War Memorial
Church of 1923 at Neu-Ulm is like an imaginative film-set of the period,
being a sort of free fantasia on Gothic themes with little feeling of
structural reality. But the boldest of Böhm’s churches, that he built at
Bischofsheim in 1926, seems almost to take off from the engineer
Freyssinet’s hangars at Orly. The paraboloid forms are here very frankly
used; yet the concrete ‘barrel’ vault of the nave, intersected by lower
cross-vaults over the bays of the aisles, creates a strong emotional
effect that is both Gothic and Expressionist in tone. The finest of his
churches, however, may be Sankt Engelbert at Cologne-Riehl of 1931-3.
This is circular in plan and very ingeniously roofed, not with a
dome,[426] but with lobes of paraboloid barrel-vaulting.
However, in a church built in 1929, Sankt Josef at Hindenburg in Upper
Silesia, Böhm had already turned away from the emotionalism of his
earlier work towards simple rectangular forms.[427] This simplicity he
has maintained in his post-war churches, with the result that his last
work, Maria Königin,[428] built at Marienburg outside Cologne in 1954,
with its squarish plan, very slender metal supports, and side wall of
glass, has very little churchly flavour left. Yet some of Böhm’s very
late projects indicated that many of his ambitions of thirty years ago
still remained with him to the end; they may well some day find
effective expression at the hands of his son or of Rudolf Schwarz now
that a more emotional approach to church-design has been revived
internationally.
Compared to such a French church of the twenties as Perret’s Notre-Dame
at Le Raincy or such a Swiss church as Moser’s Sankt Antonius in Basel,
both using concrete in the rectangular and skeletal mode usually
preferred at that time, Böhm’s churches of the twenties once seemed
semi-traditional rather than modern. One can now see, however, that
there is a different and more emotive line of development in modern
church architecture to which, for example, Gaudí’s unfinished churches
at San Coloma and Barcelona belong, as do also such later Latin American
examples in ferro-concrete as the Purísima at Monterrey in Mexico by
Enrique de la Mora (b. 1907) of 1939-47, São Francisco at Pampulha in
Brazil, built by Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1901) in 1943, Nuestra Señora de los
Milagros in Mexico City by Felix Candela (b. 1910), completed in 1955,
and several completed in the mid fifties by Juvenal Moya at Bogotá in
Colombia[429] (see Chapters 23 and 25). Expressionism may have been less
of a cul de sac than its brief impingement on Behrens might lead one to
suppose. Certainly it was a potent force for a few years after the First
World War, and played then a significant role in breaking down the rule
of ‘tasteful’ traditionalism inherited from the preceding decade.[430]
As the twenties progressed, however, and extreme Expressionist influence
generally receded, Behrens gave evidence of his awareness of the quite
different direction that modern architecture had just taken in the hands
of certain younger men, several of whom had actually been his own pupils
or at least his employees. In 1925-6 he built New Ways, a house in
Northampton, England, for S. J. Bassett-Lowke, earlier a client of
Mackintosh’s. With its smooth white stucco walls, horizontally grouped
windows, and flat roof, this is of considerable historical interest,
although of very little intrinsic merit.[431] No such advanced work had
yet been done in England by local architects, and at this time only a
very few houses of a comparably advanced character had been executed
anywhere (see Chapter 22).
Despite his unusual openness of mind, which led Behrens in his fifties
to attempt to rival juniors barely started on their careers—or, quite as
probably, because of the lack of strong personal conviction of which
this gives evidence—Behrens did not, like Perret and Wright in later
life, continue to be very creative beyond this date. In Vienna, where he
was called in the mid twenties to be professor of architecture at the
Akademie, he settled into a sort of compromise mode. The low-cost
housing blocks that he built in Vienna in 1924-5 on the
Margaretengürtel, in the Stromstrasse, and in the Konstanziastrasse
illustrate his characteristic uncertainty of direction in these years.
If considerably sounder, they are also much less adventurous than the
Bassett-Lowke house designed at almost the same time. This can be seen
still more clearly at the Weissenhof in Stuttgart where many of the
buildings of the German Werkbund’s housing exhibition held in 1927
remain in use today. There Behrens’s block of flats stands very near one
designed by the director of this exhibition, his former assistant Mies
van der Rohe (Plate 162B), and not far from houses by such other leaders
of the new generation as Gropius, Le Corbusier—who had both worked in
his office also—and Oud (see Chapter 22). The contrast between his
massive block and their light and open structures is the more striking
because Behrens here so evidently set out to meet his juniors more than
half-way.
Behrens’s very latest work, the factory for the Austrian Tobacco
Administration at Linz built in 1930 in association with Alexander Popp
(b. 1891), was rather less conservative because of the nature of the
commission. It is less mechanistic than the industrial work done so much
earlier for the A.E.G., yet nonetheless impressive for its consistency
of treatment and also for its human scale. The Linz factory provides a
not unworthy concluding note to Behrens’s ambiguous career.
The vast productivity of the German architects of Behrens’s generation,
both before and after the First World War, building in a boom which only
came to a close around 1930 with the world-wide depression, makes it
difficult to choose specific examples worth the emphasis of even brief
mention. The situation is made no easier by the considerable versatility
of most of the leading figures. Those few buildings that have been
specifically mentioned—even most of Behrens’s own work except for his
A.E.G. factories—should be considered typical of the upper level of
German achievement in these decades rather than monuments of unique
distinction like the best things done by Perret and by Wright in the
same decades. Yet, it is worth noting, for a long time neither Wright
nor Perret had much effect on the general scene in their own countries,
for all the seminal effect of their influence on younger architects
everywhere; while the Germans achieved a tremendous volume of what can
be called ‘half-modern’ work that notably changed the whole character of
several large cities. Thus the way was prepared for a very early and
widespread acceptance of the next stage of modern architecture, an
acceptance so premature that it induced in the thirties a sharp
reaction.
In 1933 a regime rose to power in Germany with doctrinaire objections to
the latest phase of modern architecture, ironically castigated as
_Kultur-Bolschevismus_ immediately after the Bolsheviks had rejected it
as unacceptably bourgeois! As a result, the leaders of the younger
generation almost all emigrated (see Chapter 23); while with few
exceptions those German architects who remained at home turned backwards
in their tracks, though not very far backwards. Most German production
in the Nazi period is all but indistinguishable, indeed, from what was
considered most advanced before the First World War and even for some
years thereafter. Very little of it deserves specific mention. As was
the case around 1910, the more nearly the structures were of an
engineering order—as for instance Bonatz’s bridges for the Autobahn
built over the years 1935-41—the less they were likely to be stylized
along the heavy near-Classical or semi-medieval lines the later Imperial
period had established as conventional a generation before. Even the
housing that Bonatz built after the War in 1945-6 at Ankara in Turkey
and his Opera House there of 1947-8 are hardly as advanced as his
Zeppelinbau office building of 1929-31 opposite the station in
Stuttgart. Like Behrens at the same time, he had attempted there—with a
certain amount of real success—to follow the ascetic principles of the
younger generation that had just been so well illustrated at Stuttgart
in the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 on the Weissenhof (see Chapter 22).
Immediately after the Second World War there was for several years some
continuing use of the modes of 1910, so to call them. This was natural
because of the prolonged absence of most of the leaders of the
intervening generation from the country—Gropius, Mies, and Mendelsohn
never returned—and the renewed activity of so many of the older
generation who had made their reputation in the period 1905-25 with
which this chapter has chiefly dealt. Today it is as if Germany had
lived through the stylistic developments of the twenties a second time,
and now the newer sort of architecture is once again as ubiquitous there
as it was in 1930.
These tidal waves of changing taste in Germany, each representing a
sharp reaction against its predecessor, make difficult such a focusing
of attention on a few creative and insurgent figures as gives dramatic
pungency to the history of these decades in America and France.
_Jugendstil_, _Expressionismus_, _Neue Sachlichkeit_,[432] these general
movements, more than even so distinguished an individual as Behrens, are
the real protagonists of the German story from 1900 to 1933; but in the
international frame of reference they must be subordinated to the
broader currents that dominated the architecture of the western world in
the period. In that frame of reference the contribution of a few
Austrians more than equalled that of the more prolific Germans, down at
least to the First World War.
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CHAPTER 21
THE FIRST GENERATION IN AUSTRIA, HOLLAND, AND SCANDINAVIA
THE development of modern architecture in Austria between 1900 and the
Nazi conquest has many connexions with that of Germany. The Austrian
Olbrich had as much as anyone to do with setting off the reaction
against the Art Nouveau in Germany after 1900. From the mid twenties,
Behrens was living in Austria, not in Germany. Even so, and particularly
for the years before the First World War, there is a separate and purely
Austrian story, more limited than the German story yet at least equally
notable for highly distinguished achievement. Two Austrian architects at
least, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos (1870-1933), if not Wagner’s pupil
Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), were the equals of any of the leading German
architects of their day, except perhaps Behrens. Wagner, already sixty
in 1901, produced his finest work after that date. The Wiener
Werkstätte, founded by Hoffmann in 1903, provided a centre of activity
in the field of decoration comparable to what the Century Guild and the
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society had offered earlier in England. Above
all, Loos—in part possibly because he, of all Europeans of his
generation, knew American architecture best—demonstrated, from his
earliest executed work of 1898, a determination to renew the art of
building that was as revolutionary as Wright’s.
Soon after 1900 Wagner threw off all Art Nouveau influence. Yet the
finest element in his masterpiece, the central hall of the Postal
Savings Bank in the Georg Coch Platz in Vienna of 1904-6, still retains
in the curvature of its glass roof and the tapering of its metal
supports something of Art Nouveau grace (Plate 154B). The exteriors of
this massive edifice are lightened by the very original treatment of the
geometrically organized wall-planes; the thin plaques of marble which
provide the sheathing suggest volume, not mass, and the delicate relief
of the few and simple projections quite avoids the ponderousness of most
contemporary German work. As in so much of the best German work,
however, the severity of form and even the specific character of certain
ornamental features reflect in a stylized way the Grecian mode of a
hundred years earlier. This is somewhat surprising in Vienna, where
Romantic Classicism had been on the whole both unproductive and
uncreative, but doubtless Wagner knew Schinkel’s work as well as did
Behrens—certainly his lightness of hand is more comparable to
Schinkel’s.
Not least interesting technically is the consistent employment of
aluminium[433] in this building. The sculptured figures by Othmar
Schimkowitz which crown the façade and the visible bolts that retain the
granite and marble plaques are of this new metal; so also, apparently,
are the structural members that support the glazed roof of the hall; at
least they are completely sheathed with it. The large rear block of the
bank dates from 1912, but the original vocabulary was retained by Wagner
with only some slight simplification of the detailing of the plaquage.
Sankt Leopold, the cruciform church that serves as the chapel of the
Steinhof Asylum on the Gallitzinberg at Penzing outside Vienna, was
built by Wagner in 1904-7 at the same time as the Postal Savings Bank.
This crowns his extensive hillside layout of the whole establishment,
comparable in scale to the French asylums of the mid nineteenth century,
but for the other buildings he was not directly responsible. Sankt
Leopold is a large domed monument inviting comparison with Schinkel’s
Nikolaikirche at Potsdam. However, the linear stylization of the
detailing inside and out brings to mind Olbrich’s and Behrens’s
buildings of its own day. There is no paraphernalia of Greek orders, yet
the conceptual organization of the elements is certainly in the Romantic
Classical tradition, with the four arms each quite cubic and the
hemispherical dome raised on a cylindrical drum. As at Schmidt’s
Neo-Gothic Fünfhaus church of the 1870s in Vienna, there are echoes of
Fischer von Erlach’s Baroque Karlskirche here also, but the spirit is
not at all Baroque. All the visible metalwork here, the sheathing of the
dome, the statues of angels by Schimkowitz and of saints by Richard
Luksch, and even the heads of the bolts that retain the marble plaques
on the exterior walls, is of gilded bronze, not aluminium. This has not
worn as well, for it has lost its gilt coating, peeled off many of the
bolts, and streaked the walls with verdigris. Inside the church the
mosaics by Rudolf Jettmar and the stained glass by Kolo Moser combine to
rival the most sumptuous domestic ensembles produced by the Wiener
Werkstätte, but the general effect, while light and even gay, still has
a monumental dignity appropriate to a church. The walls are of plain
white plaster, and narrow bands of geometrical ornament in gold and blue
panel the cross vault—for, curiously enough, the central dome is not
exploited internally.
Crisper in design and much simpler altogether than the Steinhof church
are the blocks of low-cost flats that Wagner built in 1910-11 at 40
Neustiftsgasse and next door at 4 Döblergasse. Their walls are covered
with stucco lined off to suggest plaquage, and the decoration is reduced
to thin bands of dark blue tiles that merely outline the surface planes.
Needless to say, these blocks have not survived as well as the
expensively built bank and church. Wagner’s last works, a hospital not
far from the Steinhof Asylum and his own house at 28 Hüttelbergstrasse,
both in Penzing and of 1913, are typical but rather less interesting.
Hoffmann’s first architectural work of any consequence, a Convalescent
Home at Purkersdorf built in 1903-4, was already simpler than Wagner’s
hospital of a decade later, if considerably less architectonic in
effect. The plain white stucco walls are full of ample windows almost
devoid of surrounding frames and very regularly disposed; cornices and
other conventional elements of detail are either omitted or reduced to
an absolute minimum. The result is a structure that would still look
very fresh and crisp half a century later were it not, like Wagner’s
flats, in shabby physical condition.
As Hoffmann’s founding of the Wiener Werkstätte indicates, he was at
heart less an architect than a decorator, like so many of the leading
English and Scottish designers of this period and the immediately
preceding one. The important commission to build a large and extremely
luxurious mansion on the edge of Brussels in 1905, the Palais Stoclet at
373 Avenue de Tervueren, gave his decorative ambitions a free rein
(Plate 154A). Yet the exterior of this has a good deal of the
geometrical clarity of the Convalescent Home and rather more of Wagner’s
architectonic values. The carefully ordered asymmetrical composition is
dominated by the stair-tower, somewhat as the best Italian Villas of the
previous century were dominated by their off-centre belvederes. The
walls appear to be no more than thin skins of marble plaques, like
Wagner’s, with the frequent and regularly spaced windows brought forward
into the same surface plane. A decorative edging of gilded metal defines
these smooth wall planes, giving the whole something of the fragile look
of D’Aronco’s exhibition buildings. This is especially true of such a
complex accent as the tower, with its tall stair-window.
The Stoclet house, as finished after six years in 1911, has some very
fine interiors, cold and formal but sumptuously simple in their use of
various marbles. The marble is quite undecorated on the delicate
rectangular piers in the two-storey stair-hall; but in the dining-room
it carries inlaid patterns by Gustav Klimt of almost Art Nouveau
elaboration. The effect is rather curious, somewhat resembling
characteristic English interiors by Voysey and his contemporaries
carried out, not in stained or painted wood, but in figured and polished
marbles; yet undoubtedly this is one of the most consistent and notable
great houses of the twentieth century in Europe. Seeking to provide a
new sort of elegance that even the best English domestic work lacked,
Hoffmann achieved here an urbane distinction only approached by Gill and
the Greenes at this time in America. His houses in Vienna, such as that
at 5-7 Invalidenstrasse of 1911 and the suburban one at 14-16
Gloriettegasse in Hietzing, are not in a class with the Palais Stoclet
but more comparable to Olbrich’s or Behrens’s houses of this period in
Germany. Work of similar character and equal distinction was done by
Fabiani in Vienna before he settled in Gorizia in 1920. Very
Hoffmann-like indeed is his building for the publisher Artaria at 9
Kohlmarkt of 1901. His Urania in the Uraniagasse of 1910 also rivals
Hoffmann’s best.
Successor to Wagner in general esteem, and himself a professor at the
Kunstgewerbeschule, Hoffman developed his personal style no further in
the work he did after the First World War. At the Austrian Pavilion in
the Exhibition of Decorative Arts of 1925 in Paris—an exhibition
organized in part to reclaim for France the primacy in the arts and
crafts of decoration that had by this time passed to Vienna, largely
because of Hoffmann’s leadership—the rather Neo-Rococo stuccoed block
that he provided was much less advanced in character than the
greenhouse-like portion designed by Behrens. However, his low-cost flats
in the Felix-Mottlstrasse in Vienna, built like those of Behrens in the
mid twenties, retain a good deal of the quality of his early sanatorium
at Purkersdorf. Crisp and clean, they are distinctly less blank and
ponderous than Behrens’s, if also less advanced in design that those by
Josef Frank (b. 1885). Frank, a somewhat younger Viennese architect of
considerable ability but lesser reputation than Hoffmann, left Vienna to
settle in Sweden when the Nazis took over Austria.
The international acclaim that Viennese low-cost housing of this period
received when new seems rather exaggerated now. From the first its
significance was more political and sociological than architectural. It
happened to be built, moreover, mostly by men not of the newest
generation of architects at just the time when an architectural
revolution was taking place in France and Holland and Germany (see
Chapters 22 and 23). Henceforth that revolution, brilliantly illustrated
as regards low-cost housing in the German Werkbund’s international
exhibition of 1927 at Stuttgart, would affect most notably the design of
such projects throughout the western world. The Viennese housing
exhibition of 1930, a modest counterpart to that in Stuttgart, came too
late to reform the local tradition, which largely survived even after
the Second World War.
The work of Hoffmann’s exact contemporary Loos dates less than his and
was of the greatest importance in providing inspiration to the modern
architects of the second generation who brought about the revolution of
the twenties. This inspiration from Loos is comparable in significance
to that which the younger architects found in the work of Wright and of
Perret. Loos, unlike other Austrians of his period, was primarily
interested in architecture, not in decoration—indeed, he wrote in 1908
an article[434] claiming that ‘ornament is crime’, an attitude shared by
no other architect of his generation, and least of all by his fellow
Viennese. It was Loos’s tragedy that a very large part of his employment
before the First World War was in remodelling and redecorating flats;
this constrained him so little, however, that many of these may easily
be taken in photographs for completely original house interiors (Plate
155B).
Although Loos began his career in the late nineties when the Art Nouveau
tide ran highest, he was never at all affected by it, in part doubtless
because he had spent the years 1893-6 in America beyond the range of Art
Nouveau influence. The interior of the Goldman haberdashery shop in
Vienna, which he designed in 1898, was entirely straight-lined and quite
without any ornament; in the Café Museum of the next year the segmental
ceiling and the bentwood chairs were curved, but only for structural
reasons. Both are now gone, although the extant Knizé men’s shop in the
Graben in Vienna of 1913 gives some idea of what the former was like.
It is Loos’s houses around Vienna, in Plzen, in Brno, in Montreux, and
in Paris that place him as one of the four or five most important
architects of his generation. His finest single extant work, however, is
a small bar in Vienna. From the first he designed from the inside out,
reducing his exteriors to square stucco boxes cut by many windows of
different sizes and shapes. The results are very like Gill’s houses in
California, as has been noted already, but with no such traditional
elements as Gill’s arched porches. This is especially true of the Gustav
Scheu house in the Larochegasse in the Vienna suburb of Hietzing, almost
the only one left in Austria in something closely approaching its
original condition (Plate 155A; Figure 43). Loos was an enthusiastic
admirer of English domestic architecture; this bent of his taste is
curiously illustrated by his liking for English eighteenth-century
furniture of the Queen Anne and Chippendale periods, which looks today
so out of place in his severely rectangular rooms. But the architectural
character of his interiors is never influenced by eighteenth-century
modes, but only by the most advanced English work of the opening of the
century which he knew well through the _Studio_. Articulated by plain
wooden structural members like Voysey’s interiors or, on occasion, by
similar piers clad with marble like Hoffmann’s in the Stoclet house,
Loos’s suites of living areas are as flowing as Wright’s[435] but he
never provided as much interconnexion between indoors and out.
Of a succession of houses built before the First World War the much
mishandled Steiner house of 1910 and the above-mentioned Scheu house of
1912, both in suburbs of Vienna, are perhaps the finest. The Villa
Karma, built much earlier at Montreux in Switzerland in 1904-6, had an
almost Hoffmann-like sumptuousness of materials and finish within; but
in the main Loos kept, like Voysey and Wright, to plainer effects and
simple dark wooden trim.
[Illustration:
Figure 43. Adolf Loos: Vienna, Gustav Scheu house, 1912, plan
]
At first his houses looked, externally, rather like quite conventional
ones from which all elements of traditional detail had been scraped, as
do many of the contemporary projects included in Garnier’s ‘Cité
Industrielle’. Gradually, however, Loos came to handle his simple
elements of external design with more of that assurance which his
domestic interiors had displayed from as early as the flat in Vienna
remodelled for Leopold Langer in 1901 (Plate 155B). Both the placing and
the sashing of his windows were more carefully studied; and the
proportions and the juxtapositions of his rather boxy masses were
abstractly ordered well before a Neoplasticist like Georges Vantongerloo
in Holland arrived at somewhat similar effects in sculpture (see Chapter
22). Compared to Wright’s more complex and articulated experimentation
with abstract composition in the house of 1909 for Mrs Thomas Gale or
the Coonley Playhouse of 1912, there remains, nevertheless, a distinctly
negative quality about all Loos’s work. He seems to have been
principally concerned to clear away inherited tradition in order to lay
the foundations of an immanent new architecture. That new architecture,
however, he himself was never able to bring fully into being, although
others did so under his influence by the time he was in his early
fifties (see Chapter 22).
In Loos’s larger urban work, such as the prominent Goldman & Salatsch
Building of 1910 in the Michaelerplatz in Vienna, he was ready to use
marble externally and even to include classically detailed columns. But
in the ground storey of this store he increased the articulated space
effects characteristic of the interiors of his flats and houses to
almost monumental scale. Here, in the small Kärntner Bar of 1907, and in
the Café Capua of 1913, both also in Vienna, his use of fine materials
with their polished surfaces uninterrupted by mouldings would eventually
prove as potent an inspiration to architects of the next generation as
did his more ascetic written doctrine.
The Café Capua is gone; the Goldman & Salatsch interior drastically
remodelled; but the Kärntner Bar, in the Kärntner Durchgang behind 10
Kärntnerstrasse, remains a small masterpiece of modern design. During
the Nazi occupation the façade lost the American flag in stained glass
which ran across the top, but the exterior was never of much interest in
any case. The interior is fortunately completely intact (Plate 151).
Skilful use of mirrors quite disguises its very small dimensions. Above
smooth dark mahogany walls, set like screens between plain green marble
piers, unframed panels of mirror that reach to the ceiling allow one to
see the strong reticulated pattern of the yellow marble ceiling
extending left and right and to the rear just as if the actual area of
the bar were merely an enclave in a much larger space. Because of the
particular height of the mahogany wainscoting this illusion is quite
perfect, for one sees only about as great a space reflected on either
side as that one is actually in; if the mirrors came lower, a greater
extension on either side and at the rear would be suggested than could
possibly be plausible as a reflection. A continuous grille of square
panels filled with translucent yellow onyx takes the place of the mirror
panel across the top of the front wall. Not until Mies van der Rohe’s
Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 was marble used again by a modern architect
with such assurance (Plate 165A).
It was not these urban commissions, however, but Loos’s free-standing
houses that the next generation of architects studied most closely. For
example, Loos’s sort of domestic open planning, not Wright’s, was
probably the major influence on the Continent after the First World War.
Moreover, the neutrality, not to say the negativity, of the exteriors of
his houses provided better even than Garnier’s projects the raw material
with which a positive sort of architectural design could be created by
younger men in the early twenties. Loos’s achievement before the First
World War was largely in the domestic field; after the war most of his
executed work still consisted of houses and shop interiors, although he
made several extremely interesting projects for larger edifices and
erected a large sugar refinery for the Rohrbacher Company in
Czechoslovakia in 1919.
The Rufer house in Vienna of 1922 is a narrow three-storey block rather
similar to Voysey’s Forster house of 1891 at Bedford Park. This has a
most interesting sort of open plan, with the dining-room on a higher
level than the living room. Loos was also working in other countries
now; for his reputation, though limited to the most advanced circles,
was increasingly international. His most considerable production of this
decade was the house he built in 1926 for the writer Tristan Tzara at 14
Avenue Junod in Paris, where Loos had settled four years earlier. In the
Tzara house the interior is arranged somewhat like that of the Rufer
house: the dining room opens into the living room but on a higher level.
The tall, rather blank front, slightly concave in plan, has a more
positive character than those of most of his houses, because the
two-storey void sunk into its centre provides a dominating plastic
feature above the solid rubble of the ground storey.
Of still later work the Kuhner house of 1930 at Payerbach in the wooded
hills near Vienna is the most original example. A two-storey hall,
opening towards the view through a window-wall, occupies most of the
interior, with the various other living spaces opening into it on the
main floor and the bedrooms reached from a gallery above. Above the
masonry base the house is externally of log-construction, chalet-like,
with Tyrolean roofs of low pitch and wide-spreading eaves. This
reversion to peasant materials, and even to peasant forms, was curiously
premonitory of a direction modern architecture took in several countries
in the thirties (see Chapter 23). Had Loos lived longer he might, like
Wright in that decade, have returned to the centre of the stage. As it
was, his major contribution antedated the First World War.
Perret, Wright, Behrens, and Loos: on the whole these are the four most
important architects of the first modern generation, important both for
their personal contribution and also for their decisive influence on
later architecture. Outside the countries in which these men worked,
notably in Holland and in Scandinavia, there were also architects of
distinction belonging to this generation but their achievement was more
limited and their influence more local, at least before the First World
War. Yet Holland, between 1910 and 1925, came closer than any other
country to creating a modern style, or phase of style, that was
universally accepted at home; the origins, moreover, go back to the
nineties. There was, properly speaking, no prefatory Art Nouveau episode
in Holland of any consequence in spite of a considerable activity in the
decorative arts inspired, in part at least, by serious study of the
crafts of Indonesia.
Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934), the leader of the national school,
was considerably older than Perret, Wright, Behrens, or Loos, although
much younger than Wagner. As in Wagner’s case, his earliest work, dating
from the eighties, is of a generically Renaissance character, though
much less suave and academic. The influence of Cuijpers soon led him
towards a medieval mode—not Gothic, however, but round-arched. Compared
to _Rundbogenstil_ work of the best period fifty years earlier, his
round-arched buildings of the nineties are rather gawky, but not without
originality in their ornamentation; above all, they are vigorously
structural in their expression in a ‘realistic’ and, indeed, almost High
Victorian way. However, the insurance company buildings in Amsterdam and
The Hague that best illustrate this phase were later enlarged by him in
a chaster mode, thereby losing much of their anachronistic flavour.
Berlage’s major opportunity came with the competition for the design of
the Amsterdam Exchange held in 1897. This competition he won with a
project which seems rather Richardsonian[436] to American eyes, though
he did not—apparently—know much about American work at that time. For
this very extensive public edifice, built over the years 1898-1903, he
used, not the stone of his insurance office across the Damrak of 1893,
but the red brick of his Hague insurance office, also of 1893, varied
with a modicum of stone trim still quite crudely notched and chamfered.
Inside, the principal interior has exposed metal principals above
galleried walls of brick and stone. In Berlage’s masculine vigour and
defiant gracelessness of detailing one could hardly have a greater
contrast to such another major public building, designed and built at
almost precisely the same time, as Horta’s Maison du Peuple in Brussels.
But Horta’s masterpiece climaxed rather than opened his career as an
architect of international importance; certainly it did not lead to the
development of a national modern school in Belgium. At least for
Holland, the Exchange was more seminal, even if it lacked the
revolutionary character of Wright’s houses of these years or Perret’s
block of flats in the Rue Franklin in Paris. A fairer comparison would
be with Voysey’s contemporary houses, the work of an architect who was
by intention rather a ‘reformer’ than a drastic innovator, or with
Martin Nyrop’s Town Hall in Copenhagen begun five years earlier.
Berlage’s near-Richardsonian mode of this period is still better
illustrated in a smaller structure, that built for the Diamond Workers’
Trade Union in the Henri Polak Laan in Amsterdam in 1899-1900 (Plate
150). In this, the organization of the windows into a sort of
brick-mullioned screen and the less aggressive handling of the carved
stone detail produces a façade not unworthy of comparison with
Richardson’s Sever Hall or Gaudí’s Casa Güell (Plate 96B). It is
notable, however, that it is work of the seventies and eighties in
America and in Spain that comes to mind, not work of this date.
The Hotel American of 1898-1900 in the Leidse Plein in Amsterdam by
Willem Kromhout (1864-1940) illustrates how boldly Berlage’s line was
taken by other local architects, and his relative originality even
outrivalled. But the lead came in Kromhout’s case not from Berlage, but
from Cuijpers’s nephew Eduard (1859-1927), a transitional figure whose
work deserves more attention outside Holland than it has generally
received. Kromhout’s touch is lighter than Berlage’s, as is also, to
make a poor pun, the colour of his pale buff bricks, but his expression
of structure is less ‘real’ and more frankly fantastic. In the detail of
the exterior, and even more in the interiors, he was undoubtedly seeking
to create a sort of Dutch alternative to the Art Nouveau, not
curvilinear or naturalistically ‘organic’ but richly decorative in a
semi-abstract way. The intention was worthy; the result, alas, is rather
tawdry.
It was not in the design of sumptuous individual buildings but in
low-cost housing and in city-planning that Berlage himself was most
active in the next fifteen years. In 1908, for example, he prepared a
plan for the extension of The Hague, and in 1915 a more ambitious one
for Amsterdam. He had built his first blocks of flats in the
Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam in 1905. These are much less Romanesquoid
than his earlier work but they are equally brusque as to the detailing.
However, his architecture shortly grew much suaver. Berlage’s finest
work of any period, perhaps, is not in Holland but in the City of
London, Holland House of 1914 at 1-4 Bury Street, E.C. This has a
reticulated façade of moulded terracotta members more Sullivanian than
Richardsonian in its verticality (Plate 138B)—and by this time he
certainly knew Sullivan’s work.
The influence of Berlage in Holland was by this time very great and the
esteem in which he was held—at least as much for his doctrine of direct
structural expression as for his executed work—by no means restricted to
his own country, since his writings were published in Germany as well as
in Holland.[437] Yet, to foreign eyes, the achievement of the new school
that grew up partly under his inspiration in Amsterdam is greater than
his own. The work of this ‘Amsterdam School’—for it was soon so
called—which flourished particularly in the decade 1912-22 is at times
very close to that of the German architects influenced by Expressionism
in the early twenties; but it began much earlier and has a strongly
autochthonous flavour.[438] German Expressionism never inspired a
building more stridently angular than the Scheepvaarthuis that J. M. van
der Meij (b. 1868), a pupil of Eduard Cuijpers, built to house dock
offices on the Prins Hendrik Kade in Amsterdam in 1912-13. The most
extreme example of the abandon with which twentieth-century Dutch
architects set out on new paths, this opened the way for the housing
work of van der Meij’s assistants Michael de Klerk (1884-1923) and P. L.
Kramer (1881-1961), both also pupils of Eduard Cuijpers, which
represents internationally the greatest Dutch contribution to modern
architecture. As the master of these three, Eduard Cuijpers, despite his
own historicism, has perhaps as much right as Berlage to be considered a
father of the Amsterdam School. Their work, moreover, has some analogies
not only with German Expressionism but also with Wright’s contemporary
Baroque phase of 1914-24. However, the crystallization of de Klerk’s
personal style preceded the beginning of Wright’s influence in Holland
and, when that influence began during the years of the First World War,
it operated in fact to counter the extravagances of the Amsterdam
School.
Early buildings by de Klerk, such as the first Eigen Haard Estate
housing blocks that were designed in 1913 and erected round the
Spaandammerplantsoen on the west side of Amsterdam, have a quaintness
that recalls English or American work of a generation earlier rather
than van der Meij’s aggressive angularity. They look almost as if they
were especially fanciful projects of the Shingle Style that happened to
be executed in brick instead of wood. But the elegant underscaled local
brick is handled with extraordinary virtuosity, and the façades achieve
a stage-set-like unreality in sharpest contrast to the often dreary
matter-of-factness of low-cost housing produced in other countries in
these same years. Although the first Eigen Haard blocks were, in
planning and general organization, as straightforward as Berlage’s, they
have a warmer human touch such as architects elsewhere—Behrens, for
example, or the Scandinavians—either missed entirely or attempted to
attain by a parsimonious use of more or less ‘traditional’ detailing.
The extension of the Eigen Haard Estate along the Zaanstraat, begun in
1917, represents perhaps the peak of de Klerk’s achievement (Plate
156B). Here the many curved wall elements bring out the special
qualities of Dutch brickwork; and the rather heavy wooden window-frames,
brought forward as in Hoffmann’s Stoclet house to the wall-plane, give
continuity to the plastic modelling of the façades. Highly imaginative,
even whimsical, features of detail, such as the barrel-like corner
oriel, give an air of good humour, and even of the outright humorous,
that is rare in any other architecture, ancient or modern; but these
features are for the most part truly architectonic, not merely
decorative. De Klerk’s whimsy is never nightmarish, in the way Gaudí’s
can be, nor loud and aggressive like van der Meij’s. His highly personal
style can be considered a sort of _barocchino_ of the early twentieth
century.
The extreme point of de Klerk’s invention is seen in the post office
that occupies the apex of the later portion of the Eigen Haard Estate.
This is like nothing so much as a child’s toy enlarged to architectural
scale in some contemporary setting for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe.[439]
After this his work grew somewhat simpler and more orderly. Already the
blocks he designed in 1920 for an area round the Henriette Ronnerplein
in the De Dageraad Estate on the south-east side of Amsterdam are more
regular and restrained; the plainest of all is the very long continuous
range near by in the Amstellaan built in 1921-2.
Also in the De Dageraad Estate, in the portion that runs down both sides
of the P. L. Takstraat, along the Burgemeester Tellegenstraat and into
the Talmastraat, Kramer showed himself even more of a virtuoso in the
handling of curved wall elements of brick—here brown and buff—than de
Klerk (Plate 156A). Projected in 1918 and built in 1921-3, Kramer’s
scheme combined tall and very plastic features at the street
intersections with notably straightforward three-storey ranges in
between. Thus he produced an extensive urbanistic ensemble of great
homogeneity of character, yet very considerable variety of visual
interest, and with a quality of craftsmanship perhaps superior to de
Klerk’s. But by the time this was completed Kramer had become even more
chastened than de Klerk in his last work in the Amstellaan. In Kramer’s
Amsterdam West housing, begun in 1923, the façades are plain and flat
with continuous bands of white-sashed windows. Thus these blocks are
definitely related to the direction that modern architecture was taking
in Holland as in France and Germany in these years at the hands of men
of Kramer’s own generation (see Chapter 22).
Kramer’s De Bijenkorf department store of 1924-6 in the Grotemarktstraat
in The Hague, however, still retains much of the plastic exuberance of
his earlier housing blocks and is executed with a sumptuous range of
fine materials. Kramer here employed at large scale the curved surfaces
of brickwork characteristic of De Dageraad, with notable success. Many
Amsterdam canal bridges of these years illustrate also his virtuosity at
elaborate semi-abstract detail carried out with excellent craftsmanship
in wrought iron and carved or artificial stone. Moreover, in the mid
twenties the Amsterdam City Architect’s office exploited with real
success in various school and police buildings a manner closely
approaching that of de Klerk and Kramer.
Unfashionable even in Holland for a quarter of a century, the work of
the Amsterdam School merits that more sympathetic examination which the
Art Nouveau has now for some years received. At its best the work of de
Klerk and Kramer from the mid teens to the mid twenties has survived
better than all but the finest contemporary achievements of Wright and
Perret, partly because it was so well built in the first place and has
been so well maintained ever since. Without being, in the proper sense
of the word, Expressionist, it yet has close analogies with the
Expressionist approach. It may be considered to stand in a relationship
to the work of Höger and Poelzig in Germany somewhat comparable to that
of Gaudí to the Art Nouveau of Brussels and Paris; for it is at once
independent of outside influence and superior to the foreign work that
it most closely parallels. But the Amsterdam School did not occupy the
entire Dutch scene even in these, its best, years.
In no European country was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright studied
earlier and with more enthusiasm than in Holland; Berlage was one of
Wright’s greatest admirers after his visit to America in 1911. The
influence of Wright’s work up to 1910, known through the Wasmuth
publications, began to be evident in the later years of the First World
War. Dirk Roosenburg (1887-1962), Jan Wils (b. 1891), J. J. Van Loghem
(1882-1940), and several others were notably Wrightian in the early
twenties; and the magazine _Wendingen_, edited by H. T. Wijdeveld (b.
1885), continued through the mid twenties to bring Wright’s later
buildings and his projects of those years to European attention, notably
devoting to him a magnificent series of special issues in 1925 which
constitutes a document of signal importance for the study of his work of
this period. The first German book on Wright after the Wasmuth
publications did not appear until the next year, and the first in French
only in 1928.
Wrightian ideas were readily accepted by many Dutch architects
previously inspired chiefly by Berlage, not to speak of their influence
on Berlage himself. Admiration for Wright’s work undoubtedly played a
real part in the rapid modulation of Dutch architecture towards greater
severity and a more geometrical discipline in the twenties. But the
major significance of the lively Dutch interest in the American lies in
its effect on the development of a few younger men in these years. To
the Amsterdam School there had arisen a strong opposition led by
architects belonging to the De Stijl group of artists who were active in
Rotterdam and Utrecht. Yet the Amsterdam School architects continued for
some time to be highly productive, and the work of several prominent
men, notably J. F. Staal (1879-1940) and W. M. Dudok (b. 1884), was
related to both camps. But by the time Berlage was engaged on the big
concrete-framed Netherlands Insurance Company Building in The Hague in
1925-6 its very Wrightian character had just been superseded in the
projects and the production of Rietveld and Oud by a more ascetic mode
parallel to that adumbrated by the new architects of France and Germany
in the early twenties (see Chapter 22).
In the new building of the Scandinavian countries before and after the
First World War admirers in other countries thought to recognize an
originality and vitality comparable to that of contemporary Dutch work.
As has already been remarked, it has since become evident that most of
what was produced in these decades in Denmark and Sweden did not really
differ very much from the work of ‘traditionalists’ elsewhere. Despite
extremely elegant and often piquant stylization, comparable but superior
to that of most German work in this period, continued maintenance of
inherited principles of design and the general use of reminiscent detail
sharply differentiated the characteristic production of the
Scandinavians from that of the Dutch, and of course far more from that
of Wright or Loos. What such men as Ragnar Östberg (1866-1945), and E.
G. Asplund (1885-1940) down to his sharp change of style in the late
twenties, designed and built in Sweden or P. V. Jensen Klint (1853-1930)
and Kay Fisker (b. 1893)—down to his parallel change of style—in Denmark
was generally still rated ‘modern’ a generation ago; almost all of it
may now be more properly classed with ‘traditional’ work in other
countries. In quality, however, it often more than rivals all but the
finest modern German, Austrian, and Dutch work of its day (see Chapter
24).
An exception to this statement as regards Sweden is the remarkable
Engelbrekt Church of 1904-14 in Stockholm by L. I. Wahlman (b. 1870),
with its great parabolic arches and its vertically massed exterior
dominated by a very tall and svelte tower; there much of the
experimentalism of the nineties lived on. For its influence, this is
possibly a more important twentieth-century church than Perret’s at Le
Raincy. An even more considerable exception is a large part of the
prolific production of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950)
both in the Old World and in the New. Saarinen was the leading architect
of Finland down to the twenties; after his removal to the United States
he was Wright’s only rival of his own generation on the American scene,
the careers of the early modern architects of the West Coast being by
then in decline (see Chapter 19).
Saarinen’s earliest work in partnership with Herman Gesellius
(1874-1916) and A. E. Lindgren (1874-1929) dates from the nineties. In
1900 he designed the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition; this
offered a powerful, though rather cranky, statement of Nordic
originality quite opposed to the Latin elegance of the contemporary Art
Nouveau and not without kinship to Berlage’s Amsterdam Exchange. At home
important public commissions followed rapidly: the National Museum in
Helsinki in 1902 and the Helsinki railway station, for which he won the
competition in 1904. This large and complex structure, built over the
years 1910-14, is Saarinen’s principal early work. In size and in
monumentality it rivals Bonatz’s Stuttgart station and also the vast
stations that ‘traditional’ architects in America were building at much
the same time (see Chapter 24). But there is much less of ‘tradition’
here than at the Stuttgart or, _a fortiori_, in the American stations.
The heaviness and the grandeur are more than a little Germanic so that
the fairest comparison is with Stürzenacker’s Karlsruhe station, on the
whole more straightforward in design and certainly much more delicately
detailed.
Saarinen’s achievement in his homeland made him well known throughout
Europe; as early as 1905 one of his principal works had been a country
house, Molchow, in Brandenburg in Germany. The project that he entered
in the Chicago Tribune Tower competition in 1922 brought him suddenly to
American attention. Although a Gothic design by John Mead Howells (b.
1868) and Raymond Hood (1881-1934) won this competition and was
executed[440] on Michigan Avenue, in 1923-5, Saarinen’s project (which
in any case received a financially generous second premium) had a
tremendous _succès d’estime_, including the accolade of Sullivan
himself. In retrospect the design appears almost as medievalizing as
Howells & Hood’s; but the elegance of the silhouette and the consistency
of the detailing, stylized nearly to the point of absolute originality,
had an enormous contemporary appeal.
By this time Americans were beginning to grow bored with the
increasingly forced adaptation of familiar styles of the past to
skyscraper design. Yet in 1922 they were hardly ready to recognize the
positive qualities of the very plain reticulated tower, elaborated with
certain minor Constructivist touches, that was proposed by Walter
Gropius (b. 1883) and Adolf Meyer (d. 1925) (Plate 158A). Today it is
easy to see how close this came to reviving the Chicago tradition of the
early skyscrapers, a tradition almost forgotten since the First World
War, as also its great importance in the crystallization of a new
architecture in the early twenties (see Chapter 22).
Saarinen, after settling in the United States in 1922, designed various
other skyscrapers along the lines of his Chicago project, none of them
built. However, other architects at once picked up his relatively novel
ideas; and undoubtedly his ideas played an important part in turning
American skyscraper architects away from their long-continued dependence
on the styles of the past. Hood himself was not least affected, as his
black and gold American Radiator Building[441] on West 40th Street in
New York, completed in 1924 even before the Chicago Tribune Tower, soon
made evident. In Detroit, near which city Saarinen settled, Albert
Kahn’s Fisher Building is even more Saarinenesque and quite unrelated to
his contemporary factories.
Called to Bloomfield Hills, Mich., by the Booth publishing family,
Saarinen’s first work in America was the Cranbrook School for Boys, a
very extensive group of buildings begun in 1925. Here an almost Swedish
elegance of craftsmanship and a profusion of semi-traditional detail
were combined in a somewhat whimsical manner rather recalling English
work of forty or fifty years earlier. The girls’ school near by,
however, Kingswood, begun in 1929, is much simpler, with an almost
Wrightian horizontality and crispness of expression.
When American building activity revived in the late thirties Saarinen
continued to develop. From 1937 on his American-trained son Eero
(1911-61), destined later to be one of the leaders of post-war
architecture in the United States, doubtless played some part in
encouraging that bolder structural expression and increasing
sparseness of ornamentation that characterizes his finest late works.
These qualities are already very evident in the Kleinhans Music Hall
in Buffalo, N.Y., of 1938; while the contrast between the
straightforwardness of the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Ill., of
1939, on which the Chicago firm of Perkins, Wheeler & Will
collaborated, and the quaintness and fussiness of the Cranbrook School
is quite startling.
Most distinguished of all the late Saarinen works are his Tabernacle
Church at Columbus, Ind., designed in 1940 and built in 1941-2, and the
similar but smaller Christ Lutheran Church in Minneapolis that was built
in 1949 just before his death (Plate 157B). Cool, clear, and rational,
the distinguished handling of brickwork in these churches, the knowing
control of light, and the careful ordering of space in the interiors
remain exemplary. Their towers are more refined versions of Moser’s on
Sankt Antonius in Basel; yet the massing of their blocky external
elements almost seems to belong to an earlier tradition, that of the
English Victorian Gothic churches of the third quarter of the nineteenth
century, whose reminiscent forms they wholly abjure, and with which
neither of the Saarinens was probably familiar.
Of the first generation of modern architects not even Wright still
survives. As long as he continued in active production the story that
the last four chapters have tried to tell could not be completed but in
1959, with his death, an architectural epoch came finally to an end. It
was a rich epoch and a complex one because the men of that generation
were all great individualists and proud of it. In most countries they
had to fight a vigorous battle for the right to personal expression, a
battle that they carried through to recognition against entrenched
inertia, both professional and lay. Yet in general, the links of this
generation with the later nineteenth century remained close, both in
their dependence on handicraft and in their frequent tendency—least
evident with Wright and Loos—to accept (up to a point) personal
stylization of earlier architectural forms[442] as a substitute for that
basic originality of which all were at their best truly capable.
Not since the late eighteenth century had there been any such wide
international renewal of architectural aspiration. Just as then, a new
generation would profit from the experiments of their elders, taking
much from each, but rejecting much as well, in order to create a
style—or at least a discipline—aiming at universality. By its essential
principles, this discipline could not have the variety and the intensity
of personal expression which gives such colour and life to the work of
the older men. Just as in the early nineteenth century, however, the
architects who succeeded the great originals were far more able than
they to work together. By joining their individual efforts the men of
the next generation changed the character of almost all architectural
production in a way that their elders were quite unable to do. Thus
there came into being an architecture more completely of its own century
than any style-phase of the previous hundred years—up to the Art Nouveau
at least—had ever been wholly of the nineteenth century.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 22
THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER,
MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH
THE project that Gropius and Meyer offered in the competition of 1922
for the Chicago Tribune Tower, unlike Saarinen’s, attracted very little
contemporary attention in America (Plate 158A). Such a stripped
expression of skeleton construction had, up to that time in America,
been seen only in factories and warehouses. Even in Chicago, moreover,
the New York ideal of the shaped tower had quite replaced the
Sullivanian slab as the favourite form for pretentious skyscrapers. Ten
years later, however, when the first International Exhibition of Modern
Architecture was held at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York it was
evident that the kind of architecture represented by Gropius’s project
had become widely accepted in several European countries. By that date
it was even possible to deduce from the executed work of Gropius and his
chief European contemporaries, most of which was shown in the
exhibition, the existence of a new style christened ‘international’[443]
by Alfred Barr, the Museum’s director. Whether the new architecture that
came into being in the twenties in Europe and has since spread
throughout the western world should in fact be considered a style, or
even a style-phase, remains a matter of controversy; but for forty years
now it has been readily distinguishable from what the older generation
of modern architects produced.
In 1922 this new architecture hardly existed except in the form of
projects. Some of the most strikingly novel buildings built in the early
twenties were by Willem Marinus Dudok (b. 1884) in Holland and by Erich
Mendelsohn[444] (1887-1953) in Germany. These no longer belonged to the
realm of the earlier, pre-war modern architecture. Yet the work of
neither was as indicative of the direction the newer architecture was
taking in these formative years as is the Gropius Chicago Tribune
project. Very shortly, however, both Dudok and Mendelsohn drew closer to
the main current of development of this decade, although they continued
to be, in varying degree, individualists rather than whole-hearted
converts to the dominant architectural mode of their generation.
Dudok’s work as City Architect of Hilversum, beginning with the Public
Baths and the Dr H. Bavinck School in 1921, is remarkably simple and
direct (Plate 157A). The abstract crispness and clarity of his
compositions are very different from the whimsically curved surfaces of
de Klerk’s and Kramer’s housing blocks (Plate 156A and B). This rigidly
geometrical organization of the forms reflects his earlier contact with
the group of Dutch abstract artists known as _De Stijl_,[445] notably
the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg and the sculptor
Georges Vantongerloo. But Dudok’s continued emphasis on the fine quality
of his brickwork, the massiveness of his characteristically interlocking
blocks, and a certain basically decorative intention still link his
buildings of the twenties at Hilversum with the ideals of the older
generation. Dudok’s work of this period was certainly novel—and even
modern in a very advanced way for the date—but it remained quite Dutch
in its idiosyncrasies, not ‘international’.
The plasticity of Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, designed in 1919 and
completed in 1921, at Neubabelsberg near Berlin (Plate 153B) seems at
first sight not unrelated to that of Gaudí’s hewn-stone Casa Milá in
Barcelona of 1905-10 (Plate 137A). But it was originally intended to be
executed in poured concrete—for technical reasons it is in fact mostly
of brick rendered with cement—and what one might call the ‘overtones’ of
the forms are more mechanistic than organic. Like Dudok, Mendelsohn had
been influenced by a local school of painting. But the images he
distorted according to the tenets of Expressionism came from the world
of machines not, like Gaudí’s, from the world of plants and animals.
Mendelsohn’s earlier war-time sketches[446] make this origin even more
evident. The extreme point of this sort of abstract sculptural
Expressionism[447] in the twenties is found in the work of no architect
but in the mountainous cult edifice called the Goetheanum at Dornach in
Switzerland, designed by the creator of anthroposophy Rudolf
Steiner[448] and begun in 1923.
Mendelsohn himself rejected this excessively plastic approach to
architecture—an approach to which a reversion can be noted on the part
of Le Corbusier in the last decade, incidentally (Plate 167)—even before
the Einstein Tower was completed. The hat factory that he built at
Luckenwalde in 1920-3 was in the direct line of descent from the
industrial work Behrens and Poelzig had done before the First World War.
This was rightly recognized as one of the signal productions of those
crucial years of the early twenties when the concepts of the new
architecture were first being tentatively realized in France and in
Holland, and very shortly, of course in Germany. Dudok’s buildings at
Hilversum of the early twenties had a very considerable international
influence;[449] Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower did not, at least not on
architecture.[450] However, other work of his done in the next few years
was much admired and also widely emulated, both in Germany and abroad,
by the younger architects.
In spite of the importance in these years of the executed work of Dudok
and of Mendelsohn, several other architects certainly had far more to do
with determining the direction that architecture took from 1922 on. One
was a Swiss then working in Paris, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as
Le Corbusier. At this time more painter than architect, Le Corbusier had
earlier been an assistant of Perret’s and had also worked briefly for
Behrens and even for Josef Hoffmann. Two others were Dutchmen. J.J.P.
Oud had practised in association with Dudok at Leiden in 1912-13, and
from 1917 and 1918 he and G.T. Rietveld were in much closer contact with
the artists of _De Stijl_ than Dudok ever was, being actual members of
that small cohesive group. Two more were Germans, Walter Gropius and
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both of whom had been Behrens’s assistants,
respectively for two and for three years.
Gropius, born in 1883, is the eldest of the five and older than
Mendelsohn also; Le Corbusier, Rietveld, and Mies were born in 1888; Oud
in 1890. Gropius’s career began as early as 1906, when he erected some
plain brick workmen’s houses in Pomerania even before he had finished
his professional training at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. A
leading professor in this school was Theodor Fischer, Bonatz’s master,
in whose office Oud later spent a few months in 1911. After a year of
travel in Spain, Italy, and Holland Gropius entered Behrens’s office in
1908, remaining there till 1910. On leaving Behrens he designed in 1911,
with Adolf Meyer, the Fagus Factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine. He worked
again in partnership with Meyer from after the First World War until the
latter’s death in 1925.
Directly as this Alfeld factory—it made shoe-lasts—follows from
Behrens’s work for the A.E.G., notably the front of the Turbine Factory
of 1909, its architectural expression is much more advanced (Plate
158B). There the great window remained, for all its size, but a window;
here, in the main three-storey block, the slightly projecting metal
chassis rise unbroken over very wide areas bounded by narrow brick
piers, and the storey levels are barely indicated by solid panels
identical in treatment with the glazed sash above and below them. This
arrangement of transparent and opaque elements identically handled may
almost—but not quite—be considered to constitute a ‘curtain-wall’.[451]
The omission of piers at the corners, a structural novelty here,
enormously enhances the effect of transparent volume as opposed to that
of solid mass. In the organization of the various industrial elements of
the complete plant that are associated with the glazed block there is
neither symmetry, such as Behrens was only beginning to relinquish, nor
yet asymmetry of the more casual and picturesque sort; instead a modular
regularity controls the whole composition. This factory has long been
recognized historically as one of the most important[452] buildings of
the twentieth century.
Gropius’s next building, the Hall of Machinery at the Werkbund
Exhibition of 1914 in Cologne, was in some ways less advanced. The main
façades of this were quite symmetrical; and in the articulation of the
brick piers of the ground storey, in the heavily framed central entrance
and, above all, in the projecting slab roofs of the raised corners there
appears to have been some direct influence from the work of Wright,
notably from his hotel of 1909 in Mason City, Iowa. (This was published
in the Wasmuth book of 1910, where Gropius would almost certainly have
seen it.) The glazed front of the principal storey, however, and
especially the rounded glass stair-towers at the ends were not at all
Wrightian; they carried still further the expression of architecture as
transparent volume already evident in the Fagus Factory and approached
very closely indeed the mature curtain-wall concept, although at a
modest scale.
Mies remained with Behrens a year longer than Gropius, after having
spent three earlier years with Bruno Paul[453] (1874-1954), a more
conservative architect whose best work was done as a furniture designer.
His independent career began in a much less spectacular fashion than
that of Gropius. The Perls house of 1911 at Zehlendorf outside Berlin
was as formally symmetrical as Behrens’s houses at Hagen of 1908-9 and
rather more Schinkelesque. The Urbig house of 1914 at Neubabelsberg was
very correctly late-eighteenth-century in its detailing. His most
important work of these years, however, was the project for the H. E. L.
J. Kröller house in The Hague of 1912, intended to contain the large and
famous Kröller-Müller Collection of modern paintings now at Otterlo. Of
this a full-scale wood and canvas model was erected on the actual site,
but it was never built. The formal though asymmetrical organization of
the severe horizontal blocks, the incorporation of voids in the
composition by means of loggias and pilastrades, and the cold austerity
of the refined detailing of the masonry all approach very closely such
things by Schinkel as the Zivilcasino at Potsdam and Schloss Glienecke,
even if the characteristic belvedere tower of the latter is
significantly omitted. In many ways this project was as premonitory of
later modern architecture as the Fagus Factory, although the latter, as
an executed building, has properly received much more notice.[454] Both
Gropius and Mies were involved in the First World War from 1914 to 1918,
so that the next stage in their careers opened only in 1919.
Le Corbusier, Oud, and Rietveld were neutral nationals, but their
production of these early years, although less interrupted by the war,
is mostly not of much intrinsic interest. After two years with Perret in
Paris Le Corbusier had spent six months in Behrens’s office in
1910.[455] His first house,[456] built for his parents at La Chaux de
Fond in Switzerland in 1913, is more closely related to Behrens’s early
houses in its plain white stucco walls and fairly restricted
fenestration than it is to the work of Perret or to Behrens’s A.E.G.
factories of 1909-11. The plan is the most interesting feature: this
provides a central living area out of which other more specialized rooms
open to left and right through wide glazed doors, a scheme that seems to
derive from Perret’s planning, or perhaps that of Loos,[457] rather than
from Wright’s.
Le Corbusier’s next significant work was a war-time project of 1914-15
for low-cost houses called Dom-Ino. These seem to derive not from
anything of Perret’s or Behrens’s but rather directly from the ones that
Tony Garnier had proposed for his ‘Cité Industrielle’ as early as
1901-4,[458] but they are still plainer, probably because of the
concurrent influence of Loos. However, Le Corbusier’s only important
executed building of the War years, the Villa Schwoff of 1916 at La
Chaux de Fond, is closer to Perret in its elaborate formality,[459] its
much simplified academic detail, and its concrete-and-brick
construction. The plan represents an advance over that of his parents’
house, however, for the main living area here is carried up two storeys
and lighted by a tall window-wall towards the garden. Of special
significance also is the arrangement of all the flat roofs as usable
terraces.
The next year, 1917, _De Stijl_ was founded, and soon Oud and Rietveld
as members of the group began to collaborate with the Dutch abstract
painters and sculptors generally known as Neoplasticists.[460] In this
year Oud built two villas by the seashore: Allegonda at Katwijk,
designed in association with the architect M. Kamerlingh Onnes; and De
Vonk at Noordwijkerhout, with interiors decorated by the _De Stijl_
painter and critic Theo van Doesburg. The Dutch had no direct contact
with Behrens, unlike the other three, but Oud was briefly with Fischer
in Munich in 1911, as has been said. However, Oud’s work down to this
time had been essentially Berlagian: moreover, it was Berlage who evoked
his interest in the work of Wright. Nevertheless, there is nothing
Wrightian about these villas, but rather a Loos-like reduction of
architecture to white stucco cubes. The interest of De Vonk is largely
confined to the floors of bold geometric pattern executed in coloured
tile by van Doesburg; Allegonda was much modified by Oud in 1927.
Rietveld was still primarily a furniture designer until 1921.
In 1918 Oud became City Architect of Rotterdam, where his brother
occupied a prominent political position, and began work at once on the
Spangen Housing Estate, Blocks I and II being of that year, Blocks VIII
and IX of the next. The Tuschendijken Estate followed in 1920. These
housing blocks, even more than the seaside villas, are notable for their
negative rather than their positive qualities. All the elaboration of
form and detail of the Amsterdam School was put aside in favour of an
ascetic regularity. But various projects of these years illustrate how
boldly Oud was attempting, partly under the influence of his painter and
sculptor friends, partly under that of Wright, to arrive at new formal
concepts. But Oud was not alone in these years in attempting to
translate the ideals of _De Stijl_ into architecture. Gerrit Rietveld,
in a jewellery shop in Amsterdam built in 1921, was probably the first
fully to realize Neoplasticist concepts in three dimensions and at
architectural scale.[461]
In Paris in the first post-war years Le Corbusier was also closely
involved with painters; indeed, he himself was then as much, or more, a
painter as an architect, and he has never ceased painting since. With
the French painter Amédée Ozenfant he had written a book on art, _Après
le cubisme_, published in Paris in 1918; together they developed a
post-Cubist sort of abstract painting, partly inspired by their friend
Fernand Léger and partly by their interest in the simple shapes of
everyday objects. This they called ‘Purisme’. In support of their ideas
about all the arts they began in 1920[462] to publish a review,
_L’Esprit nouveau_, which continued to appear until 1925, the nursery
years of the new architecture.
In succession to his Dom-Ino system of multiple housing of 1914-15, Le
Corbusier was developing at this time the Troyes system, using poured
concrete, and also the Monol system with a reinforced-concrete skeleton
deriving technically from the innovations of Perret. But the definitive
formulation of his new ideals for architecture, focused as they were at
this time on the sociological problem of the low-cost dwelling, lay a
year or two ahead. Having no official position, he did not need, like
Oud, to produce executed work in quantity before his own concepts
matured. Gropius’s earliest work, back in 1906, had been a low-cost
housing scheme, as has been noted, and in 1911 he built another housing
estate, at Wittenberg-an-der-Elbe. Economical housing was increasingly
recognized as a social service for which architects ought to exploit to
the utmost their technical abilities; from the first it offered a common
challenge to the Dutchman, the Swiss-Parisian, and the German.
Like the Dutch and Le Corbusier, Gropius was involved with painters in
the early post-war years. Appointed in 1919 head of the Art School in
Weimar and also of the Arts and Crafts School there which Van de Velde
had run before the War, he combined them and named the new school the
Bauhaus.[463] Here teachers of painting and sculpture and architecture
worked in closest association with teachers of the crafts in
continuation and extension of the English Arts and Crafts ideals of the
eighties and nineties. Soon this rather Viennese approach, brought to
the Bauhaus by Adolf Itten, with its emphasis on handicraft, was revised
by Gropius so that it might better fit an increasingly industrialized
society.[464] To his faculty Gropius brought such advanced painters as
the German-American Lyonel Feininger in 1919 and in 1922 the Russian
Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee. Yet it was not their refined
art but rather Expressionist painting and sculpture which still
influenced the jagged War Monument that he erected in Weimar in 1921.
His architectural ideals in the early post-war years before 1922,
moreover, seem to have been rather closer to Poelzig’s or Mendelsohn’s
than to those of Le Corbusier, Oud, or Rietveld.
[Illustration:
Figure 44. Le Corbusier: First project for Citrohan house, 1919-20,
perspective
]
As has been several times stated already, certain remarkable projects
best displayed the direction in which several of the architects of the
younger generation were moving, along nearly parallel lines, in these
years preceding the general revival of building production in the mid
twenties. Gropius’s Chicago Tribune project of 1922, in which the line
of his development shifted away from Expressionism, has already been
discussed out of sequence (Plate 158A). But the most significant
projects, earlier than this by several years, were by Mies and by Le
Corbusier. Mies’s early work had not been very adventurous up to the
time when he proposed, in 1919 and in 1920-1, two revolutionary glazed
skyscrapers to be built in Berlin. In both, the floors were to be
cantilevered out from central supporting cores and the curtain-walls
enclosing them merely light metal chassis holding great panes of glass.
However, their plans, respectively jagged and curvilinear, reflected the
strong influence of Expressionism, an influence that disappeared from
Mies’s as from Gropius’s work the very next year, after the Germans
became aware of the architectural implications of Dutch Neoplasticism
and also of Russian Constructivism. Van Doesburg,[465] it should be
noted, visited the Bauhaus in 1922, and for a short but crucial period
both Gropius and Mies seem to have drawn from Dutch sources as much
inspiration as the young Dutch architects. In addition to the obvious
debts of Dudok, Oud, and Rietveld to Neoplasticism, Cornelis van
Eesteren (b. 1897), today City Architect of Amsterdam, was actually
collaborating with van Doesburg in these years on various house
projects.
Less striking than Mies’s skyscrapers, but more buildable, were Le
Corbusier’s successive Citrohan projects for houses of 1919-22 (Plate
160A; Figures 44 and 45). Brought to public attention first in _L’Esprit
nouveau_ and later in his extremely influential book _Vers une
architecture_, published in Paris in 1923 and shortly translated into
English and German, these adumbrated a new aesthetic of architecture
more completely than anything that he or any other architect had yet
proposed on paper, much less built. Modest in size, each Citrohan house
was to consist largely of a two-storey living-room fronted like that of
the La Chaux de Fond house of 1916 with a tall window-wall. This would
occupy most of the façade, and it was here set within a very plain frame
of rendered concrete. The dining area was to be at the rear under a
balcony from which the bedroom would open. Thus the section is similar
to Wright’s Millard house of 1923.
The earlier version of the house was intended to stand on the ground
(Figure 44); in the later scheme the whole cube of the house was to be
lifted up on _pilotis_, that is, free-standing piers of reinforced
concrete constituting, Perret-like, essential parts of the structural
skeleton (Plate 160A; Figure 45). Like Sullivan’s piers at the base of
the Guaranty Building of 1894-5 (Plate #119:pl119) the effect of these
_pilotis_, allowing circumambient space to pass under the enclosed
building above, was to enhance very strongly the look of volume as
opposed to mass. This treatment, possible only with skeleton
construction in ferro-concrete, steel, or wood, soon became one of the
most significant formal devices differentiating the new architecture of
the twenties from what preceded it. The later Citrohan project was thus
the first of the ‘boxes on stilts’ against which Wright continually
protested, even though his own buildings themselves tended more and more
frequently to be lifted off the ground by one means or another.
[Illustration:
Figure 45. Le Corbusier:
Second project for
Citrohan house, 1922,
plans and section
]
If the structural methods employed here by Le Corbusier came from
Perret, the external expression of his lifted box seems rather to derive
from Garnier or Loos, although the rendered surfaces were evidently
intended to be smoother and flatter than those of Loos’s executed houses
(Plate 155A) and the pattern of the windows much more regularly
organized in the wall-plane. With the roof terrace on top surrounded by
parapets continuous with the wall-planes below, even the earlier type is
apprehended as volume rather than mass, especially as there were no deep
window reveals to suggest thickness in the walls such as appear in
Garnier’s projects and Loos’s executed work. By keeping the openings
absolutely in the wall-plane, as Hoffmann had done on the Stoclet house,
the very exact geometrical discipline of the design of the façades could
be maintained even when seen in perspective. As a result, however, the
underlying structure was expressed only in the _pilotis_ of the later
project. Yet the wide expanse of the window-wall at the front and the
characteristic shape of the other windows, oblongs extended
horizontally,[466] would obviously not have been practical but for the
long spans made possible by the ferro-concrete skeleton.
There was in the Citrohan projects no very close similarity to Le
Corbusier’s Purist pictures of these years other than the crisply
geometrical ordering of the very flat façades and the untextured
smoothness of their surfaces. However, the extreme mechanical precision
and the more-than-Loosian rejection of the inessential clearly reflected
an aesthetic parallel to that adumbrated in his paintings. Certainly the
effect was—as Wright and others recurrently complained—likely to prove
more pictorial than architectonic when such things were executed. There
was no ornament such as Oud had, in some sense, obtained at Katwijk from
his painter-collaborator van Doesburg; indeed, there was hardly any
detail at all, at least as architectural detail was understood by Perret
and Behrens. In this respect also Le Corbusier’s new architecture was
closest to the personal style of Loos.
Articles in _L’Esprit nouveau_ and later the illustrations in _Vers une
architecture_ revealed the sources of Le Corbusier’s extra-architectural
inspiration and made such inspiration available to others who cared to
look about them with his particular vision and his clearly defined
ideals for the modern world. Works of engineering, American
grain-elevators and the like;[467] the forms of things that move—ocean
liners, motor cars and aeroplanes:[468] such things provided some of the
visual prototypes for Le Corbusier’s new aesthetic of architecture.[469]
But there was also the social motive of developing a method of building
houses to satisfy the needs of all classes. Moreover, Le Corbusier was
already—to use a term introduced later—as much a ‘planner’ as an
architect. In 1922 he prepared a project for a city of three million
inhabitants. This proposed at the core a geometrically ordered group of
widely spaced cruciform skyscrapers and, round the core, ranges of
blocks of flats of moderate height, not arranged along narrow streets,
but broadly distributed over a park-like terrain.
Le Corbusier had many years to wait before the world caught up with
his ideas as a planner as these were promulgated in his book
_Urbanisme_, published in Paris in 1925. But as an architect[470] he
was shortly building in and near Paris a series of houses, most of
them of considerably greater size than his Citrohan project. Moreover,
in 1927, at the Werkbund Exhibition in Stuttgart, he finally brought
that to execution also, although some minor modifications were
incorporated.[471] Le Corbusier’s very first post-war houses—one at
Vaucresson, S.-et-O., near Paris, which has been remodelled quite
beyond recognition, and the house for Ozenfant at 53 Avenue Reille in
the Montrouge district of Paris, both designed in 1922 and built in
1923—were naturally not very adequate expressions of his ideals[472]
(Figure 46). But, beginning with the contiguous La Roche and Jeanneret
houses, designed originally in 1922 also and executed with many
modifications and improvements in 1924 in the Square du Dr Blanche in
the Auteuil district of Paris, and culminating in the Savoye house at
Poissy, S.-et-O., of 1929-30 (Plate 159), the new aesthetic[473] of
the Citrohan project was exploited with increasing virtuosity. Le
Corbusier developed much further the spatial unity of his plans,
usually keeping inside a defining rectangle but articulating that in
various ways: at the Savoye house, for example, the main terrace is
within the same raised box as the enclosed rooms (Figure 47). The
treatment of the exteriors likewise grew simpler and more open.
Horizontal windows were grouped and extended to form continuous
ribbons all the way across façades, and roofs at various levels, being
completely flat, served as outdoor living-spaces. This is best seen at
Les Terrasses (Plate 160B), the house built in 1927 for Michael Stein
at 17 Rue du Professeur Pauchet in Garches, S.-et-O.
[Illustration:
Figure 46. Le Corbusier:
Vaucresson, S.-et-O., house, 1923, plans
]
Different colours were often used on different walls to emphasize them
as individual planes, particularly in interiors. Curved elements, such
as were introduced earlier in the plan of the Vaucresson house (Figure
46), appeared at the Savoye house in screens that rose around the upper
roof-terrace (Plate 159). Moreover, the geometrical discipline of his
_tracés régulateurs_ based on the Golden Section was used with
ever-increasing consistency.[474] At the same time the use of different
colours and of curves produced, particularly at the Savoye house, a
lyricism closely related to that of Purist paintings of the early
twenties. This is curious, since in his paintings dating from the late
twenties Le Corbusier was moving away from Purism, under the influence
of Fernand Léger (and perhaps even of Surrealism), towards a looser and
more connotative mode.
[Illustration:
Figure 47. Le Corbusier: Poissy, S.-et-O., Savoye house, 1929-30, plan
]
Le Corbusier was not the only architect of the new generation building
houses in Paris in these years. Beside his, those by the Belgian Robert
Mallet-Stevens (b. 1886)[475] are at once cruder and more superficial in
their design. In the Rue Mallet-Stevens near Le Corbusier’s La Roche and
Jeanneret houses, where he built several houses close together in
1926-7, he provided a somewhat depressing glimpse of the future, a
glimpse which has often proved, alas, to be only too accurate a
generation later. The Cité Seurat, on the other side of Paris near Le
Corbusier’s Ozenfant house, offered an even larger group of new houses
of the same period, several of them of much higher quality. The Chana
Orloff house there is by Perret; but most of the others are by André
Lurçat[476] (b. 1892), an architect of much more integrity than
Mallet-Stevens, if without Le Corbusier’s genius. The best of Lurçat’s
houses, where they have been adequately maintained, possess certain
common-sense virtues that Le Corbusier’s lack; in the late twenties and
early thirties they provided paradigms at least as popular as Le
Corbusier’s. His school of 1931 in Villejuif, Seine, has a special
importance also, as it was in the field of school-building[477] that the
new architecture first became widely accepted later in the thirties in
several countries. Le Corbusier’s activity was much greater than
Lurçat’s, however, and in one major project at least he extended the
scope of the new architecture far beyond the realm of the modest private
dwellings that he and Lurçat were so largely restricted to building in
the twenties.
In 1925, in the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exposition des
Arts Décoratifs, Le Corbusier had shown a dwelling unit of the Citrohan
type arranged as a flat with a large terrace at one side, following an
unexecuted project of 1922. The actual housing estate that he built at
Pessac outside Bordeaux in 1925-6 was less successful, although by this
time many young architects concerned with housing in other countries
were finding inspiration in his work and perhaps even more in his ideas.
But it was in an entirely different realm that Le Corbusier had, like
Saarinen in the Chicago Tribune competition, a failure which was
nonetheless a tremendous _succès d’estime_. Le Corbusier’s project for
the Palace of the League of Nations[478] came very close to winning the
competition of 1927. Moreover, the totally undistinguished scheme
jointly produced by the elderly Frenchman P.-H. Nénot (1853-1934), who
had built the new Sorbonne in Paris in 1884-9, and various other
architects from several different countries eventually executed in
Geneva never received the attention or the flattery of world-wide
emulation and imitation which Le Corbusier’s project did. This led, for
example, to his selection to design the Centrosoyus in Moscow in 1928.
Begun the following year, this was finally finished in 1936, but with
most inadequate supervision. However, the Communist ‘party line’[479]
turned sharply against modern architecture in the early thirties, and no
more projects by Western European architects were invited after the
Palace of the Soviets competition held in 1931.
If Le Corbusier in the twenties was, by force of circumstances, almost
more completely restricted to house-building than Wright had been in the
preceding decades, Gropius’s career in Germany developed very
differently. In 1925 he was invited by the city of Dessau to come there
from Weimar and re-establish the Bauhaus; in that year and the next he
had a chance to build a very large and complex structure to house the
school as well as his own and several other professors’ houses. The
houses were not notable additions to the new canon, although they were
soon as much imitated as Le Corbusier’s and Lurçat’s. However, the
Bauhaus building itself was the first major example of the new
architecture to be executed, illustrating on a large scale most of its
possibilities and principal themes, none of them by this date altogether
novel.
The most striking element of the Bauhaus is the studio block, a
four-storeyed glass box (Plate 161A). This carried to its logical limit
the implications of the near-curtain-wall of the Fagus Factory, quite as
Mies had already proposed for his two glass skyscraper projects, but
without their Expressionist planning. The bridge to the left of this
block exploits the possibilities of great spans in ferro-concrete
construction. Throughout that section and the block on the left
ribbon-windows longer than Le Corbusier’s at Les Terrasses open up the
walls just as Mies had already proposed to do in a notable project of
1922 for a ferro-concrete office building. A lower refectory wing links
the glazed block with an apartment tower at the rear; in that the
grouping of the horizontal windows with the many little projecting
balconies clearly expresses the fact that this portion of the building
is made up of small repeated dwelling units.
The organization of this very complex structure is asymmetrical but
carefully studied (Figure 48). Where Le Corbusier had thus far composed
most of his houses inside a single ‘box’, Gropius here combined four or
more. In each he emphasized visually the fact that the surface was but a
thin shell enclosing an internal volume, but he varied the treatment
according to the internal use of each portion of the building. At the
same time regularity of rhythm, and often identity of measure in the
parts, ordered the whole without recourse to symmetry or to the
imposition of any such special system of proportion as Le Corbusier was
enthusiastically developing.
Gropius did not again, until late in life in America, have such another
architectural opportunity. In the following years, down to his departure
from Germany with the rise of Hitler, his production was almost entirely
in the field of low-cost housing. There he had the large-scale
responsibilities largely denied to Le Corbusier until after the Second
World War, but common enough by then in Germany.[480] First, in 1926-8,
came the Törten Estate at Dessau consisting of terrace houses of
concrete with smoothly rendered walls and horizontal windows. These were
sound and economical but somewhat dull in design, the very reverse of Le
Corbusier’s at Pessac. At the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927, moreover,
Gropius’s free-standing houses did not rival Le Corbusier’s in quality
of design, despite their considerable technical importance as early
examples of something approaching total prefabrication.
[Illustration:
Figure 48. Walter Gropius: Dessau, Bauhaus, 1925-6, plans
]
Gropius’s most finished works of the twenties were all at Dessau.
Besides the Bauhaus itself, there is a small block of flats rising at
the end of a row of one-storey shops to form the centre of the Törten
Estate of 1928. But even more notable is the Dessau City Employment
Office, begun the year before. Here Gropius rejected stucco
rendering,[481] hitherto almost as much the sign manual of the new
architecture in Germany as in France, and surfaced his walls with brick
(Plate 161B). The horizontal strips of window in the office wing,
carefully related to the narrow bands of wall between and elegantly
subdivided by light metal sash, are balanced with bold assurance against
the tall vertical light of the stair tower at one end. Whether Gropius
had learned from the Neoplasticists or the Constructivists, by this time
he had become a master of abstract architectural composition in his own
right.
Leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, Gropius next undertook a large housing
estate, Dammerstock, at Karlsruhe. Here he combined terrace houses,
somewhat ampler in size and less mechanically designed than those at
Törten, with ranges of six-storey blocks of flats in the form of long,
rigidly orientated slabs. Following this came the Siemensstadt Estate of
1930 outside Berlin (Plate 162A). This is the classic example of housing
in tall, thin slabs, prototype of innumerable similar estates to be
built throughout the western world before and after the Second World
War. In Germany, however, where the form was first adumbrated, their
production ceased in 1933 with the onset of the Hitler regime—it has
since been revived very actively, particularly by Ernst May at Hamburg
and by architects of several countries in the Interbau exhibition of
1957 in Berlin.
[Illustration:
Figure 49. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Project for brick country house,
1922, plan
]
Mies in the twenties was not nearly so prolific as Gropius, nor was he
so widely influential. His Wolf house of 1926 at Guben and the Lange and
Esters houses at Krefeld of 1926 and 1928, side by side in the
Wilhelmshofallee, despite their fine dark brickwork[482] and the careful
placing of the large horizontal windows, did not redeem the promise of
an earlier project which he had made in 1922 for a country house; that
was comparable in significance to his skyscraper schemes of the
preceding years. Its plan seemed to represent the extension upward of a
complex, but very rigid, geometrical pattern like those seen in
Mondriaan’s and van Doesburg’s paintings of this period (Figure 49).
This sort of planning allowed a continuous flow of space in and around
internal partitioning elements and out through wall-high glass areas to
the surrounding terraces, themselves defined by the extension of the
solid brick walls of the house. This openness more than rivalled, and
was probably influenced by, the spatial flow in the Prairie Houses of
Wright. Neoplasticist influence continued strong in Mies’s work as late
as his Liebknecht-Luxemburg Monument in Berlin of 1926. This was an
abstract rectangular block, ingeniously composed of various brick
surfaces arranged in different planes. (It was, of course, destroyed
under Hitler.)
The flats that Mies built in the Afrikanische Strasse in Berlin in
1924-5 were more in line with Gropius’s and Le Corbusier’s contemporary
work than his private houses. Moreover, his block of flats (Plate 162B)
at the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 on the Weissenhof at Stuttgart, of
which he was the general director, with its lines of broad window-bands
broken occasionally by vertical stair-windows, had an elasticity of
planning and a clarity and subtlety of expression much superior to
Gropius’s taller and longer slabs at Dammerstock and Siemensstadt.
In 1929 came Mies’s masterpiece, one of the few buildings by which the
twentieth century might wish to be measured against the great ages of
the past (Plate 165A). The German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition,
although built of permanent materials—steel, glass, marble, and
travertine—was, like most exhibition buildings, only temporary. But few
structures have come to be so widely known after their demolition, or so
intensely admired through reproductions, except perhaps Paxton’s Crystal
Palace. Set on a raised travertine base almost like a Greek stylobate,
in which lies an oblong reflecting pool, the space within the pavilion
was defined by no bounding walls at all but solely by the rectangle of
its thin roof-slab. This was supported, almost immaterially, on a few
regularly spaced metal members of delicate cruciform section sheathed in
chromium. The covered area was subdivided, rather in the manner of the
project of 1922 for a brick country house, by tall plate-glass panels
carried in light metal chassis, some transparent, some opaque, and also
by screens of highly polished marble standing apart from the metal
supports. The disposition of these screens is asymmetrical but
exquisitely ordered; yet it has none of that Neoplasticist complexity
evident in the placing of the partitioning elements in the project of
1922. As a result, the articulated space of the pavilion has a classic
serenity quite unlike the more dynamically flowing interiors of Wright’s
houses. At the Berlin Building Exhibition in 1931 Mies repeated the
Barcelona Pavilion in less sumptuous materials, making only slight
changes in the plan so that it might provide a model for a house.
[Illustration:
Figure 50. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Brno, Tugendhat house, 1930, plan
]
More than a little of the special quality of space-distribution in this
exhibit Mies had been able to achieve already in the Tugendhat house of
1930 at Brno in Czechoslovakia. There also the screens that subdivide
the unified living-space are quite separate from the delicate cruciform
metal supports (Figure 50). One of them, made of macassar ebony,
partially encloses the dining-area and is semicircular in plan, thus
notably enriching the general spatial effect. Externally this house is
less remarkable. At the upper, or entrance, level towards the street it
is quite closed in and even rather forbidding; but at the rear towards
the garden there is a continuous, room-high glass wall framed by stucco
bands above and below. At one end an open terrace is included within the
rectangle of the plan, and from this a broad flight of stone stairs
descends to the ground. The contrast with the somewhat similar rear of
Le Corbusier’s Les Terrasses expresses well the considerable range of
different effects possible within the tight limits of the new
architecture even in this, its most rigidly doctrinaire period of the
late twenties.
Within the twenties, both in France and in Germany, the new architecture
received its full formulation, first in projects and shortly afterwards
in executed work. At the same time Le Corbusier and Gropius provided in
articles and in books the arguments in its defence.[483] Both are
extremely articulate men, the one with the emotional intensity of a poet
or a preacher, the other with the cool logic of a scientist or a
professor. They soon found excited readers and later devoted followers
all over the western world as their writings were exported,
translated,[484] and paraphrased; but the significant activity of this
period was by no means only French and German. Despite the continuing
vitality of the Amsterdam School through the mid twenties, the new Dutch
school associated with Rotterdam rose rapidly in national and
international significance. Oud,[485] indeed, brought the new
architecture to maturity in Holland in precisely the same years as Le
Corbusier and their German contemporaries; Rietveld and several others
made signal contributions also, in Rietveld’s case perhaps equal in
importance to Oud’s.
The Oud Mathenesse housing estate at Rotterdam, which Oud undertook in
1922, is rather different from Spangen and Tuschendijken. At first sight
it may appear more conservative, since it consists of small terrace
houses with visible tiled roofs rather than tall blocks of flats. But
rendered and painted walls replaced the brick of the earlier Rotterdam
work, recalling the Loos-like treatment of his seaside villas as also
the rather Wrightian projects he had designed in the intervening years.
Moreover, the shapes and subdivisions of the windows were very carefully
considered, so that the general effect is quite similar to the most
advanced projects of Le Corbusier and of Mies designed in this same
year. The influence of the _De Stijl_ artists may not be very apparent
in the façades of the houses and shops; but in the temporary building
superintendent’s office that Oud built here in 1923 cubical wooden
elements painted in primary colours produced a composition quite like a
Neoplasticist painting developed in three dimensions. It should be
noted, however, that this was not, like Dudok’s work of the period, at
all related to the very complex Neoplasticist sculpture of Vantongerloo.
Oud’s façade of 1925 for the Café de Unie in Rotterdam, being
two-dimensional, was even more like a Mondrian painting raised to
architectural scale.
It has already been mentioned that in 1923 van Doesburg was engaged in
collaboration with van Eesteren on some remarkable studies, half
abstract paintings, half architectural isometrics. Rietveld, in the
Schroeder house of 1924 in Utrecht (Plate 164B), boldly carried such a
hypothetical Neoplasticist architecture of discrete planes and
structural lines into the world of reality even more completely than in
his earlier shop in Amsterdam.
But by this time, Oud felt he had learned what Neoplasticism had to
offer him. He was in any case now personally closer to Mondrian than to
van Doesburg, and Mondrian had left Holland for Paris. In Oud’s first
really mature work, which remains also his masterpiece, two terraces
with shops at their ends built at the Hook of Holland in 1926-7 but
designed a year or two earlier, all overt emulation of contemporary
painting disappeared, except for the restriction of colour to
white-painted rendering with only small touches of the primaries on some
of the minor elements of wood and metal (Plate 163B). The serenity of
these smooth façades with their long regular ranges of horizontal
windows, the extreme refinement of the detailing of the fences and the
doorways, and, above all, the lyricism of the rounded shops, their walls
all of glass under a cantilevered slab bent down at the ends, were
unequalled by anything Le Corbusier or Gropius or Mies had yet built.
Reputedly it was the influence of Van de Velde that led Oud to introduce
curves here, much to the disgust of the Neoplasticists.
Oud’s terrace-houses in the 1927 exhibition at Stuttgart were equally
exemplary in their perfection of finish but slightly less interesting in
their over-all design. Those by a still younger Dutch architect, Mart
Stam (b. 1899), were perhaps superior. Then there followed Oud’s very
large Kiefhoek housing project at Rotterdam which was built in 1928-30.
Here the windows of the upper storey of each terrace became a continuous
band, but something of the earlier refinement was lost just as in
Gropius’s Siemensstadt blocks of the same period.
At Kiefhoek Oud was called on to provide a church as well as housing.
Its vices as well as its virtues epitomize very well the state of the
new architecture at the end of the decade (Plate 164A). Considered as
elements in an abstract composition, the handling of the subordinate
features of the Kiefhoek church is masterly, refining and—as it
were—domesticating various adjuncts of an almost industrial order such
as had earlier provided a good part of the varied visual interest of
Gropius’s Fagus Factory. But the main auditorium block is so box-like
that it holds its place among the rows of houses only by its size,
offering no expression whatsoever of its special purpose—it could as
easily be a garage. A far more notable exemplar of the new architecture,
still about the finest twentieth-century building in Holland, is the van
Nelle Factory outside Rotterdam built in 1927-8 by the firm of J. A.
Brinkman (1902-49) and L. C. van der Vlugt (b. 1894) but probably
designed by Stam (Plate 163A). The Dutch firm of B. Bijvoet (b. 1889)
and Johannes Duiker (1890-1935) should also be mentioned for their
admirable work of the twenties, starting with several Wrightian houses
of 1924 at Kijkduin, but soon quite as advanced as Oud’s or Rietveld’s.
The conditions of the twenties—or more precisely the particular
conditions under which the new architects had to work and, to a large
extent, even seemed satisfied to work—restricted their scope rather
considerably. In France the usual clients, often American rather than
French, sought houses that were _avant-garde_ and related ideologically
to the painting of the Cubists and Post-Cubists. Towards the utilitarian
field of low-cost housing the new architects everywhere felt a special
responsibility; in Germany and Holland they readily found major
opportunities for official employment at such work. Their intense
concern with the aesthetic potentialities of engineering gave them a
special sympathy for industrial building, but major opportunities such
as the van Nelle Factory were very rare. Gropius’s Bauhaus, a large and
complex structure serving a cultural purpose, and the Barcelona
Pavilion, an edifice with almost no other purpose than to be beautiful,
were important exceptions in a range of production characterized by a
surprising international consistency of type as well as of character.
Yet the hands of the various individual architects are, in fact, never
difficult to distinguish and, from this time onwards, the paths of the
four early leaders began definitely to diverge. It was chiefly the work
of late-comers, of whom there were in the twenties large numbers only in
Germany, that tended towards monotony and anonymity. Not since the early
years of the nineteenth century, when Romantic Classicism at the hands
of a second generation reached a comparable clarity of stylistic
definition, had there been such a rigid and humbly accepted
architectural discipline. However, certain men, such as Mendelsohn and
Dudok, retained in their practice of the new architecture strong traces
of earlier idiosyncrasies. Much of their work lacks therefore the purity
and the assured mastery of the four initiators. But Mendelsohn’s
Schocken Department Stores, built in several German cities in the late
twenties—at Nuremberg and Stuttgart in 1926-7, at Chemnitz in 1928—and
his Petersdorf Store at Breslau in 1927 are certainly superior in
interest and in vitality to the new city houses and suburban villas in
France; not to speak of the housing estates in Germany that were being
produced in such considerable quantity by the end of the decade by
architects who were literalistic adherents of the new architecture. The
work of such designers showed all the naive enthusiasm, the subjection
to discipline, and the doctrinaire characteristics of the activity of
new converts in any field.
But when, in his Columbus Haus of 1929-31 in Berlin, Mendelsohn finally
accepted a comparable discipline he was able to retain most of his
earlier vitality. Here he produced a really paradigmatic commercial
building—almost a small skyscraper—such as none of the four leaders ever
had the opportunity of carrying to execution in the twenties. Much the
same can be said for a considerably later ‘baby skyscraper’, Dudok’s
Erasmus Huis of 1939-40 in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam. This is still,
after the van Nelle Factory, one of the best buildings in Rotterdam,
despite all the post-war reconstruction there (see Chapter 25).
As the new architecture spread to other countries around 1930 it was
naturally the lowest common denominator of its potentialities that
became most widely evident. However, at just this point an international
depression supervened; the building boom, with which the rise of the new
architecture had been at best but coincidentally associated, soon ground
to a standstill. In Germany in the early thirties, moreover, as also in
Russia and considerably later and less rigidly in Italy, an
authoritarian regime proscribed the new architecture. Leaders like
Gropius, Mies, and Mendelsohn left the country and the new architecture
was in abeyance there until after Hitler’s fall.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 23
LATER WORK OF THE LEADERS OF THE SECOND GENERATION
HISTORIANS, whether of politics or the arts, should ideally stand at
some distance from their subjects thanks to remoteness in time; in lieu
of that, remoteness in space sometimes serves the same purpose. However,
this historian has now reached the point at which he entered the scene;
he must write, as statesmen who write history are often forced to do, of
events concerning which he has first-hand knowledge—and hence, alas,
first-hand prejudices. Architects, the real actors in architectural
history, often write as well as build; since Vitruvius there have been
many whose fame depends as much on their books as on their buildings,
not least several of the men with whom Part Three of this book has
dealt. But those who write about architecture as historians and critics
without being active builders, who merely explain, select, and
illustrate the significant work of their own day or even of the
past—particularly the immediate past—are to some extent minor actors on
the scene also. They cannot, therefore, be merely neutral observers,
reporting without _parti pris_ the ideas and the achievements of others,
however hard they may try to maintain their objectivity.
To have written the only monograph on Wright to appear in French, to
have provided the first account in English of the new architecture, to
have published a book on the work of Oud in the late twenties, modest as
these contributions were, are all actions indicating an early commitment
on the part of this author. The preparation in 1931 with Philip Johnson
of the first International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, held at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, in which Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud,
and Mies were signalized as the leaders of the new architecture, and the
publication—also with Philip Johnson—of the book called _The
International Style_[486] at that time were even more definite and
controversial acts of participation in the dialectic of architectural
development in this century.
If it seems necessary to mention these publications here and not merely
to refer to them in the Notes or list them in the Bibliography, it is in
no spirit of boastfulness but rather of apology. From this point on the
ideal objectivity of the historian, attempting disinterestedly to piece
the past together from a study of its extant monuments and from relevant
contemporary documents, is inevitably coloured, if not cancelled out, by
the subjectivity of the critic writing of events he knew at first hand.
Concerning them, of course, his present opinions have no more real
historical validity than those he held and published nearer the time
when the events occurred. With this proviso the canvas may now be
somewhat broadened.
By the early thirties the new architecture was by no means restricted to
France, Germany, and Holland, the countries where it had originated.
Yet, with the possible exception of Alvar Aalto (b. 1898) in Finland, no
other leader of the calibre of the early four had appeared up to that
time. The building of 1928-9 at Turku for the newspaper _Turun Sanomat_
was Aalto’s first mature work to be completed. In this the plastic
handling of the concrete piers[487] in the interior introduced a new and
personal note of architectural expression in a frankly industrial
setting. His Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Paimio of 1929-33 rivalled the
Bauhaus in size, if not perhaps in complexity, and was almost the
first[488] major demonstration of the special applicability of the new
architecture to hospitals. The City Library at Viipuri, designed as
early as 1927 but not finished until 1935, was a more original example
of the new architecture. In particular, the lecture hall there, with its
acoustic ceiling of irregularly wavy section made up of strips of wood,
was strikingly novel.
In the United States the Lovell house in Los Angeles opened in 1929 the
American career of Richard J. Neutra (b. 1892), an Austrian who had
worked briefly with Wright. In this house, with its cantilevers, its
broad areas of glass, and its volumetric composition, Neutra showed the
completeness with which he had already rejected the broad Wrightian road
and accepted the more restricted aspirations of the newer architecture
of Europe. Never, perhaps, have Wright’s ideals and those of the next
generation appeared so sharply opposed as at just this time, moreover.
But Neutra’s mature work began only considerably later than this.
In 1930-2 the tallest of all skyscrapers, the Empire State Building by
Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, was rising in New York; this was a shaped tower
in the local tradition although devoid of reminiscent stylistic detail.
In these same years, however, a well-established ‘traditional’
architect, George Howe (1886-1954),[489] in association with a Swiss,
William E. Lescaze (b. 1896), who had been a pupil of Karl Moser,
returned to the Sullivanian slab in designing the Philadelphia Savings
Fund Society Building (Plate #169:pl169). Moreover, they treated their
slab along the lines that the leading European exponents of the new
architecture had adumbrated in the previous ten years. It would be a
score of years before other skyscrapers of such significant and
distinguished design were built in American cities (see Chapter 25).
In Sweden E. G. Asplund (1885-1940), whose architecture had hitherto
been of a ‘Neo-Neo-Classic’ order, extremely crisp and refined but
definitely reminiscent,[490] turned to the new architecture of Le
Corbusier and Gropius just before he completed the Central Library of
Stockholm (Plate 176A), a building first projected in 1921 but not
opened until 1928 (see Chapter 24). For the Stockholm Exhibition of
1930, of which he had entire charge, Asplund was soon designing an
extensive and elegantly varied range of pavilions that exploited to the
full the possibilities of the new architecture. In Denmark Kay Fisker
(b. 1893) underwent a somewhat less drastic conversion at much the same
time.
These years also saw the beginning of the English career of Berthold
Lubetkin[491] (b. 1901), a Russian who had settled in England in 1930
after working for some time in France. His early Gorilla House at the
Regent’s Park Zoo in London was soon outshone by the smaller, but much
more remarkable, Penguin Pool there of 1933-5, which is almost a piece
of Constructivist sculpture (Plate 172B). In 1933-5 also, the tall block
of middle-class flats, Highpoint I at Highgate outside London, was
erected by the Tecton group, of which Lubetkin was the leading spirit.
With its fine hill-top site overlooking Hampstead Heath, this cruciform
tower rivalled Le Corbusier’s Clarté block in Geneva of 1930-2 in
interest and in quality. Almost equally impressive, and like Highpoint
hardly rivalled by comparable work in London since, is the Peter Jones
Department Store in Sloane Square, designed in 1935 by William
Crabtree.[492] Already in 1933 Mendelsohn had settled in England,
practising there for a few years in partnership with Serge Chermayeff
(b. 1900) before moving on to Israel in 1936. From 1934 to 1937 Gropius
was in England working with E. Maxwell Fry (b. 1899); Marcel Breuer (b.
1902), a Hungarian pupil of Gropius from the Bauhaus, was also in
England working with F. R. S. Yorke (1906-62). By the mid thirties
Connell, Ward & Lucas,[493] Wells Coates (1895-1958), and Frederick
Gibberd (b. 1908) were also well started on their careers.[494]
In Italy, where the projects of an architect associated with
Futurism,[495] Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916), before his death in the
First World War had offered a remarkable premonition of the new
architecture of the twenties, a fresh talent at least comparable in
interest and individuality to Lubetkin’s appeared on the scene in these
years. The Casa del Fascio at Como of 1932-6 by Giuseppe Terragni
(1904-43) is almost as original as Aalto’s Viipuri Library but very
different (Plate 172A). In its use of fine marbles and in its innate
classicism it recalls Mies, yet it is as Mediterranean in spirit as his
work is Northern. Unfortunately, like Sant’Elia before him, Terragni was
killed in the Second World War that followed within a few years after
the start of his career. However, the firm of Luigi Figini (b. 1903) and
Gino Pollini (b. 1903), who continue to be leaders of Italian modern
architecture, also made their first mark at this time with the ‘Artist’s
House’ that they showed at the Fifth Triennale in Milan in 1933. This
was similarly calm and Latin in its handling of the ‘international’
vocabulary of form.
The Florence railway station, built in 1934-6 by Giovanni Michelucci (b.
1891) and five associated architects, also deserves mention. Michelucci
is not to be compared with Terragni or Figini & Pollini, but his station
was stylistically the most advanced in the world when it was built.
Moreover, like the Casa del Fascio in Como, it offers notable evidence
of the support the Fascist regime was still giving to _architettura
razionale_ at a time when both in Germany and in Russia other
authoritarian regimes were denouncing the International Style. The
Termini Station in Rome (Plate 183B) was begun even earlier from the
designs of Angiolo Mazzoni. It owes its distinguished reputation as the
finest station of the twentieth century, however, to the new project of
Eugenio Montuori (b. 1907) and his associates, prepared in 1947 and
finally carried to effective completion in 1951 (see Chapter 25).
Yet for all the increasingly wide spread of the new architecture by the
mid thirties, Le Corbusier and two Germans retained their international
position of leadership despite economic depression in France and
Hitlerian exile from Germany. If the amount of their executed work was
much reduced—in the case of Mies for several years to nil—the
geographical range of their activities was now much extended. Today, for
example, Le Corbusier’s work is to be found from La Plata in Argentina
to Chandigarh in India; he was also a consultant on two of the largest
and most striking buildings in the New World built just before and just
after the Second World War, the Ministry of Education and Public Health
in Rio (Plate 171) and the United Nations Secretariat[496] in New York.
Gropius and Mies, settling in America in the late thirties, became
figures of crucial importance in the reform of American architectural
education[497] as well as being increasingly productive as architects
since the war. At Harvard University[498] and at the Illinois Institute
of Technology, respectively, they set a pace for several American
architects who later became leading educators, such as Howe at Yale and
W. W. Wurster (b. 1895) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
the University of California. Mendelsohn, still very much of an
individualist, but with a notable international reputation based on what
he had built in England and in Israel as well as on his earlier work of
the twenties in Germany, practised in America from after the war down to
his death.
This extension of the field of activity and the direct influence of the
European leaders further emphasized the universal character of the new
architecture. Today American architects, such as the firm of Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill,[499] working as far from home as Turkey, or Edward D.
Stone (b. 1902), building on three continents, provide almost the most
characteristic later examples of what—and in their cases most critics
would agree—is not improperly called the International Style. The
American Embassies in Copenhagen and in Stockholm, and the flats for
embassy personnel at Neuilly and at Boulogne outside Paris, all by
Rapson[500] & Van de Gracht, are perhaps the most distinguished examples
of American work abroad of the 1950s.
But there would have been no El Panamá Hotel in Panama (1950) by Stone,
no Istanbul Hilton Hotel (1954) by the Skidmore firm, and no such
foreign building programme by the United States Government as was
responsible for the executed embassies by Rapson & Van de Gracht of the
early fifties and the ones since built by Eero Saarinen in London and
Oslo, by Gropius and TAC in Athens, by Stone in New Delhi, and by Breuer
in The Hague but for the pioneering of the Europeans, nor did that
pioneering cease in the thirties. Only in Oud’s case, because of a
serious indisposition that removed him from practice for many years
after 1930, was the _œuvre_ effectively complete with the twenties; and
even he is now quite active again. In the case of both Le Corbusier and
Mies, if not of Gropius, their largest commissions came only after the
Second World War. Their influence in the 1950s was still as great as
around 1930, in Mies’s case considerably greater. The mid twentieth
century had come to accept stylistic continuity in a way that the
nineteenth century, was never able to do once the tradition of Romantic
Classicism finally wore out. The often adventurous late work of these
men, now become elder statesmen of modern architecture, fortunately
counter-balanced to some extent those more rigid interpretations of the
discipline they founded, interpretations that recurrently threatened
after the late twenties to become academic and frozen in one country or
another.
Many of the more characteristic demands of Le Corbusier’s aesthetic
canon, as it had been announced in his projects of the early twenties
and adumbrated in the succession of houses that led up to the Savoye
house of 1929-30—including restrictions docilely accepted almost
everywhere by advanced architects in the late twenties—were already
ignored in the buildings he himself designed in the early thirties. The
house that he built for Hélène de Mandrot at Le Pradet in Provence in
193O-1 is raised on no _pilotis_ but sits firmly on a terrace; and its
walls, where solid, are of rough, uncoursed rubble. Quiet and
rectangular, with no lyrically curved elements and little painted
colour, this house accepts the surrounding landscape as Wright’s had
always done. Le Corbusier seemed here almost to be avowing a respect for
local materials and humble village craftsmanship such as is associated
with Voysey and his English contemporaries of a generation earlier that
would certainly have been anathema to him in the twenties. On the other
hand, the penthouse that he built in 1931 for Carlos de Beistegui on top
of a block of flats on the Champs Élysées in Paris was all of plate
glass and white marble. This had something of the glittering elegance of
Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion of two years earlier, where the polished
marbles, once so brilliantly exploited by Loos, were first brought back
after a decade of restriction to ascetic and impermanent surfaces of
painted stucco.
The Salvation Army Building which Le Corbusier erected in 1931-2 in the
Rue Cantagrel in Paris is more in line with the canon of the twenties.
Unfortunately the original curtain-wall is now cut up by projecting
sun-breaks added in a post-war refurbishing by Le Corbusier’s former
partner Pierre Jeanneret. The Maison Clarté block of flats of 1930-2 in
Geneva is almost as completely glass-walled.
It was most notably the Swiss Hostel at the Cité Universitaire in Paris,
designed in 1930 and built in 1931-2, which introduced various quite new
elements of plan and design that Le Corbusier would develop much further
after the Second World War (Plate 165B). The _pilotis_ he used in the
twenties were thin and round, rather like Perret’s columns, though
without their facets and capitals; but here a double row of heavy piers
of a complex moulded section carries a dormitory block that is boldly
cantilevered out from them both front and back. The rubble masonry of
the Mandrot house was used here once more for a tall unbroken wall of
irregularly curved plan at the rear of the building; the textured and
tonal surface of this wall and its effect of solidity contrasts both
with the exposed concrete of the structural elements and with the smooth
areas of thin stone plaquage on the upper walls. Curves in Le
Corbusier’s earlier work were almost always confined within a bounding
rectangle and never made of massive materials; yet they lost none of
their elegance in being handled in this bolder and more organic way.
This is closely related to his later paintings, of which the mural in
the common room here provides a major example.
The international depression closed in even more completely on France in
the early thirties than it did elsewhere, and there was no subsequent
revival of building activity such as other countries experienced in the
years preceding the Second World War. Le Corbusier’s activities were
therefore more and more confined to projects, most of them for
commissions outside France. However, a small block of flats, very
similar to the Maison Clarté in Geneva, was built at 24 Avenue Nungesser
et Coli on the western edge of Paris in 1933. The most interesting
portion of this is the architect’s own penthouse on top; there, like
another Soane, he experimented at small scale with a variety of
vault-topped spaces.
In a modest house at 49 Avenue du Chesnay in Vaucresson of 1935 there
are no more curves in plan than in the Mandrot house, but segmental
concrete vaults cover the rectangular bays of which the plan is made up.
Moreover, as if to underline Le Corbusier’s return towards nature after
his earlier devotion to the abstract and the mechanistic, grass grows
over their crowns to provide insulation. The exposed frame of the
concrete structure, where not filled with glass brick, has panels of
coursed rubble.
Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties often included new ideas that
others exploited even before he was able to do so himself in executed
work. For example, the Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio de
Janeiro, on which he was a consultant only, designed in 1937 and
completed in 1942 by Lúcio Costa (b. 1902), Oscar Niemeyer (b. 1907),
and a group of others, the great building which opened so brilliantly
the story of the new architecture in Brazil (Plate 171), included on the
west front the projecting sun-breaks he had first proposed in 1933 for
certain tall buildings intended to be erected in Algiers. Such
sun-breaks soon became characteristic of mid-century architecture in all
countries where the sun’s heat and glare offered a major problem—in Asia
and Africa as much as in South America. By this device the all-glass
wall, favourite large-scale theme of the new architecture since Mies’s
early skyscraper projects, received a much-needed functional correction.
As often before, a real (or supposed) practical need encouraged the
satisfaction of overt or covert aesthetic aspirations; for sun-breaks
very much enhance the three-dimensional interest of large façades,
substituting for the slick planar effects characteristic of the twenties
a more articulated sort of surface treatment related to, but independent
of, the expression of skeleton structure. Sun-breaks even came to be
used where they are hardly needed, quite as has been the case with
various other clichés of modern architecture.
Since the war three major works of Le Corbusier, in the estimation of
many critics his masterpieces, have carried much further the sculptural
tendencies of his architecture of the thirties. One of these, the block
of flats called the Unité d’Habitation,[501] far out the Boulevard
Michelet in Marseilles, which was first projected in 1946 and finally
completed in 1952, has various other points of interest, however. The
Unité realizes on a large scale Le Corbusier’s ideas for the
mass-dwelling, providing a single tall slab large enough to house a
complete community and including, half-way up, a storey intended to be
entirely occupied by shops, as well as other communal facilities on the
roof (Plate #166:pl166). An ingenious section allows two-storey
living-rooms for all the flats and also permits the use of a skip-stop
lift system (Figure 51). The framework in front of the walls provides
sun protection for the tall living-room windows and also shallow
balconies for each flat both front and back.
Like the Swiss Hostel, the Unité is carried on central supports arranged
in a double row. These are much more massively sculptural than the
earlier ones in Paris, and almost anthropomorphically expressive of
weight-bearing. All the poured concrete surfaces are left rough as they
came from the forms, and the prefabricated members of the outer
sun-break system have an exposed pebble aggregate. Everything is bold
and masculine, even coarse, indicating a complete turnabout in Le
Corbusier’s understanding of the essential ‘nature’—itself a rather
Wrightian concept—of concrete. On the roof an abstract landscape of
sculptural forms plays counterpoint to the superb backdrop of mountains.
One cannot help remembering the roof of Gaudí’s Casa Milá in Barcelona
(Plate 137A); there are even some glazed tiles set in the concrete to
provide notes of ‘permanent polychrome’. Yet the window in the
entrance-hall at the base of the slab is quite Neoplasticist in the
pattern of its subdivisions and the use of coloured glass; while painted
colour of the boldest sort, by no means restricted to the primaries, is
used on the sides of the sun-breaks, though not on any of the outer
surfaces. Thus has Le Corbusier’s later architecture been enriched by a
sort of eclecticism quite remote from his Purist aesthetic of the
twenties.
[Illustration:
Figure 51. Le Corbusier: Marseilles, Unité d’Habitation, 1946-52,
section of three storeys
]
At Chandigarh in India, where Le Corbusier had the general
responsibility for planning the entire new capital of the State of
Punjab and of building the principal public monuments, only one or two
were by the mid fifties finished; the rest of the city was the work of
other architects, principally Pierre Jeanneret and the English firm of
Maxwell Fry and his wife Jane Drew. The High Courts of Justice,[502]
built by Le Corbusier in 1952-6, are even more sculptural than the Unité
at Marseilles. A continuous umbrella-like shell-vault of concrete rises
high above the roofs of the court-rooms to allow the free passage of
air. Supporting this are great rounded piers that merge into the concave
surfaces over them, almost like the structural elements of the Casa
Milá, but here of monumental scale. On the west side deep box-crates,
with brilliant painted colours on their soffits like those on the
sun-breaks of the Unité, keep the sun off the glazed walls of the
court-rooms and provide that three-dimensional play first exploited on
the Ministry in Rio.
The long slab of the Secretariat at Chandigarh, also of 1952-6, with its
very varied pattern of sun-breaks, is less novel than the High Courts;
but other work of the mid fifties at Ahmedabad should not be ignored
(see Chapter 25). However, Le Corbusier’s most extraordinary late
building is in France, not India, and therefore considerably more
accessible. Architects and laymen alike have been consistently impressed
by the intense emotionalism of his church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at
Ronchamp, Hte-Saône,[503] built in 1950-5. Whether this church will ever
have as much influence as the Unité has already had remains debatable
because of its very special character. But it certainly made even more
evident than the High Courts the fact that Le Corbusier in the fifties
was moving in almost the opposite direction from that in which he led in
the twenties.
In an exaggerated phrase Le Corbusier described his early houses as
_machines à habiter_; but Notre-Dame-du-Haut is more like an enormous
piece of sculpture than a ‘machine for praying-in’ (Plate 167). He who
once drove architecture towards the mechanistic, the precise, and the
volumetric, now provides the exemplar of a new mode so plastic as almost
to be naturalistic in the way of Gaudí’s blocks of flats of fifty years
earlier. The walls and roof are rough, indeed almost brutal, in finish,
and so massive and solid that the interior of the church at certain
times of the day seems positively ill-lit by the tiny deep-sunk windows
that irregularly penetrate the side walls. In place of an aesthetic
expression emulating the impersonal results of engineers’ calculations,
there is here a freehand quality comparable to the spontaneity of the
sculptor. Moreover, where the overtones of his characteristic buildings
of the twenties were wholly of the present, this arouses deep
prehistoric atavisms—and quite intentionally. Whether the High Courts at
Chandigarh and the church at Ronchamp evidence a deep split in modern
architecture or represent rather a major turning point is still far from
clear. Only a few have yet succeeded in following with any distinction
the line of development they appear to open (see Chapter 25 and
Epilogue).
The later work of the German leaders arouses no such difficult critical
problems as does Le Corbusier’s; yet it has also ranged sometimes in
directions not altogether to be expected from their best-known work of
the twenties. Their careers, moreover, suffered a harsher break because
of the political tribulations of their homeland than Le Corbusier
suffered from the economic tribulations of France. In 1930 Mies became
Director of the Bauhaus, remaining until it was closed by Hitler in
1933. Although he won a competition for the Reichsbank in Berlin as late
as that year, he was allowed to do no work under the Nazis, and so he
settled in the United States in 1938 after a preliminary visit the
previous year.
As has been noted, Mendelsohn and Gropius, on leaving Germany in 1933,
settled first in England, and both did significant work there—if not
especially significant for their own careers, certainly so for the early
stage of modern architecture in England. With his English partner
Maxwell Fry, Gropius was responsible in 1935-7 for the Impington Village
College in Cambridgeshire; this set a new pace for school design in
England in the post-war years, perhaps the best in the world.
Mendelsohn, with Chermayeff, built in 1934-5 the De La Warr Pavilion at
Bexhill on the Sussex coast. In the main this is a rather conventional
example of the new architecture; but it has a semicircular glazed
stair-tower that recalls the more lyrical quality of his best earlier
work such as the Schocken department stores.
From England Mendelsohn moved on to Israel, where a large Government
Hospital by him at Haifa and the Medical Centre of the Hadassah
University in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus, both of 1936-8, show a most
skilful adaptation of the international European canons to a hotter
climate and a different cultural tradition, somewhat as is the case with
the Ministry at Rio. Only with the onset of the war in 1941 did
Mendelsohn settle in America. There his Maimonides Hospital in San
Francisco of 1946-50 and synagogues and Jewish community centres in
Cleveland (1946-52), St Louis (1946-50), Grand Rapids (1948-52), and St
Paul (1950-4) continued to illustrate his very personal command of the
commonly accepted elements of the new architecture, with the inclusion
here and there of anomalous features that seem to belong to a much
earlier period of his career.
Gropius proceeded directly from England to America in 1937, having been
called by Dean Joseph Hudnut of the Graduate School of Design to be
Professor of Architecture at Harvard University. He became Chairman of
the Architecture Department the following year, which position he
retained until 1953. As has already been said, his major contribution to
architecture in America has been as an educator. However, he built, in
partnership with Breuer, whom he had brought to Harvard, several houses,
including his own at Lincoln, Mass., and also a housing development at
New Kensington, Penna., in the years 1938-41. These are, on the whole,
no more successful than much of his work of the late twenties in
Germany, despite an intelligent effort to adapt a European mode to
American building methods, particularly as regards the use of wood, both
structurally and for sheathing. This turning away, on Gropius’s part,
from ferro-concrete and rendered surfaces is parallel to Le Corbusier’s
somewhat earlier reversion to the use of local and traditional
materials. The houses that Breuer designed after he parted from Gropius
have considerably more intrinsic interest; as is perhaps natural in the
work of a younger man, they show a more integral adjustment to the
characteristic living habits and building methods of the New World. Two
large-scale commissions, for the Unesco Building[504] in Paris (now
nearly finished) and for the Bijenkorf Store in Rotterdam (1955-7), not
to speak of the U.S. Embassy at The Hague, have brought him back to the
European scene, but as an American rather than a Hungarian or German
architect.
Gropius’s principal American work was all done after the war. It
included by the mid fifties two schools at Attleborough, Mass., one of
1948 and one of 1954, and the Graduate Centre of Harvard University in
Cambridge, Mass., of 1949-50. These were all three designed—as also the
already-mentioned Athens Embassy, which is not yet completed—in
association with the firm known as TAC (The Architects’ Collaborative),
consisting of a group of younger architects, all but one educated at
Yale University, formed in 1946. In the double quadrangle of buildings
at Harvard, forming in itself almost a complete small college, the
architecture of the twenties lived on with little change. Light-coloured
brick replaced stucco for the walls, however, and there is a certain
rather inhibited use of curves in plan and of angular relationships in
detail reflecting ideas that had entered the new architecture only in
the thirties. The Attleborough schools are less pretentious and
altogether more successful, improving upon Gropius and Fry’s Impington
College of the thirties in England in various ways. After his retirement
as professor, Gropius and TAC became increasingly active, and he
continued to present his well-known architectural doctrines in lectures,
articles, and books.[505]
Coming to the United States a year later than Gropius, Mies also found
his greatest opportunity there, and almost at once. In 1939 he was
commissioned to design the entire new group of buildings for the
Illinois Institute of Technology, which was moving to the south side of
Chicago. In this scheme, which is of urbanistic scale and extent, a
classic, indeed an almost academic, order prevails throughout (Figure
52). The buildings that he was able to execute, two during the war in
1942-4, many more after 1945, have a comparably classic serenity. But
they also express with relentless logic the character of their
predominantly steel-skeleton construction. In them Mies almost revived
architectural detail by the precision and the elaboration of his
handling of the elements of metal structure. As at Gropius’s Graduate
Centre, light-coloured brick replaces stucco for the solid wall panels.
The severe patterns of the black-painted metalwork are organized with
something of the purity of Mondrian’s canvases of the twenties yet with
a dominating symmetry. This is true also of the interior planning of the
individual buildings. However, the latest, Crown Hall, housing the
architectural school, completed in 1956, is unsubdivided on the
principal floor, and thus represents the most extreme statement of his
later ideals, both structurally and in its planning.
[Illustration:
Figure 52. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe:
Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1939-41, general plan
]
Mies also built houses and several tall blocks of flats in and near
Chicago and, with Philip Johnson (b. 1906), a New York skyscraper at 375
Park Avenue for the Seagram Company in 1956-8 (Plate 192). His
completely glazed Farnsworth house near Plano, Ill., designed in 1946
and built in 1950,[506] is a cage of white-painted welded steel raised
above the river valley in which it is set and walled partly with great
sheets of plate glass, partly with metal screening. The floor is a
continuous plane of travertine from which broad travertine steps descend
to an open travertine terrace. Planned about a central core in which are
placed the fireplace, the bathrooms, and the heater, the interior space
is completely unified, the different functional areas being separated
only by cupboards that do not rise to the ceiling (Figure 53). Even more
than Crown Hall, this house represents the purest and most extreme
statement of aesthetic purpose in one particular direction that the new
architecture has yet produced—a direction which is, of course, in total
opposition to the increasingly complex plastic effects sought in these
same years by Le Corbusier. It is, nevertheless, quite as remote from
the stucco boxes characteristic of the twenties and even more remote
from Mies’s own brick houses of that period.
A similarly ascetic luxury is also evident in Mies’s blocks of flats at
845-860 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago of 1949-51 (Plate 170). There he
seemed to have arrived, not imitatively but by force of parallel logic,
at something very close to the skyscrapers that Sullivan designed in the
nineties (Plate 119). Mies’s structural piers, carried down to the
ground as free-standing elements just as they are below the Farnsworth
house, give the dominant bay rhythm, their structural steelwork being
sheathed here first in protective concrete and then in black-painted
metal. Between the piers continuous I-shaped beams along the mullion
lines stiffen the wall screens which are otherwise entirely of glass
held in bright aluminium frames; they also provide a subsidiary rhythm,
quite as Sullivan’s mullions sometimes did in the eighties and nineties.
[Illustration:
Figure 53. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Plano, Ill., Dr Edith Farnsworth
House, 1950, plan
]
Identical in shape, rectangular slabs both, the two blocks were set
close together and at right angles to one another. This placing gave a
minimum of overlap as regards the lake view and a minimum of overlook as
regards the privacy of the apartments. The relationship also creates
from these very simple shapes a notable variety of effects in
perspective. The visual interest is enhanced especially by the fact that
the projecting I-beams, when seen at a sharp angle, give the illusion
that one wall of each block is solid; the other wall, being seen head on
or nearly so, appears completely open between the structural piers and
the mullions. Four more nearly identical apartment blocks[507] have
risen in Chicago from Mies’s designs since, the Esplanade Apartments
beside the first two towers, and two farther to the north, not to speak
of those in Detroit and Newark.
After his arrival in America Mies was not merely for fifteen years the
architect of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s buildings, he soon
became head of its Department of Architecture also, a post he retained
until he retired in 1955. Less articulate than Gropius and occupying a
less important academic post, Mies’s influence specifically as an
educator has been considerably less. On the other hand, the general
influence of his work in America in the late forties and fifties has
been far greater. The ‘Miesian’ became almost a sub-school of the new
architecture not only in the United States but in several other
countries: to Mies not only younger men but also many established
practitioners owed the specific direction of much of their post-war work
(see Chapter 25).
Just before the Second World War broke out Oud, in 1938, recovered his
health sufficiently to undertake a large commission, the Shell Building
in The Hague, completed in the course of the next four years. In Holland
there had been in the thirties a strong reaction against the new
architecture led by M. J. Granpré-Molière (b. 1883) and the graduates of
his school at Delft. Granpré-Molière urged a return, if not to the
outright ‘traditional’, at least to a semi-traditionalism that was not
without some similarity to what Hitler was sponsoring in Germany. In
response to this challenge Oud set out to show how the new architecture,
still considered by many in Holland to be too stark and mechanistic,
could be humanized. To return from stucco to brick, in this case a thin
glazed white brick such as Dudok was using at this same time with great
success on his quite conventionally ‘International Style’ Erasmus Huis
office building in the Coolsingel in Rotterdam,[508] was merely to
emulate the rejection of stucco in this decade by the French and German
leaders in favour of more permanent, if also more traditional, walling
materials, such as marble, rubble, brick, and even wood. But Oud’s
attempt to revive ornament and the elaborate symmetry and near-academic
complications of his over-all design of the Shell Building had little
appeal outside Holland. In the small Esveha office building of 1952 near
the railway station in Rotterdam and the much larger Vrijzinnige
Christelijk Lyceum at 131 Goudsbloemlaan in The Hague of 1953-6 Oud
returned to something much closer to the norms of the new architecture
elsewhere. But the day of his great international influence has long
been over despite the belated prestige which is still his in
Holland.[509]
Like several of the preceding chapters dealing with the architects of
the first modern generation, this has brought some aspects of our story
down nearly to the present. In so doing, the specifically modern
architecture of the twentieth century has been largely accounted for;
the picture will be rounded out later by offering a synoptic view of the
international scene at the mid century (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue).
But first it is necessary to discuss the architecture that was _not_
modern which was produced in the first four decades of this century.
Historicism,[510] that is reminiscence of past styles, endemic
throughout the nineteenth century, lived on. It is considered polite to
call such architecture ‘traditional’, over-favourably weighted rather
than accurate though the term may be. Clearly a traditional architecture
that produced a ‘Gothic’ skyscraper like Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth
Building (Plate 178) or vast ‘Classical’ railway stations like the two
in New York (Plate 177B) was not unduly restricted by revivalistic
canons. Clearly also this sort of architecture cannot be ignored
historically, since it produced some of the largest, most prominent, and
most carefully studied buildings and groups of buildings of the first
third of this century. Moreover, in many countries traditionalism gave
way to modern design only after the Second World War; while the
authoritarian regimes of Europe in varying degree returned to its
sanctions in the thirties, just as it was generally losing ground
elsewhere in the western world.
There were few if any great leaders among twentieth-century traditional
architects; certainly hardly more than one or two approached the calibre
or the individual significance of the men whose work Part Three of this
book has largely dealt with up to this point. But a conspectus can be
provided, with typical examples of the best work in several countries,
and some indication offered of the character of the production in other
countries where the individual architects were less colourful, the
monuments less notable, and the general level of quality less high.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 24
ARCHITECTURE CALLED TRADITIONAL
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
THROUGH at least the first three decades of the twentieth century most
architects of the western world would have scorned the appellation
‘modern’ or, if they accepted it, would have defined the term very
differently from the way it has been understood in the immediately
preceding chapters. For twentieth-century architecture that continued
the historicism[511] of the nineteenth century the usual name in English
is ‘traditional’. This term reflects a fond presumption that such
architecture derives its sanctions from the traditions of the further
past, although in fact its only real tradition is that of the preceding
hundred years. Whatever one calls it, this traditional architecture
includes the majority of buildings designed before 1930 in most
countries of the western world and a considerable, if very rapidly
decreasing, proportion of those erected since.
Statements of this sort are not very relevant when they concern the
arts. In the case of every revolutionary change in architecture the same
situation has obtained while the old slowly gave way to the new. Since
the modern revolution may well be of the scale of the Renaissance, the
student of architectural history should recall that from the early
crystallization of the new Italian mode—and at first it was no more than
a minor regional mode—in Florence around 1420 to the general acceptance
of a new international style throughout Europe some two hundred years
passed. The Baroque, in succeeding the Renaissance, came to
international dominion only by gradual stages and eventually died out,
not all at once around 1750, but gradually over the next half century.
Despite prolific production and the quite remarkable things that were
occasionally achieved when historicism came to uneasy terms with new
technical means—as had already happened not infrequently in the
nineteenth century—the traditional architecture of the twentieth century
is primarily an instance of survival; and cultural survivals are among
the most difficult problems with which history has to deal. Their
sluggish life, sunk in inertia and conservatism, is very different from
the vitality of new developments. Yet survivals are tough and resilient,
tending always to maintain themselves by their very uneventfulness.
Static, not to say smug, assurance is their greatest strength; their
greatest danger is that boredom resulting from excessive familiarity
which they eventually induce.
Survivals do not generally rouse the interest of posterity. The Gothic
of fifteenth-century Italy or that of seventeenth-century England has
not received from historians the attention of the rising forces in the
architecture of those periods. Somewhat unfairly, late and anachronistic
achievements, if admired at all, are likely to be credited to the
previous age. In America, for example, Grecian plantation houses built
as late as the 1850s are frequently called ‘Southern Colonial’. We are
too well aware today, however, that the work of the traditional
architects of the last fifty or sixty years is of this century, and not
of the previous one, to permit that kind of confusion. The historian
_must_ attempt to give some sort of account of things like the Stockholm
City Hall (Plate 174A and B) and the Woolworth Building (Plate 178). But
the story is not an easy one to tell because it seemed—still at least in
the mid twentieth century—to lack plot. The rise of modern architecture,
on the other hand, offers material for a dramatic narrative, for it
follows the pattern of the ‘success-story’, just as does that of the
Gothic in twelfth-century France or the beginnings of the Renaissance in
fifteenth-century Italy.
In some areas of the world a meaningful succession of stages can be
discerned in the late period of historicism. Because of the differential
lags in various parts of the western world, however, it is difficult to
find a scheme of organization that is at all generally applicable. All
the same, those lags usually mean that certain countries were going
through phases of architectural development in the early twentieth
century that more advanced areas had left behind before 1900. Since
those phases have been discussed in Part Two, it is unnecessary to
detail here the peripheral and anachronistic ‘repeats’ of familiar late
nineteenth-century episodes in the present century.
Without attempting to round out the picture with the citation of
multiple examples, one may at this point suggest some of the aspects,
parallel and successive, of twentieth-century historicism. There was,
for example, a characteristic continuation of that reaction against the
boldness and coarseness of the architecture of the third quarter of the
nineteenth century which is recognizable in most countries, and
particularly perhaps in America and England from the eighties; hence the
general critical emphasis of the period on ‘restraint’ and on the
‘tasteful’. Academically designed buildings of the 1920s were often
still intended to realize aspirations that had been novel some forty
years earlier; rarely, however, did they do so with a vitality
comparable to that of later nineteenth-century work. So also Gothic of
the early twentieth century produced by such American architects as
Ralph Adams Cram or James Gamble Rogers hardly differs in its standards
from what the English Bodley initiated around 1870.
We have already seen in much of the work of Perret and Behrens a special
kind of continuation of the Classical tradition in the twentieth
century. This shades down through various degrees and kinds of
simplification as represented in the personal modes of such architects
as Asplund in Sweden or Marcello Piacentini in Italy to the maintenance
of a Classical revivalism as absolute as that of 1800 in white marble
temples like Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial in Washington (Plate 180).
The medievalizing currents of the nineteenth century link up with many
aspects of the advanced architecture of the early twentieth century.
This aftermath, often vital and creative in the fields of theory and of
craftsmanship with architects as different as the English Voysey and the
Spanish Gaudí, likewise shades down through various levels of decreasing
stylization to a literal revivalism that is still in the Victorian
tradition, but more in line with that tradition’s early or Puginian
phase or its latest Bodleian phase than with the Butterfieldian phase of
the 1850s and 1860s.
Both on the Classical and on the Gothic side of the fence, however,
there have been a few twentieth-century traditional architects whose
personal stylization of borrowed forms was almost as extreme as that of
the High Victorians. In their work, intense individualism and limited
respect for the canons of ‘taste’ and ‘restraint’ offer real points of
contact with the brashness of such modern architects of the first
generation as Wright and de Klerk. This is in contrast to the other line
of traditionalist integrity in the handling of materials that was
solidly based on Gothic Revival standards of revived hand-craftsmanship,
one of the truly positive values contributed to the next generation by
such architects as Richardson in America and Webb in England. The two
lines could also in some milieus combine to produce, particularly in
Scandinavia, some of the most impressive works of the early twentieth
century. Such an outline, blurred and overlapping in its rubrics, can do
little more than suggest some of the principal later channels of the
architectural currents which were carried over from the nineteenth
century into the early decades of the twentieth century.
There is still hardly a country in the world where buildings of
traditional design are not being erected; but whatever vitality
twentieth-century traditional architecture retained as late as the
second and even the third decade of the century had departed by the
fourth. Post-mortems on traditional architecture have been many—and
often premature. The causes of death are still disputable, but the fact
of dissolution is by now generally accepted. Yet the last years of
traditional architecture were not completely senile. However much the
youthful vitality of the newer architecture attracts sympathy and
attention, as late as 1930 its impact on building production was in most
countries a very limited one. It is fortunate, therefore, that not all
the traditional architecture of the years 1900-30 need be dismissed with
scorn, even if the standards by which it must be judged remain those of
the nineteenth rather than of the twentieth century.
The nineteenth century ended, as we have seen earlier, with a surge of
innovation (see Chapters 14, 15, and 16). Looking forward from the late
nineties, a prophet might well have assumed that a new architecture
would surely arise just beyond the turn of the century; yet within a few
years a general reaction set in which took somewhat different forms in
various parts of the western world. As has already been noted, there
were almost everywhere strong links with the earlier Academic Reaction
of the eighties against the bold and brash ‘high styles’ of the mid
century; indeed, it may be said that the traditional architecture of the
new century was in general both a continuance and a resurgence of that
reaction. In most European countries, although not in England and
America, the academic architecture of the late nineteenth century had
represented little more than a resurgence or a continuance of certain
aspects of decadent Romantic Classicism. Seeking a loftier pedigree,
however, conservative architects often claimed that they were returning
to traditions that had existed down to less than a century before their
own day, quite as various reformers from Pugin to Voysey claimed they
were renewing a link with one or another earlier period.
Relatively valid as this might still have been for certain aspects of
the Queen Anne in England and the Colonial Revival in America, or for
the parallel return to eighteenth-century modes in various Continental
countries towards the end of the century, this theory had already run
into serious difficulties long before 1900. A church might hope to be
plausibly Gothic, but a railway station could only be Victorian Gothic;
a skyscraper could not even be as Gothic as that. Moreover, the tide of
eclecticism that had been rising since the mid eighteenth century was
not turned back; for both the reaction of the 1880s and the later
reaction of the early 1900s represented chiefly a rejection of earlier
nineteenth-century innovations, especially of novel sorts of detail,
rather than positive programmes of exclusive revival.
It is possible, at least for individual countries, to make statements
concerning what occurred in the field of traditional design between the
1890s and the 1930s that are not wholly without significance. Of Holland
it may be said, negatively, that no reaction of consequence towards the
traditional occurred before the mid thirties. In Germany the boundary
line between what was traditional and what was modern was always fairly
vague; yet evidence of a return to stylistic reminiscence after the
earliest years of the century is to be found even in the work of leaders
of the first generation of modern architects such as Olbrich and Behrens
(see Chapter 20). Farther to the North in Denmark and Sweden, the
Copenhagen Town Hall of 1892-1902 (Plate 173A) by Martin Nyrop
(1849-1923) and the contemporary post offices and fire stations in
Stockholm and Malmö by Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1940) resemble Berlage’s
Exchange in Amsterdam in their haunting parallelism to the Richardsonian
of the eighties in America and even, to some extent, to the Shavian of
the seventies in England. It is true that Absalons Gaard, built in
1901-2 by Vilhelm Fischer (1868-1914) in the square in front of Nyrop’s
Town Hall, and even more notably the nearby Palace Hotel of 1907-10 by
Anton Rosen (1859-1928), developed the freer implications of Nyrop’s
manner with an almost Dutch verve. But more characteristically there
followed in Scandinavia from about 1900, as elsewhere rather earlier, a
programme of tasteful emulation of local versions of the Baroque and
then, from shortly after 1910 in Denmark and a decade later in Sweden,
an even more programmatic revival of Romantic Classicism.
In the Scandinavian development from 1890 to 1930 there is therefore a
sort of ‘plot’ or recognizable sequence of phases despite their
overlappings. What has been called ‘National Romanticism’, rooted in the
cultural climate of the eighties, had a briefer span in Denmark than in
Sweden. Nyrop’s Town Hall, begun in 1892, although in fact hardly more
traditional than Berlage’s Amsterdam Exchange, introduced the mode, and
the Stockholm Town Hall (Plate 174A and B) by Ragnar Östberg
(1866-1945), completed thirty years later, brought it to a close. But
its dominion in Denmark was never exclusive. Although the Custom House
of 1897 at Aarhus by Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) with its picturesque high
roofs and corner towers belongs to the mode, his Aarhus Theatre of
1898-1900 and his City Library there of 1898-1902 do not. Externally,
the theatre is in the main of Early Renaissance design, although with
considerable eclecticism in the detail; on the other hand, the library
is even less traditional than Nyrop’s Town Hall. Both, moreover, have
extremely rich plaster decoration inside that may not improperly be
called Art Nouveau.
Wahlman’s Engelbrekt Church of 1904-14 in Stockholm, mentioned earlier
as an exception to the general dominance of tradition in Scandinavia in
these decades, and the Grundvig Church in Copenhagen (Plate 175B) by P.
W. Jensen Klint (1853-1930), originally designed in 1913 and completed
finally in 1926, are both closely related to the earlier National
Romanticism of the eighties and nineties. By the time the latter was
designed, however, this phase had for some years been superseded by a
sort of Neo-Baroque still also very nationalistic in its choice of
precedents and very romantic in their handling. Sometimes, however, this
mode approached eighteenth-century revivalism of the sort that
flourished in England and America. For example, the Marselisberg Slot,
built by Kampmann for the Danish Crown Prince at Aarhus in 1899-1902, is
the precise Danish equivalent of the best Neo-Georgian houses of the
period in England and America.
Monuments such as the Masthugg Church (Plate 175A) of 1910-14 in
Göteborg by Sigfrid Ericson (b. 1874) or the Högalid Church of 1916-23
in Stockholm by Ivar Tengbom (b. 1878) are hardly recognizable as
Neo-Baroque to non-Swedish eyes, for they are composed with a sense of
visual drama quite equal to Wahlman’s and very stylized in all their
detailing. Ericson’s, in particular, has much in common with the
American Shingle Style, although that was rarely used for churches and
never for big ones of stone or brick construction.
In much secular Swedish work in the Neo-Baroque mode, such as the very
typical ASEA Building of 1916-19 in Västeros by Erik Hahr (1869-1944),
bold asymmetrical massing and onion-domed towers reflect the romanticism
of the churches and also recall early stages of the revived Queen Anne
in England in the seventies. Danish taste in the second decade of the
century was much more severe than Swedish, as in fact it had always
been, and the characteristic low-cost housing blocks in Copenhagen of
this period, such as those of 1914 in the Amagertorv by Hansen & Hygom,
are, so to say, only Neo-Baroque round the edges.
For the 1920s, however, the most significant phase was the third, that
is the return to Romantic Classicism. This was initiated in Denmark by
Carl Petersen (1874-1923) in his Faaborg Museum designed in 1912, and
reached its climax immediately after the First World War. In Sweden the
parallel phase began a bit later. By the time such men as Fisker in
Denmark, Asplund in Sweden, and Aalto in Finland became ‘converts’ to
the International Style in the late twenties, Scandinavian
traditionalism had become almost as purged of stylistic detail as the
architecture of Tony Garnier, or even that of Adolf Loos, had been for a
generation.
On the whole the Danes and the Swedes produced the most lively and
distinguished traditional architecture of the early decades of the
century. Medievalizing churches in Scandinavia, such as the
just-mentioned Grundvig Church in Copenhagen, where Jensen Klint
followed Baltic modes that seemed strange and even Expressionist to
foreign eyes, or Tengbom’s Högalid Church in Stockholm, superbly sited
and actually much more Baroque than Gothic in its detail, make the
respectable Neo-Perpendicular and Neo-Georgian exercises of contemporary
Anglo-Saxon architects look timid and unimaginative. In both cases it is
the stylization of proportion—the tremendous verticality—that makes them
striking and full of a sort of vitality, at once nervous and lusty,
which is comparable to that of the best High Victorian Gothic churches.
The finest medievalizing work is undoubtedly Östberg’s Stockholm Town
Hall of 1909-23.[512] This is an exceedingly eclectic combination of
elements adapted from various periods both of the Swedish and the
general European past. Superbly set at the water’s edge, it is
sumptuously decorated inside and out with products of craftsmanship that
are of a very high order of competence (Plate 174A and B). Despite his
eclecticism, Östberg succeeded in imposing on all his disparate elements
a high degree of personal stylization at the same time that he exploited
the situation with marvellous dramatic effect. There is also a witty
allusiveness suggesting the art of the theatre and the exotic fantasies
of the late eighteenth century. The Stockholm Town Hall provides a sort
of pageant-setting for the ceremonial life of the city, recalling the
splendours of town-hall architecture of many epochs of the past, even
though it lacks the straightforwardness and the integrity of Nyrop’s
earlier Town Hall in Copenhagen.
The outside world had hardly had time to apprehend such new Scandinavian
building in the years following the First World War before it became
evident that architecture in these countries, hitherto on the whole in
stylistic retard of developments elsewhere by almost a generation, had
taken a surprisingly sharp turn. Petersen’s museum at Faaborg followed
the local Romantic Classical models of C. F. Hansen far more literally
than any of the contemporary admirers of Schinkel in Germany were doing.
Brought to completion in 1916 during the First World War, it attracted
very little foreign attention at the time it was built. But the Police
Headquarters in Copenhagen by Kampmann, erected after the war in
1918-22, with its great colonnaded circular court, and the Øregaard
School (Plate 176B) at 32 Gersonsvej in the Gentofte Kommune north of
Copenhagen by Edward Thomsen (b. 1884) and G. B. Hagen (1873-1941) that
followed in 1922-4 were at once noticed abroad. Both indeed are notable
for their grandeur and for their simplicity, the latter realizing old
Romantic Classical ideals with extraordinary success, the former coming
closer to the academic work of McKim, Mead & White in America.
Still simpler, and not without a similar sort of understated grandeur
surprising in such work, were the Danish low-cost housing blocks erected
in the early twenties in succession to those of Hansen & Hygom. Those by
Povl Baumann (b. 1878) in the Hans Tavsengade or the enormous
Hornsbaekhus of 1923 by Kay Fisker (b. 1893), all in Copenhagen, are
especially fine. The extreme precision, the elegant craftsmanship in
brick, and the ascetic detailing of these blocks of flats, rivalling the
contemporary ones by de Klerk and by Kramer in Amsterdam in quality but
subscribing to a quite opposed aesthetic, are found also in many Danish
private houses of the twenties built by Gotfred Tvede (1863-1947) and
other architects both in the city and in the country.
Although Carl Westmann (1866-1936) in the Röhss Museum of Handicraft at
Göteborg and Erik Lallerstedt (1864-1955) in the University of
Architecture and Engineering at Stockholm approached the simplicity and
fine craftsmanship in brick of the Danes, Swedish work of this period
was in general richer and more robust, still reflecting the very
eclectic sources of inspiration of Östberg’s Town Hall. However, in 1923
Neo-Classicism of a more attenuated and whimsical order than Petersen’s
made a striking appearance in the buildings for the Göteborg Jubilee
Exhibition. Of these the Congress Hall by Arvid Bjerke (b. 1880), with
its serried clerestories carried on arched principals, was the boldest
and least reminiscent. These Göteborg pavilions were very influential
abroad in the mid and late twenties; detailing of Swedish inspiration
then seemed to offer to traditional designers elsewhere a sort of Nordic
spice with which to enliven the dead-level of the local
eighteenth-century revivals.
Tengbom, deserting the romantic eclecticism and the emotional drama of
his earlier Högalid Church, used a highly stylized, almost
exposition-like, Neo-Classic mode for his Stockholm Concert Hall of
1920-6. However, the climax in Sweden—if not, indeed, the climax as
regards all Scandinavia—came with Asplund’s Central Library in
Stockholm, begun in 1921 and much simplified and refined as construction
proceeded through the mid twenties. Rejecting the frivolous decorative
detail of his Skandia Cinema of 1922-3, Asplund rivalled the Danes in
reducing architecture to geometrical simplicity (Plate 176A). Thus he
might almost seem to have passed beyond C. F. Hansen and Schinkel, the
Scandinavian idols of the day, to draw the inspiration for his plain
cylinder rising out of a cube directly from Ledoux or Boullée (Plate
2A); while at the base he ran a continuous band of windows derived from
the newest architecture of these years in France, Germany, and Holland.
This juxtaposition in the same edifice of Ledoux and Le Corbusier, so to
put it, is rather awkward; but it is highly symptomatic of the very
slight step that the Scandinavians had still to take in the late
twenties when they gave up revived Romantic Classicism—already pared
down to basic geometry in this library and in much Danish housing—to
become outright converts to the International Style.
Although Sweden and Denmark produced no modern architect of the first
generation of such individual distinction as the Finnish Saarinen, and
must in any case be considered to have started out around 1900 from a
position somewhat in retard of the French and the Germans, their early
twentieth-century architecture largely avoided the stasis of
traditionalism elsewhere, moving through overlapping but discrete phases
to an early and sympathetic acceptance of the new international
architecture of the twenties even before that decade was over. So clear
a picture is hard to discern in most other countries.
In the United States the pattern of development between the 1890s and
the 1930s, in so far as one can make out any pattern at all, was quite
different; nor was there in America, in the way of England in the
twenties, any Swedish influence of consequence. Movements roughly
equivalent to the Scandinavian National Romanticism of 1900, the
Richardsonian Romanesque and the Shingle Style, had flourished in the
eighties and come to an end by 1900. The Academic Reaction that early
succeeded them swept on, however, for some forty years. Despite the
ruling eclecticism of taste that permitted an archaeological sort of
revived Gothic still to thrive as a mode for churches and educational
institutions, the more widely favoured Classical, Renaissance, and
Georgian stylisms had all been initiated by McKim, Mead & White in the
eighties and early nineties. The quality of their work began to
decline[513] almost as soon as their professional primacy became
assured; yet their best buildings of the first decade of the new century
undoubtedly remain among the most competent, if unexciting, examples of
traditional architecture then produced anywhere. Americans, not
Frenchmen, were in these decades the worthiest products of the École des
Beaux-Arts, and thus heirs of the strongest academic tradition in the
world.
Whether McKim, Mead & White’s models be Renaissance, as in the
University Club in New York (Plate 179) completed in 1900, the series of
Branch Public Libraries there that were built over the next dozen years,
and the Tiffany Building finished in 1906; or Classical, as in the
Knickerbocker Trust in New York and the Bank of Montreal in Montreal,
both completed in 1904, the very similar Girard Trust in Philadelphia of
1908, and the vast Pennsylvania Station in New York of 1906-10, this New
York firm was clearly one of the truest successors to the
nineteenth-century academic heritage that so many of the French were
frittering away at the opening of the new century in a half-hearted
flirtation with the Art Nouveau.
The Gare d’Orsay in Paris of 1898-1900 (Plate 183A) by V.-A.-F. Laloux
(1856-1937) is no more to be compared with the Americans’ station than
his Hôtel de Ville at Tours of 1904-5 with their clubs and banks—his
best work, closer to the tradition of Duquesney and Hittorff, was an
earlier station, that at Tours of 1895-8. Yet Laloux was often
considered the most accomplished French traditional architect of the
period.[514] Moreover, the McKim, Mead & White repertory of stylistic
modes was wide: much wider than that of the French, although Laloux did
produce in Saint-Martin at Tours, completed in 1904, a domed basilica
still in the line of the earlier French Romanesquoid churches, though
not at all of the quality of Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge of
the sixties.
McKim, Mead & White exploited a vernacular Colonial Revival, as in the
E. D. Morgan house of 1900 at Wheatley Hills, Long Island, as well as a
more formal Neo-Georgian, at which several others, such as Delano &
Aldrich[515] and Charles A. Platt (1861-1933), were quite as competent
as they. But they could also shade their Classicism towards the
Byzantine, as in the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York
completed in 1906, or adapt it to industrial uses, as in the I.R.T.
Power Station in New York of 1903. They could even extend it upward into
skyscrapers, as in the New York Municipal Building completed in 1908,
concentrating all their attention on the ground floor and the crowning
feature while ignoring the many-storeyed shank between; or spread it
thin over large apartment houses such as that they built in 1918 at 998
Fifth Avenue, one of the best examples of the apparently solid blocks
that walled one side of that thoroughfare above 57th Street facing
Central Park and soon turned Park Avenue from 46th to 96th Street into a
man-made canyon. The one thing they and their contemporaries seemed to
be unable to do was to make their architecture live, even with the
derivative vitality of the Scandinavians. Frozen ideals of stylistic
‘correctness’ stifled such expression of individual personality as gives
real character to the work of a Tengbom or a Kampmann even when it comes
closest to theirs.
In popular estimation certain buildings that made use of Gothic rather
than Classical, Renaissance, or Georgian forms had a higher reputation.
Cass Gilbert’s already-mentioned Woolworth Building finished in 1913
(Plate 178) initiated a considerable range of Gothic skyscrapers,
including Howells & Hood’s Chicago Tribune Tower of 1923-5, but it
remains in the judgement of posterity the most notable example of this
sort of applied medieval design. Despite the considerable acclaim it
received when new, such an equally characteristic Romanesquoid example
as the Shelton Hotel of 1929 by Arthur Loomis Harmon (b. 1901) rivals
Gilbert’s no more in interest than in height. The New York Telephone
Company Building, completed in 1926 by Ralph Walker (b. 1889) at the
beginning of his career with the firm of McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin, is
more original. Its fortress-like masses, somewhat frivolously relieved
by ornamental touches borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925, and
its isolated location at the Hudson River’s edge, ensure that its bold
silhouette will long vie, for the visitor arriving from abroad, with the
so much taller and richer silhouette of the Woolworth Building. Most of
the other individual big buildings of the twenties in New York and other
large American cities are no more than incidental elements in the
man-made mountain ranges of their skylines.
Curiously enough the ‘correct’ Gothic churches of this period do not
receive today as favourable a response as the large-scale medievalizing
secular work that is necessarily so very unlike real work of the Middle
Ages. Those of Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), then the most esteemed
Gothic practitioner, are lifeless and even crude beside Bodley’s and
Pearson’s in England from which they largely derive. His first church,
All Saints’, Ashmont, outside Boston which was built in 1892 is by its
early date the least anachronistic. Cram’s former partner Goodhue’s St.
Vincent Ferrer in New York completed in 1916, a competent and
well-scaled example of Late Gothic that is more Continental than English
in character, is rather more successful than any of their joint work or
that which Cram did later with his other partner Ferguson. Bertram
Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924), responsible also, as has been noted, for
the Spanish Colonial revival in California, moved on in the early
twenties just before his death to an eclectic sort of semi-modernism
best represented by his Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln. This is
vaguely Byzantinesque, yet towered instead of being domed in what had
been the tradition for state capitals ever since Bulfinch’s in Boston.
His contemporary Los Angeles Public Library is starker and more like a
project by Tony Garnier.
There were other architects to match McKim, Mead & White directly at
their own academic exercises: most notably John Russell Pope
(1874-1937), with his Temple of Scottish Rite in Washington completed in
1916, a grandiose reconstruction of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus; and
Henry Bacon (1866-1924), with his Lincoln Memorial completed the
following year (Plate 180). The latter is a peripteral Greek Doric
temple of white marble with a high attic that might almost have been
designed in Paris in the 1780s—no mean compliment. Equally French in
spirit, but with no such evident prototypes, is the Grand Central
Station in New York, built in 1903-13 by Reed & Stem and Warren &
Wetmore.[516] More efficiently organized than the Pennsylvania Station,
its concourse is one of the grandest spaces the early twentieth century
ever enclosed (Plate 177B).
Compared to most work of these decades by French architects, all trained
like the American leaders at the École des Beaux-Arts, the greater
‘correctness’ of the detailing of these buildings is notable. The boast
of ‘good taste’ was not altogether a hollow one, although it is at best
a negative rather than a positive criterion for architecture.
So extensive was American building production during the twenties that
it is difficult to know how to epitomize it.[517] On the one hand, there
are the later skyscrapers, essaying new stylistic garments as the older
ones lost their piquancy. Even before the Romanesquoid of Harmon’s
Shelton Hotel had come the massive simplicity of Walker’s Telephone
Building. But for all the playing around with superficially novel
decoration borrowed from the Paris Exposition of 1925 in the succeeding
years, there was no basic renewal of form before next decade opened.
Just after the crash of 1929 terminated the boom, the second skyscraper
age came to a belated close with the erection in the early thirties of
Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s Empire State Building and the initiation of the
Rockefeller Center project.[518] There a more urbanistic grouping,
extending over a considerable area, replaced the earlier ideal of
building single structures of ever greater height that had just reached
its climax with the Empire State Building. This change in approach,
recognized ever since as a turning point, was for a long time hardly at
all followed up. However, the spaced skyscrapers of Pittsburgh’s rebuilt
Golden Triangle and, since then, various projects of urban renewal for
big and middle-sized cities from coast to coast are shifting the
emphasis from individual structures to the wholesale reorganization of
very large areas (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue).
In the terms of this chapter neither the Empire State Building nor
Rockefeller Center are examples of traditional architecture, even if it
is hardly proper to consider them ‘modern’ in the sense of the European
architecture of their day. Although likewise no example of the new
architecture as then understood in Europe like Howe & Lescaze’s
Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of 1932 (Plate 169), such a
clean-cut skyscraper as Hood’s vertically striped Daily News Building in
New York marked with more distinction than its outsize rivals the end of
traditional design in this field.
Almost as remarkable as the skyscrapers of the twenties in size and
elaboration were the groups of new buildings in which so many academic
institutions, both new and old, variously housed themselves. The mode is
Classical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built by Welles
Bosworth (b. 1869) in 1912-15 on the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.;
‘Georgian-Colonial’ in the range of ‘Houses’ that Coolidge, Shepley,
Bulfinch & Abbott[519] built in the twenties for Harvard, also along the
Charles River in Cambridge; it is Gothic at Cram & Ferguson’s Graduate
College at Princeton, N.J. (Plate 177A) completed in 1913, in the
Harkness Quadrangle, designed in 1917, and other later buildings for
Yale at New Haven, Conn., by James Gamble Rogers (1867-1947), and at the
Men’s Campus by Horace Trumbauer (1869-1938) at Duke University in
Durham, North Carolina; it is even, by exception, Byzantinoid at Cram’s
Rice Institute at Houston, Texas, opened in 1912. The usual modes for
such work were what was known as ‘Collegiate’ Gothic, based rather
loosely on work at Oxford and Cambridge that was quite as likely to be
nineteenth-century as medieval in date, and Neo-Georgian in an
Anglo-American version, usually too grand to be plausibly Colonial yet
too casually composed to be properly Anglo-Palladian. Curiously enough,
the Gothic Cram’s Neo-Georgian Sweet Briar College in Virginia of 1901-6
is more successful than much of his own medievalizing work or than
comparable work by those who specialized in eighteenth-century design.
The technical competence of American architects in this period was very
great, the sums of money available almost unlimited, and the avowed
standards of design only the vague ones of ‘taste’ and ‘correctness’, by
this time little more than a schoolmasterish respect for precedent in
detail, though rarely in over-all composition.[520] Far less than in
Scandinavia is it possible to define the particular ways in which the
period expressed itself, for express itself America in these decades
undoubtedly did. Yet, when Americans of this period worked abroad, what
they produced is readily distinguishable from the work of local
traditionalists. The American Academy on the Gianicolo in Rome, built by
McKim, Mead & White in 1913, has a certain chaste precision in its High
Renaissance detailing no Italian could then have achieved even if he had
wanted to. In London Helmle & Corbett’s[521] Bush House, rising between
the Strand and Aldwych, has a clarity of form and a sense of urbanistic
responsibility that few comparable buildings of its period designed by
leading British architects display; up to a point, the same is true of
Carrère & Hastings’s[522] Devonshire House in Piccadilly of 1924-6. The
Ritz Hotel of 1906 across the street by the Anglo-French firm of Mewès &
Davis,[523] both of them trained at the École des Beaux-Arts as was
Thomas Hastings, is bolder in scale, less priggish, but it also lacks
the suavity and finish of its neighbour. Bolder also, indeed too
monumental for its size, is Barclays Bank of 1926 by W. Curtis Green (b.
1875), near by in Piccadilly across Arlington Street. Of more nearly
comparable quality is Green’s earlier Westminster Bank of 1922-3 on the
north side of Piccadilly.
Somewhere between the extreme professional competence of the traditional
architects of America, a competence almost wholly anonymous in its
results, and the intensely personal expression of the Scandinavians lies
the pattern that the best traditional architecture, such as Green’s,
followed in England in the early twentieth century. But before turning
to that a good deal more should first be said concerning both the
competence and the anonymity of American production, since that
competence and even that anonymity came to be accepted throughout the
western world as desirable[524] characteristics of modern architecture
by a great many architects, at least in the mid century.
Partnerships were not unknown in the nineteenth century, although
professional alliances between strong personalities rarely lasted for
long. When the partner was not an equal the historian is often justified
in writing, say, of G. G. Scott and forgetting Moffatt or, with rather
less justification, only of Sullivan while ignoring Adler. But
architectural firms that include three or more named partners, with
still other members listed only on the letter-head; others such as D. H.
Burnham _and Company_ and Albert Kahn _Incorporated_, or ‘partnerships’,
such as McKim, Mead & White or Cram & Ferguson, which continued to
function under the same name for decades after the death of the original
partners like so many firms of lawyers: these are more or less peculiar
to the twentieth century and first became common in the United States.
Today, moreover, an architect of European background like Mies van der
Rohe does not undertake large-scale operations in America, such as the
group of buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology or _a
fortiori_ his tall blocks of flats in Chicago and the Seagram skyscraper
in New York, without associating himself with such large local firms.
Wright and Gropius solved the problem somewhat differently; but the
Taliesin Fellowship and TAC provided them respectively with the
relatively modest and idiosyncratic equivalents of the organization of
the big Harrison & Abramowitz firm in New York or of one of the
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco,
and Portland, Oregon.
The development of the characteristic large-scale American architectural
office seems to have begun in Chicago. Burnham, on the death of his
designing partner Root in 1891, just after they had undertaken the
primary responsibility for the general planning and building of the
World’s Fair of 1893, had to set up an organization of which he was no
more than the executive head. But the office of McKim, his closest
associate in carrying out the Fair, was certainly already far advanced
along a parallel road. There is a definite connexion here also with the
rise of the skyscraper, for those very large commercial buildings
already required a vast amount of uninspired draughting that could be
efficiently undertaken only by a large force of assistants working in
what came later to be derisively called ‘plan-factories’.
The same is even more true of industrial work. Here Albert Kahn took
the lead around 1905 in developing a type of subdivision and flow of
work in his office in Detroit comparable to the new methods of
mass-production that his motor-car factories were specifically
designed to facilitate. Such patterns are found at their extreme in
the group[525] of firms that together produced Rockefeller Center, in
the Harrison & Abramowitz office which is in effect their heir, and in
the largely post-war expansion of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Abroad,
more characteristically, such organizations have been built up in
offices under a public authority such as those of the London and the
Hertfordshire County Councils, the City Architects’ Offices in various
German cities, or the Banco Obrero housing agency in Venezuela.
‘Plan-factories’ are undoubtedly conducive to speed and to a certain
sort of competence in the execution of large projects, but it must be
evident that the architecture they produce will necessarily be
anonymous. In defining the character of their competence, moreover, one
must be careful not to imply too much. Only such team-work, perhaps, can
organize the logistics of building production in such a way that
extensive and ramified ventures are carried rapidly to completion, a
desideratum of the first order in a boom period for skyscrapers that
must be finished quickly in order to begin repaying their enormous cost.
Efficiency is of a different sort of consequence where large-scale
building schemes of a more public and social nature are being
undertaken, but none the less extremely important. Le Corbusier’s Unité
at Marseilles, produced without an elaborate office organization, took
some six years to build; as a result it was no longer ‘low-cost housing’
when it was finally completed.
Yet competence in the sections of a big office that deal with the
plumbing, say, or the electrical system is no assurance that the quite
different sort of competence required in the design department will be
available. Moreover, a brilliant initial design may or may not survive
intact the various modifications that other departments bring to it as
the preparatory paper-work for the building moves through successive
stages to ultimate execution. At best, even when a particular designer’s
name is associated with a particular building, as is that of Gordon
Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Lever House (Plate 189), his
responsibility is of a very different order from Wright’s for the Price
Tower-although not perhaps so different from Mies’s for the Seagram
skyscraper.
The situation in England in the first third of the century was rather
different from that in America despite a nineteenth-century inheritance
which was in many aspects common to both countries. One architect, Sir
Edwin Lutyens, had a personal capacity for invention along traditional
lines superior to that of any American of his generation. This was not,
however, of the order of individualistic intensity of an Östberg or a
Jensen Klint, nor was he able, in the way of an Asplund or even a Hood,
to accept around 1930 the discipline of the newer architecture of the
day. Lutyens built no skyscrapers, nor did he develop the sort of office
organization that made them possible in America. This was, however,
occurring to some extent by the twenties and thirties in other big
English offices, such as those of Sir John Burnet & Tait[526] and of
Curtis Green.
All the same, it fell to Lutyens’s lot to build some of the biggest
business structures erected anywhere outside America in these years, and
his career culminated in the design and construction of an imperial
capital such as came the way of no American. His competence was of a
more nineteenth-century order than that of the Americans, and there was
certainly nothing anonymous about his work. He was, moreover, still an
inspiriting figure in an England where architecture, under the difficult
economic conditions since the last war, tended to become anonymous
without becoming especially competent, except for public housing and for
schools (see Chapter 25).
Lutyens’s beginnings were very remote from the world of business and
governmental buildings with which his career wound up (see Chapter 15).
Very early houses, such as Ruckmans of 1894 at Oakwood Park or
Sullingstead of 1896 at Hascombe, both in Surrey, followed directly in
the line of Shaw’s Surrey manor-houses with their tile-hung walls, free
and easy composition, and simple domesticity of tone. They are, indeed,
superior to most of Shaw’s—the first of which, Glen Andred, was built
almost thirty years earlier and the last about this time—because of
Lutyens’s respect for Webb and the resultant superiority of his
craftsmanship. In his finest early houses, such as Deanery Gardens at
Sonning of 1901 (Plate 182B), he rivalled Voysey. He was already
inclined, however, like Webb in many of his later houses, to use
considerable stylistic detail, usually Neo-Georgian, in his interiors,
and here and there on exteriors as well.
Perhaps the revolution—or counter-revolution—in his development
represented by his Heathcote of 1906 at Ilkley in Yorkshire has been
somewhat exaggerated. Yet the design of this, completely symmetrical and
quite elaborately Palladian in detail, did represent as great a shift in
approach, taken in one jump, as that from Shaw’s Glen Andred of the late
sixties to his Chesters of the early nineties. It was, however,
practically the same shift. Eclectic like almost all the traditional
architects of his generation, Lutyens still occasionally remodelled
medieval houses, but the main line of his development henceforth was
certainly Neo-Georgian. Yet it was usually Neo-Georgian with an
important difference from what had become by this time in England as in
America a rather drearily codified mode. Nashdom at Taplow in
Buckinghamshire, built in 1909, is a vast white-painted house, plain,
regular, massive, and hardly at all archaeological. Yet this is so
handsomely proportioned and so well built that one could well believe it
to be the result of some generations-long process of accretion in the
eighteenth century. Great Maytham in Kent of 1910 is Queen Anne, but not
the Queen Anne of the 1870s. Here a great mansion of the early
eighteenth century was re-created with such a plausibility of
craftsmanship that after only half a century it was hard to believe it
was not two hundred and fifty years old. A somewhat smaller house, the
Salutation at Sandwich of 1912, is similar and perhaps even more
remarkable as an example of what is almost ‘productive archaeology’ on
the part of a man who was not, in fact, at all archaeologically minded.
Such houses are the twentieth-century equivalents of Devey’s in the
nineteenth century, but they often have a witty originality in the
handling of traditional detail that has aptly been called ‘naughty’ and
is peculiarly personal to Lutyens.[527]
If the Georgian had to be revived in the way of the Greek and the
Gothic, it could hardly have been done with more competence and more
animation; certainly the Americans of Lutyens’s generation rarely
excelled so notably in this particular field, although many of the once
highly esteemed firms mentioned earlier positively specialized in it.
Beside these houses of Lutyens, the Neo-Georgian of the Shepley firm’s
Harvard Houses or Cram’s Sweet Briar College is merely routine. Yet in
such work Lutyens was still only a country-house architect.
Before discussing Lutyens’s work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, with
which his association began in 1908, something should be said concerning
the ‘Garden City’ movement[528] in general. In 1892 Ebenezer Howard[529]
(1850-1928) published _Tomorrow. A Peaceful Path to Reform_, better
known by the title of the edition of 1902 as _Garden Cities of
Tomorrow_. Howard’s opportunity to realize his aspirations for a new
sort of town began with the acquisition of land at Letchworth in 1903,
but the construction of the Letchworth Garden City on the plans of Sir
Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) and his partner Richard Barry Parker actually
post-dates their work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb. They had, however,
already laid out a ‘model village’ for a chocolate manufacturer at New
Earswick near York in 1904.
In 1907 Dame Henrietta Barnett set out to realize some aspects of the
Garden City ideal on the outskirts of London. The next year land was
acquired near Golders Green on the far side of Hampstead Heath and the
suburb planned as a whole by Parker & Unwin.[530] Lutyens was invited to
plan and design the group of public buildings in the centre and their
immediate setting (Figure 54). This town centre was eventually largely
completed, most of it from Lutyens’s design, and the two churches, with
the contiguous squares, provide some of his finest work. His work here
certainly set a pace of coherence and urbanity that was unfortunately
not maintained in later Garden Cities such as Welwyn, begun in 1919,
that followed the rather more diffuse plan of Letchworth.
Welwyn, however, is of importance in the history of town-planning
because it was not merely a residential development but included from
the first an industrial estate as well. Thus it was a more complete
entity and the prototype of the English ‘New Towns’ initiated after the
Second World War. The Barnett project was originally, and has remained,
an upper-middle-class suburb; yet it is unique for the orderliness and
the distinction of the public buildings that Lutyens provided at the
centre and the terrace-framed squares that flank them.
St Jude’s, the Anglican church, begun in 1910 and not finally completed
at the west end until 1933, is Lutyens’s principal ecclesiastical work,
his Catholic cathedral in Liverpool having been barely begun before his
death. Lacking the emotional drama of the Scandinavian churches of its
period, St Jude’s has nevertheless a certain real boldness of
silhouette, produced by rather eclectic means, and an elegance of
craftsmanship in the brickwork that is in the finest tradition of the
Gothic Revival. Yet, being by Lutyens, it is hardly at all medieval. The
tall crossing tower may have slight suggestions of the Norman in its
detailing and a cathedral-like scale, but in general the exterior is in
a vaguely seventeenth-century vernacular descending from the later work
of Shaw and Webb.
[Illustration:
Figure 54. Sir Edwin Lutyens: Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, North
and South Squares, 1908
]
The interior, rather surprisingly, proves to be almost High
Renaissance in character; there is even a barrel vault over the nave.
On the other hand, the timberwork of the roofs of the aisles, which
descend so low on either side, is of a structural peculiarity
recalling Webb at his crankiest if not, indeed, Butterfield. Except
for the highly exceptional London church of the Holy Redeemer,
Clerkenwell, built by J. D. Sedding (1837-91) in 1887-8, so truly
Palladian—rather than Anglo-Palladian—internally as almost to persuade
one that it is Italian, no non-Gothic church of this quality had been
built in England for two generations. Lutyens’s more modest Free
Church is rather similar, both inside and out, but considerably less
effective.
To surround two sides of both North Square and South Square beside the
churches Lutyens revived the Early Georgian terrace, varying the
composition ingeniously and handling the beautifully laid bricks in two
colours, reddish and greyish, with a fascinating subtlety. Unfortunately
such truly urban housing stood no chance with the clientèle drawn to
this and other Garden Cities as against the appeal of free-standing or
semi-detached houses. No general revival of the terrace occurred. But
Parker & Unwin and their emulators achieved in individual houses a
standard of semi-traditional suavity that represents one of the
principal English achievements of the period, and something frequently
imitated abroad.
Lutyens’s call to lay out New Delhi as the capital of India followed in
1911, and the first plans were made before 1914. It was a commission
better suited to his leaping imagination than the modest domesticity of
an English Garden City. Construction of the buildings, notably the
enormous Viceroy’s House, began only in 1920.[531] Not since L’Enfant
laid out Washington had a fiat city of such amplitude and grandeur been
conceived, much less even partly executed. The Viceroy’s House, finally
finished in 1931, is official residence, centre of administration, and
focus of the whole scheme—a _tour de force_ for which, from the Queen
Anne, the Neo-Georgian, and the Palladian, Lutyens lifted his sights to
a Roman scale (Plate 181). The result is grand and broad, adapted to the
climate, and even reminiscent of the Indian architectural past in some
of its forms and features. Towards the designing of such a major
monument generations of Frenchmen and others who studied at the
Beaux-Arts had been prepared; there is a certain irony that this
opportunity came to an Englishman, trained in the most private and
individualistic English way.
Nashdom and Great Maytham represent a side of Lutyens’s mature talent
that follows rather directly from Webb’s Smeaton Manor of the seventies
(Plate 102A). The work at the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and above all
that at Delhi, represents another side. On the one side he had a few
worthy rivals: Leonard A. S. Stokes (1858-1925)[532] was a more
adventurous architect than he around 1900, with some leaning towards the
Art Nouveau; Shaw’s pupil Newton was almost as competent at Neo-Georgian
work. Those who tried to rival him on the other side, however, Sir
Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942), a pupil of Norman Shaw, and Sir Herbert
Baker (1862-1946), a pupil of Ernest George, hardly deserve mention,
even though their work bulks very large on the London scene.
Blomfield’s watered-down version of Shaw’s quadrant façade of the
Piccadilly Hotel, carried out in the twenties, has been mentioned.
Better examples of what may be called in W. S. Gilbert’s terms his ‘not
too French, French’ academicism face Piccadilly Circus. But his
pretensions to cosmopolitanism, although based on a very considerable
knowledge of French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture,
did not serve him as well as Lutyens’s purely English background in
continuing along the ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ line of Shaw’s late work.
Baker’s outrageous rape of Soane’s masterpiece, the Bank of England,
carried out over the years 1921-37, has also been mentioned; it was
literally a fate worse than death. Despite a half-hearted decision to
preserve a good deal of the relatively unimportant exterior, the Tivoli
Corner was pointlessly stripped of its idiosyncratic crown, presumably
in the name of Baker’s superior ‘taste’. His South Africa House of 1935,
moreover, all but ruins Trafalgar Square.
Lutyens’s Midland Bank of 1924, near the Bank of England in Poultry,
like Baker’s bank almost a skyscraper in size if not in height, at least
required the destruction of no earlier work of distinction and is
undoubtedly more consistently and personally designed. Yet the
cliff-like massiveness of its walls, with even less evidence of the
underlying structural skeleton than in office buildings of this period
by American architects, is almost as anti-urbanistic as Baker’s Bank of
England. Because of the very narrow streets of the area, the filling up
of the City of London with such structures, very few of them even of
this degree of intrinsic interest, was a tragedy of the twenties that
even bombing did not put right. The superiority of Corbett’s Bush House,
not in the rather flat detailing but in the exploitation of the fine
site at the foot of Kingsway, and even in the politeness of the plain
foil it offers to the Baroque elaboration of Gibbs’s St Mary-le-Strand,
is very notable.
Lutyens’s other big Midland Bank buildings, one of 1928 in Leadenhall
Street in the City and one of 1929 in King Street in Manchester, are not
much of an improvement over that in Poultry. However, his elegant little
Midland Bank of 1922 in Piccadilly in front of Wren’s St James’s is a
rich and inventive exercise in the vein of Wren built of brick and
stone. Anachronistic as such a design must be considered, the verve of
the _pastiche_ nevertheless has a distinct appeal, like a plausibly
realistic setting on the stage.
Lutyens’s most successful big business building is doubtless Britannic
House of 1924-7. This profits from its site between Finsbury Circus and
Moorgate Street, the curve of the Circus giving to the eastern front a
certain major Baroque drama that is echoed in the versatile play with
seventeenth-eighteenth-century motifs in the detailing. But one may well
prefer the massively mock-Egyptian effect of Adelaide House by London
Bridge, built by Sir John Burnet & Tait in 1924-5. This, at least, makes
some approach to the new ideals of the Continent in these years. Burnet,
moreover, had been for decades one of the most competent British
practitioners in a local version of the international Beaux-Arts mode,
as his King Edward VII wing of the British Museum of 1904 notably
illustrates. Three years later Tait was the first English-born
architect[533] to attempt to build in the International Style, as has
been mentioned earlier. The closest Lutyens came to the Continental
modes of the twenties was in his public housing.
Public housing in England between the wars was generally rather routine
in design despite the statistical importance of its social achievement,
lacking either the drama of the Dutch or the restraint of the
Scandinavians. On the one occasion when Lutyens turned his attention to
this field, on the Grosvenor Estate in Westminster in 1928, he succeeded
beyond all expectation. The bold device of chequering all the façades of
his blocks of flats in alternate oblongs of brickwork, plain stucco
panels, and windows is somewhat inhuman in scale but notably effective.
The contrast is striking to the work of the twenties by the London
County Council Architect’s Office. In that a type of design not unsuited
to semi-detached houses in middle-class suburbs was spread thin over
vast many-storeyed masses.
Lutyens, one feels, in a different time and place—a generation earlier
in England, say, or a generation later—might have been a greater
architect. But even as his career actually worked out, he is not
unworthy to occupy the place given him here as the ‘last
traditionalist’. Since his death there has not been, either in England
or elsewhere, any traditional or even semi-traditional building of
consequence, unless one wishes to consider Perret’s work at Le Havre in
the latter category.
The traditional architecture of the first third of the twentieth century
in Italy and France, headquarters in so many ways of the major
architectural traditions of the western world, is disappointing beside
that of the countries discussed so far. In the case of France, the
situation is confused by the modulation of Perret’s style towards a
semi-traditional Classicism which, by the thirties, official and
academic taste was ready to meet half-way. In Italy Marcello Piacentini
(1881-1960), the son of the architect of the Academy of Fine Arts in the
Via Nazionale in Rome, always had more vitality than the French of his
generation other than Perret. From the new _città bassa_ of Bergamo, for
which he won the competition in 1907 and which was executed in 1922-4,
through his general responsibility for the _Terza Roma_, Mussolini’s
vast project for a new capital between old Rome and Ostia which was to
have opened with an exhibition in 1942, there is a certain assurance and
amplitude of scale lacking in most contemporary work in France.
Mussolini, in the middle years of Fascism, was not averse to modern
architecture, as we have seen. When, under German influence, he began to
turn against the International Style the choice of Piacentini to set a
neo-imperial pace was as natural as Hitler’s return to the modes of
twenty years earlier in Germany. Moreover, from the public buildings of
Bergamo through the ‘New Towns’ below Rome—Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia,
etc., mostly destroyed during the Second World War—to the arcaded cube
of La Padulla’s Palace of Italian Civilization at the _Terza Roma_,
nicknamed by Italians the ‘Square Colosseum’, fine materials, clean if
familiar proportions, and excellent craftsmanship provide certain
lasting qualities not unworthy of Italian national traditions. Where
Fascist work is interpolated in an earlier urbanistic scheme, as along
the Via Roma in Turin between the Piazza San Carlo and the Piazza Carlo
Felice, the new buildings of 1938—here by Piacentini—fit as well with
the seventeenth-century buildings of the one as with the
nineteenth-century ones of the other. For all their obviousness,
moreover, the colonnades of the Via Roma, all of polished granite
monoliths, have a truly Roman scale and dignity. Even the Square
Colosseum has a Chirico-like obsessive force, like something out of a
dream; while the big unfinished structures around it, only now being
completed, are not altogether without virtues to balance the mid century
conventionality of those that have lately risen beside them.
To pursue the subject of traditional architecture further would be
merely to explore what can now be seen to have been not so much
a cul-de-sac as a road without a goal. The standards of
traditionalism—standards of ‘taste’, of ‘literacy’, of ingenious
adaptation—were still on the whole nineteenth-century ones. Yet down
into the thirties, traditional buildings were the big trees in the
forest of twentieth-century architecture; with the rise of a new range
of giants in the forest, the seedlings from which they grew seem now to
have been more significant: Asplund’s Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and
his Crematorium there of 1935-40 tend to obscure our vision of his
earlier Library, although that is perhaps finer considered absolutely.
So also the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society skyscraper of 1932, so
clearly the immediate ancestor of those built in the last decade, draws
attention away from the Woolworth Building. In England continuity has
been so completely broken that it is hard to realize how much the
‘Mannerist’ façade-treatment of Drake & Lasdun’s tall housing slabs of
1946-56 on the Paddington Estate has in common with Lutyens’s chequered
Grosvenor Estate blocks of thirty years ago. However the future may
evaluate the achievements of the traditional architects of the early
twentieth century, the chapter is now closed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER 25
ARCHITECTURE AT THE MID CENTURY
TO describe the state of architecture in the late forties and early
fifties, before and after the mid-point of this century, is far more
difficult than to sketch its condition a hundred and fifty years
earlier, as the first chapter of this book attempted. The western world
was enormously larger in geographical extent, vastly more populous, and
as a result very much more productive of buildings of all types and at
all levels of quality. Many of the types most important in the twentieth
century—big business buildings, low-cost public housing, facilities for
transportation such as bus stations and airports—did not exist in 1800.
These difficulties are objective and merely imply that the sampling of
executed work must be relatively much more limited. But the very limited
selection provided here is inevitably influenced by subjective criteria.
The activity of two generations of historians writing on the
architecture of the early nineteenth century has produced something
approaching a consensus of opinion as to what is and what is not
important or characteristic in that period. There remains, of course,
much to be discovered concerning building in the decades around 1800,
particularly as interest rises in the technical aspects of the story;
yet the engineers[534] are unlikely ever to force the Soanes and the
Schinkels out of the centre of the picture: moreover, men like Latrobe
and Mills were themselves as much engineers as architects.
Already, in carrying the story of the production of the leading
architects of the first and second generations of modern architecture
down to the mid fifties, a certain emphasis has been given to their work
in the production of the last decades. The decisions as to what to
include in rounding out the picture are critical ones hardly comparable
to the relatively objective historical process of selection that
controls in the First and Second Parts of this book. The very extent in
time of what should be considered ‘the present’ is a subjective matter.
I have known American architectural students whose present was so
limited that they had never heard of Perret! To anyone under thirty the
effective present will hardly extend backward more than five or ten
years. To keep this chapter still more or less historical I have saved
consideration of the years since the later fifties for an Epilogue.
In most countries of the western world the Second World War occasioned a
hiatus in construction that lasted nearly a full decade from the slowing
down that came with Munich in the late thirties to the general revival
of building activity in the late forties. There is therefore a real lack
of continuity between pre-war and post-war building except in those
countries that remained neutral. But just as the break in the continuity
of building production around 1800 resulting from the Napoleonic Wars
was a limited, not an absolute, phenomenon, since the truly
revolutionary developments in architecture preceded rather than followed
its onset, so there was in the last post-war period very little to be
recognized at first that had not had its beginnings well before 1939.
The perspective of the war seemed somehow to flatten out some of the
architectural episodes deemed to be significant in the mid thirties, not
alone the Nazi and late Fascist reaction but such minor symptoms of
dissatisfaction with the general line that architectural development had
taken internationally since the early twenties as the rise of the Bay
Region School[535] in America and of the New Empiricism in Europe.
Historians are still rather uncertain how much weight to give to these
matters. Once they lost the topicality of current events they seemed no
more and no less significant than the rather similar critical flurries
that came later concerning the ‘New Brutalism’ and ‘Neo-Liberty’.[536]
Such flurries cannot be entirely ignored;[537] yet the general
emendation of the rigid doctrines of the ‘International Style’ was more
strikingly illustrated by the continued high esteem of Wright’s latest
productions and, _a fortiori_, by the warm critical reception of Le
Corbusier’s remarkable church at Ronchamp than by any of the buildings
that illustrated the schismatic reactions of the decade of the thirties.
The accepted definitions of modern architecture had undoubtedly become
very much looser than they were a generation earlier, partly as a result
of various abortive attempts at more thoroughgoing revolt. But the
greatest individualists were, paradoxically, not young men[538] in their
thirties, but older masters in their late sixties, seventies, and
eighties.
The greatest change in the post-war architectural scene, a change that
began gradually during the pre-war years, was the shift in the
geographical pattern. No longer did France, Germany, and Holland occupy
the centre of the stage. The rise of the United States to great
prominence, continuing a development already begun in the 1870s, was not
surprising. Far more surprising was the rise in the importance of Italy
and Japan, not only because of their actual achievements, especially in
concrete construction in both cases, but as major influences. This was
presaged in Italy by the work of Terragni and of Figini & Pollini in the
mid thirties and was hardly inhibited there by the ambiguities of the
later Fascist attitude towards architecture just before the Second World
War. The post-war British achievement was more canalized; yet it was of
an autochthonous character which a long-term consideration of English
architectural abilities and disabilities makes more intelligible than
that flurry of new ideas, so largely of foreign origin, characterizing
the mid thirties in England.
The Scandinavian countries retained their position of prominence but not
pre-eminence in the international architectural scene. In contrast to
their long-recognized virtues, some rather less relevant today than they
once were, must be set the very different contribution of the Latin
American countries, whose entry on the international scene all but
post-dates the war. Production there was hardly worth mentioning a
hundred and fifty years ago; by the late forties Brazil, Mexico,
Colombia, and Venezuela were making a contribution on a par, in quantity
and even in quality, with older and richer countries. Moreover, while
the West was more and more losing political control of Africa and Asia,
its cultural influence on those continents did not necessarily decline,
indeed as regards architecture it probably increased. Modern
architecture, originally developed to utilize to the full the most
advanced technologies, was found to serve especially well also in areas
where technology was least advanced. Indeed, the most characteristic
building material of modern architecture, ferro-concrete, is often
exploited most ingeniously in countries where materials are dear and
labour cheap.
Not only did many outlying parts of the world import architects along
with other technicians from the West; Asia, which lay almost entirely
outside the field of western culture a century and a half ago, produced
a great modern school in Japan. Various Dominions and dependencies—South
Africa, Australia, Puerto Rico, for example—likewise began to have
active groups of local practitioners operating in close consort of
principle with those of Europe and North America.
With so wide a range of lively activity, no continent-by-continent, much
less country-by-country, survey of modern architecture is possible in a
single short chapter. Even allowing for all the enormous climatic and
cultural differences that still affect architectural production, there
was still sufficient identity of principle in architecture throughout
most of the world to justify an international consideration of post-war
achievement in terms of various building types, moving from the
macrocosm down to the microcosm—from the whole city as a planned product
of architectural design to the individual dwelling-house.
Despite its vast productive capacity, the old western world in the mid
twentieth century created rather fewer urban entities of distinction
than did the nineteenth. Partly, this was because the building of cities
necessarily remains a slower process than the building of individual
structures, even in an age when there are many fiat towns and also much
concerted rebuilding of older cities partially cleared by bombing in the
Second World War. Even more, perhaps, it is because it takes far longer
for the ‘planning’ ideals of architects in any period to achieve a
degree of public acceptance sufficient to ensure over decades proper
control of layout and construction—or reconstruction—of whole cities
than to find clients, even governmental clients, for single buildings or
for extensive, but piecemeal, social projects.
Perret’s Le Havre (Plate 140A) has earlier been characterized as the
realization—notable even if belated—of ideals that date back before the
First World War. None of the post-war ‘New Towns’ of England were
complete enough by the mid fifties to be apprehensible as urban
entities; for the most part they were still only large-scale housing
developments—suburbs in search of a city, so to say—realizing at a
considerably lower economic level the ideals of the Garden Cities of
fifty years before. Better than the English examples and indicative of
the widespread acceptance of Garden-City ideals was Vållingby in Sweden.
More complete urban entities of the mid century could be seen in such
heavily bombed and largely rebuilt cities as Coventry in England or
Hanover in Germany; yet in neither case was the architectural
achievement of the highest contemporary order. They should be compared
for quality with Napoleon III’s Paris or Francis Joseph’s Vienna rather
than with Alexander I’s Petersburg or Ludwig I’s Munich, and even that
comparison is not always very favourable to them.
In the extensive and almost explosive expansion and reconstruction of
various Latin American cities it was only in Caracas that the planner
Maurice Rotival was able to keep a bit ahead of the builders. But even
Caracas still had only samples of the characteristic new urbanism of the
mid twentieth century: two or three isolated skyscrapers and a housing
development, the Cerro Piloto, differing from those in other parts of
the world chiefly by its very great extent and its superb
mountain-backed site. The North American cities that were growing
fastest, Houston or Los Angeles or Miami Beach or Toronto in Canada,
were at least as chaotic as the Latin American ones, and neither the
quantity nor the quality of the individual buildings was as high.
Against the eruptive growth of a city like São Paulo in Brazil might be
better balanced such a North American programme of large-scale
rebuilding as that which had already cleared the Golden Triangle in
Pittsburgh, replacing typical nineteenth-century urban congestion with
an open park and spaced cruciform skyscrapers. The new capital of
Brazil, Brasilia, was not planned by Lúcio Costa even on paper until
1957.
The mid twentieth century had no full-scale cities that properly
exemplified the highest ideals of modern architects. It would be
necessary to wait, with fingers crossed, even to see the results of such
piecemeal projects of reconstruction as that proposed by Sir William
Holford for the bombed district around St Paul’s Cathedral in
London,[539] and still longer for such complete cities as Brasilia and
Chandigarh where, however, the public buildings by Le Corbusier were in
the mid fifties rapidly rising. But there were also in existence already
certain special entities of almost urban scale planned since the Second
World War that deserve attention. Notable are the ‘university cities’,
complete educational plants located on new terrain, planned as a whole
and designed as regards their individual buildings either by a single
team of architects or by several teams whose work was closely
co-ordinated from start to finish. The most remarkable of these is that
of the University of Mexico, but even here the difference in quality
between such highly original structures as the Olympic Stadium of
Augusto Perez Palacios (b. 1909), Raúl Salinas Moro, and Jorge Bravo
Jiménez of 1951-2, with its fine relief mosaic by Diego Rivera, or the
Central Library of Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra, and Juan Martinez de
Velasco of 1951-3, with its stack tower entirely covered with mosaics
designed by O’Gorman, and certain of the other equally large and
prominent buildings is very notable (Plate 184). The university city of
Rio de Janeiro, for which Le Corbusier was originally called to Brazil
to provide a plan in 1936, was by no means so far advanced; but the
control of the design of all the principal buildings by one architect,
Jorge Moreira (b. 1904), who is one of the three or four ablest in
Brazil, seemed to promise a homogeneity of character and a distinction
of finish unique in this field. Among several other Latin American
examples begun and partly built by the mid fifties, that at Caracas by
Carlos Raúl Villanueva (b. 1900) rivals in its principal building, the
Aula Magna of 1952-3 with its extraordinary acoustic ceiling by the
technician Robert Newman and the sculptor Sandy Calder, the achievement
of the Mexicans.
Of a very different character indeed, and initiated much earlier, is the
University of Aarhus[540] in Denmark for which Kay Fisker, C. F. Møller
(b. 1898), and Povl Stegmann (1888-1944) won the competition in 1931.
Some of its many buildings date from before the Second World War:
professors’ houses of 1933, student residences of 1934, museum of
natural history of 1937-8; while most of the classroom buildings were
actually erected in the war years 1942-6. The work continues in the
hands of Møller, and the layout of the beautiful sloping site was by C.
Th. Sørenson (b. 1893). Built of buff brick with tile roofs of medium
pitch, the general effect is much quieter than that of the Latin
American university cities with their tall ferro-concrete buildings,
crisply shaped and distinguished both by a bold use of colour and the
conspicuous incorporation of work by distinguished painters and
sculptors. At first sight—and to the prejudiced—the University of Aarhus
may appear more conservative; but the range of the new architecture is
recognized today as being wider than it was thirty years ago, and
Møller’s _aula_ in its very different way is quite as advanced as
Villanueva’s; or even, for that matter, as the shell-domed auditorium of
1952-5 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.,
by Eero Saarinen (1910-61).
One of the earliest individual building types to find wholly
untraditional expression was the large block of offices. The skyscraper
reached maturity early in the hands of Sullivan in Chicago; the later
vagaries of the form in New York did not recommend it to European
emulation, although skyscraper projects by Mies, by Gropius, and by Le
Corbusier were among the most notable early evidences of the birth—on
paper—of a new architecture in the years 1919-22. Howe & Lescaze’s
Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of a decade later was the
first large-scale example of the acceptance in America of the new
architecture of Europe; but during the thirties skyscraper-building
languished, and many critics thought that their day was already over. In
many parts of the world that day had yet to dawn, and Europe still had
very few notable examples to offer, but in the New World the fifties saw
the start of a new wave of skyscraper building by no means confined to
the United States. For the first time since the nineties a rather
considerable number of really distinguished examples were being built in
both North and South American cities. Wright’s Price Tower at
Bartlesville, Okla., a relatively modest one, and Mies and Johnson’s
Seagram Building in New York have both been mentioned already.
Diagonally across Park Avenue in New York from the site of the Seagram
tower stands the first epoch-making post-war skyscraper in New York,
Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft (b. 1909) of the Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill firm and built in 1950-2 (Plate 189). The almost
completely glazed curtain-walls of the east and west sides of the United
Nations Secretariat in New York—built in 1947-50 by Wallace K. Harrison
(b. 1895) and his partner Max Abramowitz (b. 1908) but incorporating
ideas provided by an international panel of which Le Corbusier and
Niemeyer were members—are carried round three sides of Bunshaft’s slab.
More significant, however, is the fact that this slab, rising like the
isolated United Nations building with no setbacks, covers only a portion
of the available site. Thus it stands in its own envelope of space
carved, as it were, out of the solid canyon of Park Avenue, just as Mies
and Johnson would later set their building back 100 feet from the avenue
and well in from both the side streets also. Their ‘plaza’ is
unconfined; Bunshaft’s open space is defined by a mezzanine on _pilotis_
carried round an unroofed court.
Reacting against the almost totally glazed curtain-wall of his U.N.
Secretariat, a type of sheathing for large urban structures then
spreading very rapidly to other countries, Harrison on the Alcoa
Building of 1952 in Pittsburgh used storey-high panels of aluminium cut
by relatively small windows. This alternative type of sheathing has been
less exploited since, however, than the more completely glazed sort.
There was a curious revival of Expressionist feeling in the complex
angular design of the glazed lobby of the Alcoa Building that contrasted
sharply with the paradigmatic expression of the ‘International Style’
seen in the Equitable Building in Portland, Ore., of 1948 by Pietro
Belluschi (b. 1899), the earliest of the interesting post-war
skyscrapers. A later Western skyscraper, the Mile-High Center in Denver,
Col., completed by I. M. Pei (b. 1907) in 1955, followed almost more
closely the formula of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago
than he did himself in the design of the Seagram Building.
It is invidious to mention only these few North American examples, but
production of similar skyscrapers was already so nation-wide in the
United States and in Canada that one can still hardly hope to see the
individual trees for the forest. There are good reasons why those
selected for illustration or mention are likely to remain conspicuous
and not become lost in the crowd. But skyscrapers are no longer a
prerogative of North America; some of the finest were rising in Latin
America, and these would before long be rivalled by European examples
already projected or even under construction by 1955.
It is a mistake to assume that North Americans housed business only in
skyscrapers. More and more large corporations were moving their
headquarters to the open country. Quite as significant as Lever House in
the production of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the mid fifties was the
700-foot-square but only four-storeyed office plant of the Connecticut
General Insurance Company of 1955-7, set in a park of eighteenth-century
size and amenity at Bloomfield, Conn., some ten miles outside Hartford,
the insurance capital. Luxury of materials, white marble and granite as
well as aluminium, makes up somewhat for the rigid asceticism of the
standardized walls, while four interior court gardens by Noguchi and
three pink granite figures by him on the slope beyond the ‘artificial
water’ in which swans swim about below the all-glass cafeteria further
balance the expression of crisp efficiency with something warmer and
more humane.
In most Latin American cities all-glass walls are impractical because of
the heat and the glare of the sun. As a result, architects have
developed various versions of the sun-break system introduced twenty
years ago on the first tall modern building to be erected in that part
of the world, the Ministry of Education in Rio; glazed curtain-walls
were by no means unknown, however. The egg-crate sun-breaks of the
Edificio C.B.I. of 1948-51 in São Paulo by Lucjan Korngold (b. 1897) and
the horizontally patterned grid of the Retiro Odontológico of 1953-4 in
Havana by Antonio Quintana Simonetti and Manuel A. Rubio give these
buildings a very different look from such examples of more North
American character as the building in the Calle de Niza at the corner of
the Calle de Londres in Mexico City of 1952-3 by Juan Sordo Madaleno (b.
1916), or that of the Suramericana de Seguros in the Avenida Jiménez de
Quesada in Bogotá of 1954 by Cuéllar, Serrano, Gomez & Co.
The most ingenious and best designed Latin American skyscraper of the
fifties, however, is the completely isolated Edificio Polar of 1953-4 at
the Plaza Venezuela in Caracas. This was built by Martin Vegas Pacheco
(b. 1926), a pupil of Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and
his partner José Miguel Galia, a pupil of the one distinguished South
American architect of the first modern generation, Julio Vilamajó, at
the University of Montevideo. Here the structure was reduced to four
ferro-concrete piers from which the curtain-walls were cantilevered out
11 feet on all four sides. The curtain-walls have a varied infilling,
part solid sandwiches of plywood and aluminium sheeting, part louvres
that transmit air but not light, and part glass. These are combined in
different proportions on each side according to the orientation in order
to control the glare and the heat of the sun while providing direct
ventilation. Since this tower was isolated, it needed no envelope of
space; in fact, however, the wider mezzanine extending under the base of
the tower does provide this. The two open storeys, one at ground level
and one above the mezzanine, give a lightness of effect and a frank view
of the essential structure that is even more striking than at Lever
House, where the relation of the towering slab to the mezzanine is less
boldly handled.
European skyscrapers[541] as yet rarely rivalled North American ones in
height, and few large urban office buildings reached even the median
level of quality of those in Latin America. In rebuilding bombed cities,
however, there were opportunities that could readily be exploited for
carrying certain buildings very high over a portion only of their sites,
as was first done in North America at Lever House, but using the ampler
spaces provided by the replanning of the cities to extend lower blocks
from the main slab. One of the best examples of this treatment is the
Continental Rubber Building of 1952-3 in Hanover by Werner Dierschke and
Ernst Zinsser, which replaces Behrens’s ponderous block of thirty years
earlier that was destroyed in the war. The surfacing materials, mostly
various stones, are serviceable and the general composition well
studied, but the proportions lack the elegant lightness of the Edificio
Polar. Yet the whole achieved a ‘reality’ of effect lacking in the
C.B.I. in São Paulo, which looks, despite its great size, rather like a
cardboard model; or Lever House, which too much resembles a slick
cellophane-wrapped package. Some German commercial work at smaller scale
was more refined, as, for example, the Haus der Glas-Industrie of 1951
at Düsseldorf by Bernhard Pfau and Pempelfort Haus there of 1954 by
Hentrich & Petschnigg, or the Burda-Moden Building of the same date in
Offenburg by Egon Eiermann. Hentrich & Petschnigg are also responsible
for the striking BASF skyscraper at Ludwigshafen, the tallest built in
the Old World up to the mid fifties.
Post-war Italian commercial work was more varied and imaginative than in
other countries, but the tallest examples were not the best. Very often
it was the fine marble or mosaic surfacing—echoed in the BASF—and the
high quality of the craftsmanship that seemed to give them interest and
an effect of luxury rarely yet found in other countries, rather than
real distinction of design. Interestingly enough, since post-war Latin
America has tended to follow Italian models, one of the best Italian
buildings of this decade, the Olivetti offices in Milan of 1954-5 by G.
A. Bernasconi, Annibale Fiocchi (b. 1915), and M. Nizzoli, has a very
Latin American air because of its prominent sun-breaks. This was one of
the few buildings premiated by the international jury at the São Paulo
Biennal in 1957, and the only non-Brazilian one.
Industrial construction has not even yet been as fully accepted into the
realm of architecture as has commercial building for the last hundred
years. Ever since the factories of Behrens and the warehouses of Perret,
however, industrial commissions have played an increasingly important
part in modern architectural production. Probably the largest acreage of
good factory-building just after the war, as earlier in the century, was
in North America. With rising standards of amenity, moreover, and the
substitution of road haulage for rail transportation, factories came out
from behind the railway tracks and took their proper place visually as
well as functionally, with well-maintained grounds as important
features, in regional planning. It is hard to single out particular
factories for mention, if only because their design, whether it is by
engineers or by specialist architectural firms like Albert Kahn, Inc.,
had arrived at a largely anonymous standardization—the fate,
incidentally, towards which some critics see all twentieth-century
architecture as inevitably moving.
The General Motors Technical Institute at Warren, Mich., completed by
Eero Saarinen in 1955 after a decade of planning and construction, is
almost more comparable in scale and complexity to a university city than
to a factory; yet this group of twenty-five buildings organized round a
large rectangular artificial lake is also in its use and in its
character a major example of American industrial building raised at the
behest of a corporate client into the realm of distinguished
architecture (Plate 168B; Figure 55). Little or no link remained between
this and even the latest buildings designed by Eliel Saarinen on which
his son collaborated, although the former was involved in this
commission down to his death in 1950. Instead, the influence of Mies was
very strong, since in the younger Saarinen’s estimation the Miesian
discipline was specially suitable for giving order to such a project, in
terms both of over-all planning and of the characteristic structural
vocabulary of curtain-walling. Yet the necessary variety of size and
shape of the buildings, determined in part by the very different
activities that they house, from power-houses and engine-test cells to
the Styling Centre for new motor-car models, made impossible the
imposition of so classic a pattern as Mies had aimed to produce at the
Illinois Institute of Technology (Figure 52). In conscious avoidance of
the monotony of the motor-car factories around Detroit, which run on
without modification for thousands of feet, and in pursuit of ideals
which most modern planners have realized only on paper, Eero Saarinen
accented his long lake-front with a water-tower all of stainless steel
rising out of the water and provided a special domed unit at the south
end to house the display of new models beside the one section of the
complex to which the outside world has some access. Moreover, he varied
the characteristic metal-and-glass vocabulary of the façades—the metal
in general black oxidized aluminium, the glass greenish in tone to
reduce glare in the interiors—with solid walls of glazed brick in
various brilliant colours, almost rivalling the Mexicans in the
intensity of the reds, blues, yellows, and greens that he chose. As with
the later Connecticut General plant, sculpture of distinction, here by
Antoine Pevsner, provides a note of humane interest amid all the
expression of mechanistic efficiency.
In Europe the Olivetti Company were more consistent patrons of
distinguished design in architecture than General Motors. The main plant
at Ivrea, designed by Figini & Pollini, is small by American standards,
and has been in existence for some time—since 1942. It is chiefly
notable because it is the heart, as it is the _raison d’être_, of an
architectural programme of almost urbanistic scope at Ivrea that is
still in process of
[Illustration:
Figure 55. Saarinen & Saarinen: Warren, Mich., General Motors
Technical Institute, 1946-55, layout
]
realization by Figini & Pollini and by the resident architect Fiocchi,
whose small foundry of 1954-5 is an exemplary industrial unit of almost
Miesian elegance. Characteristic now of most Latin countries are the
sun-breaks on the south-west side of the large Ivrea factory; while the
north-east façade rises four storeys in sheer glass like a vast
extension of Gropius’s studio block at the Bauhaus. Of the present
period of the fifties, and better sited, more articulated, and more
self-complete, is the later Olivetti factory at Pozzuoli near Naples by
Luigi Cosenza. Structurally, however, the industrial work of the
engineer Nervi is more original.
Factories are still more likely to be designed by engineers than by
architects; but the contribution of engineers to their design is by no
means always standardized and monotonous. Particularly in those
countries where the lack of steel encourages the use of ferro-concrete,
engineers were devising notably imaginative solutions to the problems of
space-coverage and lighting. The Spanish-born engineer Candela in Mexico
worked with ferro-concrete vaults in industrial construction with the
casual ease and _ad hoc_ ingenuity of a twelfth-century Frenchman
building in stone; yet his church of Nuestra Señora de los Milagros of
1953-5 gave the impression of being a reversion to Expressionism,
despite the unassailable mathematical and structural logic of the
hyperbolic paraboloid forms of its ‘ruled surfaces’. The Italian-born
José Delpini, in such factories as his S.I.T. Spinning Shed of 1949-50
at Pilar in Argentina, easily rivalled the work of the leading modern
architects of Argentina in the distinction as in the scale of his
buildings. The Danish-born Ore Arup in England, working with the
Architects Co-Partnership on the artificial rubber factory at Bryn Mawr
in Wales, provided one of the most notable large-scale buildings in
post-war Great Britain, and deserves much of the credit for it. To
return to the work of architects, it should be noted that in England,
where most post-war industrial building was rather modest in size, the
power-stations of Farmer & Dark, culminating in that of 1955-7 at
Marchwood, have a grandeur of scale and a logic of partially open design
that ordinary factories can almost never rival.
Industrial building, still at the frontier of architecture despite the
great contribution it has made to more general developments since the
English mills of the 1790s, was notably international in its
twentieth-century standards and its achievements. The leading
industrial firms, such as Albert Kahn, Inc., and that of Frankland
Dark were asked to build in many parts of the world, for the
traditions of the old-established technologies are of especial value
in such work. The continued existence of cultural empires, so to call
them, is still made manifest when English firms build power-houses and
factories in the Middle and Far East. James Cubitt & Partners[542]
completed in Rangoon in 1955, for example, a pharmaceutical plant that
was probably the largest post-war factory of architectural interest to
be built by an English firm, just as their Technical College at Kumasi
in Ghana built at the same time was a more considerable example of a
mid-twentieth-century university city than England had yet seen.
The provision of housing by organs of the State had come to be
recognized almost everywhere as an essential social service, quite as
modern architects always insisted that it should be. Le Corbusier’s
Unité at Marseilles is doubtless the most striking single example of the
tall structures, slabs or ‘point-blocks’, which were increasingly the
characteristic form of such housing, but the most notable general
programmes of production were still found in England, in certain Latin
American countries, and in Denmark and Sweden. The pressure of
population-growth and the need for rebuilding after war-time destruction
motivated such programmes almost everywhere, but in several countries
notable otherwise for the high standard of their current
architecture—the United States and Italy, for example—the results were
disappointing indeed. A strong social tradition of public housing,
moreover, as in Holland, even with the precedent there of the notably
fine work of thirty and forty years ago, seemed then to be no guarantee
of continued excellence in this field. Although the rising popularity of
housing in tall structures is still balanced in England by a strong
attachment to small houses built in pairs or in terraces, such as
comprise the greater part of the New Towns, English achievement in this
field on the whole exceeded that of most other countries in the ten
years after the war, both in quantity and in quality. The post-war pace
was set by the Churchill Gardens of A. J. Philip Powell (b. 1921) and
his partner Hidalgo Moya in Pimlico, London, for which the Westminster
Borough Council was the client. For over a decade the planning and
building of this vast urban project went forward towards completion with
rising standards of design and finish. Perhaps the finest single block
is De Quincey House, with its ingenious section of duplexes approached
by access galleries. But the Architect’s Department of the London County
Council, under the successive leadership of Robert Matthew (b. 1906) and
of Sir Leslie Martin (b. 1908), in the last seven years equalled and
perhaps exceeded in quality, as many times over in quantity, the
achievement of Powell & Moya. Whether on urban sites, such as that at
Loughborough Road in South London (Plate 186B), or on more open sites,
as at the Ackroydon estate in Putney or at Roehampton, by the
combination of tall blocks, some square in plan, some slab-like, with
ranges of lower blocks of maisonettes and terraces of houses the L.C.C.
has provided—piecemeal at least—examples of mid-twentieth-century
urbanism more impressive than anything the New Towns yet offered. A
provincial English example of comparable excellence is the Tile Hill
Estate outside Coventry by the Borough Architect’s Office.
The forty-eight slabs of the Cerro Piloto development of 1955 built by
the Banco Obrero, the Venezuelan public housing corporation, and
designed by Guido Bermudez (b. 1925), rising against the mountains
outside Caracas more than rival in extent and in scale the English
examples. And in the Cerro Grande blocks of flats there, built in
1953-5, Bermudez rivalled the ingenuity of Powell & Moya and the L.C.C.
in the use of duplexes. Interesting for the mixture of types—tall slabs,
lower blocks of flats, and houses—is the Centro Urbano Presidente Juarez
in Mexico City by Mario Pani (b. 1901); the handsome colours used here
were chosen by the painter Carlos Mérida. But the most exemplary of the
Latin American estates is Pedregulho outside Rio de Janeiro begun in
1948 by Affonso Eduardo Reidy (b. 1909). Here the tall serpentine block
at the rear is entered at middle level from the hill slope, a scheme
suggested by certain of Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties for
North Africa, and various community buildings provide something of New
Town character in the development, as does a range of low blocks with
shops at their base in the Tile Hill Estate at Coventry. Most notable is
Reidy’s school at Pedregulho with its murals of _azulejos_—glazed
tiles—by Cándido Portinari and its characteristic repertory of the
architectural forms of the Cariocan School. Of that Reidy, a member of
the original group who designed and built the Ministry of Education, was
as much one of the founders as Oscar Niemeyer.
In the mid twentieth century, however, it is England that leads in
school design and construction even more definitely than in the design
of tall housing blocks. In particular, the Hertfordshire County
Architect’s Office under C. H. Aslin (1893-1959) developed a system of
construction using a light-metal skeleton and prefabricated concrete
slabs of very great technical interest. Not all the Hertfordshire
schools are designed in the County Architect’s Office, however, and some
of the best were by private architects, such as the Architects’
Co-partnership and James Cubitt & Partners (Plate 186A). The new
architecture has been more widely and successfully used for schools than
for most other types of buildings. Outside England those of Donald
Barthelmé in Texas, such as his Elementary School at West Columbia of
1952, and by Ernest J. Kump (b. 1911) in California may be especially
noted, although they represent no such concerted programme of design and
construction as has spread in England from Hertfordshire to other parts
of the country. Outright ‘traditional’ schools are rare anywhere today.
In church architecture the post-war situation was rather different.
Although Perret and Wright, Moser and Böhm, among the older generation
of modern architects, all built notable churches, until Le Corbusier’s
Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp the international leaders of the next
generation were rarely called on to design them; and from Oud’s church
of the late twenties at Oud Mathenesse through Mies’s Chapel of 1950 at
the Illinois Institute of Technology it seemed that the extreme
rationalism of these men made it difficult if not impossible for them to
provide ecclesiastical edifices which differed in any expressive way
from meeting-halls. Something was said earlier of the more emotional
concrete-vaulted church architecture of Böhm and the line of related
advance in the last two decades from the semi-traditional, somewhat
Gothic or Baroque, effects of the twenties to work of completely
original character. Niemeyer’s São Francisco at Pampulha (Plate 190C),
completed in 1943, was one of the buildings that early established his
reputation as one of the most imaginative architects of his generation
anywhere in the world. Soon Latin American churches as different as
Candela’s Nuestra Señora de los Milagros in Mexico City and the
unvaulted Beato Martín Porres at Cataño outside San Juan in Puerto Rico
by Henry Klumb (b. 1905), a pupil of Wright, were illustrating a wider
range of possibilities; while Juvenal Moya’s Nuestra Señora de Fatimá
and his chapel at the Ginnásio Moderno in Bogotá, the one of 1953-4, the
other of 1954-5, followed—with considerable vulgarization—the more
lyrical line of Niemeyer’s São Francisco.
Less operatic, but doubtless better adapted to Protestant use, are the
churches in the American Northwest by Belluschi, notably the First
Presbyterian of 1951 at Cottage Grove in Oregon. Various Swiss churches,
some Catholic but more of them Protestant, followed also in this line,
to which such earlier-mentioned churches as Moser’s Sankt Antonius in
Basel of 1927 and the elder Saarinen’s Christ Lutheran, Minneapolis, of
1948 belong (Plate 157B). The younger Saarinen’s silo-like circular
chapel of red brick at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of
1954-5, however, reverted to something much more emotional. There is
great ingenuity in the handling of the lighting, which streams down from
above over a screen by Harry Bertoia and also penetrates more subtly
round the edges of the low-arched base through the water of a
surrounding moat.
Johnson’s synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., of 1955-6, while severe in
its general character, uses coloured glass in slots between the vertical
slabs with which the visible steel frame is filled and also a curved
awning-like ceiling of plaster to warm and enrich the basically Miesian
paradigm. Accessories by the sculptor Ibrahim Lassaw also play an
important part in the interior; while the oval domed entrance vestibule
is an element of almost Baroque formal interest despite its ascetic
simplicity of execution. Thus, two Mies disciples have offered in their
ecclesiastical work correctives to the classroom-like coldness of his
own chapel in Chicago.
Such large-scale constructions as factories and tall housing blocks,
together with skyscrapers, represent the new architecture’s
preoccupation with building problems that the nineteenth century had
already essayed, but of which the development was not carried to its
logical extremes, either technically or architecturally, before the
present period. Curiously enough, in the provision of new edifices to
serve the needs of transportation, the nineteenth century in its middle
decades was rather more successful in bringing the railway station to
quite early maturity than was the twentieth century with the airport.
One of the largest and finest post-war buildings of Italy is the Rome
railway station (Plate 183B), and within a few years the active campaign
of modernizing and rebuilding stations in Italy was notably reflected in
other European countries. But airports had still to find so satisfactory
an expression, partly because the expansion of traffic everywhere made
them inadequate almost before they were completed. Too often the
necessity for continual extension has destroyed such integrity of
conception as the architects were able to give them in the first place.
Some of the world’s busiest, such as Idlewild near New York and Midway
near Chicago, were through the nineteen fifties near-shambles beside
which century-old railway stations appeared as masterpieces of
up-to-date organization! Here, as in many other fields of contemporary
building, there seem to be two main lines of approach, but not properly
to be distinguished as ‘rational’ versus ‘emotional’, since both are
almost entirely dependent on the structural solutions chosen. Of the
first sort a relatively early example (which now carries only local
traffic and has therefore not had to be expanded), the Santos Dumont
Airport by the Roberto brothers begun in 1938 and largely completed
after 1944 at the bay’s edge in downtown Rio de Janeiro, remains one of
the best; for it is compactly planned, clear and direct in design, and
elegant in the choice of materials and the use of colour. The San Juan
Airport completed in 1955 by Torro, Ferrer & Torregrossa[543] in Puerto
Rico is larger and somewhat less refined in detail, but an excellent
example of planning in terms of circulation. The vast London Airport by
Gibberd was still incomplete.
Two other airports of much the same date, the very large one at St Louis
by Minoru Yamasaki (b. 1912) and Joseph W. Leinweber, and the small one
by Pani and his partner Enrique del Moral at Acapulco, used concrete
shell vaults with very dramatic effect. It would seem that the ‘classic’
stage of airport design, reached in railway stations between 1845 and
1855, was only beginning in the late fifties, and its climax may well
lie many years ahead.
From the airport to the individual dwelling, from the newest sort of
structure to what is presumably the oldest, represents a considerable
jump. Yet it is at least debatable whether the best houses of the mid
twentieth century, continuing a line of development that has earlier
been traced forward from 1800 (see Chapter 15), were not more
satisfactory solutions of the problems their designing and building
poses, both practically and aesthetically, than any of the airports
mentioned. To a considerable extent they were as novel.[544] The
dwelling may not, in the years after 1925, have developed primarily as a
‘machine for living in’, according to Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, but
it certainly became more and more a ‘box for housing machinery in’. As
the relative proportion of the total cost spent for mechanical equipment
went up, the shell had to shrink. As the shell shrank, planning was
increasingly simplified. Only rarely was the ultimate in unification of
space reached, as in Mies’s Farnsworth house or Philip Johnson’s own
house in New Canaan, Conn., where only the bathroom is enclosed and the
other subdivisions of the interior are but ranges of cupboards not
reaching to the ceiling. Equally rare is the exclusively glass walling
of these two houses, clearly the extreme point of a _crescendo_ that
goes back at least to the window-walls of the third quarter of the
nineteenth century. But if they represented the end-point of several
developments, from which there has since been a return even on the part
of their own architects (Plate 190A), the extremes that they illustrate
were in many respects those towards which houses in general were then
tending.
The house as a detached, individually-designed edifice was still for
most people the ideal dwelling. But at no time since 1800 had such a
dwelling been more of a luxury. Convenience and economy drove rich and
poor alike towards more communal forms of habitation, whether they were
the cabañas of the millionaires’ motels at Palm Springs or the low-cost
flats in suburban ‘point-blocks’. In between these poles were all the
varieties of terrace-housing, ‘semi-detachery’, and builders’
standardized products, ranging from conservative parodies of the
individually designed houses of a generation ago through various
vulgarizations of more modern houses to the prefabricated
package-dwelling which seemed to be no nearer to receiving that general
acceptance which would make it economical than it was a hundred years
ago. Mass housing, no matter what form it took, whether the forty-eight
tall slabs of the Cerro Piloto or the forty-eight hundred, more or less,
semi-detached two-storey dwellings of an English housing estate, belongs
increasingly to the world of bureaucratized architecture. The house, on
the other hand, conceived as an individualized entity, remained almost
as much a specialized and exceptional product as the church; yet the
changes first made in individual houses gradually affected all housing
standards. Particularly in North and South America they still provided
architectural opportunities of the greatest interest and variety. Most
Latin American houses, for example, retained the semi-oriental ideals of
seclusion of the Iberian tradition; yet behind the walls surrounding
their plots to cut out the world, they were often opener than houses in
the United States, since a warm climate makes of the patio or garden the
principal living area. Niemeyer’s own house of 1954 at Gávea outside Rio
de Janeiro is almost as much a glass box as Mies’s or Johnson’s,
although its glass walls are set under a slab whose outline is a
continuous free curve. The house of Osvaldo Arthur Bratke (b. 1907) at
3008 Avenida Morumbí outside São Paulo is also closer in plan and
conception to houses in the United States, protection of various sorts
being provided by grilles and movable shutters (Figure 56).
[Illustration:
Figure 56. Osvaldo Arthur Bratke: São Paulo, Morumbí, Bratke house,
1953, plan
]
There was considerable variety in mid-century house-design in Latin
America, ranging all the way from such Mexican houses as those of
Francisco Artigas (b. 1916) or Sordo Madaleno that present a blank wall
to the street and yet open up completely to a patio or a garden, to
Niemeyer’s open pavilion at Gávea. In North America there was perhaps
even wider diversity. Despite the equalization of climate by then
readily provided by heating and cooling facilities, there were still
great differences between one region and another in the forces of nature
that must be controlled or protected against, from the insects and
hurricanes of Florida to the blizzards of Minnesota, than between the
various countries of Latin America. Johnson’s Davis house at Wayzata in
Minnesota was enclosed, however, not because of the climate, but in
order to provide hanging space for an art collection, while it opens
within on to a patio that can be roofed in winter (Figure 57). Neither
screening nor anchorage against high winds is conspicuous in the design
of most of the Florida houses of Paul Rudolph (b. 1918). On the West
Coast the aberrant casualness of the Bay Region manner of the thirties
and forties now became increasingly disciplined. Wooden construction,
pitched roofs, and a certain discursiveness of planning still
contrasted, however, with more rigidly Miesian design; yet the finest
houses of Joseph Esherick in and around San Francisco or of John Yeon in
Portland, Ore., to mention only two West Coast architects, sometimes
rivalled in distinction those of Johnson and Rudolph.
[Illustration:
Figure 57. Philip Johnson: Wayzata, Minn., Richard S. Davis house,
1954
]
Whether the building of individual houses in other countries will ever
again have the significance it still retains in the New World depends on
many extra-architectural factors. The last thing a historian should
pretend with regard to this or to any other aspect of the near-present
is that he is capable of prophecy. The history of architecture in the
second half of this century can only be written in the future. The
glimpses—for they are no more than that—of post-war production given
here represent a critic’s and not an historian’s selection, and a
selection that has inevitably been much influenced by what that critic
knows best at first hand.
* * * * *
Despite the obligation to provide in the Introduction some sort of
eighteenth-century foundation, this book had a real historical
turning-point for its actual beginning; it had, in the mid 1950s, no
such point at which to end. From Wright, near ninety, to men two
generations younger, some of whom have been mentioned in this chapter,
the work of the architects of the western world showed then no
convincing evidence of a major and general turn, however surprising in
the light of his work of the twenties Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp
might seem. We stopped in mid-stream and even the Epilogue which follows
can provide no true peroration. Fortunately the contemporary history of
architecture is being recorded more promptly and completely than ever
before in the professional press. It does not seem necessary to footnote
this chapter or the Epilogue with references to periodicals when every
issue of the principal journals inevitably includes material
illustrative of current production throughout the world. Yet when one
leaves the world of history for the world of ‘current events’, the time
has come to turn from books to periodicals. In the Bibliography there
are naturally few ‘monographs’—i.e. books or summary articles—devoted to
the men first mentioned in this chapter, since many of them were still
at the outset of their careers.[545]
From Papworth’s ‘Cottage Orné’ (Plate 122A) to the slabs of Loughborough
Road (Plate 186B)—’model’ dwellings both; from the Bank of England to
Thyssen Haus (Plate 191), both housing business as it was never housed
before the period with which this book deals; from Baltimore Cathedral
(Plate 5) to Notre-Dame-du-Haut (Plate 167), the range of notable
achievement recorded in this book is not readily outranked in variety by
any other hundred-and-fifty-year period in the history of the western
world. As to the absolute quality of that achievement, as distinguished
from what may be called the ‘plot’-interest of various relatively
coherent developments continuing over the last century and a half, it
requires a very catholic taste indeed even to pretend to pronounce. The
‘revivals’ of the nineteenth century and the ‘traditionalism’ of the
twentieth century accepted the dangerous challenge of meeting the
earlier past on its own ground, and this in itself is enough to reduce
the absolute value of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century production.
Yet there were renaissances long before there were revivals; and at
almost any given moment of the past most production has been the
equivalent in stylistic retardation of the traditional architecture of
the twentieth century. If one must have originality, these hundred and
fifty years have not lacked it, from Ledoux and Soane to Gaudí and
Wright. Of the hundreds of names mentioned in these twenty-five chapters
there are few doubtless equal to Bramante or to Bernini, but how many
were there in the preceding hundred and fifty years? while the variety
of approach represented, from a Schinkel to a Le Corbusier, from a
Butterfield to a Mies, is hardly to be equalled in any comparable period
of history. Above all, this is the stage of architectural history that
lies between the unhallowed present and the hallowed past, between the
cultural certainties—if they were so certain—of the eighteenth century
and the cultural anxieties of the present. What we are we can only hope
to understand by exploring the immediate ancestry of our own present.
Only revivalists could afford to denigrate and ignore all that lay
between them and some ‘golden age’ they sought to emulate. The future
must build upon the foundations—so very various, so often nearly
contradictory—of the architecture of the last hundred and fifty years.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EPILOGUE
THE five years since the original edition of this book appeared have
seen a building boom throughout the western world such as has rarely
been equalled in other post-war periods; nor has this boom been confined
to those countries of Europe and the Americas with which this account
has chiefly been concerned. These have also been years of
continuing—indeed increasing—uncertainty in architectural doctrine. As
might have been expected, various tendencies already touched on in the
preceding chapter—both positive (although often apparently reactionary)
tendencies towards greater individuality, and negative or, at least in
the present context, conservative tendencies towards somewhat tired
repetition of pre-war clichés—have not only continued but become much
stronger. The tonality of the over-all picture of current architectural
production has by now definitely changed. That relative balance between
what may, at their best, be called the Miesian and the Corbusian, still
maintained almost everywhere in the mid fifties, had by the early
sixties been upset. In hindsight, for example, it must now seem that
such mature and established architects as the Finnish Alvar Aalto and
the American Louis Kahn were inadequately treated in previous
chapters—not to speak of such still older men whose activity has
continued or been renewed as the Germans Hans Scharoun and the late
Rudolf Schwarz. Various new names call for attention also: the Dutchman
Aldo van Eyck, for example, the Norwegian Sverre Fehn, the Japanese
Tange and Maekawa, the Italian Viganò, and the English firm of Stirling
& Gowan, to mention but a few that were all but unknown internationally
in the mid fifties whose work is now of rising consequence.
For all the evidences of change, it is almost as difficult as it was
five years ago to isolate the common denominator of the new tendencies
except in negative terms. It is still easier to be explicit about what
architects are moving away from—what they are rejecting—than whither
they are headed. Any attempt in a few words to describe positively the
present architectural climate faces the difficulty that only in certain
extreme works are novel architectural ideals and ideas wholly dominant;
while by no means all the current building that does _not_ follow in the
newer directions, either by older architects such as Mies himself or by
those who have stayed faithful to his canons—whether intentionally or by
default of any alternative allegiance—can yet be dismissed as merely
vulgar, provincial, or _retardataire_.
The rejection of the advanced doctrines of the 1920s and 1930s has
rarely been total. The assumption of some writers, moreover, that there
has yet been any serious and concerted return to Beaux-Arts or other
pre-modern standards is, as regards the attitude of most mature
architects—even those who actually have such backgrounds—still something
of an exaggeration. On the other hand, the current sensibilities to
which architects such as Aalto and Kahn, at least, have been
successfully appealing—and in Aalto’s case for some twenty-five years
already—are certainly very different from the sensibilities that once
responded to the crisp geometries, the smooth surfaces, the glass walls,
and the minimal detailing of the Bauhaus (Plate 161A), the Savoye house
(Plate 159), and the Barcelona Pavilion (Plate 165A). ‘Neo-Brutalism’,
or _brutalismo_, is as dangerous a term to use indiscriminately as any
other critical catchword that has been prematurely popularized. But it
does suggest, at least by a play upon words in several languages, a
current climate of taste which favours _béton brut_—naked concrete—and
rough, usually rather dark-coloured, materials. Bricks, pre-cast slabs
with a coarse aggregate in relief, or even stone masonry of rubble or
quarry-faced granite, with rather heavy trim of raw or varnished wood
and wrought iron, are widely preferred to the slicker, more highly
finished elements that are the natural product of the increasing
industrialization of the building crafts. But this is literally
superficial.
Associated with the notable shift of preference as regards the texture
of the skin, so to say, of buildings there has been a comparable rise of
interest in broken silhouettes, uneven skylines, masses that are
articulated rather than unified, and expressive exposure of individual
structural elements, themselves often sculptural rather than mechanistic
in character. This has affected in varying degree the work of almost all
architects from the most Corbusian to the most Miesian. Windows,
moreover, tend to be fewer and smaller, and their shapes are very likely
to be vertical rather than horizontal, slots instead of ribbons. So also
plans now emphasize the particularity of various internal functions and
over-all organization tends towards additive compilation of contiguous
spatial units, in some cases equal or modular, in others disparate in
both size and shape. All this would once have been disapproved by most
critics as under-studied, not to say amateurish, before Aalto’s mature
work became a major international influence (Plates 173B and 182A).
There is surely some reflection of the painting and the sculpture of the
past decade, even perhaps of its most advanced music, in the apparent
intention to suggest freehand improvisation and randomness in an art
whose works, however their designing may have been initiated, are
necessarily in the end products of relatively long periods of
preparatory study and of complex collaborative execution.
Yet to hazard such statements as these, even though they have long
applied to much of the work of Aalto and are now true in varying degree
of the production of architects as different in many basic ways as the
Frenchman Guillaume Gillet or the Italian Franco Albini, is to be
reminded of the prevalence of another kind of interest in more elaborate
effects of detail—often denigrated as merely decorative—that is being
exploited not only by such well-established architects as the Americans
Edward Stone or Minoru Yamasaki, on the one hand, and by the German Egon
Eiermann, on the other—otherwise quite opposed as a result of their very
different training, experience, and personal dispositions—but by many
others from Latin America to Asia and Africa.
Perhaps it may be said in very simple terms that what is widely
recognized as the newest architecture has two aspects, one exaggeratedly
masculine, the other almost daintily feminine. Both are in some cases to
be found illustrated, in a curious kind of rhythmic alternation, by
successive works of the same architect; both contrast with the neutral
severity of the architecture of the immediately preceding period. Yet
both clearly have their half-admitted precedents in the varied and even
contradictory work over many decades of Frank Lloyd Wright and that of
the Expressionists forty years and more ago.
Even if it could be accepted, for the moment, that these two tendencies
represent the whole story, few would be impartial enough to admit that
they are _equally_ characteristic of the more serious architectural
production of the present. Thanks to a revival of near-Puritanical
asceticism in some quarters, sharply contrasting with the readiness in
others to beguile with somewhat saccharine ‘beauty’, the more masculine
aspect has been presented as superior morally and even as more
‘advanced’; for there are still those ready, as in the 1920s and 1930s,
to plead near-Hegelian necessities for one or another direction in which
architecture may be moving, necessities that are often in patent
opposition to the actual pressures from the aesthetically neutral realm
of technology.
But the two aspects so far noted do not, in any case, even suggest the
full complexity of the present situation. A third, not necessarily
related to the other two yet also, possibly, subsuming both, is more
evident to historians than it is to most architects. Admitting the
danger of pressing analogies with the morphology of earlier periods—the
Gothic, say, or the Renaissance—there is at least a presumption that
what we have known as ‘modern architecture’ is (rather prematurely, it
must seem) already in a ‘late’ phase. Recurrent in late phases there
have usually been two distinguishable but often closely related aspects
of academicism: a return towards principles that dominated the arts
before the stylistic revolution with which the particular cycle began,
on the one hand, and on the other the reduction to an easily applied
system of formal elements of the painfully evolved features that were
peculiar to the preceding ‘high’ phase.
But reaction, to give this aspect of the current architectural scene an
unnecessarily denigratory name, is quite likely in particular instances
to be more due to the special circumstances of the current building boom
than to any hypothetical life-pattern of modern architecture. In the
first half of the twentieth century economic influences were supposed,
at least, to favour both technological advance in the building sciences
and, concommitantly, ‘advanced’ design in the aesthetic sense. Not
always, however, were the theoretical economies actually realized—or
not, at any rate, before considerable time had passed—and ‘advanced’
design often proved in practice not only expensive but physically
uncomfortable. Then other kinds of technological development, by setting
up even more expensive new standards of amenity, notably in such things
as vertical transport, glare-control, and air conditioning, were already
cancelling out the economies that mechanized methods of large-scale
production were eventually making real. At the same time the inherent
practical difficulties of such things as all-glass walls and completely
open plans were increasingly realized as they were ever more generally
and uncritically exploited. By the 1960s some of the technical
improvements in building advocated since the 1920s, notably in the field
of partial prefabrication and prefabrication of larger and larger
components—whole sides of houses and flats, for example—had become
widely viable, not to speak of new materials and structural methods that
made certain features relatively easy and inexpensive to provide. Yet
total prefabrication of dwelling units was remoter from
realization—except in mobile units such as caravans—than a quarter of a
century earlier, in part because the public’s willingness to accept the
results of partial mechanization of house-production seemed actually, in
many countries, to have diminished.
The major building problems of the post-war world were not and still are
not the production of individual monuments: opera houses, churches,
stadia, and the like, on which professional as well as public attention
has tended to focus and for which drastically new kinds of architectural
expression can most readily be invented. What has been more significant
are the large-scale reconstruction of bombed or blighted cities, the
rehousing of very considerable segments of the population, and the
provision of the manufacturing facilities, the offices, and the stores
required by greater industrial, financial, and commercial activity.
Inevitably, in a boom period, the very large volume of production over
large sectors of the total range of building has led, in such work, to a
sort of stasis in stylistic development. A vast amount of architectural
energy everywhere must go into the mere carrying out of unprecedentedly
extensive plans the major decisions for which were made as many as ten
or fifteen years ago. An inertial lag is very evident wherever large
urban areas, whether cleared twenty years ago by bombing or in the last
few years by schemes of urban renewal, have been or are being rebuilt.
Large parts of the world outside North America, moreover, are only now
first learning how to build very tall structures and hardly yet ready to
modify creatively what they have just learned to do at all.
The last decade, and particularly the last five years, have seen the
production of a great part of the urban and suburban settings in which
we will probably be living for the rest of this century, and doubtless
well into the next. Somewhat as the post-Napoleonic period carried out
at an ever lower level of quality the ambitions and aspirations of the
revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, so in the
post-war years—and particularly the last five—there has come about the
realization of many urbanistic ideals that once seemed fantastic or
Utopian when they were first proposed some forty years ago. Inevitably
there has been a diminution of visual interest when certain modes of
design, first adumbrated in a few unique individual structures or in
relatively modest housing projects in the 1920s by architects of intense
conviction and high inventive power, have been applied wholesale, almost
as clichés, by countless other men, usually much less able and less
dedicated, throughout the whole world. Moreover, serious errors in the
original ideals, perhaps only recognizable as those ideals came to
large-scale actuality, have been discovered and denounced. To some
critics certain earlier urban conditions, against whose vices those
ideals were first invoked as correctives, have come to seem, by
nostalgia, preferable in various human ways to the ‘brave new world’ of
the 1920s which has, to such a surprising extent, become the real world
of the 1960s.
But the reaction against the International Style, thus to describe in
over-simplified form what seems to be the consensus of many of the
changes of attitude in the last years, is by no means as yet a
counter-revolution. If the canons of the permissible and the desirable
have been broadened by current theory and practice towards various
aspects of what may still be called the traditional—including, as by now
also traditional, much that was common to various pre- or
extra-international Style aspects of earlier modern architecture—certain
of the presuppositions of the most advanced architects of the 1920s
still seem, though usually in revised form, quite as forward-looking as
ever. For the rather limited aspects of function recognized by the
Functionalists (if there ever were architects truly meriting that name),
for example, far more sophisticated conceptions of function have come to
be accepted by most architects whose fields of work are not industrial
or commercial.
Yet some engineers—the Italian Nervi, whose practice has become
international in scope, the late Spaniard Torroja, the Mexican Candela,
the Danish Arup, and the American Fuller, to mention but a few of the
best known—have today reputations throughout the architectural
profession, and even with the public, which neither the Swiss Maillart
nor the lately deceased Frenchman Freyssinet had in their heyday half a
century ago. None the less architecture is not more largely in the hands
of the engineers today than it was earlier despite many prognoses, both
pessimistic and optimistic, that the engineers are, or should be, taking
over. Moreover the architectural quality, as distinguished from the
technical ingenuity, of the works of the great engineers is often as
notable as is that of those buildings by certain architects in which
engineering principles are dominant such as Eero Saarinen’s Chantilly
airport (Plate 190B).
These paragraphs have necessarily been of the most general nature and
critical rather than historical. Properly they should be illustrated by
a considerable body of carefully described photographs, plans, and
sections such as fortunately can be found in several current books
covering either the whole world, or single countries, individual
architects, or particular types of building. Some of the most useful of
those that had appeared by the summer of 1962 will be found among the
additions to the Bibliography. The few plates that it has been possible
to add in this new edition cannot hope to present a conspectus of the
various aspects of the current situation that have been at least
mentioned in this Epilogue. But the plates of the Seagram Building
(Plate 192) and the Guggenheim Museum (Plate 188A and B) may serve as a
reminder that some of the dichotomies of the third quarter of this
century in architecture could, in the late 1950s, be almost as well
illustrated in the work of long-recognized masters of architecture as in
that of men a generation or more younger. The illustrations of the work
of Aalto, work actually of an earlier date, show clearly whence one of
the winds of influence has for some time been blowing; while the plate
of Japanese buildings (Plate 187) in contrast to the Thyssen Haus (Plate
191), illustrate the international Corbusian and the international
Miesian of these last years at levels that are notably high, both in the
size and prominence of the structures and, what is more important, in
intrinsic quality.
Throughout its length this book has been less concerned with urbanism,
with the architectural macrocosm, than with individual buildings; nor,
for that matter, can photographs give the feeling of the newly rebuilt
central and peripheral areas of our cities even as well as for the
nineteenth century. The character of the Ludwigstrasse (Plate 10B) or
the Place de l’Opéra (Plate 70C) can be fairly well apprehended from
photographs; Park Avenue above the Grand Central Station, as rebuilt
beginning with Lever House (Plate 189) in the last decade, or the
cities, as distinguished from the individual public monuments, of
Chandigarh and Brasilia—or even Cumbernauld in Scotland or Vållingby in
Sweden—cannot.
Despite all the confusion of architectural doctrine in the early 1960s,
despite the vast areas of undistinguished and even manifestly bad
building, these last years have seen their share of new masterworks, or
at least of structures which in our present myopic view have already
been accepted as such. Yet, on the negative side, several of the older
leaders have left us: Wright, Freyssinet, Torroja, Skidmore, Schwarz,
and, alas, a few rather younger men as well: Yorke in England, for
example, and in America Eero Saarinen.
Saarinen’s work, since the General Motors Technical Institute completed
in 1955 and illustrated here (Figure 55; Plate 168B) which was so very
Miesian, came by the late 1950s to epitomize the variety, not to say the
incoherence, of the ambitions of many architects throughout the world in
those years. Happily, after a mature career which lasted only eleven
years compared to his father Eliel’s fifty, his contribution to
American, indeed to world, architecture, culminated in two works, his
colleges at Yale (Plate 185B) and his airport outside Washington (Plate
190B) that in their differing, even apparently opposed, ways express
many of the aspirations of our day at as high a level, perhaps, as
earlier modern architecture ever reached except in the greatest works of
Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies. But what make Eero Saarinen in
retrospect the typical architect of the late fifties and early sixties
are, on the one hand, his Miesian beginnings, in sharp reaction to his
father’s half-traditional romanticism, and on the other the fact that
his _oeuvre_ included many works which in their wilfulness and even, one
may say, their frivolity were well below the median standards of serious
achievement in those years. Thus he stood, to an extent not always
realized in his brief lifetime when the kaleidoscopic diversity of his
buildings dazzled those it did not shock, at the centre of his age. His
remarkably successful career, remarkable even in a period—so unlike
several of the earlier decades of this century—when few architects of
quality, even the most ascetic or most fanciful, were wholly without
employment, made plain one of the central facts about these last few
years: that the style or movement we call ‘modern architecture’ had in
many, perhaps in most, countries achieved such total acceptance that
clients were willing, almost too willing, to trust their architects in
whatever novel direction they might wish to move, in terms of structure,
of materials, and of either asceticism or decorative elaboration, not to
speak of philosophical content.
Remembering the extraordinary new developments in architecture that were
under way in the 1760s two hundred years ago in the period with which
the Introduction has dealt, the historian can only end by wondering
whether in the welter of innovation of the last few years there lie
somewhere the particular seeds from which the architecture of the later
twentieth and twenty-first centuries will grow; whether, to use another
dubious historical analogy, the stylistic development of this quarter of
our century corresponds to the Mannerism of the central decades of the
sixteenth century in Italy. May we look forward, towards 2000 perhaps,
to some such immanent movement, at once a synthesis of many preceding
technical and stylistic innovations and a return to some at least of the
principles of the preceding ‘high’ phase, yet above all a vital new
creation with a life-expectancy of a hundred years and more, as was the
Baroque around 1600? From the latest Baroque Western European
architecture turned away two centuries ago; to the Baroque, in any
revivalistic sense, it is hardly likely to return. Yet after the
ever-increasing divergencies, which have been as characteristic of the
mid century as convergence was of twentieth-century architecture down to
the 1930s, will we—perhaps before another decade has passed—begin to
sense the beginnings of a new synthesis?
Today, the problem must be posed in world terms. So far Eastern Europe,
Asia, and Africa have, on the whole, been learners and disciples of the
West. Will the countries of Eastern Europe and the new countries of Asia
and Africa soon be making contributions towards a new world-style, such
as in the last few decades first the North Americans, then the Latin
Americans, and now the Japanese have made? Will the history of Western
European architecture continue to be the principal story (which thanks
to political conditions has been largely true up to the present) or will
the Western European tradition, to which this volume has been almost
completely devoted, become in the succeeding period somewhat peripheral
and even alien to a basically changed situation in which under-developed
countries will increasingly, as they come of age, tend to throw off
cultural tutelage as they have mostly already thrown off political
tutelage?
The Brazilians could design and build in these last years Brasilia by
themselves as well, perhaps better than Europeans or North
Americans—above all, certainly, the architects of their own Portuguese
homeland—could have built it for them. The Indians, on the other hand,
have employed Le Corbusier and other Europeans, and the Iraqis have
assigned the designing and building of their University to an American
firm headed by an architect of German origin. The Japanese, who are in
this respect already at the forefront, had employed Wright half a
century ago for the Imperial Hotel; today it may perhaps be said that
their own best work is superior to the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo
whose designs they obtained from Le Corbusier. Yet current Japanese
architecture is not and is not intended to be—witness the
foreign-language editions of two of their architectural
periodicals—outside the tradition of Western European architecture;
indeed, it represents the latest notable contribution to that
architecture with which this book has hitherto dealt. It is appropriate,
therefore, that the roster of plates in this book, which began with
buildings conceived—in effect at least—in Rome and built in France, in
England, and even in North America, should end with buildings built in
Asia following principles first adumbrated by a Swiss in France. The
later eighteenth century turned inward in architecture towards the Rome
and the Greece that were at the fountain-head of the Western European
tradition; today we should perhaps be turning outward towards the new
non-European world which is still in the mid twentieth century, in
architecture as in so much else, the child of Europe. Symbolically, at
least, the best hope of a new architectural synthesis in the decades to
come may lie in this fact; so that later histories of twentieth-century
architecture will perhaps give as much attention and space to India or
to some of the new African states as little Holland or vast North
America have received in this account of the architecture of the last
two hundred years.
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NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
INTRODUCTION - Notes
Footnote 1:
Sigfried Giedion introduced this term in his _Spätbarocker und
romantischer Klassizismus_ in 1922 and provided an extended discussion
of the concept. Fiske Kimball first used the term in English in his
article ‘Romantic Classicism in Architecture’, _Gazette des
Beaux-Arts_, XXV (1944), 95-112.
Footnote 2:
See Hautecœur, L., _Rome et la renaissance de l’antiquité à la fin du
XVIII^e siècle_, Paris, 1912. However, the deeper background of theory
was French, not Roman. Unhappily the brevity with which this whole
matter must be treated here, where it is merely prefatory to an
account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, makes it
impossible to discuss such French theorists of the early eighteenth
century as J.-F. Félibien (1656-1733), A.-L. Cordemoy, and A.-F.
Frézier (1682-1773); even Laugier appears somewhat out of context,
since he was active not in Rome but in France. Hautecœur in _Histoire
de l’architecture classique_, vols III and IV, and Kaufmann in
_Architecture in the Age of Reason_—particularly in Chapter
XI—elaborate this background of theory in France centring round the
_Cours d’architecture ..._, Paris, 1770-7, of J.-F. Blondel (1705-74).
Footnote 3:
See Harris, J., ‘Robert Mylne at the Academy of St Luke’,
_Architectural Review_, CXXX (1951), 341-52.
Footnote 4:
Monographs on major architects will be found listed alphabetically by
architect in the Bibliography and are not referenced from the text.
Footnote 5:
The changing attitudes towards the Greek Doric order provide a measure
of the rise of Romantic Classicism. It is noteworthy that Soufflot was
one of the first to make drawings of the very archaic Doric of
Paestum, but it never occurred to him to emulate it in his own work.
See Pevsner, N., and Lang, S., ‘Apollo or Baboon’, _Architectural
Review_, CIV (1948), 271-9.
Footnote 6:
Winckelmann’s major work is the _Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums_,
2 vols, Dresden, 1764.
Footnote 7:
Interest in Egyptian forms can be traced all the way back through the
Baroque period to the early Renaissance, but it undoubtedly increased
after 1750 and lasted well into the next century. See Pevsner, N., and
Lang, S., ‘The Egyptian Revival’, _Architectural Review_, CXIX (1956),
242-54. For a remarkable, rather late (1838-41) example of an
‘Egyptian’ mill, see Bonser, K. J., ‘Marshall’s Mill, Holbeck, Leeds’,
_Architectural Review_, CXXVII (1960), 280-2. In the second quarter of
the nineteenth century Egyptian forms were most likely to be used,
especially in America, for prisons and cemetery accessories.
Footnote 8:
Adam studied, with the assistance of the French _pensionnaire_ C.-L.
Clérisseau (1722-1820), the Late Roman ruins of Diocletian’s Palace at
Spalatro in 1757, and began his brilliant career in London two years
later with the Admiralty Screen in Whitehall. See Adam, R., _Ruins of
the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro_, London, 1764, and
Fleming, J., _Robert Adam and his Circle_, London, 1962.
Footnote 9:
The present dome is a relatively late emendation; the original
crowning feature was much less severe. Soufflot sent a pupil named
Roche to London to make measured drawings of St Paul’s in 1776, the
year before he prepared this design.
In general, the Panthéon appears much more Romantic Classical today
than what Soufflot actually built. The towers which once rose over the
corners of the portico—in any case disapproved by Soufflot—were
removed by Antoine Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) in 1791, and he
also filled up the windows that originally cut into the plain wall
surfaces. The murals are all of the nineteenth century.
Footnote 10:
Actually many of the spans are much too great to be covered by single
stones and the entablatures are really flat arches. There is also
considerable use of iron.
Footnote 11:
See Petzet, M., _Soufflot’s Sainte Geneviève und der französische
Kirchenbau des 18. Jahrhunderts_, Berlin, 1961.
Footnote 12:
See Rosenau, H., ‘George Dance the Younger’, _Journal of the Royal
Institute of British Architects_, LIV (1947), 502-7. Even more
significant of developing Romantic Classical taste at this point was
the character of the designs in Peyre, M.-J., _Livre sur
l’architecture_, Paris, 1765.
Footnote 13:
See Rosenau, H. (ed.), _Boullée’s Treatise on Architecture_, London,
1953; and Boullée, E.-L., _Mémoire sur ... la Bibliothèque du Roi
..._, [Paris] 1785.
Footnote 14:
This more classical arrangement was first proposed in the 1760s by
Pierre Patte (1723-1814), a theorist in the Blondel tradition, on the
analogy of Palladio’s theatre in Vicenza.
Footnote 15:
This is not true, however, of much of his executed work at
Arc-et-Senans which has heavily plastic roofs of various shapes.
Footnote 16:
So did Friedrich Gilly in Germany and—according to Kaufmann—Valadier
in Italy.
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CHAPTER 1 - Notes
Footnote 17:
See Steel, H. R., and Yerbury, F. R., _The Old Bank of England_,
London, 1930, for photographic coverage of this monument of which the
interiors were largely destroyed in the 1920s, and even the exterior
considerably—and unnecessarily—modified (see Chapter 24).
Footnote 18:
See Britton, J., _Illustrations of Fonthill Abbey_, London, 1823;
Rutter, J., _An Illustrated History and Description of Fonthill
Abbey_, Shaftesbury, 1823; and Storer, J., _A Description of Fonthill
Abbey_, Wiltshire, London, 1812. The most extensive modern account of
the building of Fonthill Abbey is given by Brockman, H. A. N., _The
Caliph of Fonthill_, London [1956].
Footnote 19:
See Pevsner, N., ‘The Genesis of the Picturesque’, _Architectural
Review_, XCVI (1944), 139-46, and Pevsner, N., ‘Richard Payne Knight’,
_Art Bulletin_, XXXI (1949), 293-320.
Footnote 20:
Hussey in _The Picturesque_ lists many of these books and gives good
examples of their illustrations.
Footnote 21:
First, that is, in this period. The columnar Monument in the City of
London by Robert Hooke, commemorating the Great Fire, dates from the
1670s.
Footnote 22:
See Telford, T., _An Account of the Improvements of the Port of
London_, London, 1801. Splendid later examples also survive in
Liverpool, built by the Corporation engineer Jesse Hartley
(1780-1860); see Waldron, J., ‘Measured Drawings of the Albert Dock
Warehouses in Liverpool’, _Architectural History_, IV (1961), 103-16.
Footnote 23:
See Kimball, F., _Thomas Jefferson and the First Monument of the
Classic Revival in America_, Harrisburg, 1915.
Footnote 24:
See Kimball, F., ‘The Genesis of the White House’, _Century Magazine_,
February 1918.
Footnote 25:
See Brown, G., _History of the United States Capitol_, 2 vols,
Washington, 1900-3.
Footnote 26:
See Kimball, F., ‘Origin of the Plan of Washington, D.C.’,
_Architectural Review_ (New York), VII (1918), 41-5; and Kite, E.,
_L’Enfant and Washington_, Baltimore, 1929.
Footnote 27:
See Davison, C. V., ‘Maximilien and Eliza Godefroy’, ‘Maximilien
Godefroy’, _Maryland Historical Magazine_, March, September 1934.
Footnote 28:
See Alexander, R. L., ‘The Public Memorial and Godefroy’s Battle
Monument’, _Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians_, XVII
(1958), 19-24.
Footnote 29:
See Hislop, C., and Larrabee, H. A., ‘Joseph-Jacques Ramée and the
Building of North and South College’, _Union College Alumni Monthly_,
February 1938.
Footnote 30:
The idea probably originated with Soufflot, who had earlier proposed a
similar plan for the cathedral of Rennes.
Footnote 31:
See Blondel, J.-F., _Plan, coupe, et élévations du nouveau marché
Saint Germain_, Paris, 1816, and Délespine, P.-J., _Marché des Blancs
Manteaux_, Paris, 1827.
Footnote 32:
See Chierici, G., _La Reggia di Caserta_, Rome, 1937; and Mongiello,
G., _La Reggia di Caserta_, Caserta, 1954.
Footnote 33:
See Hautecœur, L., _L’Architecture classique à Saint Pétersbourg à la
fin du XVIII^e siècle_, Paris, 1912.
Footnote 34:
See Loukomski, G., _Charles Cameron_, London, 1943.
Footnote 35:
See Thomon, T. de, _Recueil des principaux monuments construits à
Saint Pétersbourg_, Petersburg, 1806; repeated in his _Traité de
peinture_, Paris, 1809; and Loukomski, G., ‘Thomas de Thomon’,
_Apollo_, XLII (1945), 297 ff.
Footnote 36:
See Lancere, N., ‘Adrien Zakharov and the Admiralty at Petersburg’ (in
Russian), _Starye Gody_, (1911), 3-64.
Footnote 37:
Kaufmann, who illustrates the Belanger project in _Architecture in the
Age of Reason_, figure 169, dates it around 1808 on the ground that
slaughterhouses first began to be built in Paris in that year. It is
extremely unlikely, of course, that Hansen ever saw this project; but
the similarity of his tower to Belanger’s indicates how closely he was
in tune with his French contemporaries. In any case similar towers are
to be found in the projects published by Durand in his _Précis_ of
1802-5, which Hansen must have known (see Chapter 2).
------------------------------------------------------------------------