CHAPTER 13 - Notes
[277]. See Webster, J. C., ‘Richardson’s American Express Building’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 21-4, and my article cited in Note 7 to Chapter [11].
[278]. See Richardson, H. H., Trinity Church, Boston, Boston, 1888.
[279]. 3 vols, Paris, 1868-73. It will be noted that the last volume of this appeared after the original competition drawings for Trinity Church were prepared.
[280]. The source was probably the book by Vogüé of which the second volume appeared only in 1877 (see Note [[196]], Chapter [8]). The motif first appeared in the North Easton Library, designed and begun in that year.
[281]. See Richardson, H. H., The Ames Memorial Building[[197]], Boston, 1886.
[282]. See Olmsted, F. L., and Kimball, T., Frederick Law Olmsted, 2 vols, New York, 1922-8.
[283]. See Richardson, H. H., Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, Boston, 1885.
[284]. See Richardson, H. H., Description of Drawings for the Proposed New County Building for Allegheny County, Penn., Boston, 1884.
[285]. See Schuyler, M., ‘The Romanesque Revival in New York’, Architectural Record, I (1891), 7-38, 151-98.
[286]. See Bragdon, C., ‘Harvey Ellis’, Architectural Record, XXV (1908), 173-83.
[287]. Hunt, of the older generation, was generally recognized as a leader in this camp also, although his energies in these years were principally engaged in designing and building a series of François I châteaux for the Vanderbilts and other millionaires that are anything but academic in their involved picturesqueness.
This curious episode, which has been given exaggerated importance by some historians of American architecture, began with the designing of the W. K. Vanderbilt house in New York in 1879-80 (see Andrews, W., The Vanderbilt Legend, New York, 1941). Other architects were also briefly affected by what was hardly more than a recrudescence of a mode popular in France under Louis Philippe in Hunt’s youth (see Chapter [3]).
A few houses by McKim, Mead & White of the early eighties are definitely François I, and Richardson used François I dormers, probably independently of Hunt, on the Albany Capitol. Moreover, the round towers of the ‘Shingle Style’ undoubtedly owe something to Stanford White’s sketching trips in France. This episode obviously parallels the interest in revived Northern Renaissance modes of design in Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia in these decades, and has analogies also to the contemporary work in England of George & Peto and Collcutt (see Chapters [9] and [12]).
[288]. In the designing of the Sherman house—particularly in the Shavian detailing—White had probably played an important part; he was, moreover, called on by the Shermans to enlarge the house in 1881. The library, of this date, is one of his finest pieces of interior decoration.
[289]. One of the earliest examples of the serious study of Colonial precedent is Arthur Little’s Early New England Interiors, Boston, 1878. However, his own work remained relatively free for some years.
[290]. See Building News, 28 April 1882.
[291]. These tiles wore out some years ago and have now been replaced. The smooth black roof seen on Plate 111 lacks the fine scale and rich texture the pantiles provide.
[292]. The conceptual organization of the exterior has seemed to most critics to have been borrowed from a much later monument, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris of the 1840s, even though McKim would not admit it. There is certainly none of Labrouste’s exposed metalwork in the interior; but the extensive use of Guastavino tile vaults, at this time a real technical innovation, is worth noting.
[293]. See Burnham, D. H., World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1894, and Ives, H., The Dream City, St Louis, 1893.
[294]. The area round the ‘Wooded Isle’ was much less regular than that round the Lagoon in continuance of Olmsted’s earlier and more naturalistic sort of landscaping. Into this area were shunted most of the buildings by local architects, doubtless because McKim distrusted their capacity to conform to the academic standards he was setting.