|
[Contents.]
[List of Illustrations] (In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.) (etext transcriber's note) |
AMERICAN
ARCHITECTURE
BY
MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
1892
Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
TO
K. L. S.
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE POINT OF VIEW
THE connection between the papers here collected, in addition to their common subject-matter, is their common point of view. Of this I do not know that I can make a clearer or briefer statement than I made in a speech delivered, in response to the toast of “Architecture,” at the fifth annual banquet of the National Association of Builders, given February 12, 1891, at the Lenox Lyceum, in New York. Accordingly I reprint here the report of my remarks:
“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the National Association of Builders,—You will not expect from me, in responding to this toast, any exhibition of that facetious spirit with which some of my predecessors have entertained you. It has, indeed, been said that American humor has never found full expression except in architecture. It has also been said by an honored friend of mine, himself an architect, whom I hoped to see here to-night, that American architecture was the art of covering one thing with another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, would not be desirable. But I hope you will agree with me that, though the expression is comic, the fact, so far as it is a fact, is serious even to sadness. It is a great pleasure and a great privilege for me to speak to this sentiment, and it is especially a privilege for me to speak upon it to an association of builders, because it seems to me that the real, radical defect of modern architecture in general, if not of American architecture in particular, is the estrangement between architecture and building—between the poetry and the prose, so to speak, of the art of building, which can never be disjoined without injury to both. If you look into any dictionary or into any cyclopædia under ‘architecture,’ you will find that it is the art of building; but I don’t think that you would arrive at that definition from an inspection of the streets of any modern city. I think, on the contrary, that if you were to scrape down to the face of the main wall of the buildings of these streets, you would find that you had simply removed all the architecture, and that you had left the buildings as good as ever; that is to say, the buildings in which the definition I have quoted is illustrated are in the minority, and the buildings of which I have just spoken are in the majority; and the more architectural pretensions the building has, the more apt it is to illustrate this defect of which I have spoken.
“It is, I believe, historically true, in the history of the world, with one conspicuous exception, that down to the Italian Renaissance, some four centuries ago, the architect was himself a builder. The exception is the classical period in Rome. The Grecian builders, as all of you know, had taken the simplest possible construction, that of the post and lintel, two uprights carrying a crossbeam, and they had developed that into a refined and beautiful thing. The Romans admired that, and they wished to reproduce it in their own buildings, but the construction of their own buildings was an arched construction; it was a wall pierced with arches. They did not develop that construction into what it might have been. They simply pierced their wall with arches and overlaid it with an envelope of the artistic expression of another construction, which they coarsened in the process. According to some accounts, they hired Greek decorators to overlay it with this architecture which had nothing to do with it, and there was the first illustration in all history of this difference between the art of architecture and the art of building. In every other country in the world the architect had been the builder. I think that is true down to the Italian Renaissance; and then building was really a lost art. There hadn’t been anything really built in the fifteenth century; and they began to employ general artists, painters and sculptors and goldsmiths, to design their buildings, and these men had no models before them except this Grecian-Roman architecture of which I speak.[A] These men reproduced that in their designs, and left the builder to construct it the best way he could, and that, I am told, is a process which sometimes prevails in the present time. But before that everything had been a simple development of the construction and the material of the building, and since that men have thought they perceived that architecture was one thing and building was another, and they have gone on to design buildings without any sort of reference to the materials of which they were composed, or the manner in which they were put together. That is the origin of the exclusively modern practice of working in architectural styles, as it is called. Why, before the fifteenth century, I don’t suppose any man who began to build a building ever thought in what style he should compose it any more than I thought before I got up here in what language I should address you; he simply built in the language to which he was accustomed and which he knew. You will find this perfect truth is the great charm of Grecian architecture, and ten or fifteen centuries later it was the great charm of Gothic architecture; that is to say, that it was founded upon fact, that it was the truth, that it was the thing the man was doing that he was concerned about, even in those pieces of architecture which seem to us the most exuberant, the most fantastic, like the front of Rouen, or like the cathedral of which Longfellow speaks, as you all remember:
“‘How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while, canopied with leaves,
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers.’
Even in those things there was that logical, law-abiding, sensible, practical adherence to the facts of construction, to the art of building, which we have so long lost, and which I hope we are getting back again.
“There are examples, in the work of our modern architecture, of architects who design with this same truth, with this same reality, with this same sincerity that animated the old builders before the coming-in of this artificial and irrelevant system of design, and one of them is the building in which I am informed a great many of you spent last evening; I mean the Casino. I don’t know any more admirable illustration of real, genuine, modern architecture than that building; and among all its merits I don’t know any merit greater than the fidelity with which the design follows the facts of structure in the features, in the material, in everything. It is a building in baked clay; there isn’t a feature in it in brick or in terra-cotta which could be translated into any other material without loss. It is a beautiful, adequate, modern performance. I say this without any reservation, because unfortunately the genius who, in great part, designed that building has gone from us; and there are many things by living architects, whom I cannot mention because they are living, which exhibit these same merits. There is one other example that I would like to mention here, because many of you know his work; I mean the late John Wellborn Root, of Chicago. I shouldn’t mention him either if he hadn’t, unfortunately, gone from us. Mr. Root’s buildings exhibit the same true sincerity—the knowledge of the material with which he had to do, the fulfilment of the purpose which he had to perform. I don’t know any greater loss that could have happened to the architecture of this country and to the architecture of the future than that man dying before his prime. These are stimulating and fruitful examples to the architects of the present time to bring their art more into alliance, more into union, more into identity, with the art of building; and it is by these means, gentlemen, and by these means only, that we can ever gain a living, a progressive, a real architecture—the architecture of the future.”
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE[B]
THE new departure is an apt name for what some of its conductors describe as the new “school” in architecture and decoration. It has still, after nearly ten years of almost complete sway among the young architects of England and of the United States, all the signs of a departure—we might say of a hurried departure—and gives no hint of an arrival, or even of a direction. It is, in fact, a general “breaking-up” in building, as the dispersion of Babel was in speech, and we can only and somewhat desperately hope that the utterances of every man upon whom a dialect has suddenly fallen may at least be intelligible to himself. From a “movement” so exclusively centrifugal that it assumes rather the character of an explosion than of an evolution, not much achievement can be looked for. In fact, the “movement” has not, thus far, either in England or in the United States, produced a monument which anybody but its author would venture to pronounce very good. Not to go back to the times when Gothic architecture was vernacular in England, it has produced nothing which can be put in competition with the works either of the English classical revival, or with the works of the English Gothic revival—with St. Paul’s and the Radcliffe Library, on the one hand, or with Westminster Palace and the Manchester Town-hall, on the other. Before the “movement” began, the architects of Europe and America were divided into two camps. They professed themselves either Renaissance or Gothic architects. The mediævalists acknowledged a subjection to certain principles of design. The classicists accepted certain forms and formulæ as efficacious and final. They were both, therefore, under some restraint. But the new movement seems to mean that aspiring genius shall not be fettered by mechanical laws or academic rules, by reason or by revelation, but that every architect shall build what is right in his own eyes, even if analysis finds it absurd and Vitruvius condemns it as incorrect.
“Queen Anne” is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use. But it is rather noteworthy that the effect of what is most specifically known as Queen Anne is to restrain the exuberances of design. Whoever recalls Viollet-le-Duc’s pregnant saying, that “only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career,” would scarcely select the reign of Queen Anne out of all English history for a point of departure in the history of any one of the plastic arts. The bloated Renaissance of Wren’s successors, such as is shown in Queen’s College and in Aldrich’s church architecture in Oxford, was its distinctive attainment in architecture. The minute and ingenious woodcarving of Grinling Gibbons was its distinctive attainment in decoration. Nothing could show more forcibly the degeneracy of art at the period which of late years has been represented as an æsthetic renascence than the acceptance of these wood-carvings, which in execution and all technical qualities are as complete, and in design and all imaginative qualities are as trivial and commonplace, as contemporary Italian sculpture, as works of art comparable to the graceful inventions of Jean Goujon, and clearly preferable to the sometimes rude but always purposeful decoration of mediæval churches.
The revivalists of Queen Anne have not confined their attentions to the reign of that sovereign. They have searched the Jacobean and the Georgian periods as well, and have sucked the dregs of the whole English Renaissance. Unhappily, nowhere in Europe was the Renaissance so unproductive as in the British Islands. It was so unproductive, indeed, that Continental historians of architecture have scarcely taken the trouble to look it up or to refer to it at all. Not merely since the beginning of the Gothic revival, but since the beginning of the Greek revival that was stimulated by the publication of Stuart’s work on Athens, in which for the first time uncorrupted Greek types could be studied, what contemporary architects have ransacked as a treasury was considered a mere lumber-room, and fell not so much into disesteem as into oblivion. During two generations nobody any more thought of studying the works of English architecture from Hawksmoor to “Capability” Brown, than anybody thought of studying the poetry of Blackmore and Hayley. The attempt within the past ten years to raise to the rank of inspirations the relics of this decadence, which for years had been regarded by everybody as rather ugly and ridiculous, is one of the strangest episodes in the strange history of modern architecture.
Mr. Norman Shaw has been the chief evangelist of this strange revival. Mr. Shaw is a very clever designer, with a special felicity in piquant and picturesque groupings, which he had shown in Gothic work, especially in country-houses, before the caprice seized him of uniting free composition with classic detail, and the attempt at this union is what is most distinctively known as Queen Anne. Whoever considers the elements of this combination would hardly hope that the result could be a chemical union, or more than a mechanical mixture. Classic detail is the outcome and accompaniment of the simplest construction possible, which was employed by the Greek architects in the simplest combination possible, and precisely because it was so simple and so primitive they were enabled to reduce it to an “order,” and to carry it to a pitch of purity, lucidity, and refinement to which the most enthusiastic mediævalist will scarcely maintain that more complicated constructions have ever attained. But this very perfection, which was only attainable when life was simple and the world was young, this necessary relation between the construction and the detail of Greek Doric, makes it forever impossible that Greek detail should be successfully “adapted” to modern buildings. A late writer on the theory of architecture has said of Greek architecture: “As partisans of its historical glory, we should desire that it remain forever in its historical shrine.” We laugh at the men of two generations ago who covered Europe and America with private and public buildings in reproduction as exact as they could contrive of Grecian temples. But, after all, if the Greek temple be the ultimate, consummate flower, not only of all actual but of all possible architectural art, were not these men wiser in their generation than their successors who have taken the Greek temple to pieces and tried to construct modern buildings out of its fragments? There is even something touching and admirable, in this view, in the readiness and completeness of the sacrifice to beauty which the reproducers of the Greek temples made of all their merely material comforts and conveniences, something that we miss in the adapters. The Romans can scarcely be said to have attempted this adaptation. They built Roman buildings for purposes and by methods which had never entered the minds of Greek architects to conceive, and they built them with no more thought of art than enters the mind of a modern railway engineer in designing a truss bridge. After they were designed according to their requirements it was that the Roman engineer overlaid them with an irrelevant trellis of Greek architecture, debasing and corrupting the Greek architecture in the process. And it is this hybrid architecture, which analysis would at once have dissolved into its component parts, that was accepted without analysis as the starting-point of “the new departure” of the fifteenth century, and the ultimate English debasement of which in the eighteenth is taken by the contemporary architects of England and America as the starting-point of the new departure in the nineteenth. It cannot be said that Mr. Norman Shaw and his followers have succeeded in the task of combining free composition with classic detail, which the Romans forbore to attempt, and in which the French architects of the sixteenth century failed. Every attempt to fit antique detail to a building faithfully designed to meet modern requirements shows that it cannot be so fitted without being transformed, and—since the sole excuse for the attempt is that it cannot be bettered—without being debased. What the Queen Anne men have done is virtually what the Romans did. They have shirked the impossible problem they unnecessarily imposed upon themselves, and have either overlaid or inlaid their buildings with their architecture. Of course the result of this process can no more be accepted as an architectural organism than if they had hung water-proof paper on the outer walls instead of decorating them with carving, or moulding, or what not, built in the walls, but no more architecturally related to them than the paper-hanging. But this is precisely what has been done in every “free classic” building, with more or less skill and dissimulation of the process. It is seldom done with the winning candor with which it has been done in the house of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt in New York, which is officially described as a specimen of the “Greek Renaissance,” possibly because its architectural details are all Roman. In that edifice two bands of exquisite carving—exquisite in execution, that is to say—which girdle the building, simply occur on the wall at levels where they are quite meaningless in relation to the building; where, consequently, they would not help the expression of the building, if the building could be said to have any expression beyond that of settled gloom; and where the irrelevant carving, not being framed by itself, would contradict the expression of a structure which was architecturally, and not alone mechanically, a building. How much this carving would gain by being framed away, so that if it did not help, it should at least not injure, the architecture to which it is attached, may be seen by comparing these Vanderbilt houses with a brown-stone house, in formal Renaissance, in upper Fifth Avenue, near Sixty-ninth Street, where the carving is neither better cut nor more abundant than that of the Vanderbilt houses, but where its disposition at least appears to be premeditated, and not casual.
It would scarcely be worth while to point out the faults of designs, if they can even be described as such, so generally disesteemed as those of the two houses built for Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, “those boxes of brown stone with architecture appliqué.” But it is worth pointing out that the radical error, which in these appears so crudely and naïvely as to be patent to the wayfaring man who has never thought about architecture, is latent in all the works of the Queen Anne movement—to which these houses do not specifically belong—and must vitiate every attempt to adjust classic detail to free and modern composition. Classic detail cannot grow out of modern structures faithfully designed for modern purposes as it grows out of antique structure, or as Gothic ornament grows out of Gothic structure, like an efflorescence. It must be “adjusted” as visibly an after-thought, and to say this is to say that in all Queen Anne buildings the architecture is appliqué.
However, to disparage Queen Anne is not to explain its acceptance. It looks like a mere masquerade of nineteenth-century men in eighteenth-century clothes, and with many of its practitioners it is no more. In England it seems to have originated as a caprice by which a clever and dashing but by no means epoch-making architect misled the younger and weaker of his brethren. In this country, which had never been much more architecturally than an English colony, there seemed special reasons for following the new fashion of being old-fashioned. American architects, and American builders before there were any American architects, had been exhorted, as they have lately been exhorted again, to do something distinctively American. The colonial building, which was done by trained English mechanics, was of the same character as the contemporary domestic work of England, and showed in its ornament the same unreflecting acceptance of a set of forms and formulæ bequeathed as a tradition of the trade and
RECESSED BALCONY, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTH AVENUE.
Herter Brothers, Architects.
part of the outfit of a journeyman. Although Jefferson complained that in his time and in rural Virginia it was impossible to “find a workman who could draw an order,” it is evident that there was no difficulty of that kind in other parts of the country. These trained workmen, it is to be noted, were all carpenters, and there is probably no work in stone which shows an equal precision and facility in workmanship. Such buildings as the New York City Hall and the Albany Academy were clearly the work of architects of culture according to the standard of the time. The only architectural qualities of the works of the mechanics were the moderation and respectability of detail, which they had learned as part of their trade, and it is quite absurd to ascribe to these buildings any value as works of art. It is particularly absurd to assign the degradation of house-building which undoubtedly followed, and which made the typical American house, after the Greek temple had spent its force, the most vulgar habitation ever built by man, to the substitution of book-learned architects for handicraftsmen. People talk as if the middle part of Fifth Avenue, the brown-stone high-stoop house with its bloated detail, which displaced the prim precision of the older work, had been done by educated architects. In fact, there was hardly a single building put up in New York after the design of an educated architect between the works we have mentioned and the erection of Trinity Church by Mr. Upjohn in 1845, which not only marked a great advance over anything that had been done before, but began the Gothic revival to which we directly or indirectly owe whatever of merit has been done since, including so much of Queen Anne as, not being Queen Anne, is good. But the bulk of the building which gave its architectural character to New York and to the country continued to be done by mechanics, who continued, so far as they could, to supply the demand of the market, who gradually lost the training their predecessors had enjoyed, and who lost also all sense of the necessity for that training in the new demand that their work should be, above all things, “American.” As the slang of to-day puts it, they were exhorted, as the architects are still sometimes exhorted, to “talk United States.” They might have answered that there was no such language, and that a few bits of slang did not constitute a poetical vocabulary. The feeling which urges an artist to be patriotic by being different from other people not long ago led Mr. Walt Whitman to resent the absence of an “autochthonous” poetry, and has lately led a newspaper writer to call the attention of a New England building committee to the log cabin as the most suitable motive for a town-hall they are going to build.
The Northern reader notes with mild amusement the occasional resentment in the Southern press of the absence of a “distinctive Southern literature,” and perceives the plaint to be provincial; but he is not so quick to perceive that his own clamor for an American this or that is equally provincial. The hard lot of the American painter has often been bewailed, in that, when he has tried to rid himself of his provincialism by learning to paint, and has learned to paint more or less as other men do who have learned to paint, he is straightway berated for not being provincial. If American literature or painting or architecture be good, the Americanism of it may safely be left to take care of itself. But a man cannot be expected to innovate to much purpose upon usages with which he is unfamiliar; and the effects which Mr. Whitman’s admonition to his fellow-poets to “fix their verses to the gauge of the round-globe” would probably have upon an aspiring young poet, conscious
DOORWAYS ON MADISON AVENUE.
G. E. Harney, and McKim, Mead, & White, Architects.
of genius, but weak in his parts of speech, are the effects which the demand for aboriginality actually had upon the race of builders, whether they were content with that title, or without any sufficient provocation described themselves as architects. They undoubtedly attained difference, and their works did not remind the travelled observer of any of the masterpieces of Europe. It is quite conceivable and not at all discreditable that the wild work of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should have led architects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Washington Square, and to sigh for a return of the times when the common street architecture of New York was sober and respectable, even if it was conventional and stupid.
This justifiable preference for Bowling Green and Washington Square and St. John’s Park over Broadway and Madison Square and Murray Hill, for an architecture confessedly colonial over an architecture aggressively provincial, is no doubt the explanation why so many of our younger architects made haste to fall in behind the Queen Anne standard. What we really have a right to blame them for is for not so far analyzing their own emotions as to discover that the qualities they admired in the older work, or admired by comparison with the newer, were not dependent upon the actual details in which they found them. To be “content to dwell in decencies forever” was not considered the mark of a lofty character even by a poet of the time of Queen Anne. If virtue were, indeed, “too painful an endeavor,” and if there were no choice except between the state of dwelling in decencies and the state of dwelling in indecencies forever, we could but admit that they had chosen the better part. But they were not, in fact, confined to a choice between these alternatives. The Gothic revival in England, after twenty years, had succeeded in establishing something much more like a real vernacular architecture than had been known in England before since the building of the cathedrals—an architecture which, although starting from formulas and traditions, had attained to principles, and was true, earnest, and
ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET.
C. C. Haight, Architect.
alive. It was quite inevitable that it should be crude in proportion as it was alive, according to the frankness with which it recognized that we live in times unknown to the ancients, and endeavored to respond with changes in its organism to changes wrought in its environment by new requirements and new knowledge, with forms necessarily rude, inchoate, embryonic, as beseems the formative period of letters and of arts as of life, in contrast with the ultimate refinement which is the mark of a completed development. But that these crudities would be refined was also inevitable; that they were in process of refinement was apparent. Another generation of artists as earnest as those who began the Gothic revival might have brought this rough and swelling bud to a splendid blossom. But in an evil hour, and under a strange spell, the young architects of the United States followed the young architects of England in preferring the refinements of a fixed and developed architecture to the rudenesses of a living and growing architecture. Because they did not see their way at once to “supply every deficiency and symmetrize every disproportion,” they did not leave this for their successors, but abandoned the attempt at an expression of the things they were doing for the elegant expression in antique architecture of meanings that have grown meaningless to modern men.
They have had their way in New York for seven or eight years, during a period unprecedented in building activity, and out of all comparison in the profusion with which money has been lavished upon building and decoration. What have they gained for architectural art? They have, indeed, subjected many miles of sandstone to the refining influence of egg-and-dart mouldings (the designer of a house in Fifth Avenue has so much faith in the efficacy of that ornament that he has belted his street front with three rows of it, one above the other), and triglyphs (faithfully to have contemplated which softens the manners, nor suffers to be rude) have been brought within the reach of the humblest in the decoration of tenement-houses. They have built so much and so expensively that they have produced in minds—like some of their own—which do not reflect much upon these things the impression that if luxury and art be not synonymous, they are at least inseparably connected, with the latter in the capacity of handmaiden. But will any educated architect assert that the characteristic monuments of the last five or six years—greatly superior in quantity, and superior by a great multiple in cost—are equal in architectural value to the work of the decade preceding? Suppose that Mr. Norman Shaw had not bedevilled the weaker of his brethren, and that this unprecedented building activity and this unparalleled spending of money that have fallen under the control of architects had been directed along the lines laid down by the Gothic revivalists, and had extended, consolidated, and refined the work begun and carried on here by such architects as Mr. Upjohn, Mr. Eidlitz, Mr. Withers, Mr. Cady, Mr. Potter, and Mr. Wight, will any educated architect maintain that the result of such a process would not have been nobler monuments than any to which we can point as characteristic products of the later movement?
DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET.
R. H. Robertson, Architect.
We might ask Mr. Harney, for example, who has been one of the noteworthy contributors to the works of both periods, whether in falling to “grace” he has not fallen from something more important. One can readily understand that Mr. Harney, in contemplating the effect of his completed work in the respectable warehouse at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, should have been disappointed in the effect of much of the detail he had designed for his building, should have found some of it rude, some of it disproportionate
HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET.
Bruce Price, Architect.
to its function and position, and none of it exquisite in modelling. It is also intelligible that he may have been dissatisfied with some parts even of his still more successful house at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, which, always a grateful object, has lately acquired an air of additional distinction from the eager architectural competition which has set in alongside of it, and the results of which give an air of unquestionable animation—the animation of excited controversy—to Fifty-seventh Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. This dissatisfaction, if the architect underwent it, was a wholesome discontent which we should have expected to see allayed by more thoroughly studied detail in Mr. Harney’s succeeding work. But it seems to have been a morbid sensitiveness to the defects of his work which led Mr. Harney to abandon altogether, and in despair, the practice of architectural design, and, when he had another commercial building to do, to erect in Wall Street an entirely ineffectual structure, of which the architecture that one carries away with him consists in a crow-stepped gable, an irrelevant entablature appliqué which crosses the building half-way up, and windows covered with flat arches, the key-stones of which are “shored up” by the mullions; and, when he had another city house to do, to depute the design of it to some unknown carpenter who died before he was born, and to reproduce accurately in Madison Avenue a Vandam or Charlton Street house built out of due time, with a familiar “old New York” doorway, in the jambs of which quoins intercept sheaves of mouldings. This confession that a carpenter of 1825 was a better-trained designer than an educated architect of 1880 is very possibly creditable to the personal modesty of the latter; but Mr. Harney’s own earlier works sufficiently testify that it does not do him justice.
Mr. Cady, one of the most important and distinguished of the contributors to the Gothic revival in New York, has also of late years become a convert to the new movement, and seems from our point of view to have thrown himself away with even less sufficient cause than that which impelled Mr. Harney to his rash act. For we have distinctly admitted that Mr. Harney had reason to be dissatisfied with his Gothic detail, while we cannot make that admission in behalf of Mr. Cady. Mr. Cady’s newer work is shown in a house of red-brick and brown sandstone, which he contributed to the architectural competition just noticed. This edifice shows a desire to live at peace in the midst of very quarrelsome neighbors. Mr. Cady, indeed, could scarcely design a vulgar and vociferous work if he tried. At any rate, he has never tried, and does not in the least need to be put under the bonds of a style in order to insure his keeping the peace. One wonders what Mr. Cady believes himself to have gained in abandoning the style of his brilliant Art Building in Brooklyn for the style of his not very noticeable house in Fifty-seventh Street.
Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; but it can also be attained, by architects who are really in quest of it, in other styles quite as well, which admit a much wider range of expression, while the student is forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre repertory of Queen Anne any other quality than quietude can be expressed. Its successes in domestic architecture are mainly the successes of unnoticeableness, which is really the character not only of the dwellings just mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, and of a house, which has the great advantage of double the usual frontage, by Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s reproduction; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street by these latter architects, which looks less like a work of architectural art than a magnified piece of furniture “with the Chippendale feeling,” can scarcely be called successful, while the house they designed for Mr. Astor in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street front in brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called Queen Anne, in spite of the three rows of egg-and-dart moulding, already remarked, which crown its rock-faced basement. The highest praise to which these typical Queen Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thoroughly studied detail, such as the treatment of the oriel in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is that they look like eligible mansions for highly respectable families content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also the highest praise that can be bestowed upon their prototypes of the Georgian era. We can repeat the admission that it is far better they should look like that than like the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons, without thereby admitting that the prim and prosaic expression of respectability never so eminent can be scored as a triumph in domestic architecture. The domestic architecture of Venice, or Rouen, or Nuremberg has something more to say to us than that. And a touch of such spirit and picturesqueness as Mr. Bruce Price has given us in a brick house in Fifty-sixth Street (p. 22), or as Mr. Hunt has given us not only in the elaborately ornate house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, but in some dwellings in upper Madison Avenue, is more to be desired than a mere omission to outrage decorum.
HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.
Such as the successes of Queen Anne in domestic architecture are, they are its only successes, although it is only fair to say that much interesting work has been done in it, if not strictly of it, in suburban houses and sea-side cottages, which do not come within our present scope. A “feature” suffices for the architecture of a narrow street front, and a feature may be compiled out of the repertory of Queen Anne by a designer who thinks that result a reward of his pains. The oriel, for example, in effect comprises the architecture of the house just mentioned as designed by Mr. Haight. But even in a house which is only a feature the classic detail is not always adjusted without a visible incongruity to the constructions, out of which classic detail cannot spontaneously grow as it grew out of classic constructions. The doorway, for example, of the house designed by Mr. Robertson, which is virtually repeated in the window over it, is a moulded round arch standing upon pilasters of its own width, and thus apparently making of the jamb and arch a complete and detached construction. That is to say, the pilasters seem to carry the arch. The architect of the New York Post-office has done the same thing in a much ruder way. But the elegance of Mr. Robertson’s detail cannot rid even the spectator who does not stop to analyze the source of the feeling of an uneasy sensation that what is thus elegantly expressed is not the fact. An arch does, in fact, exercise a lateral as well as a vertical pressure; and if the arch and its vertical supports formed a detached construction, as they here appear to do, the arch would be unstable. Insensible as the classical Romans were to considerations of artistic expression, they were not so insensible as this. They recognized the existence of a lateral pressure by marking the impost of the arches with a continuous moulding, thus allying the arch with its lateral abutment as well as with its vertical support; and here the architect of the Post-office, wiser, or, if thought be not predicable of his architecture, more fortunate than Mr. Robertson, has been content to imitate them.
The buildings in which these solecisms appear, we repeat, are the successes of Queen Anne. For structures more complicated most of its practitioners have shrunk from invoking it. Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, indeed, took the ground, when they designed the Union League Club House, that a “feature” supplied a sufficient idea for that edifice; and that a portico of four large Roman Corinthian columns in front, subdued to an equal number of brick pilasters on the side, would meet the architectural requirements of the case, if they let their consciousness play freely over the remaining surfaces without reference to this central thought. But the result has scarcely justified this belief, and the spectator finds that the building, in spite of the unifying influence of a large and simple roof, in addition to the feature in question, does not make a total impression, but is scattering and confused; while its parts, taken singly, are feeble in spite of their extravagant scale. This, indeed, is not even a sacrifice to the conventions, but a specimen of what can be achieved in a style of gentle dulness gone rampant. If tame Queen Anne is a somewhat ineffectual thing, what shall be said of wild Queen Anne? There is nothing wild about two other public buildings in which architects have ventured upon Queen Anne—one a hospital, in Park Avenue, by Mr. Haight, and one an “institution” of some other kind, in Lexington Avenue, by Mr. Fernbach. Both of these, indeed, are tame, and whatever the differences of detail may be, both have much the same expression, so that one carries away from either, as from one of the commonplace faces which we are always confounding, an impression which may be that of the other—in either case of a centre with projecting wings separately roofed, and the whole wall overlaid with a shallow trellis of brick-work, too shallow to be serviceable as buttresses, and serviceable only as the badge of the alleged “style.” It seems hard upon an owner that he should be required to pay money for rectangular applications of brick which can scarcely strengthen his building appreciably, and can hardly be held to beautify it, by way merely of labelling it, “This is Queen Anne.” And this resemblance, be it noted, which is not so much a specific resemblance as the expression of an amiable characterlessness common to both, is not all to be imputed to the architects, except upon the ground of their choice of a style. The works of both of them have character, and not at all the same character, when they are working in a style which is a real form-language in which meanings can be expressed, and not a mere little phrase-book containing elegant extracts wherewith to garnish aimless discourse. Mr. Fernbach,[C] as is testified by such works as the “Staats-Zeitung” building and the German Savings-Bank in New York, and the building of the Mutual Insurance Company in Philadelphia, is one of the most accomplished practitioners in this country of academic Renaissance. Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is a highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not their fault if Queen Anne, when spread over an extensive façade, spreads thin.
Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the temerity to attempt a Queen Anne church, and the success of his essay is not such as to invite imitation. The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue, with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, which are of a rugged rusticity, with the needful openings left square-headed and unmodelled; but these walls are crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow shingles, under a broad gable, and its openings united under a thin ogee canopy of painted pine. There is here and there a little classic detail, which, if it pleases the designer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the interior that is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what the German critics call the “playful use” of forms devised for one construction and one material in another material and with no visible construction; and the result of this pleasantry is what a German professor, celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “an important joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, the treatment passes a joke, for the mahogany nave arches, with their little protruding key-woods, and their supporting posts incased in boxed pedestals, are actually doing the work of carrying the clere-story—unless, indeed, there is a concealed system of iron-work—although their function is so far sacrificed to their form that they are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne contains no forms that can be even tortured into the construction of an open ceiling, the architect has omitted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere loft, sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as in the fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is entirely playful, so that the interior of the church seems to be a collection of pleasantries. In a dining-room, for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes seems to be ruled out by the previous question as to the admissibility in the sacred edifice of levity even of the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for the appliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeed for the designers of “cozy” churches in general, that there is no official censorship of church architecture as there is of church music, and that no rubric makes it the duty of every minister, with such assistance as he can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to suppress all light and unseemly architecture by which vain and ungodly persons profane the service of the sanctuary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the spirit in which we have been asking other architects, what he has gained by abandoning such an effort as he made some ten years before in the Phillips Memorial Church to develop a composition out of his subject in favor of these scraps of quotations, and of quotations neither fresh nor very pregnant! He might answer that the church in which we admire at least the effort was a somewhat untamed and obstreperous fabric, and that the present edifice is much more chastened and subdued. It is tame, no doubt, and Mr. Robertson’s talent, when he works in Queen Anne, is subdued—
“subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand;”
but, upon the whole, it is difficult to see how the architect, comparing the earlier with the later work, could fail to feel that the attempt to express something, however crude and so far unsuccessful the attempt might have been, was a more manly and artistic employment than this elegant trifling, in which the highest attainable success has an element of puerility. In truth, it is gratifying to remark that the argument by which we have supposed the architect to have solaced himself for the result of his ecclesiastical labors in Queen Anne does not seem to have convinced himself, and that a later work still, a sandstone church farther down the same avenue, is a much more serious piece of design, being an attempt to develop the architecture out of the structure itself. It would be especially unjust to misapply to Mr. Robertson’s Queen Anne church the saying that the style is the man, for the church last mentioned shows that Mr. Robertson is a man of talents, when he gives his talents a chance.
Thus far we have been speaking of the respectable and conservative element in the new departure, of the Extreme Right, so to speak, and generally of works which were seriously designed, and so are entitled to be seriously considered. It is not so pleasant to turn to the Extreme Left, a frantic and vociferous mob, who welcome the “new departure” as the disestablishment of all standards, whether of authority or of reason, and as an emancipation from all restraints, even those of public decency, and who avail themselves of the remission of them from academic restraints to those imposed by their own sense of propriety by promptly showing that they haven’t any. The tame decorum of one phase of the new departure is supplemented by the violent indecorum of another. Sometimes the same designers march now with one wing and now with the other of the divergent host. Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, for example, have consoled themselves for what now almost seems to have been the enforced sedateness of the houses we have noticed, by a mad orgy of bad architecture in East Fifty-fifth Street. The scene of this excess almost immediately adjoins the dignified and respectable dwelling designed by Mr. Haight, and almost frights that edifice from its propriety, and the designers seem to have been led into it by the baleful example of older persons who ought to have known better, and who committed the maddest freaks in the artistic quarter of the London suburb of Chelsea while in a condition of total irresponsibility alike to any convictions and to any conventions of architectural art. The present indecorum has been committed in the design of two dwellings which consist of a ferociously rugged basement and parapeted cornice in granite, with two or three irregularly disposed tin dormers emerging above, and with a flat and shallow screen of brick wall inserted between them, as between the upper and the nether millstone, and having its thinness emphasized at all the angles by shallow incisions forming a series of brick weather-strips, as it were, a square reticulation of which traverses the plane surfaces also. It is quite conceivable that rugged simplicity may have suggested itself to a designer as a desirable character for a city house, but it seems scarcely possible that squareness and flatness and thinness should have appeared desirable, and quite impossible that beauty should have seemed to dwell in a building the top and bottom of which were characterized by rugged simplicity, and the middle by squareness and flatness and thinness. The details, whether in brick or granite or tin, are as preposterous as the conception of a building with its parts thus swearing at each other. The round-headed doorway is surmounted with the imitation in granite of a metal flap secured to the rest of the block from which it is cut by similitudes in granite of iron bolt-heads. In the basement respectable blocks of granite are subjected to the indignity of being decorated with streaming ribbons in low-relief. In truth, the only detail of the work which one can contemplate even with tolerance is a grill in the basement doorway which is the simplest possible trellis of iron rods.
Indecorous and incoherent as this edifice unquestionably is, it has yet the air of a gentleman taking his pleasure, albeit in a perverse and vicious fashion, when compared, for example, with the dwellings in red brick
DOORWAY AT FIFTH AVENUE AND SIXTY-SEVENTH STREET.
and brown stone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street. In these there is no composition whatever, and the effect is so scattering, and the whole is so fortuitous an aggregation of unrelated parts, that it is impossible to describe the houses or to remember them when one’s back is turned. Their fragments only recur to memory, as the blurred images of a hideous dream. So one recalls the Batavian grace of the bulbous gables; the oriel-windows, so set as to seem in imminent danger of toppling out; the egg-and-dart moulding, niggled up and down jambs of brick-work connected by flat openings with protruding key-stones; the whiplashes cut in sandstone blocks; the decorative detail fished from the slums of the Rococo. These are not subjects for architectural criticism; they call for the intervention of an architectural police. They are cases of disorderly conduct done in brick and brown stone. Hazardous as the superlative degree generally is, it is not much of a hazard to say that they are the most thoroughly discreditable buildings ever erected in New York, and it is to be noted that they are thoroughly characteristic of the period. Such a nightmare might, perhaps, have entered the brain of some speculative builder during the wildest vulgarity of the brown-stone period, but he would not have had the effrontery to build it, being deterred by the consideration that nobody would face public ridicule by consenting to live in it. Some speculator is, however, convinced that there is now a market for a house which stands upon the street corner, and screeches for people to come and look at it, when there is nothing in it worth looking at; and we must take shame to ourselves from the reflection that the speculator may be right in counting upon this extreme vulgarization of the public taste, and that, at any rate, there is no police to prevent the emission of the screech upon the public highway.
This is the result of a demand for “something new” upon a mind incapable of producing anything good. The screech is the utterance of the Sweet Singer of Michigan, exhorted not to mind about grammar, but “to fix her verses to the gauge of the round globe.” It is an extreme instance, to be sure; but there are others only less discreditable, and only to be dealt with in the way of what is called “slashing” criticism, which
GLIMPSE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE FROM MADISON AVENUE.
C. C. Haight, Architect.
probably never yet served any more important purpose than to ease the critic’s mind. It is enough to indicate these things, and to point out that they are all produced by the strain in the minds of incompetent designers after originality and aboriginality—a purpose essentially vulgar, which would vitiate the work even of a competent designer wherever it could be detected. For although the pursuit of excellence is sure to result in novelty, the pursuit of novelty is sure not to result in excellence. The extreme instance we have cited is still an instance of a tendency to which all the younger generation of architects, of whom so much was hoped, and of whom, considering their opportunities, so little of value has come, have more or less yielded—the tendency to take themselves too seriously and their art not seriously enough, and to imagine that anything that occurs to them is for that reason good enough to build, without asking it any questions. Such caricatures of architecture as these houses would not occur to the mind of an educated architect; but when all restraints, rational and academic, are removed, even educated architects, as we have seen, will not always take the trouble to analyze their conceptions before embodying them in durable brick and stone. It is from this that it comes that, as we said awhile ago, the characteristic works of the present period are distinctly inferior to the characteristic works of the preceding period. It is not that thoroughly good buildings have not been done within the latter period, but that they are not characteristic of the period. The buildings which appear to have been done by architects, and yet fail to stand the tests either of sense or of style, date themselves infallibly as having been done since 1876. One must resort to external evidence to ascertain whether the buildings that are honorable monuments to their architects were done before or since Mr. Norman Shaw did all this mischief.
First among these, one has little hesitation in placing the new buildings designed by Mr. Haight for Columbia College. Mr. Haight has not here been in pursuit of novelty, but has been content with conforming his structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus arrived at so as to heighten their inherent expression. And although he has kept within the limits of historical English Gothic in doing this, the result of the process is an individual building with a characteristic
FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN’S HOUSE.
Calvert Vaux, Architect.
expression of its own, the most successful piece of Gothic design that has been done in New York since Mr. Withers designed the Jefferson Market Court-house. In Queen Anne, as we saw, Mr. Haight’s work was not very distinguishable from the work of a very different architect. With a vocabulary limited to fifty words, not much can be expressed. But when he permits himself the use of language, it is seen that Mr. Haight can express thoughts. In composition and in detail these buildings are thoroughly studied and thoroughly effective. In the earlier, a street front of a whole block on Madison Avenue, the designer has resisted the temptation to diversify his building into unrest, but has built a wall of three stories in red brick and light sandstone, the broad and quiet aspect of which is enhanced by the grouping of the openings, and not disturbed by the chimney-stacks and the oriel and the turret which animate the composition. The later building, of the same materials, has been built for the library of the college, and the large hall which contains this is in effect the building. This is treated with equal skill, and to the same result of cloistral repose, of harmony and dignity and grace. These vigorous and refined works show, if the showing were needed, except by the architects of the new departure, that vigor does not necessarily involve bowlders, nor refinement microscopic mouldings, and that these short-cuts to architectural effect are rather sorry and shabby substitutes for faithful and skilful design. That these works of Mr. Haight’s are grammatically “correct” Gothic is not, to our mind, either a merit or a defect. But it shows how wide is the range of expression possible in the architecture of the Middle Ages, and of its pliability to modern uses, that without a departure from precedent the needs of an American college in the nineteenth century can be completely answered in that architecture; for there is no innovation in Mr. Haight’s work, unless we include the iron roof, which is partly visible from the floor of the hall. There are one or two “survivals” of forms which have lost their functions, as the unpierced pinnacled turrets at the angles of the library building and the crenellated parapet of the porch in the quadrangle. But, upon the whole, the result upon which the college and its architect are to be congratulated has been attained by following the advice of the sculptor who informed his pupil that the art was not difficult: “You simply take a piece of marble and leave out what you don’t want.” Mr. Haight has taken what he wanted in Gothic architecture for the uses of Columbia College, and with the trivial exceptions we have noted has left out the rest. And what is true of this work is equally true of an unpretending and picturesque piece of late Gothic, erected from Mr. Haight’s designs for St. Thomas’s School, in East Fifty-ninth Street.
ORIEL IN W. K. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTY-SECOND STREET.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.
Another interesting piece of Gothic work, though this time of distinctly Victorian Gothic, is the house designed by Mr. Vaux for Governor Tilden. The interest of this, however, is rather in the detail of form and color than in general composition, since the building is architecturally only a street front, and since the slightness of the projections and the lack of visible and emphasized depth in the wall itself give it the appearance rather of a screen than of one face of a building, and the small gables which surmount it too evidently exist for the sole purpose of animating the sky-line. But the color treatment of this front is admirable, and recalls the best work of the most successful colorist in architecture whom we have ever had in New York—Mr. Wrey Mould. It is characteristic that interesting treatment of color, like every other properly architectural development, has been stopped short by the new “movement.” An unusually large variety of colors, and those of the most positive tints that natural stones supply, has here been employed and harmonized; and, what is even rarer, they have all been used with architectural propriety to accentuate the construction and to heighten its effect. An ingenious and novel use of dark granite, which when polished is almost black, and which is employed in narrow bands precisely where it is wanted, deserves particular remark. The decorative carving attracts attention chiefly by its profusion, and by the exquisite crispness and delicacy of its execution. In both these respects the only parallel to it is in the house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, for, as we have seen, the carving upon the houses of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt does not count. That this carving counts so fully is the result of the skill of the architect in fixing its place and adjusting its scale so that it everywhere assists the architecture, and is better in its place than it would be in another place.
REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH AVENUE.
George B. Post, Architect.
These things are equally true of the equally profuse carving in the house designed by Mr. Hunt for Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt; but this, although in a monochrome of gray limestone, would have a high architectural interest without the least decoration by force of design alone. The decorative detail is scarcely so well adjusted to the building in scale as that in the house just mentioned, or in the house designed for Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt by Mr. Post, being partly lost by its minuteness, but it has the same merit of being in the right place, and designed for its place, and is cut with the same perfection. In a more recent work of Mr. Hunt’s, the Guernsey Building, in lower Broadway—a street front in distinctly modern Gothic—there is assuredly no error in scale on the side of minuteness; but the treatment, in mass and in detail, is marked by great vigor and animation, and the architecture of the building is an emphatic expression of its structure.
Another commercial building, at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, is by the architects of the Union League Club, and seems to have been designed under the pressure of a recent discovery that that building would not do. There is no doubt about the discovery; it is only a pity that it should not have been made from the drawings before they were translated into masonry. Clear, however, as the architects were on this point, they were not so clear when they began the United Bank Building what would do, and the first two stories look like a series of tentative experiments to find out. They were proving all things, perhaps, with the intention of holding fast that which was good. The practice of projecting bowlders, especially in soft sandstone, has already been mentioned as a somewhat slovenly substitute for the expression of vigor by modelling. Bowlders are projected from the piers of this basement in the most ferocious and blood-curdling manner—so ferocious, indeed, that the architects repented them of their bullying behavior. It is like the fear that came upon Snug the joiner, of the consequences that would ensue if ladies took him for the king of beasts: “Another prologue must tell he is not a lion.” And so the architects seem to have taken the counsel of Nick Bottom: “Half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck;
DOORWAY OF GUERNSEY BUILDING, BROADWAY.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.
and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect—Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or, I would request you, or, I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No. I am no such thing: I am a man as other men are: and there, indeed, let him name his name; and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner”—that is to say, Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, architects. The “other prologue,” which is calculated to reassure the most timid, is the treatment of the first floor, where a disclaimer of any offensive intention is made in the insertion between the openings of pairs of banded pilasters, between the capitals of which is inserted the novel and pleasing ornament of a key-stone. In order to make sure that they are not strong enough to do any harm, they are not only designed with much feebleness, but they are projected from the face of the wall they might otherwise be imagined to strengthen, and set upon brackets. Between these Renaissance pilasters are Romanesque entrance arches, in which there is a return to truculence of demeanor; but these are seen to be not entrances at all, but only innocent windows of bank parlors, and the real entrances under them, covered with trefoiled gablets in cast iron, are obviously harmless. It is quite fair to say that up to the top of the first story there is no design in the building, nothing that betrays any evidence of a general intention. But having built thus far in futile search of a motive and of a style, they came upon both, and built over this aimless and restless collection of inconsistent details a purposeful, peaceable, and consistent brick building, a series of powerful piers connected by and sustaining powerful arches, defined by a light label moulding, and enriched at the springing with a well-designed belt of foliage. It seems incredible that the authors of this respectable building should be also the authors of the basement on which it stands. At the angle is the ingenious device of a griffin “displayed,” and with one wing folded back against either wall, to carry the metal socket of the flag-staff. This feature in all its details is designed with great spirit and picturesqueness. But the architectural impulse fails in the attic story, which should obviously be here the richest part of the building, and which is the baldest, being only a series of rectangular holes, without either modelling or decoration, and without relation in their grouping to the openings immediately under them.
UNITED BANK BUILDING.
Peabody & Stearns, Architects.
By far the most successful, however, of all the recent commercial buildings is the Post Building, designed by Mr. Post, and executed, above the blue-stone basement, in yellow brick and yellow terra-cotta. The site is an irregular tetragon at the intersection of three streets, and the court, made necessary by the depth of the plot, instead of being a well sunk in the middle of the building, is made a recess in one of the long sides. This
“POST” BUILDING.
George B. Post, Architect.
arrangement is not only practically convenient, but, like every arrangement obviously dictated by practical convenience, is capable of becoming architecturally effective, and here becomes so. The openings are admirably well grouped between the powerful piers, and, what is a rare attainment in “elevator architecture,” there is abundant variety in their treatment, without the look of restlessness and caprice which generally attends an effort for variety in a many-storied building. The detail enhances the effect of this disposition. It is well adjusted to its function and position, nowhere excessive in quantity or in scale, and nowhere meagre, and it is in itself rich and refined. It is designed in “free Renaissance,” that is to say, the designer has undertaken to model the building faithfully, according to its plan and construction, in Renaissance architecture, leaving out all that he does not want. Mr. Haight, as we saw, was able to achieve that result without transcending the lines of academic Gothic. Mr. Post has put his academic Renaissance into the alembic of analysis, and where the analysis has been complete his Renaissance architecture has volatilized and disappeared. We are very sure that he had no real use for the imitations in terra-cotta of protruding key-stones, for example, and these are almost the only badges left his building of the style with which he started, except the capitals of the pilasters, and the Ionic capitals of the very pretty shafted arcade which forms the attic. But for these comparatively trivial incidents of his work, Mr. Post’s free Renaissance would have to be classified as Gothic, if it were really necessary to classify it at all, except as good architecture. Mr. Post, in fact, has done on his own account what the Romanesque builders did. They, too, were doing “free classic.” They began with classical Roman architecture, and, steadily leaving out what they did not want, they arrived at Westminster and Amiens and Cologne.
It is strange to see so thoroughly studied a performance as this succeeded by so thoroughly unstudied a performance as the Mills Building, by the same architect. But possibly ten-story buildings, which must be built in a year, will not wait for architects to mature designs which would make the buildings of interest to students of architecture as well as to investors. Whatever the cause may be, the result is unfortunate; for after the grandiose and somewhat swaggering Roman gateway, and the portcullis which it encloses, have been taken out, the rest of the Mills Building may safely be thrown away. The portcullis is really an interesting piece of iron-work both in design and in workmanship, although in both it is distinctly inferior to such a piece of work as the nondescript beast in cast iron that performs the humble office of holding a sign in Cedar Street, and that might have been wrought in the thirteenth century, so grotesque, so skilful, so charged with the spirit of artistic and enjoyed handicraft it is. [See initial letter.]
GATEWAY OF MILLS BUILDING.
George B. Post, Architect.
So the new departure is still but a departure, and it seems time that such of the victims of it as are artists who take serious views of their art should ask themselves why they continue to work in a style which has never produced a monument, and in which it is impossible to discern any element of progress. In doing Queen Anne, have they done anything but follow a fashion set, as fashions in millinery and tailoring are set, by mere caprice? A professional journal has indeed declared that “architecture is very much a matter of fashion,” and architects who take this view of their calling will of course build in the fashion, as they dress in the fashion, in spite of their own knowledge that the fashion is absurd. But it is impossible to regard an architect who takes this view as other than a tradesman, or to discuss his works except by telling what are the latest modes, in the manner of the fashion magazines. It seems impossible for architects who take this view of their art to take their art seriously—anything like so seriously, for example, as they take their incomes. But for architects who love their art and believe in it, the point of “departure” is much less important than the point of arrival, and by such architects the historical styles of architecture will be rated according to the help they give in solving the architectural problems of our time. We have seen that an architect who starts from Renaissance architecture and an architect who starts from Gothic architecture, if they faithfully scrutinize their precedents, and faithfully discard such as are inapplicable, in arriving at free architecture will arrive, so far as style is concerned, at much the same result. If this process of analysis were to be carried on for a generation, it would be as difficult, and as purely a matter of speculative curiosity, to trace the sources of English and American architecture as the sources of the composite and living English language, which is adequate to every expression. We have been blaming the architects for accepting the forms of past architecture without analyzing them. But, indeed, if architects had been analysts, they would generations ago have recognized in their work that we do live in times unknown to the ancients, whether of Athens in the fifth century before our era, or of Western Europe in the thirteenth century of our era; that within the limits set by fact and reason there is ample room for the exercise of all accomplished talents, and verge enough for the expression of all sane temperaments, while without these limits nothing can be done that will stand the test of fact and reason, which is the test of time; that “effects” cannot precede causes, and that the rudest art which is sincere is living and in the way to be refined, while the most refined art that has lost its meaning can never be made alive. The recognition of these things would have prevented a vagary like the frivolities and affectations of the new departure from attaining any vogue, but it would also have prevented the establishment of any technical styles in modern building, and instead of reproducing “examples” of one historical style and then of another, and then of a mixture of two, architects would be producing and writers would be discussing works of the great art of architecture.
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES
AS an architectural work, the house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt is perhaps the most noteworthy of the four large and costly mansions herewith illustrated. In this a design intrinsically interesting has been carried out with an amplitude of means of all kinds which yet nowhere degenerates into profusion or mere ostentation. The dimensions are generous for a town house, and they have been made the most of by a breadth of treatment and an emphasis of structure, in the walls at least, which enable the building to carry with grace a wealth of ornament under which many buildings of equal size would disappear. The material is a soft gray limestone, which leaves much to be desired in color, though in texture it is equally adapted to the simple and massive treatment of the walls and to the minute delicacy of the decoration, both architectural and sculptural. It is very much to the credit of the designer that in spite of a richness without many examples in our domestic architecture, except in the other dwellings of this same series, the first impression of his work, and the most abiding, is that of power and massiveness. This is secured mainly by the unbroken breadth of the flank of wall between the porch and the angle on the Fifth Avenue front of the building—unbroken except by the simple and square-headed openings with which it is pierced, and the crisp and emphatic though
HOUSE OF W. K. VANDERBILT.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.
not excessive string courses which traverse it and mark the division of the stories. It is questionable whether this massiveness is not carried too far, but everybody will admit that an excessive weight of wall is a “good fault” in the street architecture of New York, and that of the two, a dwelling is more dignified which approaches the solidity proper to a prison than one that emulates the precarious lightness proper to a greenhouse. The depth of the porch and of the recessed balcony over it in the central division of the avenue front assists this expression of solidity, and helps the building to wear its burden of decoration “lightly, like a flower.” The richness, as we have said, is almost unexampled in New York. Of strictly architectural decoration—that is, of members and details which are usually designed by the architect of a building—there is a copiousness which is only saved by the means just indicated from becoming an embarrassment of riches. All this work is exquisite in execution. In design it is generally interesting and scholarly, though there is common to all of it the defect of being too small to be thoroughly well seen and thoroughly effective. The uniformity of this defect of scale seems to prove that the architect erred in estimating the effect of his design in the colorless material employed. The decoration of the recess of the balcony, too, loses effect by being entirely unrelated to the construction, and the stone trellis with which the turret at the angle is overlaid is equally irrelevant to the object to which it is applied. Architectural decoration ceases to be such when it ceases to be a development of the structure; and these exceptions, by their comparative ineffectiveness, confirm the wisdom of the rule by which elsewhere throughout the building the ornament is used to emphasize the structure, and thereby gains greatly in impressiveness and in charm.
The sculptural decoration, in contradistinction to that strictly architectural, equally abounds. By sculptural decoration is meant that designed as well as executed by the sculptor, and in regard to which the only care of the architect is to provide places for it, and so to frame it that, if it does not help, it may not injure, the architecture to which it is attached. It is not too much to say of this that it is much the most important and interesting work in decorative sculpture which is to be seen out-of-doors in New York. The most noteworthy piece of it, perhaps, is the procession of cherubic musicians girdling the frieze-like band of the corbel which carries the oriel of the southern front.[D] The execution elsewhere, in the panels under and between the windows, and in the pilasters of the bay, is equally good, but the design is nowhere else so effective. One need not be a purist, indeed, to find fault with the introduction of these pilasters at the angles of the bay and on the curve of the oriel, which are so clearly not structural members, actual or symbolic, and which are so clearly introduced for the sake of the ornament they bear, although he may condone the fault for the prettiness of the ornament generally in design, and its unfailing care and delicacy of execution. The only criticism possible, indeed, upon the execution of this work is, that it is too exquisite, and reduces the texture of carved stone too nearly to the more facile surface of moulded clay.
One’s admiration of Mr. Hunt’s spirited and scholarly design does not indeed cease with the walls of the house; but it must be owned that it undergoes some modification above the cornice. It cannot be said that the sky-line is so effective as might have been expected from what is beneath it. There is an undeniable piquancy about the statued gable which terminates the roof of the principal mass, and the relation between this roof and the steep hood of the turret is picturesque, taken alone. Unfortunately, it cannot be taken alone, and the effect of the whole series of roofs is not a harmonious grouping, but—there is no other word for it—a “huddle.” It is in the roof, too, that the shortcomings of the architect in the solution of what may be called his academic problem are most apparent. The style of his work is the transitional style of France, the modification of mediæval architecture under the influence of the Italian Renaissance, until what was all Gothic at the beginning of the transition had become all classic at its close. This is, in fact, an attempt to summarize in one building the history of a most active and fruitful century in the history of architecture, which included the late Gothic of the fifteenth century and the early Renaissance of the sixteenth, and spanned the distance from the minute and complicated modelling of the Palais de Justice at Rouen and the Hôtel Cluny at Paris, to the romantic classicism of the great châteaux of the Loire. Certainly the attempt does not lack boldness. Here we have in one building the superimposed bases and interpenetrating mouldings of the latest French Gothic and the fish-bladder tracery of the Renaissance, and in the dormers the stride from the ogee canopies of Rouen to the prim pilasters and pediment of Orleans. Mr. Hunt’s skill has not sufficed to introduce together these features, the outcomes of different modes of thought as well as of different systems of construction, without a visible incongruity; nor are they in all cases successful, taken singly. The large and elaborate dormer over the entrance, especially, instead of being a visible reconciliation of the two styles, is a visible demonstration that they cannot be reconciled. A complete construction of post and lintel, of pilaster and entablature, is supplemented by another construction of flying buttresses which are clearly superfluous and irrelevant, and which, instead of resisting the thrust of an arch, have the appearance of ineffectually “shoring up” a structure which, though complete, is unstable.
One is inclined to ascribe the lack of unity and repose which the disturbed sky-line of the building entails upon it, and which somewhat impairs the dignity of an otherwise dignified and always animated design, to the angle turret of which the architect was evidently enamoured. We may share his liking for it, and admit it to be an extremely pretty thing, without admitting that it belongs to this building. The leading motive of the composition is evidently the “pyramidization,” to borrow Mr. Thomas Hope’s uncouth word, of the whole building towards the apex of the main mass at the angle, from the point of view from which the illustration is taken. It is clearly to assist and emphasize the ascent and convergence of all the lines of the building to this apex, and to enhance the apparent dimensions, that this mass is raised a story, and the extremities of the building allowed to fall away, and it is in order to account for the emphasizing of this mass by a separate roof that the somewhat awkward expedient has been adopted of dropping the cornice on the street side below the eaves. New York readers who are familiar with the aspect of the Dry Dock Savings-Bank in the Bowery will know what is meant by this “pyramidization,” and will remember how it is there attained. Now it happens that it is precisely this intention which in the present instance is obscured and partly defeated by the tormenting of the sky-line, which in turn may be traced to the insistence of the architect upon his extremely pretty but irrelevant
HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT.
George B. Post, Architect.
turret. It is a good lesson in architecture to find that the effect of a whole may be so much impaired by one of the most successful of the parts, and that even when “the thing” is really rich and rare, we may still be unsatisfied how it “got there.” Happily neither this shortcoming, nor shortcomings much graver, could prevent such a work as this from being an ornament to the city, and an honorable monument to its architect.
Perhaps it is because Mr. Post, the architect of the house of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, has not attempted so much as Mr. Hunt that his work may be called at once more successful and less interesting. In color it has more and in design less of variety. For the monotony of gray wall and black roof it substitutes red brick, with wrought work of the same gray limestone employed in the house we have been talking of, and with a red slated roof broken by great stone dormers. It is much more simple and compact in composition than the other, for the main house is a parallelogram brought together under one great four-hipped roof, and the wing is here a very subordinate appendage. It is thus much simpler, much more within the conventional decorum of a town mansion in its scheme, while it is equally far from having the appearance of having been designed by contract, and is studied with equal thoroughness, although with a very different motive. In the matter of color, it is undeniable that the brick-work has in places a patchy look by reason of the comparatively small quantities in which it is used, the whole front on the avenue being virtually of highly wrought stone, and it seems clear that the building would have gained if the brick had been omitted altogether from this front. On the street front the mode of treatment adopted might very possibly have made the building dull and monotonous if it had been built in monochrome, as assuredly the addition of a strong contrast of color would have made the more varied design of the other painfully restless. In style the two buildings offer a curious resemblance and a curious contrast. This also is a French château, but a French château of the period after the transition, when all detail had been thoroughly classicized, and only a romantic wilfulness and freedom of composition recalled the architecture of the Middle Ages. Here are the shell frieze of Blois and the fish-bladder tracery of Orleans, without the Gothic detail which in the French Renaissance is so often found side by side with them. The carving here, equally well executed for its purpose, does not appeal so much to admiration for its execution, for the reason that it is all strictly architectural, and not directly imitative. In design it is for its purpose equally well studied; in scale, indeed, is much better studied, so that the detail, which is often lost in the ineffectual minuteness of the carving in the former case, here takes its place with emphasis. Perhaps in some instances it takes its place with too much emphasis, as in the modelling of the arches of the first floor; while, on the other hand, there is a clear lack of vigor in the brackets which carry the balcony of the third story, and in the treatment of the spiral shaft upon which rests the corbelled turret at the outer angle. But these defects of design seem to be quite deliberate, and it seems, upon the whole, that the building looks as the architect intended it to look, in a more accurate sense than can be said of its competitor. The leading motive of composition in that was the “pyramidization” at the angle. The leading motive of this may be assigned to the development of the floor lines. The perpendicular lines are entirely subordinated
to these—so far subordinated, indeed, that the axial lines of the openings in the lower stories are disregarded in the upper—and the horizontal lines are wrought by modelling and decoration into emphatic belts, graduated in richness from the simple basement course to the very rich and elaborate cornice. We may say here, too, that our admiration grows fainter above this line; for the exaggerated dormers, excessive as dormers and inadequate as gables, are the least successful features of the building, while in their decoration, alone in the building, constructive propriety is abandoned. But the great and simple roof certainly prevents the building from straggling, as its neighbor tends to do, while the angle turrets at its base not only relieve its outline of monotonous heaviness, but are clever expedients for stopping the lines of its angles. Upon the whole, one may say of Mr. Post’s design that it is a thoroughly workmanlike piece of work, and may even find less fault with it than with the more ambitious work of Mr. Hunt; though, indeed, he may ascribe this to his belief that there is less in it to talk about or to think about.
Between either of these and the brown-stone houses which have been built for Mr. William H. Vanderbilt, after the designs of Messrs. Herter, the decorators, a wide architectural gulf is fixed. We found a leading motive in each of the others; but what leading motive, or, indeed, what subordinate motive, of an architectural kind, can be found here? There is indeed no development of lines or of masses, and no organized relation of parts is aimed at. The openings are not grouped or spaced so as to tell the story of the interior, nor so as to bear any reference to each other, nor are the structural features which every building must possess brought out by modelling; nor is the ornament applied to accentuate the structural features, nor is it designed with reference either to its place or to its function as ornament. The fluted pilasters of the second story seem to be meant, indeed, to re-enforce the angles of the projecting portions of the wall. But this intention is abandoned in the first and in the third stories, in which a belt of carved foliage is run to the angles of the wall, without reference to the lines of the pilasters. This foliage is in workmanship as careful as possible—as careful, indeed, as the carving in either of the architectural works which we have been discussing. Yet its perfection gives no pleasure to the spectator, for the simple reason that it has nothing to do with the building in the walls of which it is cut. Much of the detail is carefully designed, but the absence of a general design makes it ineffective. Except for the refinement of some of this detail, the building would be as vacant of architectural interest as any work of our architectural period of darkness. The Stewart mansion does not interest students of architecture; but the Stewart mansion itself exhibits a nearer approach than these houses to an architectural design, and certainly a coherent design with coarse detail is less depressing, even if it be more irritating, than an entire absence of architectural meaning, with here and there a pretty architectural phrase which in some other context may have meant something. These houses have another misfortune in their very lugubrious color. A vivid piece of painted decoration in the recessed balcony of the nearer is a grateful oasis in the gloomy waste of rubbed sandstone, and some relief to its monotony is also afforded by the gilded railings of the windows at each side of this balcony. But it is to be hoped that courage may be found to let loose a discreet decorator with unlimited goldleaf upon the whole sad fronts. A mode of decoration which has been found so effective in the fogs of London might profitably be employed to animate façades which are in no danger of becoming too joyous. It would not be fair to leave these architectural failures, which are in so unpleasant contrast to the encouraging architectural success achieved in the other Vanderbilt houses, without noting one excellent piece of design in the railings which surround them, in which an original, characteristic, and successful treatment of metal has been attained, and which, as works of art, are really of more value than the houses they protect.
POST AND RAILING, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE.
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT
THE total length of the bridge is 5989 feet, of which the central span between the towers is 1595 feet 6 inches, the “land spans” from the towers to the anchorages each 930 feet, the approach on the New York side 1562 feet 6 inches, and on the steeper Brooklyn side 971 feet. These dimensions do not make this the longest bridge in the world. But when it was built there was no single span which approached the central span over the East River; and though it has since been exceeded by two spans of the Forth Bridge, in Scotland (1710 feet each, sustained by cantilevers), it remains by far the largest example of a chain-bridge. It is half as long again as Roebling’s Cincinnati Bridge (1057 feet between towers), and nearly twice as long as the same engineer’s Niagara Bridge (821 feet). The span of the ill-fated bridge over the Ohio at Wheeling, which was built in 1848, and blown down in 1854, was 1010 feet. Noteworthy suspension-bridges in Europe are Telford’s, over the Menai Straits (589 feet), finished in 1825; Chaley’s bridge, at Fribourg (870 feet), finished in 1834; and Tierney Clark’s bridge over the Danube at Pesth (670 feet), finished in 1849. The longest spans bridged otherwise than by a roadway hung from cables are the central spans of Stephenson’s Britannia (box girder) Bridge (459 feet), of Eads’s St. Louis Bridge, of steel arches (520 feet), and of the beautiful Washington Bridge, of steel
THE BRIDGE FROM THE BROOKLYN SIDE.
arches, at New York (510 feet). The largest span of an arch of masonry known to have been built in a bridge (251 feet) was in that built in the fourteenth century, and destroyed by Carmagnola in the fifteenth, which crossed the Adda at Trezzo. The largest now standing (220 feet) is an American work, the arch designed and built by General Meigs to carry the Washington Aqueduct over Cabin John Creek. The second is that of the Grosvenor Bridge at Chester (200 feet), and the third the central arch of London Bridge (152 feet).
The Brooklyn Bridge is thus one of the mechanical wonders of the world, one of the greatest and most characteristic of the monuments of the nineteenth century. Its towers, at least, bid fair to outlast every structure of which they command a view. Everybody recalls Macaulay’s prophecy of the time “when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand upon a broken arch of London Bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” But when our New-Zealander takes his stand above the saddles that are now ridden by the cables of the bridge, to look over the site of a forsaken city, there will be no ruins of churches—at least, of churches now in being—for him to sketch or see. The web of woven steel that now hangs between the stark masses of the towers may have disappeared, its slender filaments rusted into nothingness under the slow corrosion of the centuries. Its builders and the generation for which they wrought may have been as long forgotten as are now the builders of the Pyramids, whereof the traveller, “as he paceth amazedly those deserts,” asks the Historic Muse “who builded them; and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.” It is not unimaginable that our future archæologist, looking from one of these towers upon the solitude of a mastless river and a dispeopled land, may have no other means of reconstructing our civilization than that which is furnished him by the tower on which he stands. What will his judgment of us be?
This, or something like this, ought to be a question with every man who builds a structure which is meant to outlast him, whether it be a temple of religion or a work of bare utility like this. It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. This is in itself characteristic of our time. It is true of no other people since the Romans, and of none before. Like the Roman remains, the duration of this work of ours will show that we knew how to build. “A Roman work,” we often hear it said of the bridge, and it is in many ways true. It is far beyond any Roman monument in refinement of mechanical skill. It is Roman in its massiveness and durability. It is Roman, too, in its disregard of art, in resting satisfied with the practical solution of the great problem of its builders, without a sign of that skill which would have explained and emphasized the process of construction at every step, and everywhere, in whole and in part, made the structure tell of the work it was doing. There have been periods in history when this æsthetic purpose would have seemed to the builder of such a monument as much a matter of course, as necessary a part of his work, as the practical purpose which animated the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. It would have seemed so to the engineer of a bridge in Athens in the second century before our era, or to the engineer of a bridge in Western Europe in the thirteenth century of our era. The utilitarian treatment of our monument is as striking and as characteristic a mark of the period as its utilitarian purpose. It is a noble work of engineering; it is not a work of architecture.
The most strictly scientific of constructors would scarcely take the ground that he did not care how his work looked, when his work was so conspicuous and so durable as the Brooklyn Bridge, and he must be aware that a training in scientific construction alone will not secure an architectural result. It is more probable that he looks upon the current architectural devices as frivolous and irrelevant to the work upon which he is engaged, and consoles himself for his ignorance of them by contempt. Architecture is to him the unintelligent use of building material. Assuredly this view is borne out by a majority of the “architecturesque” buildings that he sees, and he does not lack express authority for it. Whereas the engineer’s definition of good masonry is “the least material to perform a certain duty,” Mr. Fergusson declares that “an architect ought always to allow himself such a margin of strength that he may disregard or play with his construction;” and Mr. Ruskin defines architecture to be the addition to a building of unnecessary features. An engineer has, therefore, some warrant for considering that he is sacrificing to the graces and doing all that can reasonably be expected of him to produce an architectural monument, if in designing the piers of a chain-bridge he employs an unnecessary amount of material and adds unnecessary features. But if we go back to the time when engineers were artists, and study what a modern scientific writer has described as “that paragon of constructive skill, a Pointed cathedral,” we shall find that the architecture and the construction cannot be disjoined. The work of the mediæeval builder in his capacity of artist was to expound, emphasize, and refine upon the work he did in his capacity of constructor, and to develop and heighten its inherent effect. And it is of this kind of skill that the work of the modern engineer, in so far as he is only an engineer, shows no trace.
Reduced to its simplest expression, and as it has actually been used for unknown periods in Asia and in South America, a suspension-bridge consists of two parallel ropes swung from side to side of a ravine, and carrying the platform over which the passenger walks. As the span increases, so that the dip makes the ropes impracticable, the land ends of the ropes are hoisted some distance above the roadway which they carry. If nothing can be found there strong enough to hold them, they are simply passed over, say, forked trees, and the ends made fast to other trees or held down with stones. This is the essential construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The ropes become four cables sixteen inches thick, of 5541 steel wires; the forked tree becomes a tower 276 feet high, and 8260 square feet in area at the base; the bowlder to hold down the end of the rope becomes a mass of masonry of 60,000 tons’ weight; the shaky platform becomes a great street, 85 feet wide, of five firm roadways. But the man who first carried his rope over the forked tree was the inventor of the arrangement which, developed through all the refinements of modern mechanics, forms the groundwork of the Brooklyn Bridge.
This statement of the germinal idea of a chain-bridge will, perhaps, give a clearer notion of the functions of the several parts of the Brooklyn Bridge than a consideration of the complicated structure in its ultimate evolution, in which these functions are partly lost sight of. But if the structure had been architecturally designed, these things would have been emphasized at every point and in every way. The function of the great “towers,” so called, being merely to hold up the cables, it is plain that three isolated piers would have performed that
BRIDGE AT MINNEAPOLIS.
Thomas M. Griffith, Engineer.
function, and the stability of these piers, loaded as they are by the cables, would very possibly have been assured, even if they had been completely detached from each other. But in order at once to stiffen and to load them, so as to make the area of resistance to the force of the wind equal to the whole area of the towers, the openings through which the roadways run are closed above by steep pointed arches, and the spandrels of these filled with a wall which rises to the summit of the piers, where a flat coping covers the whole. There is a woful lack of expression in this arrangement. The piers should assert themselves starkly and unmistakably as the bones of the structure, and the wall above the arches be subordinated to a mere filling. It should be distinctly withdrawn from the face of the piers instead of being, as in fact it is, only distinguished from them by their shallow and ineffectual projections. It should be distinctly dropped below their summits instead of rising to the same height, and being included under a common cornice. To see what a difference in effect this very obvious differentiation of parts would have made, glance at the sketch of a suspension-bridge at Minneapolis. This is not, upon the whole, a laudable design, and it contains several survivals of conventional architectural forms meaningless in their present place. But the mere subduing of the archway to a strut between the piers explains—not forcibly, perhaps, nor elegantly, but unmistakably—the main purpose of the structure, and the functional relation of its parts. A drawing of one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge without its cables would tell the spectator nothing; the structure itself will tell our New-Zealander nothing of its uses. With its flat top and its level coping, indicating that the whole was meant to be evenly loaded, it would seem to be the base of a missing superstructure rather than what it is.
The flatness of the top alone conceals instead of expressing the structure. It is of the first practical necessity that the great cables should move freely in their saddles, so as always to keep the pressure upon the piers directly vertical, and very ingenious appliances have been employed to attain this end, and to avoid chafing the cables. But the design of the piers themselves
tells us absolutely nothing of all this. The cable simply disappears on one side and reappears on the other, as if it were two separate cables, one on each side, instead of one continuous chain. Look at this section of the top of the tower, and see how an exquisite refinement of mechanical arrangement may coexist with absolute insensibility to the desirableness even of an architectural expression of this arrangement. The architecture of this crowning member of the tower has nothing whatever to do with the purpose for which the structure exists. Is it not perfectly evident that an architectural expression of this mechanical arrangement would require that the line of the summit, instead of this meaningless flat coping, should, to begin with, be a crest of roof, its double slope following the line of the cable which it shelters? Here the very channel through which the cable runs is not designed, but is a mere hole occurring casually, and not by premeditation, in the midst of the mouldings which form the cornice of the tower. This is architectural barbarism.
Other opportunities offered for architectural expression in the towers themselves were in the treatment of the buttresses, in the treatment of the balconies which girdle the tower at the height of the roadway, and in the modelling of the arches. The girth of each of the towers at the water-line is 398 feet. At the roof-course it is 378 feet. The reduction is effected by means of five or six offsets, which withdraw each face of the tower four feet between the bottom and the top, and each end six feet. The counter-forts, eight in all, on the sides of the outer piers and on the faces of all the piers, are mere applied strips, very shallow in proportion to their width, and terminating in the capital-like projections which are casually pierced to receive the cables. It may make, perhaps, no serious difference in the mechanical efficiency of these counter-forts whether their area be narrow and deep or broad and shallow. But an increase of depth in proportion to width would of itself, with its higher lights and sharper shadows, have made forcible masses of what are now ineffectual features. This inherent effect would be very greatly enhanced if the offsets themselves were accentuated by sharp and decisive modelling. As it is, emphasis seems to have been studiously avoided. The offsets are merely long batterings of the wall, which do nothing to separate the piers into related parts with definite transitions, and so to refine the crudity of the masses. To see the difference between a mechanical and a monumental conception of a great structure, compare these towers with the front of Amiens, or of Strasburg, or of Notre Dame of Paris. Of course the designer of a modern bridge must not attempt to reproduce in his work “those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower.” That would be a more fatal fault than the rudeness and crudeness with which we have to charge the design of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. The ornament of the cathedrals, so far as it is separable from their structure, has nothing for the designer of the bridge even of suggestion. But to see how masses may be modelled so as to be made to speak, look at the modelled masses of the tower of Amiens, the stark lines of essential structure framing the screen of wall between them, in contrast with the uniform deadness here of buttress and curtain wall; the crisp emphasis of lines of light and hollows of black shade which mark the transitions between parts of structure in the west front of Rheims, in contrast with the lack of emphasis in the offsets of the bridge tower; the spirit of the gargoyled balconies that belt the towers of Notre Dame, and the spiritlessness of the parapeted balconies that encircle the tower of the bridge. And note, too (we are not now speaking of the decoration of the cathedrals), that all this transcendent superiority arises merely from a development and emphasis of the inherent expression of the masses themselves, which in the bridge are left so crude, and in the cathedral towers are refined so far. It need not, and indeed should not, have been carried so far in this architecture of reason and utility as in the architecture of a poetical religion. The mere rudiments of those works would have furnished all the expression that is necessary or desirable here. But these rudiments are wanting. What can we say but that the designer of the cathedral began where the designer of the bridge left off? If our New-Zealander should extend his travels, and come upon these monuments also, what would be his surprise at finding documentary proof that the bridge was built six hundred years after the cathedrals, and that the generation which built the bridge looked backward and downward upon the generation which built the cathedrals as rude and barbarous and unreasoning in comparison with themselves!
What we have said of the towers is true also of the anchorages. The bowlder which the Peruvian rolls upon the end of his rope to hold it down is here a mass of 60,000 tons. Scientifically it is adjusted to its purpose, no doubt, with the most exact nicety. Artistically it is still but a bowlder rolled upon a rope. It would probably be impracticable to exhibit the anchor plate which takes the ultimate strain of this mile and more of cable, though we may be sure that our Greek or our Gothic bridge-builder would not have admitted its impracticability without as exhaustive an investigation as the modern bridge-builder has given to the mechanical aspects of his problem. But it was certainly practicable to indicate the function of the anchorage itself, to build it up in masses which should seem to hold the cable to the earth, or a double arch like—or rather unlike—the double arch of the main tower, turned between piers which should visibly answer the same purpose. Instead of either of these, or of any technical device for the same purpose, the weight above is a crude mass, so far from being adapted to its function in its form, that one has to look with some care to find it from the street below, and to distinguish it from the approaches.
What we have called the balconies at the level of the roadway are not “practical” balconies, since they open from the driveways, and not from the walk, and are not accessible as points of view. The purpose of a projection at this point is to secure as great a breadth as possible for the system of wind-braces under the floor of the bridge. This purpose is attained by the projection, but is only masked by the imitations of balconies, instead of being architecturally expressed, as it might have been unmistakably expressed, by the bold projection of a granite spur from the angle of the pier.
There are, probably, few arches in the world—certainly there can be none outside of works of modern engineering—of anything like the span, height, thickness, and conspicuousness of those in the bridge towers which are so little effective. Like the brute mass of wall above them, they are impressive only by magnitude. The great depth of the archway is only seen as a matter of mensuration, not felt as a poetical impression, as it would have been if the labors of the constructor had been supplemented by the labors of an artist; if the shallow strips of pier had become real buttresses, and the jamb and arch had been narrowed by emphatic successions of withdrawal, instead of being merely tunnelled through the mass; if the intrados of the arch itself had been accentuated by modelling, instead of being weakened by the actual recession of its voussoirs behind the plane of the wall.
SECTION OF TOP AND BACK OF ANCHORAGE.
(SIDE VIEW.)
The approaches themselves are greatly impressive, as indeed the towers are also, by magnitude and massiveness. The street bridges are uniformly imposing by size and span, and especially attractive also by reason of the fact that through them we get what is to be got nowhere else in our rectangular city, glimpses and “bits” of buildings. The most successful of them all, and the most successful feature architecturally of all the masonry of the bridge, is the simple, massive, and low bridge of two arches which spans North William Street, in New York. The arcades between the streets are imposing by number and repetition as well as by massiveness, and by the Roman durability which marks all the work. They suffer, however, from two causes. The coping, the arches, and the piers, which are the emphatic parts of structure, are lighter in color than the unemphasized and rock-faced fields of the wall, and this is always a misfortune when it is not an error. The arches are of the form called “Florentine”—that is to say, round within and pointed without. The deepest voussoirs are thus those at the crown of the arch. This is the reverse of the disposition which would be dictated by mechanical considerations alone. Architecturally it has the drawback of interrupting at every arch the successive and diminishing wheelings which make a long arcade of great openings so impressive in a perspective view. The form seems to have been chosen on account of the facility it afforded, by lengthening the upper voussoirs, to conform the ridge line of the arches to the slope of the roadway, while keeping the springing line horizontal. This gradual diminution of the arches shoreward enhances the apparent length of the approach looking in that direction, but correspondingly shortens it looking towards the bridge; and it seems, upon the whole, that it would have been better to carry the arches through level, without attempting to dissemble the difference between their line and that of the roadway. There are some shabby and flimsy details of iron work, which mar the monumental effect of the great roadway itself, while the design of the iron stations at either end is grossly illiterate, and discreditable to the great work. Imitations in cast iron of stone capitals surmount and emphatically contradict posts profusely studded with bolt-heads; and other solecisms, alike against constructional reason and architectural tradition, are rife in these unfortunate edifices, which do what they can to vulgarize the great structure to which they give access.
Vulgarity certainly cannot be charged against any integral portion of the great work itself. There is nothing frivolous and nothing ostentatious even in the details which we have noted, and in which we have not been so much criticising the crowning work of a great engineer’s career as noting the spirit of our age. It is scarcely fair to say, even, as was said by an architectural journal when the completion of the bridge was doubtful, that if it were left incomplete its towers would stand “in unnecessary ugliness.” Its defects in design are not misdeeds, but shortcomings. They are the defects of being rudimentary, of not being completely developed. The anatomy of the towers and of the anchorages is not brought out in their modelling. Their fingers, so to speak, are all thumbs. Their impressiveness is inherent in their mass, and is what it could not help being. The ugliest of great bridges is undoubtedly Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge; and this is ugly, not because it is square and straight, but because it tells nothing of itself. It is a mere flat surface, and almost absolutely inexpressive, compared, for example, with such a piece of iron-work as the truss which carries the roadway of the bridge over Franklin Square, in which the function of every joint and member is apparent. But a far nobler thing than this is the central span of the great bridge itself, its roadway slowly sweeping upward to meet the swift swoop of its cables. We have complained of the lack of expression in the towers of their anatomy, but this is anatomy only, a skeletonized structure in which, as in a scientific diagram, we see—even the layman sees—the interplay of forces represented by an abstraction of lines. What monument of any architecture can speak its story more clearly and more forcibly than this gossamer architecture, through which its purpose, like “the spider’s touch”—
“So exquisitely fine,
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line”?
This aerial bow, as it hangs between the busy cities, “curving on a sky imbrued with color,” is perfect as an organism of nature. It is an organism of nature. There was no question in the mind of its designer of “good taste” or of appearance. He learned the law that struck its curves, the law that fixed the strength and the relation of its parts, and he applied the law. His work is beautiful, as the work of a ship-builder is unfailingly beautiful in the forms and outlines in which he is only studying “what the water likes,” without a thought of beauty, and as it is almost unfailingly ugly when he does what he likes for the sake of beauty. The designer of the Brooklyn Bridge has made a beautiful structure out of an exquisite refinement of utility, in a work in which the lines of forces constitute the structure. Where a more massive material forbade him to skeletonize the structure, and the lines of effort and resistance needed to be brought out by modelling, he has failed to bring them out, and his structure is only as impressive as it needs must be. It has not helped his work, as we have seen, to trust his own sense of beauty, and to contradict or to conceal what he was doing in accordance with its dictates. As little would it have helped him to invoke the aid of a commonplace architect to plaster his structure with triglyphs or to indent it with trefoils. But an architect who pursued his calling in the spirit and with the skill of the mediæval builders of whom we have been speaking, who knew in his province the lesson the engineer has re-enforced in his, that “Nature can only be commanded by obeying her,” and that the function of an organism, in art as in nature, must determine its form—such an architect might have helped the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge to make it one of the noblest monuments of architecture in the world, as it is one of the greatest and most honorable works of engineering.