American Architecture: Studies

by Montgomery Schuyler

III

It seems, then, that the question of style in a modern cathedral is not to be determined according to the individual preference of a designer for round arches or pointed, for openings traceried or plain. If the problem he is working at has been successfully solved heretofore, he is not at liberty to ignore this solution because it falls without the limits of the historical period he has proposed to himself, and to content himself with an incomplete solution. Of course this remark does not apply as a criticism to Mr. Richardson’s design for Albany, prepared under limitations that he was compelled to observe, but which the competitors for the Cathedral of New York were at liberty to disregard. Whether he was right in so far sacrificing the monumental character of his interior to the monumental features of his exterior, is not a practical question for designers of whom no sacrifice in either direction is demanded. There are very noble examples of vaulted architecture in the Romanesque period—examples which it will be glory enough for the architect of the Cathedral of New York if he succeeds in equalling without slavishly imitating. But in all these there is a lack of that complete correspondence between the interior and the exterior structure that makes the organic unity of a true cathedral, and that was attained for the first time in the thirteenth century, after a series of tentative experiments embodied in these very Romanesque buildings.[F] It is by no means necessary for an architect to revert to these experiments because he does not sympathize with the expression of strained intensity and “otherworldliness” which the Gothic architects attained, and prefers the more robust, more massive, more mundane aspect of the Romanesque monuments that preceded the great cathedrals. The modelling of these cathedrals is carried so far that nothing is left unmodelled; there are no longer any surfaces; the whole structure is anatomized; and the modern architect, even while he stands astonished at the result of this unsparing analysis, may yet say, “It were to consider too curiously to consider so.” But it is not by refusing the aid these wonderful structures offer him that he can advance upon or equal them. The development of a cathedral requires, indeed, a system of piers and vaults and flying arches and weighted buttresses. But these need not be the same features in modelling, in detail, or in expression that we know in historical examples. Instances are not wanting to show that they

TRANSVERSE SECTION THROUGH CHOIR.

Heyden Hawley

may be massed with the stalwart simplicity of the Romanesque builders as well as drawn into the complex and bewildering forms they assumed in the later Gothic. In his design for Albany, Mr. Richardson has shown very clearly that an artist, whose individuality is strong enough, can put its stamp upon whatever he adopts. The common distinction that Romanesque is a round-arched and Gothic a pointed style, is shown to be baseless in an unmistakably Romanesque church in which all the openings of the clere-story are pointed lancets, in which the pointed openings elsewhere far outnumber the round arches, and in which the architect has introduced tracery, sparingly but effectively, without at all marring the unity of the structure. Nay, the church owes the suggestion of some of its noblest features to works that did not exist until the period classified as Romanesque had closed. A modern architect forfeits his birthright who does not use all that the past has to offer him of help; and his originality is impeached only if he does not overrule to his own purposes what he adopts, if he copies instead of using. The west front of Albany, for example, is the west front of Notre Dame of Paris, with differences, as marked as the resemblances, which convert it into a new creation. The three entrances, burrowed through the thickness of the wall and not projected from the face, are repeated, but with a strong and decorated belt course at their springing. The buttresses, bringing down the line of the towers at Paris and dividing the front into three, are omitted, and a balustrade in relief takes the place of the line of statues. The flanking towers thus rise from a continuous base, and a tall mock-arcade marks their lines in the next stage and emphasizes the flanking wall, which in the mediæval example is pierced with a double arch on each side of the rose-window, and the central wall is here recessed to serve the same purpose of detaching the towers which in Notre Dame is answered by the buttresses, while above the rose-window another balustrade corresponds to the tall traceried arcade, and the lancets of the belfry stage, double in Notre Dame, are here grouped in threes. Except the buttresses, every feature of the old front has its counterpart, but by the emphasis given to the horizontal lines, and the diminution of the vertical lines, in one instance amounting to an effacement, the whole aspect of the façade is transformed. This is an admirable example of the manner in which a modern architect may employ his inheritance. Another, not less admirable, is the adoption in the transept entrance of the main and most characteristic feature of the famous “triple northern porch” of Chartres, the interpolation of narrow arches between the main portals and below the springing of their arches. This is a still more signal instance of what we have been saying of the power of changing the expression of a feature while retaining its substance, for the northern porch of Chartres is one of the loveliest fantasies of a late and highly ornate Gothic, and it is here translated back into the severer Romanesque, as all the structural features of a fully developed cathedral might be.