Just after 1900, when the metal-and-glass construction of the interiors of department stores came to be generally exposed externally, this line of development came to its climax ([Plates 131B] and [133]). This climax is so closely associated with the decorative and architectural development called Art Nouveau that the later Continental department stores may better be discussed in connexion with that (see Chapters [16], [17]). Being of exposed metal, however, not of masonry-sheathed ‘skyscraper construction’ and relatively low, these stores are closer in character to the cast-iron commercial buildings of the third quarter of the century in America and Britain than to the tall Chicago structures of 1890-1910.
Steel construction of the American type, with the internal skeleton carrying a protective cladding of masonry, has gradually spread since the opening of the century to all parts of the world that produce or can afford to buy structural steel. It was, for example, introduced into London by the Anglo-French architects Mewès & Davis in building the Ritz Hotel there in 1905. Yet it remains typically American. In most other countries reinforced concrete rivals or completely takes its place as the characteristic material for building large structures of all sorts. The story of reinforced concrete had its technical beginnings in the mid nineteenth century; but it was not before the nineties that it first began to be exploited on a large scale and for conscious architectural effect. The first important reinforced concrete buildings, French like most of the best department stores of around 1900, will be mentioned later (see Chapter [18]).
The whole picture of architecture in the twentieth century, so different from the picture of architecture before 1850, was modified by the developments that culminated in the Chicago skyscrapers. However important this has been for all later architecture both technically and aesthetically, it is important to stress here, as with the mid-century monuments of iron and glass, that the successive stages in the development are not solely, or even primarily, of premonitory and historical interest. From Parris’s granite buildings in Boston of the twenties, through the arcaded English commercial work of the fifties and sixties, to Richardson’s Field store and Sullivan’s skyscrapers in Chicago, St Louis, Buffalo, and New York, enlightened commercial patrons demanded and often received the best architecture of their day. The functional and technical challenges of commercial building seem to have brought out the creative capacities of three generations of architects as no other commissions did so consistently. Compare Parris’s Grecian temple church, St Paul’s in Boston, with his granite ‘skeleton’ fronts beside the Quincy Market (Plate [112B]); set Godwin’s Stokes Croft Warehouse beside his town halls ([Plates 113] and [92A]); measure Richardson’s Field store even against his Pittsburgh Jail ([Plates 116B] and [108B]). Then the strictly architectural, as well as the technical and social, significance of the major commercial monuments of the nineteenth century will be evident.
This chapter has summarized what was probably the greatest single innovation in nineteenth-century architecture, the rise of a new type of building to a position of prestige and of achievement comparable to that of churches and palaces in earlier periods. The same cannot be said of domestic architecture. The house was hardly a nineteenth-century invention like the office building. It was, however, modified almost beyond recognition as the century progressed, at the hands of several generations of creative architects. Around 1900 there are few if any churches, for example, to rival Sullivan’s skyscrapers in quality; but there are some houses, especially several by his disciple Wright and by his English contemporary Voysey.
CHAPTER 15
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DETACHED HOUSE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA FROM 1800 TO 1900
In the long story of man’s dwellings from prehistory to the present, the Anglo-American development that took place in the hundred years between the 1790s and the 1890s is of considerable significance, particularly as it provides the immediate background of the twentieth-century house. Architectural history has generally been little concerned, in dealing with periods earlier than the eighteenth century at least, with the habitations of any but the upper classes. The study of rural cottages in various regions of the world has been more a matter for anthropological investigation; the housing of the urban poor, when that was other than the makeshift adaptation of grander structures fallen into decay, remains for most early periods a matter of mystery. We know that ancient Rome had its blocks of middle-class flats of many storeys; although the links are not easy to recover, there was certainly some continuity in Mediterranean lands between that form of urban housing in antiquity and what can be traced from the medieval period down to the nineteenth century. Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages saw rather the development of individual urban dwellings with party walls, ancestors of the terrace-houses that first appeared in England in the seventeenth century.
The detached house of moderate size, so familiar today, the principal type of dwelling to undergo notable development in the nineteenth century in Anglo-Saxon countries, has no such remote Classical origins as the Continental flat or apartment. It made its appearance as the dwelling of the yeoman when economic conditions in late medieval England encouraged the rise of a class between the feudal landowner and the peasant parallel to the skilled artisan class in the towns. The conditions of settlement of the British colonies in America, particularly in New England, encouraged the continuation through the seventeenth century of this type of dwelling almost to the exclusion of any other sort, since towns were then small and large estates rare. Around 1700 in America, though considerably earlier in England, relatively advanced contemporary modes began to have some influence on the design of such houses. With a lag of as much as a quarter of a century, the architectural developments of the home country were generally followed in the colonies; nor did political independence much affect the dependent cultural relationship in this field after the American Revolution.
The effects of the Picturesque point of view on the development of the house in England around 1800 were several (see Chapter [6]). On the one hand, the newly fashionable attitude gave prestige to modest detached dwellings, raising the social status of the ‘cottage’ from an agricultural labourer’s hovel to a middle-class habitation or even on occasion a holiday ‘retreat’ for the upper classes—at first by adding the French adjective orné (Plate [122A]). At the same time the status of the ‘villa’ tended to be reduced from a large Italianate mansion on its own estate to a moderate-sized house at the edge of town. In much of the prolific architectural literature of the period, the hierarchy of residential building types was Rousseauistically inverted as rustic models, both native and Italian, were proposed for emulation in edifices of fairly considerable size. Thus several modes of informal design that had made their eighteenth-century debut in garden ornaments received more serious attention from architects as they came to be considered suitable for medium-sized dwellings and even sometimes for quite large mansions. As we have already seen, the towered Italian Villa was first introduced as a modest detached house by Nash at Cronkhill in 1802. It was similarly utilized by Schinkel (Plate [14A]) and Persius at Potsdam a generation later, although Royalty still preferred to dwell there in Grecian dignity or Castellated pomp (see Chapter [2]). Somewhat later, however, the Italian Villa provided (none too happily) a Royal retreat when Prince Albert decided on this mode for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in the mid forties.
Not all Picturesque modes were equally adaptable to middle-class dwellings. The Indian found its most notable realizations in a large country house, S. P. Cockerell’s Sezincote, and a Royal folly, Nash’s Brighton Pavilion (Plate [48]). There were, however, considerably later American examples[[322]] on a somewhat more modest scale, such as Iranistan at Bridgeport, Conn., built for Barnum in 1847-8, and Longwood, near Natchez in Mississippi, designed by Samuel Sloan in 1860 that have been mentioned earlier. But the Indian mode contributed the veranda, henceforth an integral feature of American domestic architecture, though rare after the Picturesque period in England. Verandas very early lost the Oriental detail, however. In front of Rustic Cottages they were often supported by bark-covered logs, but they could also acquire the formal character of Italian loggias, Tudor arcades, Swiss galleries or, most frequently, Classical porticoes and ‘pilastrades’ when adapted for use with other current modes.[[323]] In some cases the veranda, carried on occasion to two storeys in height, became the main theme of the exterior, yet was detailed so simply that no modish name properly applies (Plate [122A]).