CHAPTER 5
THE NEW WORLD
In varying degree Romantic Classicism left its mark on all the major cities of Europe. Paris without the Napoleonic monuments that Louis Philippe brought to completion is inconceivable, while Karlsruhe, Munich, Petersburg, and Edinburgh owe most of their architectural interest to this period.
In the New World, where the independence of the principal colonies of the European nations, British, Spanish, and Portuguese, was generally established in this period or just before it, one might expect that Romantic Classicism would have made a still more conspicuous contribution to the architectural scene. Yet the very youth of most of the countries of the New World, settled though many of them had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also the strong cultural links that they still maintained with the ancient traditions of their several homelands, tended to hold them back from entering fully into the new international movement of the day in architecture. What national libraries, moreover, were yet needed in Venezuela or Colombia, what sculpture galleries in the American Middle West? Columns and obelisks, if not triumphal arches, rose—frequently very belatedly—to celebrate national heroes of the various wars of independence; but outside the eastern United States the still very simple organization of society and the primitive means of transport required neither the institutional edifices of France—markets, hospitals, and prisons—nor the new railway stations of England.[[82]]
Yet in the United States, and not alone along the eastern seaboard, the period of Romantic Classicism left a very rich architectural deposit. The monuments of real distinction range all the way from such a church as Latrobe’s Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore (Plate [5]), one of the very finest ecclesiastical edifices of the first half of the century to be seen anywhere, to Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia of 1823-35, the first to be planned on the radial cellular system (Figure [11]). Studied and published by the English penologist William Crawford as well as by Demetz and Blouet,[[83]] this provided a new functional concept for penal architecture influential abroad from the time that Gilbert projected his Nouvelle Force Prison in the late thirties. Haviland’s prison was Castellated like Lebas’s Petite Roquette, not Grecian in detail; his New York prison of 1836-8, however, was Egyptian in detail, to which it owed its curious nickname, ‘The Tombs’. That both Latrobe and Haviland were English-born and English-trained is certainly significant; the latter, who was a cousin of the painter Haydon and a pupil of H. L. Elmes’s father James (1782-1862), had first tried his luck in Petersburg.
The characteristic and almost universal use of Grecian forms in domestic building, however, in many parts of the country continuing down to the Civil War of 1861-5, was the result of no foreign influence. Moreover, the Grecian details were not drawn by most architects and builders from the great basic treatise of Stuart and Revett, available in America only to a very few, but at second hand from the local Builders’ Guides[[84]] prepared by Haviland in Philadelphia, Asher Benjamin (1773-1845) in Boston, Minard Lafever (1798-1854) in New York, and various others. Such authors consciously Americanized what they borrowed from European sources in order to adapt Classical masonry forms to the ubiquitous wooden construction of the American countryside.
There are two levels of Romantic Classicism in America. Work of the upper professional level is found chiefly in the big eastern cities where architects operated who were either themselves foreign-born and foreign-trained or else pupils and emulators of such. The lower vernacular level is more conspicuous in America than in Europe because it includes a much greater proportion of building production than in older countries, where so many structures of earlier periods remain extant. ‘Carpenter’s Grecian’, so to call it, represents the perhaps naïve, but culturally significant, determination of all who built to exploit, in some degree at least, the modern style of their day.
The frontiersman in the Oregon of 1850 when raising a tavern in the Willamette Valley thus shared with the new and old royalties of Europe the satisfaction of architectural patronage. Moreover, like so many English gentlemen of the eighteenth century or such a nineteenth-century prince as Frederick William IV, he often took a hand at design himself. In this he was assisted by memories of the relatively settled towns he had left behind in the Middle West, themselves largely products of this period architecturally, and also by the Builders’ Guides issuing from the east in recurrent editions.
It was not alone the transient patronage of a Corsican soldier, for a few brief years heir to Louis XIV and overlord of Europe, nor the Building Committee of an autocrat on the banks of the Neva controlling all public and private architecture in an Imperial capital for a quarter of a century, that really established Romantic Classicism as the last universal style before that of our own day. It is the fact that Boston architects and builders, when Quincy granite (that most perfect of Romantic Classical building materials) became readily available in the mid twenties, arrived at a rational sort of trabeated design as distinguished as Schinkel’s; while three thousand miles to the west, and a quarter of a century later, amateur builders working in wood produced almost the same sort of ‘pilastrades’, simplified well beyond the Americanized paradigms of Greek antae they found in the plates of Asher Benjamin’s books, as Schinkel had in Berlin.
The Grecian writ ran far south to Buenos Aires in Latin America, where the broad portico of the cathedral, designed by the French engineer Prosper Catelin and built in 1822, follows closely Grand Prix designs of the 1790s; and deep into the Antipodes as well where Australia moved like the United States into nationhood and into the Greek Revival at much the same time, but at a slower pace and with less sophistication.