Strickland’s latest major work, the State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee, of 1845-9, still a temple but with various accretions, has the high site his bank lacked, but it suffers otherwise from the general deterioration of the sense of Grecian style after the mid thirties, a deterioration quite as evident in American architecture as in European. This Tennessee temple was the last but one of a series of state capitols that followed the model of Jefferson’s at Richmond, Virginia, rather than Bulfinch’s dome-crowned Boston State House or the national Capitol in Washington. The first example that was correctly Greek in detail seems to have been that for Connecticut in New Haven; it was built by Town and his partner Davis in 1827-31, and has long since been demolished. However, that designed by Gideon Shryock (1802-80) in Frankfort, Kentucky, was going up at about the same time.
In 1831-5 Davis built a larger and grander Greek Doric temple (no longer extant) as a Capitol for Indiana at Indianapolis, but provided it with a small central dome. The latest of all the temples built to serve as state capitols was a very modest one of 1849 at Benicia, California, where the columnar portico was reduced to two Doric columns in antis—it is worth noting that this was erected in the very year that Sutter’s gold strike first put California on the map of the world.
Other state capitols of this period are Grecian but not of temple form; a good example is that Town & Davis built at Raleigh, North Carolina, which was begun in 1833. The finest of all is that for Ohio at Columbus,[[92]] begun in 1839-40 and carried to completion over the years 1848-61. Here the giant ‘pilastrade’, for which columns are substituted in the central third of the front, has a Schinkel-like directness and severity (Plate [39A]). Not so happy is the flat-topped central lantern, which is also surrounded by a pilastrade. In conscientious pursuit of trabeated consistency the architects thus sought to mask the rounded shape of the dome within, as had been tried in various French projects of the late eighteenth century and by Schinkel in the Altes Museum already.
After Philadelphia, Boston was the architectural metropolis of this period; and from Boston, beginning in 1827, issued the later treatises of Benjamin purveying the Grecian orders to carpenters and builders all over the North and the Middle West. Here Bulfinch, however, established as the leading architect in the 1790s, long remained faithful to the ideals of Chambers and Adam (see Chapter [1]).
At University Hall, built for Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., in 1813-15, Bulfinch used granite for the ashlar of the walls as he had done for his Boston City Hall of 1810, but the white-painted wooden trim is not yet Grecian. The Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, also of granite, was designed by him in 1816-17, just before he left for Washington to take over from Latrobe supervision of the construction of the Capitol. The hospital building (now known as the Bulfinch Pavilion) as executed by Alexander Parris (1780-1852) in 1818-20 is certainly a mature Romantic Classical edifice if not a typically Grecian one. Above the plain pediment of the central portico a square attic with corner chimneys supports the saucer dome, and the long side wings with three ranges of unframed windows display the fine granite ashlar of Boston in all its cold pride. Compared to Latrobe, however, Bulfinch remained a provincial if not a colonial designer, high as is the intrinsic quality of his best work.
A younger generation, hitherto much influenced by Bulfinch’s established manner, took over leadership in Boston on his departure for Washington. Parris soon provided the first Greek temple in conservative New England when he built St Paul’s Church (now the Anglican Cathedral) in Tremont Street in 1819-21. Where Strickland’s contemporary Philadelphia bank was Doric and of marble, this is Ionic with the portico executed in the Acquia Creek sandstone from Virginia which was then being used so much in Washington. Solomon Willard carved the capitals. Parris’s Stone Temple of 1828, the Unitarian ‘Church of the Presidents’—the two Adams presidents—in Quincy, Mass., is not at all a temple in form but more comparable to the Grecian churches built in England in this decade. The Stone Temple outranks most of them in dignity, however, because of the superbly appropriate local material of which it is built. It was from this town that the Quincy granite came that was employed for the best Boston buildings of the next thirty years and more, and this church was a relatively early instance of its monumental use. Quincy granite had become more readily available after the first American railway was built from the quarries to the seashore by Willard solely to facilitate bringing it out by water.[[93]]
The first notable use of this granite away from Quincy had been for the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Mass., built by Willard in 1825-43. Not only Mills, as has been mentioned, but the sculptor Horatio Greenough[[94]] and also Parris claimed, and perhaps deserve, some credit for the particular form of this simple but grandiose obelisk, which rivalled those of the Old World a decade before Mills’s in Washington was designed. On its completion, a steam-operated lift or elevator was provided in 1844 capable of carrying six people; this was one of the earliest examples of an important technical device that would later influence architecture profoundly (see Chapter [14]).
Granite imposed rigid restrictions on detailing. But the new generation knew how to make of those restrictions an opportunity for developing a highly original sort of basic classicism such as even the most determined European rationalists rarely approached. The houses at 39-40 Beacon Street in Boston, now occupied by the Women’s City Club, and the David Sears house at No. 42, now the Somerset Club (Plate [43B])—the latter by Parris and of 1816, the former probably by him and of 1818—as also the granite terrace at Nos. 70-75, probably by Benjamin, are good examples of domestic work of this period. More important is Parris’s Quincy (properly Faneuil Hall) Market in Boston, designed in 1823 for Mayor Joseph Quincy as the central feature of a considerable urbanistic development on the site of earlier docks. This domed and porticoed structure lacks the geometrical severity of the Sears house with its great bow on the front and its superbly placed scroll panel; but in the Market House Parris not only used cast iron for the internal supports but also experimented on the exterior with a trabeated framework of monolithic granite piers and lintels. The same sort of ‘granite skeleton’ construction (so to call it) was also used but with greater delicacy of proportion and elegance of finish—note the Soanic incised detail of the wooden window-frames—for the commercial buildings[[95]] which Parris designed and that various lessees shortly built along the streets that flank the Market House to the north and the south (Plate [112B]). This was one of the major structural innovations of the period (see Chapter [14]).
Within a few years other Boston architects and builders were currently using this sort of construction, and it soon spread to several New England cities. However, more typical of the urban ambition of the twenties and thirties than the destroyed block of 1824 in Providence by J. H. Green (1777-1850), which followed line for line Parris’s commercial work, are two other buildings there. The Providence Arcade of 1828 by Warren has not one, but two terminal porticoes of Ionic columns executed in granite and also a fine interior consisting of raised side galleries under an iron-and-glass roof. Few extant galleries of this decade in Europe are as notable in scale and in finish. The Washington Buildings of 1843 by James C. Bucklin (1801-90), who had assisted Warren on the Arcade, had a plain range of three storeys of window-pierced red-brick wall above a trabeated granite ground storey, the whole dominated by a central pedimented feature (Plate [39B]). This was a commercial project as grand as any in contemporary Europe in scale, in materials, and in finish, although without the originality of the trabeated all-granite bow-front of Rogers’s contemporary Brazier’s Buildings on State Street in Boston. Yet Bucklin’s Westminster Presbyterian Church in Providence of 1846 is a straight Greek Ionic temple like so many other non-Anglican edifices of this period in England and America.
Where Romantic Classicism, and more specifically the Greek Revival, found its noblest opportunities in Europe in public monuments, in America after the days of Latrobe it was rather commercial, institutional, and even industrial[[96]] commissions that stimulated architects and builders to original achievement, while public work grew more and more conventional. For instance, the Lippitt Woollen Mill of 1836 in Woonsocket, R.I., and the Governor Harris Manufactory at Harris, R.I., dating from as late as 1851 can both be properly described as ‘in the Grecian vernacular’. They are most admirably proportioned and very soundly built, with walls of random ashlar masonry and boldly scaled wooden trim, very plain, yet of generically Greek character. The discipline of Romantic Classicism accorded well with the requirements of industrial building; not until the present century would factories of comparable architectural quality be built. Moreover, they were often complemented by consonant low-cost housing, as in the extant mill village at White Rock, R.I., of 1849.