Before Memorial Hall was designed, a competition held in 1865 for the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston in the new Back Bay residential district had brought out a variety of rather feeble attempts by Boston architects to follow the High Victorian Gothic line. The winning design of Ware & Van Brunt, executed in 1865-7, while not of the wilder Low Church order of Teulon’s or Keeling’s London work of these years, is hardly comparable to Street’s or Butterfield’s, much less to the contemporary production of younger architects such as Brooks, Bodley, or Shaw. Its best feature is the material, the richly mottled and textured local Puddingstone from nearby Roxbury.
The High Victorian Gothic of the sixties and early seventies in the United States was no more restricted to the ecclesiastical field than in England. Despite its churchy look, Memorial Hall served a variety of secular purposes from refectory to concert hall; only the wide transeptal lobby was strictly memorial in purpose. But there was rarely even such relative devotion to the Gothic in this period in the United States as the major works of Ware & Van Brunt display. For example, the untutored Elbridge Boyden (1810-98), best known for introducing the cast-iron commercial front into New England in 1854, could build two buildings for the Polytechnic Institute of Worcester, Mass., in the same year 1866 of which one, the Washburn Machine Shop, is mansarded with crude, vaguely Second Empire, detailing; while the other, Boynton Hall, is in a very provincial sort of High Victorian Gothic. Hunt, product of a Parisian education, designed the Yale Divinity School in New Haven in 1869 in a frenzied, rather Teulonian, Gothic; while in his precisely contemporary Lenox Library in New York, built in 1869-77, he followed closely and with some dignity French, if not specifically Second Empire, models.
It is not really surprising, therefore, that Richardson, returning from Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts at the end of the Civil War and entering a competition for a new Unitarian church to be built at Springfield, Mass., offered a High Victorian Gothic project that seems to derive rather directly from the work of Keeling and other Low Church English practitioners. What is surprising, however, considering the lack of special interest to later eyes in his Unity Church as executed in 1866-8, is the fact that he won the competition! The warm colour and texture of the rock-faced brownstone from nearby Longmeadow laid up in random ashlar, a certain masculine scale in the details, and an attempt at least at a boldly asymmetrical composition evidently struck his contemporaries as very promising, however. (The church was demolished in 1961.)
It was not in the Unity Church, but in Richardson’s second church, Grace Episcopal, in Medford, Mass., happily still extant, of 1867-8, that one recognizes strong personal expression. The more massively pyramidal character of the asymmetrical composition and, above all, the great boulders of which the walls are built, with heavy trim of rough quarry-faced granite, announce an original approach (Plate [91B]). Yet this approach was evidently still nurtured on the English High Victorian Gothic models that Richardson knew through the wood engravings in imported periodicals. It is even specific enough here so that one can describe this Medford church as Burgessy rather than Butterfieldian or Street-like; it is certainly no longer Keelingesque like the church in Springfield. Incidentally, when Richardson visited England in 1882 it was the work of Burges, who had just died, that he went out of his way to see—by that time, however, he found it rather disappointing.
If Richardson’s first churches were Gothic, his Western Railway Office at Springfield, built in 1867 for a client associated with the Unity Church commission, was generically Second Empire. Yet this was still more directly derived from current English work that was closely related to that mode, notably the Francis Brothers’ National Discount Building of 1857 in the City of London, than from anything Parisian. His brick and stone Dorsheimer[[241]] house of 1868 in Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, N.Y., is also Second Empire rather than Victorian Gothic, but very restrainedly so, and hence rather more French in effect. Other work by Richardson dating from the late sixties, such as the B. H. Crowninshield house in Marlborough Street in Boston of 1868-9, was more experimental in design, often recalling wild English work of the early years of the decade. Although built of wood and of very modest size, Richardson’s most interesting house of this period was the one that he built for himself in 1868 at Arrochar on Staten Island near New York.[[242]] This combines the use of a high mansarded pavilion with a sort of imitation half-timbering related to the contemporary American ‘Stick Style’ (see Chapter [14]).
In Farnam Hall at Yale College in New Haven (Plate [96A]), begun in 1869, the German-trained Russell Sturgis (1836-1909),[[243]] who had been for a time Wight’s partner, somehow arrived at an almost Webb-like—or at least Brooks-like—simplicity and sophistication of late High Victorian Gothic design, in marked contrast to the stridency of Hunt’s precisely contemporary Divinity School there. This, however, is almost unique. The most characteristic work of the day was produced by such home-trained architects as Ware & Van Brunt, Wight, Edward T. Potter, and his younger brother William A. Potter (1842-1909).[[244]] Wight’s National Academy in New York has been mentioned. His Mercantile Library in Brooklyn, N.Y., completed in 1869, of red brick with ranges of pointed-arched windows regularly but asymmetrically disposed, is similar—and not inferior—to much of G. G. Scott’s secular work. Edward T. Potter’s Union College Library has also been mentioned. His Harvard Church in Brookline, Mass., of 1873-5 is more conventional for its period. Largely renewed internally after being gutted by a fire in 1931, this shows how effectively such American materials as the popular brownstone from Portland, Conn., and the light-coloured Berea sandstone from Ohio, enlivened by accents of livid green serpentine from Pennsylvania, could produce a polychromy richer and more enduring than the endemic Butterfieldian or Teulonian red brick, with banding of bricks dipped in black tar, that had been in general use for a decade. Along this line Richardson himself followed for a while (see Chapter 13). At the same time William A. Potter, who became very briefly Supervising Architect in Washington in succession to Mullet in 1875, produced a few post offices, such as the one in Pittsfield, Mass., that are characteristic but not very distinguished examples of secular High Victorian Gothic executed in stone. (Both Potters, however, gave up the High Victorian Gothic to accept Richardson’s leadership within the next few years.)
The Boston & Albany Railroad station in Worcester built by Ware & Van Brunt in 1875-7, with its tall and striking tower and its vast segmental-pointed arches at the ends of the shed, provides one of the happiest illustrations of what the rather illiterate approach of even the most highly trained Eastern architects of this period could produce. By working in an almost primitive way, along lines suggested by the half-understood work of the bolder English innovators, something was often achieved of which few Continental architects were capable in this period. In less sophisticated hands, whether of provincial architects or of builders, the results were naturally still cruder, though sometimes equally vital and fresh. In church design,[[245]] where ecclesiological control of planning was not accepted outside the Episcopal denomination, galleried auditorium schemes with rows of exposed iron columns were often executed with a violence of polychromy and a gawkiness of notched detailing that exceeded Teulon or Keeling at their most extreme. One of the most prominent extant examples is the squarish New Old South Church at Copley Square in the Back Bay district of Boston, built in 1874-5 by Charles A. Cummings (1833-1905) and his partner Sears in 1875-7. Its impressive tower resembling an Italian campanile has now been much reduced in height and chastened in silhouette.
Even more extreme than most churches, but of the highest quality, is the intensely personal work of Frank Furness (1839-1912)[[246]] in Philadelphia. His building for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Broad Street was erected in 1872-6 in preparation for the Centennial Exhibition. The exterior has a largeness of scale and a vigour in the detailing that would be notable anywhere, and the galleries are top-lit with exceptional efficiency. Still more original and impressive were his banks, even though they lay quite off the main line of development of commercial architecture in this period (see Chapter [14]). The most extraordinary of these, and Furness’s masterpiece, was the Provident Institution in Walnut Street, built as late as 1879 (Plate [95B]). This was most unfortunately demolished in the Philadelphia urban renewal campaign several years ago, but the gigantic and forceful scale of the granite membering alone should have justified its respectful preservation. The interior,[[247]] entirely lined with patterned tiles, was of rather later character than the façade and eventually much cluttered with later intrusions, but it was equally fine in its own way originally. Later work by Furness is of less interest, and his big Broad Street Station of 1892-4 has also been demolished. No small part of Furness’s historical significance lies in the fact that the young Louis Sullivan picked this office—then known as Furness & Hewitt—to work in for a short period after he left Ware’s school in Boston. As Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea testifies, the vitality and originality of Furness meant more to him than what he was taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (see Chapter [14]).
In the realm of house-design the more-or-less Gothic-based ‘Stick Style’ represented a largely autochthonous American development not without considerable significance and interest (see Chapter [15]). In public architecture there was little serious achievement even at the hands of English-trained architects such as Calvert Vaux (1824-95) and his partner F. C. Withers (1828-1901)[[248]] or second-generation Gothicists like Upjohn’s son (Richard M., 1828-1903). The younger Upjohn’s Connecticut State Capitol[[249]] in Hartford begun in 1873, the only major American example of a High Victorian Gothic public monument of any great pretension or luxury of materials, is singularly vulgar and stylistically ambiguous, with its completely symmetrical massing and its tall central dome, compared to Burges’s contemporary project for Trinity College there.[[250]] Doubtless G. G. Scott would not have disdained it, even so!
Still more comparable to Scott’s own thwarted ambitions for a High Victorian Gothic governmental architecture, which led him as late as the seventies to enter various Continental competitions, is an earlier group of buildings in the New World outside the United States, the Parliament House (Plate [97A]) and associated structures at Ottawa, Canada, designed by Fuller & Jones and Stent & Laver in 1859 and built in 1861-7. F. W. Stent had come out from England some considerable time before this, having last exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1846. Thomas Fuller (1822-98), also English, had settled in Toronto in 1856. Of their respective partners, Augustus Laver (1839-98) and Herbert Chilion Jones (1836-1923), less is known. In the course of the work Fuller and Laver joined forces, moving on shortly to the United States, as has been noted.