The third, and for the next few years the most expansive, current was what can already be called the Academic Reaction. This was parallel to, yet already pushing well ahead of, Shaw’s somewhat coy approach to a programmatic revival of eighteenth-century forms; and McKim, Mead & White were its acknowledged leaders.[[287]] During the years that White was working for Richardson he seems to have been devotedly Shavian. Certain unexecuted house projects from the Richardson office which White signed, done for the Cheney family of Manchester, Conn., the clients for Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, make this particularly evident. When White replaced Bigelow in the firm of McKim, Mead & Bigelow, on his return from the European trip that he took after leaving Richardson in 1878, he found McKim designing Shavian houses with a considerably less sure decorative touch than his own. The McKim, Mead & White country houses that followed, however, such as that for H. Victor Newcomb in Elberon, N.J., of 1880-1 (Plate [125A]), that for Isaac Bell, Jr, in Newport, R.I., of 1881-2 (Plate [126]), and that for Cyrus McCormick in Richfield Springs, N.Y., of the same years, represent in several ways a real advance over Richardson’s Sherman house.[[288]] Such an advance is equally to be observed in various houses built around Boston in these years by W. R. Emerson (1833-1918) and by Arthur Little (1852-1925), the very earliest of which doubtless influenced Richardson when he designed the Bryant house (see Chapter [15]).
For McKim, Mead & White’s Tiffany house in New York of 1882-3, all of tawny ‘Roman’ brick with much moulded brick detail, the inspiration was largely Shavian also; only the rock-faced stone base and the broad low entrance arch were at all Richardsonian. In the New York house that they began the next year, however—really a group of houses arranged in a U around an open court across Madison Avenue from the rear of St Patrick’s Cathedral—for the railway magnate Henry Villard an entirely different, even quite opposed, spirit appears (Plate [109B]). The Villard houses, although on Villard’s insistence still built of brownstone rather than of light-coloured limestone, are as much a High Renaissance Italian palazzo as anything Barry or his contemporaries on the Continent ever designed in the preceding sixty years. Reputedly Joseph M. Wells (1853-90), an assistant in the McKim, Mead & White office who later refused membership in the firm, was responsible for the decision to follow Roman models of around 1500, most notably the Cancelleria Palace, as that was known to him—he had never been abroad—through the plates of Letarouilly’s Édifices de Rome moderne.
This type of design represented a conscious reaction against the Neo-Picturesque, whether Richardsonian, Shavian, or François I, a return to formal order of the most drastic sort. It represented also a return to close archaeological imitation of a style from the past such as had ended in America, on the whole, with the decline of the Greek Revival a generation earlier. Curiously enough this turn was also something of a declaration of independence from Europe, since the American Academic Reaction as initiated in the design of the Villard houses seems to have had no contemporary sources abroad. However much Shaw’s Queen Anne had, for about a decade, been moving towards an equivalent formality—of a more eighteenth-century sort—Shaw had neither gone as yet so far in this direction nor did he ever turn to the High Renaissance for his models. Continental parallels in the eighties are not hard to find in the work of such men as Balat in Belgium, Koch in Italy, and Wagner in Austria; but their current production was probably not known in the United States, whose foreign relations in architecture had always been largely restricted to England, France, and Germany.
This American return to order was at first more significant for its absolute aspect than for its archaeological bent. Although McKim, Mead & White used a Renaissance arcade at the base of their Goelet Building erected in Broadway at 20th Street in New York in 1885-6, the upper storeys of this modest skyscraper offer a very free, and at the same time a highly regularized, expression of the hive of offices behind, and even of the metal grid of the internal skeleton. Certain houses by McKim, Mead & White in New York of these years were even freer from the imitation of specific Italian precedents; while their Wm. G. Low house of as late as 1886-7, on the seashore south of Bristol, R.I., is a masterpiece of the ‘Shingle Style’ despite the tightness and formality of its plan (see Chapter [15]). Carefully ordered under its single broad gable, which even subsumes the veranda at the southern end, the Low house is yet quite without reminiscent detail or, indeed, much of any detail at all (Plate [127]). In a group of small houses at Tuxedo Park, not at all academic in their exterior treatment, Bruce Price (1845-1903) was reorganizing the open plan of the Americanized Queen Anne in a schematically symmetrical way at just this time also (Plate [125B]; Figure 28).
The possibility of a revival of the American Colonial and Post-Colonial in all their successive phases from the medievalism of the seventeenth-century origins to what can be called the ‘Carpenters’ Adam’ of 1800 had been in the air ever since the early seventies, when McKim had added a Neo-Colonial room to a real Colonial house in Newport, R.I. In the local Colonial architecture Americans found obvious parallels to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedent that Shaw was exploiting in England.[[289]] The ‘Shingle Style’ employed various features and treatments—such as the all-over covering of shingles itself—that recall American work of the periods before 1800. But because of the continued strength of inherited Picturesque ideals there was no programmatic imitation of formal eighteenth-century house design before the mid eighties. Even such a highly orderly example as Little’s Shingleside House at Swampscott, Mass., of 1880-1 was still quite un-archaeological. Interestingly enough, this seems to have been about the first up-to-date American house to be published in a foreign magazine[[290]] since the Allgemeine Bauzeitung in 1846 presented examples of Greek Revival terrace-houses in New York.
Following on the completion of the Bramantesque Villard houses in New York in 1885, McKim, Mead & White built in Newport, R.I., in 1885-6 the H. A. C. Taylor house, lately destroyed, which was as Neo-Georgian, in its American Colonial way, as the Fred White house Shaw began in London two years later. For this the American architects adopted the symmetrical Anglo-Palladian plan of the mid eighteenth century and capped the resultant rectangular mass with the special gable-over-hip roof of Colonial Newport. Elaborately embellished with Palladian windows and with much carved detail of a generically Georgian order, the Taylor house provided a new formula of design for domestic work that soon superseded almost completely the ‘Shingle Style’. From the Taylor house stems that mature Colonial Revival which was to last longer in the end in America than had the Greek Revival.
Down to the early nineties, however, McKim, Mead & White were rarely so programmatic in their Neo-Colonial work, and their principal public building of the late eighties, the Boston Public Library, was entirely Italianate (Plate [111]). In 1887 they were commissioned to build this major monument on the west side of Copley Square. There it was to face the Trinity Church that had initiated the Richardsonian wave more than a decade earlier—a monument in whose designing, moreover, both McKim and White had actually participated. The Library as built in 1888-92 was a major challenge to the Richardsonian, at least as contemporaries then generally understood and employed what they thought was Richardson’s mode. The contrast it offers to the church opposite is almost as great as to the prominent but low-grade High Victorian Gothic structures that flanked the new site to north and south, the New Old South Church by Cummings & Sears of the mid seventies, still standing across Boylston Street, and the contemporaneous Museum of Fine Arts by John H. Sturgis (?-1888) and Charles Brigham (?-1925) which long occupied the south side of the square.
Trinity is dark and rich in colour, a complex pile rising massively to its large central lantern. Moreover, it was flanked at the left on the Boylston Street side, where Richardson took Picturesque advantage of the corner cut off his site by Huntington Avenue, with an asymmetrically organized and domestically scaled parish house. The Library is light coloured and monochromatic, all of a smooth-cut Milford granite ashlar originally almost white and even today much lighter than the rock-faced pink Milford granite of Trinity. It is, moreover, a simple quadrangular mass, capped by a pantiled[[291]] hip-roof of moderate height; the scale throughout is monumental and the detail sparse but eminently suave. Yet if the contrast with Richardson’s Trinity of 1873-7 is so great—and even greater with the ponderous vernacular Richardsonian as that was long illustrated south of the Library in the all-brownstone S. S. Pierce Store just built by S. Edwin Tobey in 1887—the continuity with Richardson’s work of the mid eighties is equally notable.
For example, none of Richardson’s own late work was polychromatic. Three of his more prominent edifices, the Allegheny County Buildings in Pittsburgh and the Glessner and MacVeagh houses in Chicago, were all of light-coloured granite, while the Warder house in Washington is of smooth-cut limestone such as Wells had wished to use for the Villard houses. Above all, the quadrangular block of the Boston Library with its regular arcuated fenestration parallels rather closely the design of Richardson’s just completed masterpiece, the Marshall Field Store. Thus, in fact, Richardson’s former assistants, for all the Renaissance precedent of their detailing—and the courtyard of tawny Roman brick is almost more Bramantesque in treatment than the Villard houses—were to a very notable extent only proceeding farther in a direction that he himself had already taken.
Since most contemporaries, in their innocence, thought the Richardsonian merely a Romanesque Revival, it is understandable that they saw in such things as the Villard houses and the Boston Public Library an alternative—and anti-Richardsonian—Renaissance Revival. Nor can it be denied that the handling of the exterior of the Library derives from the sides of Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini almost as directly as the arcade in the court is copied from that of the Cancelleria Palace in Rome.[[292]]