“Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell does on another:
‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!
And charge with all your chivalry.’
“And should you in the contest fall, remember with old Homer—
‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’
“Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful strains:
‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!
Were the last words of Marmion.’”
That was American architecture between 1820 and the Civil War—a collection of tags, thrown at random against a building. Architectural forms were brought together by a mere juxtaposition of materials, held in place by neither imagination nor logic. There are a number of honorable exceptions to this rule, for architects like Renwick, who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Upjohn, who built Trinity Church, had a more sincere understanding of the conventional task; and by any standard of esthetic decency the old Gothic building of New York University, on Washington Square, was a far finer structure than the bulky office building that has taken its place. Nevertheless, this saving remnant does not alter the character of the great mass of work, any more than the occasionally excellent cast-iron balconies, brought over from the London of the Regency, alter the depressing character of the great mass of domestic building. In elevation and interior treatment, these ante-bellum buildings were all what-nots. Souvenirs of architecture, their forms dimly recall the monuments of the past without in any sense taking their place.