C. C. Haight, Architect.
probably never yet served any more important purpose than to ease the critic’s mind. It is enough to indicate these things, and to point out that they are all produced by the strain in the minds of incompetent designers after originality and aboriginality—a purpose essentially vulgar, which would vitiate the work even of a competent designer wherever it could be detected. For although the pursuit of excellence is sure to result in novelty, the pursuit of novelty is sure not to result in excellence. The extreme instance we have cited is still an instance of a tendency to which all the younger generation of architects, of whom so much was hoped, and of whom, considering their opportunities, so little of value has come, have more or less yielded—the tendency to take themselves too seriously and their art not seriously enough, and to imagine that anything that occurs to them is for that reason good enough to build, without asking it any questions. Such caricatures of architecture as these houses would not occur to the mind of an educated architect; but when all restraints, rational and academic, are removed, even educated architects, as we have seen, will not always take the trouble to analyze their conceptions before embodying them in durable brick and stone. It is from this that it comes that, as we said awhile ago, the characteristic works of the present period are distinctly inferior to the characteristic works of the preceding period. It is not that thoroughly good buildings have not been done within the latter period, but that they are not characteristic of the period. The buildings which appear to have been done by architects, and yet fail to stand the tests either of sense or of style, date themselves infallibly as having been done since 1876. One must resort to external evidence to ascertain whether the buildings that are honorable monuments to their architects were done before or since Mr. Norman Shaw did all this mischief.
First among these, one has little hesitation in placing the new buildings designed by Mr. Haight for Columbia College. Mr. Haight has not here been in pursuit of novelty, but has been content with conforming his structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus arrived at so as to heighten their inherent expression. And although he has kept within the limits of historical English Gothic in doing this, the result of the process is an individual building with a characteristic
FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN’S HOUSE.
Calvert Vaux, Architect.
expression of its own, the most successful piece of Gothic design that has been done in New York since Mr. Withers designed the Jefferson Market Court-house. In Queen Anne, as we saw, Mr. Haight’s work was not very distinguishable from the work of a very different architect. With a vocabulary limited to fifty words, not much can be expressed. But when he permits himself the use of language, it is seen that Mr. Haight can express thoughts. In composition and in detail these buildings are thoroughly studied and thoroughly effective. In the earlier, a street front of a whole block on Madison Avenue, the designer has resisted the temptation to diversify his building into unrest, but has built a wall of three stories in red brick and light sandstone, the broad and quiet aspect of which is enhanced by the grouping of the openings, and not disturbed by the chimney-stacks and the oriel and the turret which animate the composition. The later building, of the same materials, has been built for the library of the college, and the large hall which contains this is in effect the building. This is treated with equal skill, and to the same result of cloistral repose, of harmony and dignity and grace. These vigorous and refined works show, if the showing were needed, except by the architects of the new departure, that vigor does not necessarily involve bowlders, nor refinement microscopic mouldings, and that these short-cuts to architectural effect are rather sorry and shabby substitutes for faithful and skilful design. That these works of Mr. Haight’s are grammatically “correct” Gothic is not, to our mind, either a merit or a defect. But it shows how wide is the range of expression possible in the architecture of the Middle Ages, and of its pliability to modern uses, that without a departure from precedent the needs of an American college in the nineteenth century can be completely answered in that architecture; for there is no innovation in Mr. Haight’s work, unless we include the iron roof, which is partly visible from the floor of the hall. There are one or two “survivals” of forms which have lost their functions, as the unpierced pinnacled turrets at the angles of the library building and the crenellated parapet of the porch in the quadrangle. But, upon the whole, the result upon which the college and its architect are to be congratulated has been attained by following the advice of the sculptor who informed his pupil that the art was not difficult: “You simply take a piece of marble and leave out what you don’t want.” Mr. Haight has taken what he wanted in Gothic architecture for the uses of Columbia College, and with the trivial exceptions we have noted has left out the rest. And what is true of this work is equally true of an unpretending and picturesque piece of late Gothic, erected from Mr. Haight’s designs for St. Thomas’s School, in East Fifty-ninth Street.
