ORIEL IN W. K. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTY-SECOND STREET.
R. M. Hunt, Architect.
Another interesting piece of Gothic work, though this time of distinctly Victorian Gothic, is the house designed by Mr. Vaux for Governor Tilden. The interest of this, however, is rather in the detail of form and color than in general composition, since the building is architecturally only a street front, and since the slightness of the projections and the lack of visible and emphasized depth in the wall itself give it the appearance rather of a screen than of one face of a building, and the small gables which surmount it too evidently exist for the sole purpose of animating the sky-line. But the color treatment of this front is admirable, and recalls the best work of the most successful colorist in architecture whom we have ever had in New York—Mr. Wrey Mould. It is characteristic that interesting treatment of color, like every other properly architectural development, has been stopped short by the new “movement.” An unusually large variety of colors, and those of the most positive tints that natural stones supply, has here been employed and harmonized; and, what is even rarer, they have all been used with architectural propriety to accentuate the construction and to heighten its effect. An ingenious and novel use of dark granite, which when polished is almost black, and which is employed in narrow bands precisely where it is wanted, deserves particular remark. The decorative carving attracts attention chiefly by its profusion, and by the exquisite crispness and delicacy of its execution. In both these respects the only parallel to it is in the house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, for, as we have seen, the carving upon the houses of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt does not count. That this carving counts so fully is the result of the skill of the architect in fixing its place and adjusting its scale so that it everywhere assists the architecture, and is better in its place than it would be in another place.
REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH AVENUE.
George B. Post, Architect.
These things are equally true of the equally profuse carving in the house designed by Mr. Hunt for Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt; but this, although in a monochrome of gray limestone, would have a high architectural interest without the least decoration by force of design alone. The decorative detail is scarcely so well adjusted to the building in scale as that in the house just mentioned, or in the house designed for Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt by Mr. Post, being partly lost by its minuteness, but it has the same merit of being in the right place, and designed for its place, and is cut with the same perfection. In a more recent work of Mr. Hunt’s, the Guernsey Building, in lower Broadway—a street front in distinctly modern Gothic—there is assuredly no error in scale on the side of minuteness; but the treatment, in mass and in detail, is marked by great vigor and animation, and the architecture of the building is an emphatic expression of its structure.
Another commercial building, at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, is by the architects of the Union League Club, and seems to have been designed under the pressure of a recent discovery that that building would not do. There is no doubt about the discovery; it is only a pity that it should not have been made from the drawings before they were translated into masonry. Clear, however, as the architects were on this point, they were not so clear when they began the United Bank Building what would do, and the first two stories look like a series of tentative experiments to find out. They were proving all things, perhaps, with the intention of holding fast that which was good. The practice of projecting bowlders, especially in soft sandstone, has already been mentioned as a somewhat slovenly substitute for the expression of vigor by modelling. Bowlders are projected from the piers of this basement in the most ferocious and blood-curdling manner—so ferocious, indeed, that the architects repented them of their bullying behavior. It is like the fear that came upon Snug the joiner, of the consequences that would ensue if ladies took him for the king of beasts: “Another prologue must tell he is not a lion.” And so the architects seem to have taken the counsel of Nick Bottom: “Half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck;