American Architecture: Studies

by Montgomery Schuyler

(SIDE VIEW.)

The approaches themselves are greatly impressive, as indeed the towers are also, by magnitude and massiveness. The street bridges are uniformly imposing by size and span, and especially attractive also by reason of the fact that through them we get what is to be got nowhere else in our rectangular city, glimpses and “bits” of buildings. The most successful of them all, and the most successful feature architecturally of all the masonry of the bridge, is the simple, massive, and low bridge of two arches which spans North William Street, in New York. The arcades between the streets are imposing by number and repetition as well as by massiveness, and by the Roman durability which marks all the work. They suffer, however, from two causes. The coping, the arches, and the piers, which are the emphatic parts of structure, are lighter in color than the unemphasized and rock-faced fields of the wall, and this is always a misfortune when it is not an error. The arches are of the form called “Florentine”—that is to say, round within and pointed without. The deepest voussoirs are thus those at the crown of the arch. This is the reverse of the disposition which would be dictated by mechanical considerations alone. Architecturally it has the drawback of interrupting at every arch the successive and diminishing wheelings which make a long arcade of great openings so impressive in a perspective view. The form seems to have been chosen on account of the facility it afforded, by lengthening the upper voussoirs, to conform the ridge line of the arches to the slope of the roadway, while keeping the springing line horizontal. This gradual diminution of the arches shoreward enhances the apparent length of the approach looking in that direction, but correspondingly shortens it looking towards the bridge; and it seems, upon the whole, that it would have been better to carry the arches through level, without attempting to dissemble the difference between their line and that of the roadway. There are some shabby and flimsy details of iron work, which mar the monumental effect of the great roadway itself, while the design of the iron stations at either end is grossly illiterate, and discreditable to the great work. Imitations in cast iron of stone capitals surmount and emphatically contradict posts profusely studded with bolt-heads; and other solecisms, alike against constructional reason and architectural tradition, are rife in these unfortunate edifices, which do what they can to vulgarize the great structure to which they give access.

Vulgarity certainly cannot be charged against any integral portion of the great work itself. There is nothing frivolous and nothing ostentatious even in the details which we have noted, and in which we have not been so much criticising the crowning work of a great engineer’s career as noting the spirit of our age. It is scarcely fair to say, even, as was said by an architectural journal when the completion of the bridge was doubtful, that if it were left incomplete its towers would stand “in unnecessary ugliness.” Its defects in design are not misdeeds, but shortcomings. They are the defects of being rudimentary, of not being completely developed. The anatomy of the towers and of the anchorages is not brought out in their modelling. Their fingers, so to speak, are all thumbs. Their impressiveness is inherent in their mass, and is what it could not help being. The ugliest of great bridges is undoubtedly Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge; and this is ugly, not because it is square and straight, but because it tells nothing of itself. It is a mere flat surface, and almost absolutely inexpressive, compared, for example, with such a piece of iron-work as the truss which carries the roadway of the bridge over Franklin Square, in which the function of every joint and member is apparent. But a far nobler thing than this is the central span of the great bridge itself, its roadway slowly sweeping upward to meet the swift swoop of its cables. We have complained of the lack of expression in the towers of their anatomy, but this is anatomy only, a skeletonized structure in which, as in a scientific diagram, we see—even the layman sees—the interplay of forces represented by an abstraction of lines. What monument of any architecture can speak its story more clearly and more forcibly than this gossamer architecture, through which its purpose, like “the spider’s touch”—

“So exquisitely fine,
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line”?

This aerial bow, as it hangs between the busy cities, “curving on a sky imbrued with color,” is perfect as an organism of nature. It is an organism of nature. There was no question in the mind of its designer of “good taste” or of appearance. He learned the law that struck its curves, the law that fixed the strength and the relation of its parts, and he applied the law. His work is beautiful, as the work of a ship-builder is unfailingly beautiful in the forms and outlines in which he is only studying “what the water likes,” without a thought of beauty, and as it is almost unfailingly ugly when he does what he likes for the sake of beauty. The designer of the Brooklyn Bridge has made a beautiful structure out of an exquisite refinement of utility, in a work in which the lines of forces constitute the structure. Where a more massive material forbade him to skeletonize the structure, and the lines of effort and resistance needed to be brought out by modelling, he has failed to bring them out, and his structure is only as impressive as it needs must be. It has not helped his work, as we have seen, to trust his own sense of beauty, and to contradict or to conceal what he was doing in accordance with its dictates. As little would it have helped him to invoke the aid of a commonplace architect to plaster his structure with triglyphs or to indent it with trefoils. But an architect who pursued his calling in the spirit and with the skill of the mediæval builders of whom we have been speaking, who knew in his province the lesson the engineer has re-enforced in his, that “Nature can only be commanded by obeying her,” and that the function of an organism, in art as in nature, must determine its form—such an architect might have helped the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge to make it one of the noblest monuments of architecture in the world, as it is one of the greatest and most honorable works of engineering.

AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL

I

The saying that ours is not a cathedral-building age is so obviously true, and so familiar, that the proposal to erect in New York the most important religious monument on this side of the Atlantic strikes many, and perhaps most, cultivated persons with a sense of incongruity. It is so especially true that this is not a cathedral-building country that an American cathedral seems a violation of the unities in place not less than in time—an anatopism as well as an anachronism. It is a reflection calculated to give us pause that even while we were considering what should be the character of an American cathedral in the city of New York, the Assembly of the State, being in possession of what was acclaimed at the time of its opening as “the most monumental interior in this country,” should have decided to demolish rather than to restore its most monumental feature, and should have been hopelessly vulgarizing it by substituting for its stone-work a system of iron posts veneered with wood, and of beams enclosing panels of papier-maché, without eliciting any general or effective protest.