American Architecture: Studies

by Montgomery Schuyler

This very central tower may serve as a reminder of the point in which a modern cathedral may mark an architectural advance upon the mediæval art which, in most respects, its builders may be well content if they can equal. For the culminating feature of the exterior should be the culminating feature of the interior also, and it was this need that the mediæval architects left unanswered. They recognized it, and in the cimborio of the Spanish cathedral, and in such experiments as the octagon of Ely, they made the beginnings of an answer, but these are no more to be accepted as complete than the Romanesque system of vaulting, which the Gothic architects developed to its perfection. The flèche of a French cathedral emphasizes rather than supplies the need of such a culmination. The central towers of such English cathedrals as possess them are purely exterior ornaments, as unrelated to the body of the church as its western towers. In Mr. Richardson’s design the tall and narrow dome at the crossing would not be apprehensible as a crowning feature, except from a point of view almost directly beneath it, while its external form does not intimate its interior function. It was a true feeling that led the architects of the Italian Renaissance to embrace the aisles as well as the nave under the central dome, though they clothed their construction in untrue forms. To develop true forms for it is the one advance upon past ecclesiastical architecture which seems to be possible, and to develop these may be said to be the central problem of design in an American cathedral.

GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE

I.—CHICAGO

CLOCK TOWER, DEARBORN STATION.

C. L. W. Eidlitz, Architect.

TO begin with a paradox, the feature of Chicago is its featurelessness. There is scarcely any capital, ancient or modern, to which the site supplies so little of a visible reason of being. The prairie and the lake meet at a level, a liquid plain and a plain of mud that cannot properly be called solid, with nothing but the change of material to break the expanse. Indeed, when there is a breeze, the surface of Lake Michigan would be distinctly more diversified than that of the adjoining land, but for the handiwork of man. In point of fact, Chicago is of course explained by the confluence here of the two branches of the Chicago River. These have determined the site, the plan, and the building of the town, but one can scarcely describe as natural features the two sinuous ditches that drain the prairie into the lake, apparently in defiance of the law that water runs, and even oozes, down hill. Streams, however narrow and sluggish they may be, so they be themselves available for traffic, operate an obstruction to traffic by land; and it is the fact that for some distance from the junction the south fork of the river flows parallel with the shore of the lake, and within a half-mile of it, which establishes in this enclosure the commercial centre of Chicago. Even the slight obstacle interposed to traffic by the confluent streams, bridged and tunnelled as they are, has sufficed greatly to raise the cost of land within this area, in comparison with that outside, and to compel here the erection of the towering structures that are the most characteristic and the most impressive monuments of the town.

In character and impressiveness these by no means disappoint the stranger’s expectations, but in number and extent they do, rather. For what one expects of Chicago, before anything else, is modernness. In most things one’s expectations are fully realized. It is the most contemporaneous of capitals, and in the appearance of its people and their talk in the streets and in the clubs and in the newspapers it fairly palpitates with “actuality.” Nevertheless, the general aspect of the business quarter is distinctly old-fashioned, and this even to the effete Oriental from New York or Boston. The elevator is nearly a quarter of a century old, and the first specimens of “elevator architecture,” the Western Union and the “Tribune” buildings in New York, are very nearly coeval with the great fire in Chicago. One would have supposed that the rebuilders of Chicago would have seized upon this hint with avidity, and that its compressed commercial quarter would have made up in altitude what it lacked in area. In fact, not only are the great modern office buildings still exceptional in the most costly and most crowded district, but it is astonishing to hear that the oldest of them is scarcely more than seven years of age. “Men’s deeds are after as they have been accustomed”—and the first impulse of the burnt-out merchants of Chicago was not to seize the opportunity the clean sweep of the fire had given them to improve their warehouses and office buildings, but to provide themselves straightway with places in which they could find shelter and do business. The consequence was that the new buildings of the burnt district were planned and designed, as well as built, with the utmost possible speed, and the rebuilding was for the most part done by the same architects who had built the old Chicago, and who took even less thought the second time than they had taken the first, by reason of the greater pressure upon them. The American commercial Renaissance, commonly expressed in cast-iron, was in its full efflorescence just before the fire. The material was discredited by that calamity, but unhappily not the forms it had taken, and in Chicago we may see, what is scarcely to be seen anywhere else in the world, fronts in cast-iron, themselves imitated from lithic architecture, again imitated in masonry, with the modifications reproduced that had been made necessary by the use of the less trustworthy material. This ignoble process is facilitated by the material at hand, a limestone of which slabs can be had in sizes that simulate exactly the castings from which the treatment of them is derived. After the exposure of a few months to the bituminous fumes it is really impossible to tell one of these reproductions from the original, which very likely adjoins it. Masonry and metal alike appear to have come from a foundry, rather than from a quarry, and to have been moulded according to the stock patterns of some architectural iron-works. The lifelessness and thoughtlessness of the iron-founders’ work predominate in the streets devoted to the retail trade, and the picturesque tourist in Chicago is thus compelled to traverse many miles of street fronts quite as dismal and as monotonous as the commercial architecture of any other modern town.