American Architecture: Studies

by Montgomery Schuyler

ENTRANCE TO THE PHŒNIX BUILDING.

Burnham & Root, Architects.

main entrance relieves the arrangement from the unpleasant look of an arrangement obviously forced or arbitrary. In the Insurance Exchange the centre is signalized by a balconied projection over the entrance, extending through the architectural basement—the dado, so to speak, which is here the principal division; by a widening of the pier and a concentration of the central openings in the second division, and above by an interruption of the otherwise unbroken arcade that traverses the attic. In the Rookery it is marked by a slight projection, which above is still further projected into tall corbelled pinnacles, and the wall thus bounded is slightly bowed, and its openings diminished and multiplied. In the Phœnix Building this bowing is carried so much further as to result in a corbelled oriel, extending through four stories, and repeated on a smaller scale at each end of the principal front and in the centre of each shorter front. This feature may perhaps be excepted from the general praise the buildings deserve of a strict adherence to their utilitarian purpose. Not that even in Chicago a business man may not have occasion to look out of the window, nor that, if he does, he may not be pardoned for desiring to extend his view beyond the walls and windows of over the way. An oriel-window is not necessarily an incongruity in a “business block,” but the treatment of these oriels is a little fantastic and a little ornate for their destination, and belongs rather to domestic than to commercial architecture, and it is not in any case fortunate. This is the sole exception, however, to be made on this score. The entrances, to be sure, are enriched with a decoration beyond the mere expression of the structure which has elsewhere been the rule, but they do not appear incongruous. The entrance to a building that houses the population of a considerable village must be wide, and if its height were regulated by that of the human figure it would resemble the burrow by which the Esquimau gains access to his snow-hut, and become a manifest absurdity as the portal of a ten-story building. It must be large and conspicuous, and it should be stately, and it were a “very cynical asperity” to deny to the designer the privilege of enhancing by ornament the necessary stateliness of the one feature of his building which must arrest, for a moment at least, the attention of the most

ORIEL, PHŒNIX BUILDING.

Burnham & Root, Architects.

preoccupied visitor. It cannot be said that such a feature as the entrance of the Phœnix Building is intensely characteristic of a modern business block, but it can be said that in its place it does not in the least disturb the impression the structure makes of a modern business block. If beauty be its own excuse for being, this entrance needs no other, for assuredly it is one of the most beautiful and artistic works that American architecture has to show, so admirably proportioned it is, and so admirably detailed, so clear and emphatic without exaggeration is the expression of the structure, and so rich and refined the ornament. Upon the whole these buildings, by far the most successful and impressive of the business buildings of Chicago, not merely attest the skill of their architects, but reward their self-denial in making the design for a commercial building out of its own elements, however unpromising these may seem; in permitting the building, in a word, to impose its design upon them and in following its indications, rather than in imposing upon the building a design derived from anything but a consideration of its own requirements. Hence it is that, without showing anywhere any strain after originality, these structures are more original than structures in which such a strain is evident. “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.” The designer did not permit himself to be diverted from the problem in hand by a consideration of the irrelevant beauties of Roman theatres, or Florentine palaces, or Flemish town-halls, and accordingly the work is not reminiscent of these nor of any previous architectural types, of which so many contemporary buildings have the air of being adaptations under extreme difficulties. It is to the same directness and sincerity in the attempt to solve a novel problem that these buildings owe what is not their least attraction, in the sense they convey of a reserved power. The architect of a commercial palace seems often to be discharging his architectural vocabulary and wreaking his entire faculty of expression upon that contradiction in terms. Some of the buildings of which we have been speaking exhibit this prodigality. There is something especially grateful and welcome in turning from one of them to a building like one of those now in question, which suggests by comparison that, after he had completed the design of it, the architect might still have had something left—in his portfolios and in his intellect.

In considering the domestic architecture of Chicago it is necessary to recur to the topographical conditions, for these have had as marked an influence upon it as they have had upon the commercial quarter, although this influence operates in almost the opposite direction. The commercial centre—the quarter of wholesale traffic and of “high finance”—is huddled into the space between the lake and the river. But when this limit is once passed there is no natural limit. No longer pent up, the whole boundless continent is Chicago’s, and the instinct of expansion is at liberty to assert itself in every direction but the east, where it is confronted by Lake Michigan. There is thus no east side in Chicago to supplement the north and the west and the south sides, among which the dwellings of the people are divided, but there is no natural obstacle whatsoever to the development of the city in these three directions, and no natural reason why it should expand in one rather than in another except what is again furnished by the lake. To the minority of people, who live where they will and not where they must, this is a considerable exception, and one would suppose that the fashionable quarter would be that quarter from which the lake is most accessible. This is distinctly enough the north side, which a stranger, without the slightest interest, present or prospective, in Chicago real estate, may be pardoned for inferring to be the most desirable for residence. For it happens that the dwellers upon the south side are cut off from any practical or picturesque use of the lake by the fact that the shore to the south of the city is occupied by railroad tracks, and the nearest houses of any pretensions are turned away from the water, of which only the horses stabled in the rear are in a position to enjoy the view. The inference that the north is the most eligible of the sides one finds to be violently combated by the residents of the south and the west, and he finds also that, instead of one admittedly fashionable quarter, as in every other city, Chicago has three claimants for that distinction. Each of these quarters has its centre and its dependencies, and between each two there is a large area either unoccupied, or occupied with dwellings very much humbler than those that line the avenues that are severally the boasts of the competing sides. The three appear to have received nearly equal shares of municipal attention, for there is a park for each—nay, there are three parks for the west side, though these are thus far well beyond the limit of fashion if not of population, and nominally two for the south side, though even these bear more the relation to the quarter for which they were provided that the Central Park bore to New York in 1870 than that which it bears in 1891. They are still, that is to say, rather outlying pleasure-grounds accessible to excursionists than parks in actual public use. Lincoln Park, the park of the north side, is the only one of the parks of Chicago that as yet deserves this description, and the north side is much to be congratulated upon possessing such a resort. It has the great advantage of an unobstructed frontage upon the lake, and it is kept with the same skill and propriety with which it was planned.