It will be evident from all this that in the three residential quarters of Chicago there is plenty of room, and it is this spaciousness that gives a pervading characteristic to its domestic architecture. The most fashionable avenues are not filled with the serried ranks of houses one expects to see in a city of a million people. On the contrary, in Michigan Avenue and Prairie Avenue, on the south side, and in the corresponding streets in the other quarters, there is commonly a considerable strip of sward in front of the house, and often at the sides as well. The houses are often completely or partly detached, and they are frequently of a generous breadth, and always of a moderate height. Three stories is the limit, which is rarely exceeded even in the costliest dwellings. Conditions so different prevail in all the Eastern cities, even in Philadelphia, the roominess of which is one of its sources of local pride, that to the inhabitant of any one of them the domestic building of Chicago indicates a much less populous city than Chicago is, and its character seems rather suburban than urban. In the main, this character of suburbanity is heightened by the architectural treatment of the dwellings. There are exceptions, and some of them are conspicuous and painful exceptions; but the rule is that the architect attempts to make the house even of a rich man look like a home rather than like a palace, and that there is very little of the mere ostentation of riches. Even upon the speculative builder this feeling seems to have imposed itself; and however crude and violent his work may be in other ways, it does not very often offend in this particular direction. The commercial palace against which we have been inveighing is by no means so offensive as the domestic sham palace, and from this latter offence Chicago is much freer than most older American cities. The grateful result is that the houses in the best quarters are apt to look eminently “livable;” and though inequalities of fortune are visible enough, there is not so visible as to be conspicuous any attempt of the more fortunate to force them on the notice of the less fortunate. In other words, Chicago is, in its outward aspect at least, the most democratic of great American cities, and its aspect increases one’s wonder that anarchism should have sprung up in this rich and level soil—to which, of course, the answer is that it didn’t, being distinctly an exotic.
Another characteristic of the domestic architecture of Chicago there is—less prevalent than this absence of pretentiousness and mere display, but still prevalent enough to be very noteworthy—and that is the evidence it affords of an admiration for the work of Mr. Richardson, which, if not inordinate, is at least undiscriminating and misapplied. What region of our land, indeed,
JANUA RICHARDSONIENSIS.
N’Importe Qui, Architect.
is not full of his labors, done vicariously, and with a zeal not according to knowledge? In Chicago his misunderstood example has fructified much more in the quarters of residence than in the business quarters, insomuch that one can scarcely walk around a square, either in the north or in the south side, without seeing some familiar feature or detail, which has often been borrowed outright from one of his works, and is reproduced without reference to its context. Now the great and merited success of Richardson was as personal and incommunicable as any artistic success can be. It was due to his faculty of reducing a complicated problem to its simplest and most forcible expression. More specifically, it was due to his faculty for seizing some feature of his building, developing it into predominance, and skilfully subordinating the rest of his composition to it, until this feature became the building. It was his power of disposing masses, his insistence upon largeness and simplicity, his impatience of niggling, his straightforward and virile handling of his tasks, that made his successes brilliant, and even his failures interesting. Very much of all this is a matter of temperament, and Richardson’s best buildings were the express images of that impetuous and exuberant personality that all who knew him remember. He used to tell of a tourist from Holland in whom admiration for his art had induced a desire to make his acquaintance, and who upon being introduced to him exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Richardson, how you are like your work!” “Now wasn’t that a Dutch remark?” Richardson concluded the story. Indeed, the tact of the salutation must be admitted to have been somewhat Batavian, but it was not without critical value. One cannot conceive of Richardson’s work as having been done by an anæmic architect, or by a self-distrustful architect, or by a professor of architecture, faithful as his own professional preparation had been. There is a distinction well recognized in the art to which architecture has more or less plausibly been likened that is no less valid as applied to architecture itself—the distinction between “school music” and “bravura music.” If we adopt this distinction, Richardson must be classed among the bravura performers in architecture, who are
ORIEL OF DWELLING.