R. M. Hunt, Architect.
eligible rather for admiration than for study. Assuredly designers will get nothing but good from his work if they learn from it to try for largeness and simplicity, to avoid niggling, and to consider first of all the disposition of their masses. But these are merits that cannot be transferred from a photograph. They are quite independent of a fondness for the Provençal Romanesque, and still more of an exaggeration of the depth of voussoirs and of the dwarfishness of pillars. These things are readily enough imitable, as nearly every block of dwellings in Chicago testifies, but they are scarcely worth imitating. In Richardson’s best work there is apt to be some questionable detail, since the success or failure of his building is commonly decided before the consideration of detail arises, and it is this questionable detail that the imitators are apt to reproduce without asking
DWELLING IN LAKE SHORE DRIVE.
H. H. Richardson, Architect.
it any questions. Moreover, it will probably be agreed by most students that Richardson’s city houses are, upon the whole, and in spite of some noteworthy exceptions, the least successful of his works. As it happens, there are two of them in Chicago itself, one on the north side and one on the south, and if their author had done nothing else, it is likely that they would be accepted rather as warnings than as examples. The principal front of the former has the simple leading motive that one seldom fails to find in the work of its architect, in the central open loggia of each of its three stories, flanked on each side by an abutment of solid wall, and the apportionment of the front between voids and solids is just and felicitous. Three loggie seem an excessive allowance for the town-house of a single family; but if we waive this point as an affair between the architect and his client exclusively, it must be owned that the arrangement supplies a motive susceptible of very effective development. In this case it cannot be said to have been developed effectively; nay, it can hardly be said to have been developed in an architectural sense at all, and the result proves that though a skilful disposition of masses is much, it is not everything. We have just been saying that the success or failure of Richardson’s work was in a great degree independent of the merit of the detail, but this dwelling scarcely exhibits any detail. This is the more a drawback because the loggia is a feature of which lightness and openness is the essential characteristic, and which seems, therefore, to demand a certain elegance of treatment, as was recognized alike by the architects of the Gothic and the Renaissance palaces in Italy, from which we derive the feature and the name. It is, indeed, in the contrast between the lightened and enriched fenestration of the centre and the massiveness of the flanking walls that the potential effectiveness of the arrangement resides. Here, however, there is no lightening and no enrichment. Rude vigor characterizes as much the enclosed arcades as the enclosing walls, and becomes as much the predominant expression of the front of a dwelling of moderate dimensions as of the huge façades of the Field warehouse. Such modelling as is introduced tends rather to enforce than to mitigate this expression, for the piers of the lower arcade are squared, and the intercalated shafts of the upper are doubled perpendicularly to the front, as are the shafts of the colonnade above, so as to lay an additional stress upon the thickness of a wall that is here manifestly a mere screen. The continuation of the abacus of the arcade through the wall and its reappearance as the transom of the flanking windows is an effective device that loses some of its effectiveness from its introduction into both arcades. It scarcely modifies the impression the front makes of lacking detail altogether. The double-dentilled string-course that marks off and corbels out the attic is virtually the only moulding the front shows. Yet the need of mouldings is not less now than it was in the remote antiquity when a forgotten Egyptian artist perceived the necessity of some expedient to subdivide a wall, to mark a level, to sharpen or to soften a transition. For three thousand years his successors have agreed with him, and for a modern architect to abjure the use of these devices is to deny himself the rhetoric of his art. The incompleteness that comes of this abjuration in the present instance must be apparent to the least-trained layman, who vaguely feels that “something is the matter” with the building thus deprived of a source of expression, for which the texture given to the whole front by the exhibition of the bonding of the masonry, skilful and successful as this is in itself, by no means compensates. The sensitive architect must yearn to set the stone-cutters at work anew to bring out the expression of those parts that are especially in need of rhetorical exposition, to accentuate the sills of the arcades, to define and refine their arches, to emphasize the continuous line of the abacus, and especially to mark the summit of the sloping basement, which now is merged into the plane of the main wall, without the suggestion of a plinth. It is conceivable that an architect might, by the skilful employment of color, so treat a front, without the least projection or recess from top to bottom or from end to end, as to make us forget to deplore the absence of mouldings. Some interesting attempts in that direction have, in fact, been made, and complete success in such an attempt would be entitled to the praise of a tour de force. But when in a monochromatic wall the designer omits the members that should express and emphasize and adorn his structural dispositions without offering any substitute for them, his building will appear, as this dwelling appears, a work merely “blocked out” and left unfinished; and if it be the work of a highly endowed and highly accomplished designer like Richardson, the deficiency must be set down merely as an unlucky caprice. We have been speaking exclusively of the longer front, since it is manifest that the shorter shares its incompleteness, without the partial compensation of a strong and striking composition, which would carry off much unsuccessful detail, though it is not strong enough to carry off the lack of detail, even with the powerful and simple roof that covers the whole—in itself an admirable and entirely satisfactory piece of work.
DWELLING IN PRAIRIE AVENUE.