American Architecture: Studies

by Montgomery Schuyler

For the rest, the clever and ingenious features which one often comes upon in the residential streets of Chicago, and the thoroughly studied fronts that one comes upon so much more seldom, would excite neither more nor less surprise if they were encountered in the streets of any older American town. But from what has been said it will be seen that in every department of building, except only the ecclesiastical, Chicago has already examples to show that should be of great value to its future growth in stimulating its architects to produce and in teaching its public to appreciate.

GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE
II.—ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS

It is just thirty years since Anthony Trollope ascended the Mississippi to the head of navigation and the Falls of St. Anthony, and recorded his impressions of the works of nature and of man along the shores of that river. As might perhaps have been expected, he admired with enthusiasm the works of nature, and as might certainly have been expected, he found little to admire in the handiwork of man. “I protest that of all the river scenery that I know, that of the upper Mississippi is by far the finest and the most continued. One thinks, of course, of the Rhine; but, according to my idea of beauty, the Rhine is nothing to the upper Mississippi.... The idea constantly occurs that some point on every hill-side would form the most charming site ever yet chosen for a noble residence.” Thus Trollope of the upper Mississippi, and thus again of the “twin cities” that are the subject of our present inquisition: “St. Paul contains about 14,000 inhabitants, and, like all other American towns, is spread over a surface of ground adapted to the accommodation of a very extended population. As it is belted on one side by the river, and on the other by the bluffs which accompany the course of the river, the site is pretty, and almost romantic.” The other “twin” is so much the later born that to few Minneapolitans does it ever occur that it had even seen the light in 1861. “Going on from Minnehaha, we came to Minneapolis, at which place there is a fine suspension-bridge across the river, just above the Falls of St. Anthony, and leading to the town of that name. Till I got there I could hardly believe that in these days there should be a living village called Minneapolis by living men. I presume I should describe it as a town, for it has a municipality and a post-office, and of course a large hotel. The interest of the place, however, is in the saw-mills.”

I do not mean to celebrate again the growth of St. Paul and Minneapolis from these small beginnings, which is the marvel of even the marvellous West. But for our immediate purpose it is necessary to bear in mind not only the rapidity of the growth of the two cities, but the intensity of the rivalry between them—a rivalry which the stranger hardly comprehends, however much he may have heard of it, until he has seen the workings of it on the spot. Indeed, it is scarcely accurate to describe the genesis of Minneapolis, in particular, as a growth at all. St. Paul has been developed from the frontier trading-post of the earlier days by an evolution, the successive stages of which have left their several records; but Minneapolis has risen like an exhalation, or, to adopt even a mustier comparison, has sprung from the heads of its projectors full-panoplied in brick and mortar. “The twin cities on either bank,” remarks the historiographer of the Minneapolis Exposition of 1886, “amid many ups and downs—the ups always predominating—pegged along steadily towards greatness.” The phrase is rather picturesque than graphic, for nothing could be less descriptive of the mode of locomotion of Minneapolis than a steady pegging along. It has been an affair of leaps and bounds. There are traces of the village that Trollope saw, and there are the towering structures of a modern city, and there is nothing between. In this electric air, where there is so little “precipitation” in the atmosphere and so much in everything else; where “the flux of mortal things” is not a generalization of the mind, but a palpable fact of daily experience; where antiquity means the day before yesterday, and posterity the day after to-morrow, the present is the most contemptible of tenses, and men inevitably come to think and live and build in the future-perfect. A ten-story building in a ten-acre lot requires explanation, and this seems to be the explanation—this and the adjacency of the hated rival. In St. Paul the elevator came as a needed factor in commercial architecture, since the strip of shore to which the town was confined in Trollope’s time still limits and cramps the business-quarter, and leaves only the vertical dimension available for expansion. Towering buildings are the normal outcome of such a situation. Minneapolis, on the other hand, occupies a table-land above the river, which at present is practically unlimited. Although, of course, every growing or grown town must have a most frequented part—a centre where land is costlier than elsewhere, and buildings rise higher—the altitude of the newest and tallest structures of Minneapolis could scarcely be explained without reference to the nearness of St. Paul, and the intensity of the local pride born of that nearness. If the physical necessities of the case prescribed ten-story buildings in St. Paul, the moral necessity of not being outdone would prescribe twelve-story buildings for Minneapolis. In point of fact, it is to a Minneapolitan architect that we owe the first project of an office building which bears the same relation to the ordinary elevator building of our cities that this bears to the five or six story edifice that the topographical and commercial conditions would indicate as suited to the actual needs of Minneapolis. The project remains on paper, though it is some years since it startled the architects of the country, and an interesting project it is in an architectural sense; but it is none the less representative of the local genius than if it had been executed.

Evidently there could be no better places than the twin cities to study the development of Western architecture, or rather to ascertain whether there is any such thing. There seems to be among the Western lay populations a faith that there is, which is none the less firm for being a trifle vague, and this faith is shared by some of the practitioners of architecture in the West. In the inscrutable workings of our official architecture, one of these gentlemen came to be appointed a few years ago the supervising architect of the Treasury. It is a measure of the extent and intelligence of the national interest in the art that this functionary, with little more than the official status of a clerk, and with no guarantee that he has any professional status whatever, has little less than the ædiliary powers of an Augustus. To have found a city of brick and to have left a city of marble is a boast that more than one supervising architect could have paraphrased in declaring that he found the government architecture Renaissance and he left it Gothic, or that he found it Gothic and he left it nondescript, while each successive incumbent could have declared that he found it and left it without architectural traditions and without architectural restraints. The ambition of the architect immediately in question was not sectarian so much as sectional. To him it seemed that a bureau had too many traditions which to other students seemed to have none at all. Not personally addicted to swearing to the words of any master, he considered that the influence of authority in his office was much too strong. He was himself from the remote West, and in an interview setting forth his hopes and purposes, shortly after he came into the office from which he was shortly to go out, he explained that “Eastern” conventionalities had had altogether too much sway in the previous conduct of the office, and that he meant to embody “Western ideas” in the public buildings. In the brief interval before his retirement he designed many monuments from which one should be able to derive some notion of Western architectural ideas, and one of these is the government building in Minneapolis. This edifice is mainly remarkable for the multitude of ill-assorted and unadjusted features which it exhibits, especially for the “grand choice” of pediments which its fronts present—pediments triangular and curved, pediments closed and broken—and for the variety and multiplicity of the cupolas and lanterns and crestings by which the sky-line is animated into violent agitation. The features themselves cannot be “Western,” since they are by no means novel, the most recent of them dating back to Sir Christopher Wren, and it must be the combination or the remarkable profusion of “things” that constitutes the novelty and the Westernness which it was the mission of the author to introduce into our public architecture. Unfortunately there is nothing that can fairly be called combination, for the composition is but an agglomeration, “a fortuitous concourse of atoms.” We have all seen in the Eastern cities too many buildings of which crudity and recklessness were the characteristics, and which were unstudied accumulations of familiar forms, to assume that crudity and recklessness in architecture are especially “Western ideas.” If they be so, then assuredly “Western” is an opprobrious epithet, not lightly and unadvisedly to be applied to any structure.

There is perhaps no other building in either city equally costly and conspicuous which merits it in the same degree with the government building at Minneapolis, at least in an architectural sense. An enterprising owner in the same city has procured the materials for a new building by permitting each contributor to inscribe his contribution with the name of the material furnished by him, and a statement of its good qualities, and these incised advertisements undoubtedly give a local color to the structure; but this Westernness is scarcely architectural. The City Hall and Court-house in St. Paul is a large and conspicuous building, the more conspicuous for being isolated in the midst of an open square; and it is unfortunate in design, or the absence of it, the arrangement of its voids and solids being quite unstudied and casual, and the aggregation quite failing to constitute a whole. There are by no means so many features in it as in the government building at Minneapolis, nor are they classic; but the architect has introduced more “things” than he was able to handle, and they are equally irrelevant to the pile and to each other, especially the tower that was intended to be the culminating feature of the composition, but which fails to fulfil its purpose from any point of view, crowning as it does a recessed angle of the front. This also is a congeries of unrelated and unadjusted parts, and, in the light of the illustrations of his meaning furnished by our official spokesman, this also may be admitted to be characteristically W——n. The same admission may reluctantly be made concerning the Chamber of Commerce in St. Paul, which consists architecturally of two very busy and bustling fronts, compiled of “features” that do not make up a physiognomy, and which stand upon a massive sash frame of plate-glass. As a matter of fact, these things have their counterparts in the East, only there they are not referred to the geography, but to the illiteracy or insensibility of the designer, and this classification seems simpler, and, upon the whole, more satisfactory.

Minneapolis has a compensation for its newness in the fact that when its public buildings came to be projected, the fashion of such edifices as these had passed away. If the work of Mr. Richardson has been much misunderstood, as I tried to point out in speaking of the domestic architecture of Chicago, if its accidents have been mistaken by admiring disciples for its essence, even if its essential and admirable qualities do not always suffice to make it available as a model, it is necessary only to consider such buildings as have just been mentioned to perceive how beneficial, upon the whole, his influence has been, for it has at least sufficed to make such buildings impossible—impossible, at least, to be done by architects who have any pretensions to be “in the movement”—and it is hard to conceive that they can be succeeded by anything so bad. The City Hall of Minneapolis, for instance, was projected but a few years later than its government building, but in the interval Richardson’s influence had been at work. That influence is betrayed both in the accepted design now in course of execution and in the other competitive designs, and it has resulted in a specific resemblance to the public building at Pittsburgh, which its author professed his hope to make “a dignified pile of rocks.” The variations which the authors of the Minneapolis City Hall have introduced in the scheme they have reproduced in its general massing, and in its most conspicuous features are not all improvements. By the introduction of grouped openings into its solid shaft the tower of Pittsburgh is shorn of much of its power; nor can the substitution be commended in its upper stage of a modification of the motive employed by Richardson in Trinity, Boston, and derived by him from Salamanca, for the simpler treatment used in the prototype of this building as the culminating feature of a stark and lofty tower. The far greater elaboration of the corner pavilions of the principal fronts, also, though in part justified by the greater tractability of the material here employed, tends rather to confusion than to enrichment. On the other hand, the more subdued treatment of the curtain wall between the tower and the pavilions gives greater value and detachment to both, and is thus an advance upon the prototype; and the central gable of the subordinate front is distinctly more successful than the corresponding feature of Pittsburgh, the archway, withdrawn between two protecting towers, of which the suggestion comes from mediæval military architecture. Observe, however, that the derivation of the general scheme of the building and of its chief features from an earlier work is by no means an impeachment of the architect’s originality, provided the precedent he chooses be really applicable to his problem, and provided he analyze it instead of reproducing it without analysis. In what else does progress consist than in availing one’s self of the labor of one’s predecessors? If the Grecian builders had felt the pressure of the modern demand for novelty, and had endeavored to comply with it by making dispositions radically new, instead of refining upon the details of an accepted type, or if the mediæval builders had done the same thing, it is manifest that the typical temple or the typical cathedral would never have come to be built, that we should have had no Parthenon and no Cologne. The requirements of the Minneapolis building, a court-house and town-hall, are nearly enough alike to those of the county building at Pittsburgh to make it credible that the general scheme of the earlier work may, by force of merit, have imposed itself upon the architect of the later. The general difference of treatment is the greater richness and elaboration of the newer structure, and this is a legitimate consequence of the substitution of freestone for granite; while the differences of detail and the introduction at Minneapolis of features that have no counterpart at Pittsburgh suffice to vindicate the designer from the reproach of having followed his model thoughtlessly or with servility. So far as can be judged from the drawings, the municipal building of Minneapolis, when it comes to be finished, will be a monument of which the Minneapolitans will have a right to be proud, for better reasons than mere magnitude and costliness.