The cover image was created by the transcriber, and is placed in the public domain.
THE
ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW
AND
AMERICAN
BUILDERS’ JOURNAL.
Vol. II.—Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by Samuel Sloan, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
MONTHLY REVIEW.
THE LONDON BUILDER AND OURSELVES.
In a tolerantly critical notice of the Review recently published in the Builder, we find an effort to substantiate a charge formerly made by it, and replied to by us, on the subject of “trickery” in the construction of the exteriors of American buildings. The Builder reiterates the charge and points to Grace Church, New York, in proof of the truth of it. That marble edifice, he avers, has a wooden spire, crocketted, etc., painted in imitation of the material of which the body of the church is constructed. Alas, we must acknowledge the wood. And we will make a clean breast of it, and still farther acknowledge that at the time that Grace Church was built, our land of wooden nutmegs, and other notions, had not an architectural idea beyond the wooden spire, and that our city and country churches, that aspired at all, were forced to do so in the national material of the day. That said sundry spires of wood were of necessity, painted, is most true; and furthermore, white-lead being a great favorite with the people generally, [when our manners, customs, and tastes were more immaculate than in these degenerate days of many colors,] that pigment was the ruling fashion. That the color of the marble, of which Grace Church’s body is constructed, should be similar to that with which said ecclesiastical edifice’s spire was coated, is unfortunate; but, that the resemblance goes to prove any attempt at a cheat, we most strenuously deny. Grace Church is of a by-gone taste,—an architectural era which we now look back to in order to see, by contrast, how far we have advanced in architectural construction. Trinity Church, New York, was the first great effort at a stone spire which our Architects ventured to rear. And although hundreds have followed its lead, none in this soaring republic have gone so near to heaven as that yet. But the thing once effected is sure to be improved upon.
We are not at all abashed then, to own to the wooden spire painted to imitate stone, which crowns the steeple of old Grace Church, New York. And the less annoyance should it give our most sensitive feelings, when we reflect that the dome of the great St. Paul’s, London, is no less a delusion and a cheat, it being of wood, coated with lead and painted on the outside, having a false dome on the inside, considerably smaller than the external diameter would naturally lead the confiding observer to expect. The body of St. Paul’s is of stone. Why, according to the requirements of the Builder, is not the dome, like that of the Pantheon at Rome, likewise of stone?