Still we have great hopes of the hotel, because it is the place of all others which it is to our interest to make look well. People go to the post office all the same, be it a barn or a parthenon, but they will go, other things being equal, to the best hotel. Here comes in the American principle of Competition, the keynote of all our enterprise. Competition is to do for us what the hope of earthly immortality did for the builders of the Pyramids, what the desire to glorify God did for the builders of the cathedrals. It is to be the soul of our art: what sort of a body it is to put on, we shall presently see. Even now it is safe to assume that no more such granite prisons as the 'Revere' or the 'Astor' will be built for hotels. Lightness, variety, and vivacity will more probably characterize this style.
The shop front is something that we must have in some shape or other, and, if fairly treated, it would become as decidedly American as business is. It is susceptible of great variety, but care must be taken that it harmonizes with the superstructure. How often we see massive structures of marble, five stories or more, supported on basements of plate glass, apparently; while the real supports are carefully concealed! The best method, so far tried, seems to be that in which the columns are made sufficiently prominent to show their object, and are surmounted by arches, which give a good basis for what comes next above, while affording sufficient window space to the store front.
But we must make up our mind to part with those hideous signboards, which trail their loathsome length across our best buildings, regardless of console or capital or cornice. For the importance of the sign renders it constructive, and it has as much right to take part in the design as a door or a window. Instead of being pinned on like an afterthought, it should be built into the wall, panel fashion, and by a little taste in the selection of the style of letter, it might become one of the most striking features of the whole front. Color would be better for the letters than relief, being more economical and more easily altered.
Our warehouses and even our factories might become imposing objects if appropriately conceived, for is not labor ennobling? Anything that is worth doing, is worth doing well; and if any of our manufacturing towns are hideous, they are not necessarily so.[24] There is a certain grandeur about many such places, with their myriad chimneys and ponderous wheels and whirling engines, that deserves a corresponding grandeur of expression, and some of our Pennsylvania ironworks already afford splendid examples of this. We have seldom been more impressed by the grandeur of mechanical operations than on a recent night visit to one of the large rolling mills of Scranton. The whole interior, vast as a cathedral, was brilliantly lighted by the numerous operations in molten and red-hot iron that were everywhere in progress, and, with its gleaming furnaces, ranged on either hand down the long vista, and glowing here and there from the galleries, really made us feel prouder of our race than did many a dim, dilapidated temple of the Old World.
As to churches, we cannot expect much, except that they will be tasteful and commodious audience rooms, commensurate with the importance of their congregations. The religion of to-day appeals to soul, and not to soul and sense. The world is older and better educated than in the cathedral era, and the apostles and prophets are read, not from sculptured doors or painted windows, but from the printed page and the winged word. Childhood, that cannot read, requires gaudily painted primers for its instruction and amusement, but the world is a grown man now; the press has superseded the cathedral, and if we imitate those structures in our churches, we should bear in mind that it was their size that gave them grandeur, and that they would be caricatures without it. We have heard our American church interiors spoken of somewhere as divisible into two classes—the charlotte-russe style and the molasses-candy style. This is not true, we hope; but there is too much truth in it, for it shows the influence of a too close imitation of European palaces and churches, and the hard shamming that has to be done to make this imitation apparent.
If our rural architecture has been more successful, it is because our better class of country houses are planned with reference to the landscapes they occupy. A rich level meadow with here and there a waving elm requires a different style of house from a fir-clad bluff on a river bank or a wild gorge in a mountain. No intelligent architect, we take it, would design a country house without an intimate acquaintance with the surroundings, and yet the same man, likely as not, would make you a sketch for the elevation of your house in town, without even looking to see what it was to adjoin on either side. Now this method may be correct, but it seems to us that, by first putting on paper the existing houses, say one or two, on each side of the space to be built upon, the new front could be much better planned, and much of that unnecessary discord avoided which destroys so many of our best streets. This is what is done in painting and other arts, and why not in architecture? Particular situations require particular treatments. A front that would appear well on a narrow street, would be inappropriate on a broad avenue or a square. A corner, or the head of a street, are most responsible situations. A tall marble front, placed in a modest row of freestone, is hideous, and yet the unrelieved monotony of many such rows is quite as bad. A dome, unless at the top of a street or on some open space, is next to worthless. Who would ever notice Boston State House or the Baltimore Cathedral, but for their elevated and central positions?
We often find among the old masters elegant architectural paintings, street views, taken from the picturesque cities they lived in. We should like to find some one bold enough to paint a street view of Broadway or Washington street or Chestnut street.
It is a pity that our architects are unwilling to acknowledge the importance of the buttress. Concerning this feature, it is not easy to say whether beauty or utility is most apparent. It is the very idealization of strength, and hence its inherent elegance. Suppose Nôtre Dame or Milan Cathedral stripped of their double tiers of flying buttresses. Would you not say that their glory was gone—their beauty departed? And yet the old builders did not pile them up against their naves for mere beauty's sake. By no means. But they knew the immense weight of their vaulted roofs, and anticipated the outward thrust of the walls. That was the problem, and most fairly was it met. They counteracted the outward pressure from within by an inward pressure from without, and there was the buttress. But what if they had said, We are not going to spoil our fine churches by sticking props all around them, and had resorted to concealed bedplates and invisible rods of iron, would their structures have been better or nobler or more enduring? Fortunately, they gave themselves no concern, as to how they would look—for architecture was honest in those days—they simply built them, allowing decoration to come in afterward in its proper order; and thereupon the buttress became the distinguishing feature of Gothic art.
Perhaps this is the very reason why we so neglect it; but symptoms are already appearing which lead us to hope that gothophobia is on the decline, and not the least of them is the outcropping of something that would be a buttress if it dared to, but hides its real intention under a classic mask, and passes off as a pilaster or a panel border. But it has a guilty look, and the sooner it puts off its borrowed garments the better. Certainly the demand for it is immense. So long as we are a commercial people, vast warehouses, piled from cellar to roof with heavy merchandise, must abound in all our cities. And yet how utterly incompetent would many such buildings be to stand alone! So long, too, as we are a manufacturing people, must we have huge mills crowded full with heavy apparatus, vibrating machinery, and human lives. Have we forgotten Lawrence? Let us not wait for another such holocaust ere we learn wisdom. We can do without ornament, but we must have safety. A mere increase of dead weight is no remedy; there should be a well-studied mechanical disposition of material. If buttresses are applied to warehouses and factories with sole reference to their utility, elegance will grow upon them afterward as naturally as leaves grow upon trees.
Material must depend much upon locality, but iron is undoubtedly to hold an important place in our architecture. Already it is extensively used, but does not seem to command general favor. The reason is that nearly everything that has been done with it so far is not iron architecture, but stone architecture done in iron. We do not let it speak its own language; the truss, the tie rod, and the girder are kept out of sight, while every possible display is made of consoles and cornices and Corinthian columns and balustrades, and all sorts of foreign expressions. No wonder that it is unable to give an account of itself with all these false witnesses. Stone houses should be made of stone, and if made of wood or iron or plaster, they are nothing but shams, unenduring and unsatisfactory.