Project Gutenberg's American Architecture; Studies, by Montgomery Schuyler This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: American Architecture; Studies Author: Montgomery Schuyler Release Date: January 14, 2019 [EBook #58697] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE; STUDIES *** Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) Contents. List of Illustrations (In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.) (etext transcriber's note) AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Studies Studies BY MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER WITH ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 1892 Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. {i} {ii} TO K. L. S. CONTENTS PAGE The Point of View 1 Concerning Queen Anne 6 The Vanderbilt Houses 52 The Brooklyn Bridge as a Monument 68 An American Cathedral 86 Glimpses of Western Architecture: I. Chicago 112 II. St. Paul and Minneapolis 168 ILLUSTRATIONS New York: PAGE Recessed Balcony, W. H. Vanderbilt’s House 13 Doorways on Madison Avenue 17 Oriel of House in Fifty-Fifth Street 19 Doorway, Fifth Avenue, Below Seventy-Fifth Street 21 House in Fifty-Sixth Street 22 Houses in Madison Avenue 25 Doorway at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-Seventh Street 33 Glimpse of Columbia College from Madison Avenue 35 From Governor Tilden’s House 37 Oriel in W. K. Vanderbilt’s House 39 Rear of Roof, House of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Fifth Avenue 42 Doorway of Guernsey Building, Broadway 44 United Bank Building 46 Post Building 47 Gateway of Mills Building 49 The Vanderbilt Houses: House of W. K. Vanderbilt 53 House of Cornelius Vanderbilt 59 Houses of W. H. Vanderbilt 63 Post and Railing, W. H. Vanderbilt’s House 67 The Brooklyn Bridge The Bridge from the Brooklyn Side 69 Bridge at Minneapolis 75 Section of Brooklyn Bridge Tower 77 Section of Anchorage. (Side View.) 81 An American Cathedral Proposed Cathedral at Albany 87 West Elevation 91 East Elevation 95 Ground-Plan 99 Transverse Section through Choir 105 {iii} {iv} {v} {vii} {vi} T Chicago: Clock Tower, Dearborn Station 112 From the City and County Building 118 The Art Institute 121 Entrance to the Art Institute 123 Balcony of Auditorium 125 Tower of Auditorium 127 The Field Building 131 Arcade from the Studebaker Building 135 The Owings Building 139 Corner of Insurance Exchange 141 Entrance to the Phœnix Building 145 Oriel, Phœnix Building 147 Janua Richardsoniensis 152 Oriel of Dwelling 154 Dwelling in Lake Shore Drive 156 Dwelling in Prairie Avenue 158 Front in Dearborn Avenue 163 A House of Bowlders 165 A Byzantine Corbel 166 St. Paul and Minneapolis Public Library, Minneapolis 176 Entrance to Public Library, Minneapolis 177 The People’s Church, St. Paul 178 Unitarian Church, Minneapolis 180 Presbyterian Church, St. Paul 182 West Hotel, Minneapolis 183 Lumber Exchange, Minneapolis 187 Entrance to Bank of Commerce, Minneapolis 188 Corner of Bank of Commerce, Minneapolis 190 The “Globe” Building, Minneapolis 191 Entrance to “Pioneer Press” Building, St. Paul 192 Corner of “Pioneer Press” Building 193 Bank of Minnesota, St. Paul 195 Top of New York Life Insurance Building, St. Paul 196 Entrance to New York Life Insurance Building, St. Paul 198 New York Life Insurance Building, Minneapolis 200 Vestibule of New York Life Insurance Building, Minneapolis 201 Dwelling in Minneapolis 202 Dwelling in St. Paul 203 Porte-Cochère, St. Paul 204 Porch in St. Paul 205 From a Dwelling in St. Paul 206 Dwellings in St. Paul 207 Porch in St. Paul 209 THE POINT OF VIEW HE connection between the papers here collected, in addition to their common subject-matter, is their common point of view. Of this I do not know that I can make a clearer or briefer statement than I made in a speech delivered, in response to the toast of “Architecture,” at the fifth annual banquet of the National Association of Builders, given February 12, 1891, at the Lenox Lyceum, in New York. Accordingly I reprint here the report of my remarks: “Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the National Association of Builders,—You will not expect from me, in responding to this toast, any exhibition of that facetious spirit with which some of my predecessors have entertained you. It has, indeed, been said that {1} {x} American humor has never found full expression except in architecture. It has also been said by an honored friend of mine, himself an architect, whom I hoped to see here to-night, that American architecture was the art of covering one thing with another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, would not be desirable. But I hope you will agree with me that, though the expression is comic, the fact, so far as it is a fact, is serious even to sadness. It is a great pleasure and a great privilege for me to speak to this sentiment, and it is especially a privilege for me to speak upon it to an association of builders, because it seems to me that the real, radical defect of modern architecture in general, if not of American architecture in particular, is the estrangement between architecture and building— between the poetry and the prose, so to speak, of the art of building, which can never be disjoined without injury to both. If you look into any dictionary or into any cyclopædia under ‘architecture,’ you will find that it is the art of building; but I don’t think that you would arrive at that definition from an inspection of the streets of any modern city. I think, on the contrary, that if you were to scrape down to the face of the main wall of the buildings of these streets, you would find that you had simply removed all the architecture, and that you had left the buildings as good as ever; that is to say, the buildings in which the definition I have quoted is illustrated are in the minority, and the buildings of which I have just spoken are in the majority; and the more architectural pretensions the building has, the more apt it is to illustrate this defect of which I have spoken. “It is, I believe, historically true, in the history of the world, with one conspicuous exception, that down to the Italian Renaissance, some four centuries ago, the architect was himself a builder. The exception is the classical period in Rome. The Grecian builders, as all of you know, had taken the simplest possible construction, that of the post and lintel, two uprights carrying a crossbeam, and they had developed that into a refined and beautiful thing. The Romans admired that, and they wished to reproduce it in their own buildings, but the construction of their own buildings was an arched construction; it was a wall pierced with arches. They did not develop that construction into what it might have been. They simply pierced their wall with arches and overlaid it with an envelope of the artistic expression of another construction, which they coarsened in the process. According to some accounts, they hired Greek decorators to overlay it with this architecture which had nothing to do with it, and there was the first illustration in all history of this difference between the art of architecture and the art of building. In every other country in the world the architect had been the builder. I think that is true down to the Italian Renaissance; and then building was really a lost art. There hadn’t been anything really built in the fifteenth century; and they began to employ general artists, painters and sculptors and goldsmiths, to design their buildings, and these men had no models before them except this Grecian-Roman architecture of which I speak.[A] These men reproduced that in their designs, and left the builder to construct it the best way he could, and that, I am told, is a process which sometimes prevails in the present time. But before that everything had been a simple development of the construction and the material of the building, and since that men have thought they perceived that architecture was one thing and building was another, and they have gone on to design buildings without any sort of reference to the materials of which they were composed, or the manner in which they were put together. That is the origin of the exclusively modern practice of working in architectural styles, as it is called. Why, before the fifteenth century, I don’t suppose any man who began to build a building ever thought in what style he should compose it any more than I thought before I got up here in what language I should address you; he simply built in the language to which he was accustomed and which he knew. You will find this perfect truth is the great charm of Grecian architecture, and ten or fifteen centuries later it was the great charm of Gothic architecture; that is to say, that it was founded upon fact, that it was the truth, that it was the thing the man was doing that he was concerned about, even in those pieces of architecture which seem to us the most exuberant, the most fantastic, like the front of Rouen, or like the cathedral of which Longfellow speaks, as you all remember: “ ‘How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while, canopied with leaves, Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers.’ Even in those things there was that logical, law-abiding, sensible, practical adherence to the facts of construction, to the art of building, which we have so long lost, and which I hope we are getting back again. “There are examples, in the work of our modern architecture, of architects who design with this same truth, with this same reality, with this same sincerity that animated the old builders before the coming-in of this artificial and irrelevant system of design, and one of them is the building in which I am informed a great many of you spent last evening; I mean the Casino. I don’t know any more admirable illustration of real, genuine, modern architecture than that building; and among all its merits I don’t know any merit greater than the fidelity with which the design follows the facts of structure in the features, in the material, in everything. It is a building in baked clay; there isn’t a feature in it in brick or in terra-cotta which could be translated into any other material without loss. It is a beautiful, adequate, modern performance. I say this without any reservation, because unfortunately the genius who, in great part, designed that building has gone from us; and there are many things by living architects, whom I cannot mention because they are living, which exhibit these same merits. There is one other example that I would like to mention here, because many of you know his work; I mean the late John Wellborn Root, of Chicago. I shouldn’t mention him either if he hadn’t, unfortunately, gone from us. Mr. Root’s buildings exhibit the same true sincerity—the knowledge of the material with which he had to do, the fulfilment of the purpose which he had to perform. I don’t know any greater loss that could have happened to the architecture of this country and to the architecture of the future than that man dying before his prime. These are stimulating and fruitful examples to the architects of the present time to bring their art more into alliance, more into union, more into identity, with the art of building; and it is by these means, gentlemen, and by these means only, that we can ever gain a living, a progressive, a real architecture—the architecture of the future.” CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE[B] {2} {3} {4} {5} {6} THE new departure is an apt name for what some of its conductors describe as the new “school” in architecture and decoration. It has still, after nearly ten years of almost complete sway among the young architects of England and of the United States, all the signs of a departure—we might say of a hurried departure—and gives no hint of an arrival, or even of a direction. It is, in fact, a general “breaking-up” in building, as the dispersion of Babel was in speech, and we can only and somewhat desperately hope that the utterances of every man upon whom a dialect has suddenly fallen may at least be intelligible to himself. From a “movement” so exclusively centrifugal that it assumes rather the character of an explosion than of an evolution, not much achievement can be looked for. In fact, the “movement” has not, thus far, either in England or in the United States, produced a monument which anybody but its author would venture to pronounce very good. Not to go back to the times when Gothic architecture was vernacular in England, it has produced nothing which can be put in competition with the works either of the English classical revival, or with the works of the English Gothic revival—with St. Paul’s and the Radcliffe Library, on the one hand, or with Westminster Palace and the Manchester Town-hall, on the other. Before the “movement” began, the architects of Europe and America were divided into two camps. They professed themselves either Renaissance or Gothic architects. The mediævalists acknowledged a subjection to certain principles of design. The classicists accepted certain forms and formulæ as efficacious and final. They were both, therefore, under some restraint. But the new movement seems to mean that aspiring genius shall not be fettered by mechanical laws or academic rules, by reason or by revelation, but that every architect shall build what is right in his own eyes, even if analysis finds it absurd and Vitruvius condemns it as incorrect. “Queen Anne” is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use. But it is rather noteworthy that the effect of what is most specifically known as Queen Anne is to restrain the exuberances of design. Whoever recalls Viollet-le-Duc’s pregnant saying, that “only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career,” would scarcely select the reign of Queen Anne out of all English history for a point of departure in the history of any one of the plastic arts. The bloated Renaissance of Wren’s successors, such as is shown in Queen’s College and in Aldrich’s church architecture in Oxford, was its distinctive attainment in architecture. The minute and ingenious woodcarving of Grinling Gibbons was its distinctive attainment in decoration. Nothing could show more forcibly the degeneracy of art at the period which of late years has been represented as an æsthetic renascence than the acceptance of these wood-carvings, which in execution and all technical qualities are as complete, and in design and all imaginative qualities are as trivial and commonplace, as contemporary Italian sculpture, as works of art comparable to the graceful inventions of Jean Goujon, and clearly preferable to the sometimes rude but always purposeful decoration of mediæval churches. The revivalists of Queen Anne have not confined their attentions to the reign of that sovereign. They have searched the Jacobean and the Georgian periods as well, and have sucked the dregs of the whole English Renaissance. Unhappily, nowhere in Europe was the Renaissance so unproductive as in the British Islands. It was so unproductive, indeed, that Continental historians of architecture have scarcely taken the trouble to look it up or to refer to it at all. Not merely since the beginning of the Gothic revival, but since the beginning of the Greek revival that was stimulated by the publication of Stuart’s work on Athens, in which for the first time uncorrupted Greek types could be studied, what contemporary architects have ransacked as a treasury was considered a mere lumber-room, and fell not so much into disesteem as into oblivion. During two generations nobody any more thought of studying the works of English architecture from Hawksmoor to “Capability” Brown, than anybody thought of studying the poetry of Blackmore and Hayley. The attempt within the past ten years to raise to the rank of inspirations the relics of this decadence, which for years had been regarded by everybody as rather ugly and ridiculous, is one of the strangest episodes in the strange history of modern architecture. Mr. Norman Shaw has been the chief evangelist of this strange revival. Mr. Shaw is a very clever designer, with a special felicity in piquant and picturesque groupings, which he had shown in Gothic work, especially in country-houses, before the caprice seized him of uniting free composition with classic detail, and the attempt at this union is what is most distinctively known as Queen Anne. Whoever considers the elements of this combination would hardly hope that the result could be a chemical union, or more than a mechanical mixture. Classic detail is the outcome and accompaniment of the simplest construction possible, which was employed by the Greek architects in the simplest combination possible, and precisely because it was so simple and so primitive they were enabled to reduce it to an “order,” and to carry it to a pitch of purity, lucidity, and refinement to which the most enthusiastic mediævalist will scarcely maintain that more complicated constructions have ever attained. But this very perfection, which was only attainable when life was simple and the world was young, this necessary relation between the construction and the detail of Greek Doric, makes it forever impossible that Greek detail should be successfully “adapted” to modern buildings. A late writer on the theory of architecture has said of Greek architecture: “As partisans of its historical glory, we should desire that it remain forever in its historical shrine.” We laugh at the men of two generations ago who covered Europe and America with private and public buildings in reproduction as exact as they could contrive of Grecian temples. But, after all, if the Greek temple be the ultimate, consummate flower, not only of all actual but of all possible architectural art, were not these men wiser in their generation than their successors who have taken the Greek temple to pieces and tried to construct modern buildings out of its fragments? There is even something touching and admirable, in this view, in the readiness and completeness of the sacrifice to beauty which the reproducers of the Greek temples made of all their merely material comforts and conveniences, something that we miss in the adapters. The Romans can scarcely be said to have attempted this adaptation. They built Roman buildings for purposes and by methods which had never entered the minds of Greek architects to conceive, and they built them with no more thought of art than enters the mind of a modern railway engineer in designing a truss bridge. After they were designed according to their requirements it was that the Roman engineer overlaid them with an irrelevant trellis of Greek architecture, debasing and corrupting the Greek architecture in the process. And it is this hybrid architecture, which analysis would at once have dissolved into its component parts, that was accepted without analysis as the starting-point of “the new departure” of the fifteenth century, and the ultimate English debasement of which in the eighteenth is taken by the contemporary architects of England and America as the starting-point of the new departure in the nineteenth. It cannot be said that Mr. Norman Shaw and his followers have succeeded in the task of combining free composition with classic detail, which the Romans forbore to attempt, and in which the French architects of the sixteenth century failed. Every attempt to fit antique detail to a building faithfully designed to meet modern requirements shows that it cannot be so fitted without being transformed, and—since the sole excuse for the attempt is that it {7} {8} {9} {10} cannot be bettered—without being debased. What the Queen Anne men have done is virtually what the Romans did. They have shirked the impossible problem they unnecessarily imposed upon themselves, and have either overlaid or inlaid their buildings with their architecture. Of course the result of this process can no more be accepted as an architectural organism than if they had hung water- proof paper on the outer walls instead of decorating them with carving, or moulding, or what not, built in the walls, but no more architecturally related to them than the paper-hanging. But this is precisely what has been done in every “free classic” building, with more or less skill and dissimulation of the process. It is seldom done with the winning candor with which it has been done in the house of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt in New York, which is officially described as a specimen of the “Greek Renaissance,” possibly because its architectural details are all Roman. In that edifice two bands of exquisite carving—exquisite in execution, that is to say—which girdle the building, simply occur on the wall at levels where they are quite meaningless in relation to the building; where, consequently, they would not help the expression of the building, if the building could be said to have any expression beyond that of settled gloom; and where the irrelevant carving, not being framed by itself, would contradict the expression of a structure which was architecturally, and not alone mechanically, a building. How much this carving would gain by being framed away, so that if it did not help, it should at least not injure, the architecture to which it is attached, may be seen by comparing these Vanderbilt houses with a brown-stone house, in formal Renaissance, in upper Fifth Avenue, near Sixty-ninth Street, where the carving is neither better cut nor more abundant than that of the Vanderbilt houses, but where its disposition at least appears to be premeditated, and not casual. It would scarcely be worth while to point out the faults of designs, if they can even be described as such, so generally disesteemed as those of the two houses built for Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, “those boxes of brown stone with architecture appliqué.” But it is worth pointing out that the radical error, which in these appears so crudely and naïvely as to be patent to the wayfaring man who has never thought about architecture, is latent in all the works of the Queen Anne movement—to which these houses do not specifically belong—and must vitiate every attempt to adjust classic detail to free and modern composition. Classic detail cannot grow out of modern structures faithfully designed for modern purposes as it grows out of antique structure, or as Gothic ornament grows out of Gothic structure, like an efflorescence. It must be “adjusted” as visibly an after-thought, and to say this is to say that in all Queen Anne buildings the architecture is appliqué. However, to disparage Queen Anne is not to explain its acceptance. It looks like a mere masquerade of nineteenth-century men in eighteenth-century clothes, and with many of its practitioners it is no more. In England it seems to have originated as a caprice by which a clever and dashing but by no means epoch-making architect misled the younger and weaker of his brethren. In this country, which had never been much more architecturally than an English colony, there seemed special reasons for following the new fashion of being old-fashioned. American architects, and American builders before there were any American architects, had been exhorted, as they have lately been exhorted again, to do something distinctively American. The colonial building, which was done by trained English mechanics, was of the same character as the contemporary domestic work of England, and showed in its ornament the same unreflecting acceptance of a set of forms and formulæ bequeathed as a tradition of the trade and [Image unavailable.] RECESSED BALCONY, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTH AVENUE. Herter Brothers, Architects. part of the outfit of a journeyman. Although Jefferson complained that in his time and in rural Virginia it was impossible to “find a workman who could draw an order,” it is evident that there was no difficulty of that kind in other parts of the country. These trained workmen, it is to be noted, were all carpenters, and there is probably no work in stone which shows an equal precision and facility in workmanship. Such buildings as the New York City Hall and the Albany Academy were clearly the work of architects of culture according to the standard of the time. The only architectural qualities of the works of the mechanics were the moderation and respectability of detail, which they had learned as part of their trade, and it is quite absurd to ascribe to these buildings any value as {11} {12} {13} {15} {14} works of art. It is particularly absurd to assign the degradation of house-building which undoubtedly followed, and which made the typical American house, after the Greek temple had spent its force, the most vulgar habitation ever built by man, to the substitution of book-learned architects for handicraftsmen. People talk as if the middle part of Fifth Avenue, the brown-stone high-stoop house with its bloated detail, which displaced the prim precision of the older work, had been done by educated architects. In fact, there was hardly a single building put up in New York after the design of an educated architect between the works we have mentioned and the erection of Trinity Church by Mr. Upjohn in 1845, which not only marked a great advance over anything that had been done before, but began the Gothic revival to which we directly or indirectly owe whatever of merit has been done since, including so much of Queen Anne as, not being Queen Anne, is good. But the bulk of the building which gave its architectural character to New York and to the country continued to be done by mechanics, who continued, so far as they could, to supply the demand of the market, who gradually lost the training their predecessors had enjoyed, and who lost also all sense of the necessity for that training in the new demand that their work should be, above all things, “American.” As the slang of to-day puts it, they were exhorted, as the architects are still sometimes exhorted, to “talk United States.” They might have answered that there was no such language, and that a few bits of slang did not constitute a poetical vocabulary. The feeling which urges an artist to be patriotic by being different from other people not long ago led Mr. Walt Whitman to resent the absence of an “autochthonous” poetry, and has lately led a newspaper writer to call the attention of a New England building committee to the log cabin as the most suitable motive for a town-hall they are going to build. The Northern reader notes with mild amusement the occasional resentment in the Southern press of the absence of a “distinctive Southern literature,” and perceives the plaint to be provincial; but he is not so quick to perceive that his own clamor for an American this or that is equally provincial. The hard lot of the American painter has often been bewailed, in that, when he has tried to rid himself of his provincialism by learning to paint, and has learned to paint more or less as other men do who have learned to paint, he is straightway berated for not being provincial. If American literature or painting or architecture be good, the Americanism of it may safely be left to take care of itself. But a man cannot be expected to innovate to much purpose upon usages with which he is unfamiliar; and the effects which Mr. Whitman’s admonition to his fellow-poets to “fix their verses to the gauge of the round-globe” would probably have upon an aspiring young poet, conscious [Image unavailable.] DOORWAYS ON MADISON AVENUE. G. E. Harney, and McKim, Mead, & White, Architects. of genius, but weak in his parts of speech, are the effects which the demand for aboriginality actually had upon the race of builders, whether they were content with that title, or without any sufficient provocation described themselves as architects. They undoubtedly attained difference, and their works did not remind the travelled observer of any of the masterpieces of Europe. It is quite conceivable and not at all discreditable that the wild work of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should have led architects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Washington Square, and to sigh for a return of the times when the common street architecture of New York was sober and respectable, even if it was conventional and stupid. This justifiable preference for Bowling Green and Washington Square and St. John’s Park over Broadway and Madison Square and Murray Hill, for an architecture confessedly colonial over an architecture aggressively provincial, is no doubt the explanation why so many of our younger architects made haste to fall in behind the Queen Anne standard. What we really have a right to blame them for is for not so far analyzing their own emotions as to discover that the qualities they admired in the older work, or admired by comparison with the newer, were not dependent upon the actual details in which they found them. To be “content to dwell in decencies forever” was not considered the mark of a lofty character even by a poet of the time of Queen Anne. If virtue were, indeed, “too painful an endeavor,” and if there were no choice except between the state of dwelling in decencies and the state of dwelling in indecencies forever, we could but admit that they had chosen the better part. But they were not, in fact, confined to a choice between these alternatives. The Gothic revival in England, after twenty years, had succeeded in establishing something much more like a real vernacular architecture than had been known in England before since the building of the cathedrals—an architecture which, although starting from formulas and traditions, had attained to principles, and was true, earnest, and alive. It was quite inevitable that it should be crude in proportion as it was alive, according to the frankness with which it recognized {16} {17} {18} {19} [Image unavailable.] ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET. C. C. Haight, Architect. [Image unavailable.] DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET. R. H. Robertson, Architect. that we live in times unknown to the ancients, and endeavored to respond with changes in its organism to changes wrought in its environment by new requirements and new knowledge, with forms necessarily rude, inchoate, embryonic, as beseems the formative period of letters and of arts as of life, in contrast with the ultimate refinement which is the mark of a completed development. But that these crudities would be refined was also inevitable; that they were in process of refinement was apparent. Another generation of artists as earnest as those who began the Gothic revival might have brought this rough and swelling bud to a splendid blossom. But in an evil hour, and under a strange spell, the young architects of the United States followed the young architects of England in preferring the refinements of a fixed and developed architecture to the rudenesses of a living and growing architecture. Because they did not see their way at once to “supply every deficiency and symmetrize every disproportion,” they did not leave this for their successors, but abandoned the attempt at an expression of the things they were doing for the elegant expression in antique architecture of meanings that have grown meaningless to modern men. They have had their way in New York for seven or eight years, during a period unprecedented in building activity, and out of all comparison in the profusion with which money has been lavished upon building and decoration. What have they gained for architectural art? They have, indeed, subjected many miles of sandstone to the refining influence of egg-and-dart mouldings (the designer of a house in Fifth Avenue has so much faith in the efficacy of that ornament that he has belted his street front with three rows of it, one above the other), and triglyphs (faithfully to have contemplated which softens the manners, nor suffers to be rude) have been brought within the reach of the humblest in the decoration of tenement-houses. They have built so much and so expensively that they have produced in minds—like some of their own— which do not reflect much upon these things the impression that if luxury and art be not synonymous, they are at least inseparably connected, with the latter in the capacity of handmaiden. But will any educated architect assert that the characteristic monuments of the last five or six years—greatly superior in quantity, and superior by a great multiple in cost—are equal in architectural value to the work of the decade preceding? Suppose that Mr. Norman Shaw had not bedevilled the weaker of his brethren, and that this unprecedented building activity and this unparalleled spending of money that have fallen under the control of architects had been directed along the lines laid down by the Gothic revivalists, and had extended, consolidated, and refined the work begun and carried on here by such architects as Mr. Upjohn, Mr. Eidlitz, Mr. Withers, Mr. Cady, Mr. Potter, and Mr. Wight, will any educated architect maintain that the result of such a process would not have been nobler monuments than any to which we can point as characteristic products of the later movement? We might ask Mr. Harney, for example, who has been one of the noteworthy contributors to the works of both periods, whether in falling to “grace” he has not fallen from something more important. One can readily understand that Mr. Harney, in contemplating the effect of his completed work in the respectable warehouse at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, should have been disappointed in the effect of much of the detail he had designed for his building, should have found some of it rude, some of it disproportionate {20} {21} {22} [Image unavailable.] HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET. Bruce Price, Architect. to its function and position, and none of it exquisite in modelling. It is also intelligible that he may have been dissatisfied with some parts even of his still more successful house at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, which, always a grateful object, has lately acquired an air of additional distinction from the eager architectural competition which has set in alongside of it, and the results of which give an air of unquestionable animation—the animation of excited controversy—to Fifty-seventh Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. This dissatisfaction, if the architect underwent it, was a wholesome discontent which we should have expected to see allayed by more thoroughly studied detail in Mr. Harney’s succeeding work. But it seems to have been a morbid sensitiveness to the defects of his work which led Mr. Harney to abandon altogether, and in despair, the practice of architectural design, and, when he had another commercial building to do, to erect in Wall Street an entirely ineffectual structure, of which the architecture that one carries away with him consists in a crow-stepped gable, an irrelevant entablature appliqué which crosses the building half-way up, and windows covered with flat arches, the key-stones of which are “shored up” by the mullions; and, when he had another city house to do, to depute the design of it to some unknown carpenter who died before he was born, and to reproduce accurately in Madison Avenue a Vandam or Charlton Street house built out of due time, with a familiar “old New York” doorway, in the jambs of which quoins intercept sheaves of mouldings. This confession that a carpenter of 1825 was a better-trained designer than an educated architect of 1880 is very possibly creditable to the personal modesty of the latter; but Mr. Harney’s own earlier works sufficiently testify that it does not do him justice. Mr. Cady, one of the most important and distinguished of the contributors to the Gothic revival in New York, has also of late years become a convert to the new movement, and seems from our point of view to have thrown himself away with even less sufficient cause than that which impelled Mr. Harney to his rash act. For we have distinctly admitted that Mr. Harney had reason to be dissatisfied with his Gothic detail, while we cannot make that admission in behalf of Mr. Cady. Mr. Cady’s newer work is shown in a house of red-brick and brown sandstone, which he contributed to the architectural competition just noticed. This edifice shows a desire to live at peace in the midst of very quarrelsome neighbors. Mr. Cady, indeed, could scarcely design a vulgar and vociferous work if he tried. At any rate, he has never tried, and does not in the least need to be put under the bonds of a style in order to insure his keeping the peace. One wonders what Mr. Cady believes himself to have gained in abandoning the style of his brilliant Art Building in Brooklyn for the style of his not very noticeable house in Fifty-seventh Street. Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; but it can also be attained, by architects who are really in quest of it, in other styles quite as well, which admit a much wider range of expression, while the student is forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre repertory of Queen Anne any other quality than quietude can be expressed. Its successes in domestic architecture are mainly the successes of unnoticeableness, which is really the character not only of the dwellings just mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, and of a house, which has the great advantage of double the usual frontage, by Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s reproduction; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street by these latter architects, which looks less like a work of architectural art than a magnified piece of furniture “with the Chippendale feeling,” can scarcely be called successful, while the house they designed for Mr. Astor in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street front in brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called Queen Anne, in spite of the three rows of egg-and-dart moulding, already remarked, which crown its rock-faced basement. The highest praise to which these typical Queen Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thoroughly studied detail, such as the treatment of the oriel in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is that they look like eligible mansions for highly respectable families content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also the highest praise that can be bestowed upon their prototypes of the Georgian era. We can repeat the admission that it is far better they should look like that than like the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons, without thereby admitting that the prim and prosaic {23} {24} {25} [Image unavailable.] HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE. R. M. Hunt, Architect. expression of respectability never so eminent can be scored as a triumph in domestic architecture. The domestic architecture of Venice, or Rouen, or Nuremberg has something more to say to us than that. And a touch of such spirit and picturesqueness as Mr. Bruce Price has given us in a brick house in Fifty-sixth Street (p. 22), or as Mr. Hunt has given us not only in the elaborately ornate house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, but in some dwellings in upper Madison Avenue, is more to be desired than a mere omission to outrage decorum. Such as the successes of Queen Anne in domestic architecture are, they are its only successes, although it is only fair to say that much interesting work has been done in it, if not strictly of it, in suburban houses and sea-side cottages, which do not come within our present scope. A “feature” suffices for the architecture of a narrow street front, and a feature may be compiled out of the repertory of Queen Anne by a designer who thinks that result a reward of his pains. The oriel, for example, in effect comprises the architecture of the house just mentioned as designed by Mr. Haight. But even in a house which is only a feature the classic detail is not always adjusted without a visible incongruity to the constructions, out of which classic detail cannot spontaneously grow as it grew out of classic constructions. The doorway, for example, of the house designed by Mr. Robertson, which is virtually repeated in the window over it, is a moulded round arch standing upon pilasters of its own width, and thus apparently making of the jamb and arch a complete and detached construction. That is to say, the pilasters seem to carry the arch. The architect of the New York Post-office has done the same thing in a much ruder way. But the elegance of Mr. Robertson’s detail cannot rid even the spectator who does not stop to analyze the source of the feeling of an uneasy sensation that what is thus elegantly expressed is not the fact. An arch does, in fact, exercise a lateral as well as a vertical pressure; and if the arch and its vertical supports formed a detached construction, as they here appear to do, the arch would be unstable. Insensible as the classical Romans were to considerations of artistic expression, they were not so insensible as this. They recognized the existence of a lateral pressure by marking the impost of the arches with a continuous moulding, thus allying the arch with its lateral abutment as well as with its vertical support; and here the architect of the Post- office, wiser, or, if thought be not predicable of his architecture, more fortunate than Mr. Robertson, has been content to imitate them. The buildings in which these solecisms appear, we repeat, are the successes of Queen Anne. For structures more complicated most of its practitioners have shrunk from invoking it. Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, indeed, took the ground, when they designed the Union League Club House, that a “feature” supplied a sufficient idea for that edifice; and that a portico of four large Roman Corinthian columns in front, subdued to an equal number of brick pilasters on the side, would meet the architectural requirements of the case, if they let their consciousness play freely over the remaining surfaces without reference to this central thought. But the result has scarcely justified this belief, and the spectator finds that the building, in spite of the unifying influence of a large and simple roof, in addition to the feature in question, does not make a total impression, but is scattering and confused; while its parts, taken singly, are feeble in spite of their extravagant scale. This, indeed, is not even a sacrifice to the conventions, but a specimen of what can be achieved in a style of gentle dulness gone rampant. If tame Queen Anne is a somewhat ineffectual thing, what shall be said of wild Queen Anne? There is nothing wild about two other public buildings in which architects have ventured upon Queen Anne—one a hospital, in Park Avenue, by Mr. Haight, and one an “institution” of some other kind, in Lexington Avenue, by Mr. Fernbach. Both of these, indeed, are tame, and whatever the differences of detail may be, both have much the same expression, so that one carries away from either, as from one of the commonplace faces which we are always confounding, an impression which may be that of the other—in either case of a centre with projecting wings separately roofed, and the whole wall overlaid with a shallow trellis of brick-work, too shallow to be serviceable as buttresses, and serviceable only as the badge of the alleged “style.” It seems hard upon an owner that he should be required to pay money for rectangular applications of brick which can scarcely strengthen his building appreciably, and can hardly be held to beautify it, by way merely of labelling it, “This is Queen Anne.” And this resemblance, be it noted, which is not so much a specific resemblance as the expression of an amiable characterlessness common to both, is not all to be imputed to the architects, except upon the ground of their choice of a style. The works of both of them have character, and not at all the same character, when they are working in a style which is a real form-language in which meanings can be expressed, and not a mere little phrase-book containing elegant extracts wherewith to garnish aimless discourse. Mr. Fernbach,[C] as is testified by such works as the “Staats-Zeitung” building and the German Savings-Bank in New York, and the building of the Mutual Insurance Company in Philadelphia, is one of the most accomplished practitioners in this country of academic Renaissance. Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is a highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not their fault if Queen Anne, when spread over an extensive façade, spreads thin. Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the temerity to attempt a Queen Anne church, and the success of his essay is not such as to invite imitation. The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue, with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, which are of a rugged rusticity, with the needful openings left square-headed and unmodelled; but these walls are crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow shingles, under a broad gable, and its openings united under a thin ogee canopy of painted pine. There is here and there a little classic detail, which, if it pleases the designer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the interior that is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what the German critics call the “playful use” of forms devised for one construction and one material in another material and with no visible construction; and the result of this pleasantry is what a German professor, celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “an important joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, the treatment passes a joke, for the mahogany nave arches, with their little protruding key-woods, and their supporting posts incased in boxed pedestals, are actually doing the work of carrying the clere-story—unless, indeed, there is a concealed system of iron-work—although their function is so far sacrificed to their {26} {27} {28} {29} form that they are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne contains no forms that can be even tortured into the construction of an open ceiling, the architect has omitted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere loft, sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as in the fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is entirely playful, so that the interior of the church seems to be a collection of pleasantries. In a dining-room, for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes seems to be ruled out by the previous question as to the admissibility in the sacred edifice of levity even of the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for the appliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeed for the designers of “cozy” churches in general, that there is no official censorship of church architecture as there is of church music, and that no rubric makes it the duty of every minister, with such assistance as he can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to suppress all light and unseemly architecture by which vain and ungodly persons profane the service of the sanctuary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the spirit in which we have been asking other architects, what he has gained by abandoning such an effort as he made some ten years before in the Phillips Memorial Church to develop a composition out of his subject in favor of these scraps of quotations, and of quotations neither fresh nor very pregnant! He might answer that the church in which we admire at least the effort was a somewhat untamed and obstreperous fabric, and that the present edifice is much more chastened and subdued. It is tame, no doubt, and Mr. Robertson’s talent, when he works in Queen Anne, is subdued— “subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand;” but, upon the whole, it is difficult to see how the architect, comparing the earlier with the later work, could fail to feel that the attempt to express something, however crude and so far unsuccessful the attempt might have been, was a more manly and artistic employment than this elegant trifling, in which the highest attainable success has an element of puerility. In truth, it is gratifying to remark that the argument by which we have supposed the architect to have solaced himself for the result of his ecclesiastical labors in Queen Anne does not seem to have convinced himself, and that a later work still, a sandstone church farther down the same avenue, is a much more serious piece of design, being an attempt to develop the architecture out of the structure itself. It would be especially unjust to misapply to Mr. Robertson’s Queen Anne church the saying that the style is the man, for the church last mentioned shows that Mr. Robertson is a man of talents, when he gives his talents a chance. Thus far we have been speaking of the respectable and conservative element in the new departure, of the Extreme Right, so to speak, and generally of works wh...