The Project Gutenberg eBook ofAmerican Architecture: Studies

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofAmerican Architecture: StudiesThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world 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 atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: American Architecture: StudiesAuthor: Montgomery SchuylerRelease date: January 14, 2019 [eBook #58697]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE: STUDIES ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world 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 atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: American Architecture: StudiesAuthor: Montgomery SchuylerRelease date: January 14, 2019 [eBook #58697]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)

Title: American Architecture: Studies

Author: Montgomery Schuyler

Release date: January 14, 2019 [eBook #58697]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images available at The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE: STUDIES ***

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)

TOK. L. S.

THE 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 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, isserious 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 archedconstruction; 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 architecturalstyles, 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 sleevesBirds 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 thefidelity 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.”

“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 archedconstruction; 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 architecturalstyles, 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 sleevesBirds 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 thefidelity 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.”

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 withthe 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 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

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