CHAPTER FIVETHE DEFEAT OF ROMANTICISM
Between 1860 and 1890, some of the forces that were latent in industrialism were realized in American architecture. Where the first pioneers had fared timidly, hampered by insufficient resources, the generation that had been stimulated by war industries and profiteering, by the discovery of petroleum and natural gas, by the spanning of the American continent and by cable communication with Europe, rioted over its new-found wealth.
“The Song of the Broad-Ax” still faintly lingered on the Pacific slopes; but the land pioneer was rapidly giving way to the pioneer in industry; and for perhaps the first time during the century, the surplus of capital outran the immediate demand for new plant and equipment. The Iron Age reached its peak of achievement in a series of great bridges, beginning with the Eads Bridge at St. Louis; and romanticism made a last stand. It will pay us, perhaps, to take one last look at the romantic effort,in order to see how impossible and hopeless was the task it set out to perform.
In England, the romantic movement in architecture had made the return to the Middle Ages a definite symbol of social reform: in Ruskin’s mind it was associated with the restoration of a medieval type of polity, something like a reformed manor, while with Morris it meant cutting loose from the machine and returning to the meticulous handicraft of the town-guilds. In America, the romantic movement lacked these social and economic implications; and while it is not unfair to say that the literary expression of English romanticism was on the whole much better than the architecture, in the proportion that The Stones of Venice was better than the Ashmolean Museum or the Albert Memorial, the reverse is true on this side of the Atlantic.
Inarticulate as H. H. Richardson, the chief exponent of American romanticism, was, it seemed for a while as if he might breast the tide of mechanical industry and create for a good part of the scene a sense of stability and harmony which it had all too plainly lacked. In relation to his age, however, Richardson was in the biological sense a “sport”; surrounded by jerry-builders, who had degraded thecraft of building, and engineers who ignored it, he was perhaps the last of the great medieval line of master-masons.
Richardson began his career in America directly after the Civil War. Almost the first of the new generation of Americans to be trained by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he brought back to America none of those atrocious adaptations of the French Renaissance like the New York, Philadelphia, and Boston Post Offices. On the contrary, he had come under the influence of Viollet-le-Duc; and for about ten years he struggled with incongruous forms and materials in the anomalous manner known as Free Gothic. The end of this period of experiment came in 1872, when he received the commission for Trinity Church in Boston; and although it was not until ten years later that he saw any Romanesque buildings other than in photographs—for he had not traveled during his student-years in Paris—it was in this sturdy mode that he cast his best work. Richardson was not a decorator, but a builder: in going back to Romanesque precedent, with its round arches and massive stone members, he was following out a dictum of Viollet-le-Duc’s: “only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career.” Turningaway from “applied Gothic,” Richardson started to build from the bottom up. So far had the art of masonry disappeared that in Trinity Church Richardson sometimes introduced struts and girders without any attempt to assimilate them in the composition; but as far as any single man could absorb and live with a vanished tradition, Richardson did.
The proof of Richardson’s genius as a builder lies in the difference between the accepted drawings for Trinity Church and the finished building. His ideas altered with the progress of the work, and in almost every case the building itself is a vast improvement over the paper design. Moreover, in his capacity as master-mason, Richardson trained an able corps of craftsmen; and so pervasive was his influence that one still finds on houses Richardson never saw, the touches of delicate, leafy stone-carving he had introduced. With carving and sculpture, the other arts entered, and by his fine designs and exacting standards of work, Richardson elevated the position of the minor crafts, at the same time that he turned over unreservedly to men like John La Farge and Augustus St. Gaudens the major elements of decoration.
Probably most people who know Richardson’sname vaguely associate him with ecclesiastical work; but Richardson’s brand of romanticism was a genuine attempt to embrace the age, and in his long list of public works there are but five churches. If the Pittsburgh Court House and Trinity Church stand out as the hugest of his architectural conceptions, it is the smaller buildings that test the skill and imagination of the master, and the public libraries at North Easton, Malden, and Quincy, Mass., and some of the little railway stations in Massachusetts stand on an equally high level. Richardson pitted his own single powers against the barbarism of the Gilded Age; but, unlike his contemporaries in England, he did not turn his back upon the excellences of industrialism. “The things I want most to design,” he said to his biographer, “are a grain-elevator and the interior of a great river-steamboat.”
In short, Richardson sought to dominate his age. So nearly did he succeed that in a symposium on the ten finest buildings in America, conducted by an architectural journal in the ’eighties, Richardson was given five. This was no easy victory, and, to tell the truth, it was only a partial one. The case of the State Capitol at Albany, which Richardsonand Eidlitz took in hand in 1878, after five million dollars had been squandered on it in the course of ten years’ misconstruction, scarcely caricatures the conditions under which the arts struggled to exist. Begun in the style of the Roman Renaissance, the building under Richardson’s impetuous touch began to take on Romanesque proportions, only to be legislated back into Renaissance by the offended lawgivers!
William Morris Hunt, then at the height of his powers, was commissioned to paint two large mural compositions for the assembly chamber of this blessed building. So much time had been spent in mismanaging the structure that Hunt was given only two months to transfer his cartouche to the panels; but he worked heroically, and, as one of his biographers says, the work was a great triumph. Great, perhaps—but temporary! “The building had fallen into the hands of a political ring, and the poor construction was revealed in the leaking of the massive roof and the settling of the whole structure. Before ten years had passed, great portions of Hunt’s paintings flaked off, and what remained was walled up behind the rebuilding necessary to avert utter ruin.” In a period like this,Richardson’s comparative success takes on heroic proportions.
With the little eddies of eclecticism, with the rage for the Mansard roof, or the introduction of German Gothic, and, a little later, the taste for Queen Anne domesticity, there is scarcely any need to deal; they represented only the dispersion of taste and the collapse of judgment which marked the Gilded Age.
Up to the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, Richardson had imitators, and they were not always mean ones. L. H. Buffington, in Minneapolis, had to his credit a number of buildings which would not, perhaps, have dishonored the master himself; but, as so often happens, the tags in Richardson’s work were easier to imitate than his spirit and inventiveness; and the chief marks of the style he created are the all-too-solid courses of rough stone, the round arch, the squat columns, and the contrasts in color between the light granite and the dark sandstone or serpentine. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, an excellent architectural critic, once said, not without reason, that Richardson’s houses were not defensible except in a military sense; but one is tempted to readinto these ponderous forms partly the architect’s unconscious desire to combat the infirmity and jerry-building of his lower contemporaries, and partly his patron’s anxiety to have a seat of refuge against the uneasy proletariat. A new feudalism was entrenching itself behind the stockades of Homestead and the other steel-towns of the Pittsburgh district. Here was a mode of building, solid, formidable, at times almost brutal, that served the esthetic needs of the barons of coal and steel almost as well as the classic met those heroes who had survived the War of Independence.
I have emphasized what was strong and fine in Richardson’s work in order to show how free it was from the minor faults of romanticism; and yet it reckoned without its host, and Richardson, alas! left scarcely a trace upon the period that followed. Romanticism was welcomed when it built churches; tolerated when it built libraries; petted when it built fine houses; but it could not go much farther. Richardson was a mason, and masonry was being driven out by steel; he was an original artist, and original art was being thrust into the background by connoisseurship and collection; he was a builder, and architecture was committing itself more and moreto the paper plan; he insisted upon building foursquare, and building was doomed more and more tofaçaderie. The very strength of Richardson’s buildings was a fatal weakness in the growing centers of commerce and industry. It takes more than a little audacity to tear down one of Richardson’s monuments, and so, rather ironically, they have held their own against the insurrections of traffic and realty speculation; but the difficulty of getting rid of these Romanesque structures only increased the demand for a more frail and facile method of construction.
Romanticism met its great defeat in the office-building. By the use of the passenger elevator, first designed for an exhibition-tower adjacent to the Crystal Palace in 1853, it had become possible to raise the height of buildings to seven stories: the desire for ground-rents presently increased the height to ten. Beyond this, mere masonry could not go without thickening the supporting piers to such an extent that on a twenty-foot lot more than a quarter of the width would be lost on the lower floors. Richardson’s Marshall Field Building in Chicago was seven stories high; and that was about as far as solid stone or brick could climb withoutbecoming undignified and futile by its bulk. The possibilities of masonry and the possibilities of commercial gain through ground-rents were at loggerheads, and by 1888 masonry was defeated.
Richardson, fortunately, did not live to see the undermining of the tradition he had founded and almost established. Within a decade of his death, however, only the empty forms of architecture remained, for the steel-cage of the engineer had become the new structural reality. By 1890 the ground-landlord had discovered, in the language of the pioneer’s favorite game, that “the roof’s the limit.” If that was so, why limit the roof? With this canny perception the skyscraper sprang into being.
During this Gilded Age the standard of the best building had risen almost as high as it had been in America in any earlier period; but the mass of good building had relatively decreased; and the domestic dwellings in both city and country lost those final touches of craftsmanship that had lingered, here and there, up to the Civil War. In the awkward country villas that began to fill the still-remote suburbs of the larger cities, all sense of style and proportion were lost: the plan was marked by meaninglessirregularities; a dingy, muddy color spread over the wooden façades. There exists a huge and beautifully printed volume, of which, I believe, there are not more than a hundred copies, on the villas of Newport in 1876: the compiler thereof sought to satisfy the vanity of the original owners and the curiosity of a later generation; yet mid all these examples of the “novel” and the “unique,” there is not a single mansion that would satisfy any conceivable line of descendants.
If the level of architecture was low in the country, it touched the bottom of the abyss in the city. As early as 1835 the multiple-family tenement had been introduced in New York as a means of producing congestion, raising the ground-rents, and satisfying in the worst possible way the need of the new immigrants for housing. The conditions of life in these tenements were infinitely lower than they had been in the most primitive farmhouse of the colonial period; their lack of light, lack of water, lack of sanitary facilities, and lack of privacy, created an admirable milieu for the propagation of vice and disease, and their existence in a period which was boasting loudly of the advance of science and industrialism shows, to say the least, how themyths which inspired the age stood between the eye and reality, and obscured the actual state of the modern industrial community.
To the disgrace of the architectural profession in America, the worst features of tenement-house construction were standardized in the so-called dumb-bell tenement which won the first prize in the model tenement-house competition of 1879; and the tenements which were designed after this pattern in the succeeding years combined a maximum lack of privacy with a minimum of light and air. The gridiron street-design, the narrow frontage, the deep lot, all conspired to make good housing difficult in the larger cities: within this framework good house-design, indeed, still is difficult. The dumb-bell tenement of the Gilded Age, however, raised bad housing into an art; and the acquisition of this art in its later developments is now one of the stigmata of “progress” in a modern American city. I say this without irony; the matter is too grave for jest.
During these same ’seventies, the benefits of poor housing were extended in New York to those with money enough to afford something better: the Paris flat was introduced. The legitimate excuse for thesmall apartment was the difficulty of obtaining household service, and the futility of keeping up large houses for small families: this, however, had nothing to do with the actual form that the apartment took, for, apart from the desire for congestion-rents, it is as easy to build apartments for two families as for twenty. The flat is a genuine convenience for the well-to-do visitor to a city; it gives him the atmosphere of a home without many of its major complications, and those who got the taste for this life in Paris were not altogether absurd in desiring to enjoy the same benefits in New York. Unfortunately, what suits a visitor does not necessarily meet the demands of a permanent resident: one may tolerate a blank wall for a week or a month without being depressed, particularly since a good part of a visitor’s time is spent outside his home; but to live year after year facing a blank wall or an equally-frowning façade opposite is to be condemned to the environment of a penitentiary.
The result of building apartments in New York and elsewhere was not cheaper rents for smaller quarters: it was smaller quarters without the cheap rents. Those who wanted sunlight and a pleasant view paid a premium for it; those who did not geteither paid more than enough for what they got. The result of building apartments which would satisfy only a visitor was to make every family visitors: before the acute housing shortage, yearly removals to new premises were the only palliative that made their occupancy tolerable. The amount of wear and tear and waste, the loss of energy and money and good spirits, produced by the inability of the architect to design adequately under the pecuniary standards of the Gilded Age was colossal. The urban nomad in his own way was as great a spendthrift as the pioneer of the prairie. Both of them had been unable to create a permanent civilization; and both of them paid the price for it.
During the first period of pioneering, mechanical improvements had affected the milieu of architecture, but not architecture itself, if one overlooks such ingenuities as the circular and octagon houses of the eighteen-thirties. Slowly, the actual methods of construction changed: the carpenter-builder, who had once performed every operation, gave way to the joiner, whose work profited by putty and paint,curtains and carpets—to the plasterer, who covered up the raw imperfect frame—and to the plumber. Weird ornamental forms for doors and window-architraves, for moldings and pendants, were supplied to the builder by the catalogs of the planing and scroll-saw mills. Invention produced novelties of contortion in wood, unique in ugliness and imbecile in design. Like the zinc and iron statues that graced the buildings of the Centennial Exposition, these devices record the absorption of art in a vain technology.
One need not dwell upon the results of all these miserable efforts, conceived in haste and aborted for profit: the phenomenon was common to industrial civilization at this period, and can be observed in Battersea and Manchester as well as in New York and Pittsburgh. Mr. Thomas Hardy, who was trained as an architect, wrote the esthetic apology for industrialism; and in proclaiming the rightness of our architectural deserts, one cannot help thinking that he transferred to the Wessex countryside a little of the horrible depression he must have acquired in London.
“Gay prospects,” exclaimed Mr. Hardy, “wed happily with gay times; but, alas! if the times benot gay! Men have more often suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged.... Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new vale in Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer harmony with external things wearing a somberness distasteful to our race when it was young. Shall we say that man has grown so accustomed to his spiritual Bastille that he no longer looks forward to, and even shrinks from, a casual emergence into unusual brightness?”
Even the best work of the period is blighted with this sombreness: the fact that so many of Richardson’s buildings have the heavy air of a prison shows us that the Gilded Age was not, indeed, gay, and that a spiritual Black Friday perpetually threatened the calendar of its days.
If the romantic movement in America proved that the architect could capture only a small part of the field, and go no further than the interests of privilegeallowed, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge showed how well industrialism could handle its problems when its purposes were not limited by the necessity for sloppy workmanship and quick turnover. The story of its building is a tribute to both science and humanity. When John Roebling, the designer of the bridge, died in the midst of his job, the business of construction was taken up by his son, and by his devotion to his task in season and out of season, Washington Roebling became an invalid. Confined to his house on Columbia Heights, for ten years the younger Roebling watched the work through a telescope, and directed it as a general would direct a battle. So goes the legend: it runs rather higher than the tales of mean prudence or mechanical skill which glorified Mr. Samuel Smiles’ heroes.
The bridge itself was a testimony to the swift progress of physical science. The strong lines of the bridge, and the beautiful curve described by its suspended cables, were derived from an elegant formula in mathematical physics—the elastic curve. If the architectural elements of the massive piers have perhaps too much the bare quality of engineering, if the pointed arches meet esthetic betrayal inthe flat solidity of the cornices, if, in short, the masonry does not sing as Richardson alone perhaps could have made it sing, the steel work itself makes up for this, by the architectural beauty of its pattern; so that beyond any other aspect of New York, I think, the Brooklyn Bridge has been a source of joy and inspiration to the artist. In the later bridges the spanning members are sturdier and the supporting piers and cables are lighter and less essential; and they suffer esthetically by the very ease of their triumph over the difficulties of engineering.
All that the age had just cause for pride in—its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible—came to a head in the Brooklyn Bridge. What was grotesque and barbarous in industrialism was sloughed off in the great bridges. These avenues of communication are, paradoxically, the only enduring monuments that witness a period of uneasy industrial transition; and to this day they communicate a feeling of dignity, stability, and unwavering poise.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1884; Richardsondied, after finishing the Pittsburgh Court House, in 1886. There was a short period during which the echoes of Richardson’s style resounded in the work of the Western architects; and then in New York two of Richardson’s own pupils, Messrs. McKim and White, who had caught the spirit of the period that was to follow the passing of the frontier, prepared an appropriate mold for its activities. By far the finest things in the late ’eighties are the shingled houses which Richardson and Stanford White and a few others developed for seaboard estates: they recovered the spirit of the early vernacular work, and continued the colonial tradition without even faintly recalling colonial forms. This new note, however, was scarcely sounded before it died out; and in the twenty years that followed the conflict between industrialism and romanticism was swallowed up and finally forgotten in the rise of a new mode. Richardson had not died too soon. The quality of mind and culture which shines through his work was opposed to nearly every manifestation of the period that succeeded him.
From this time on, romanticism retained a place for itself only by forfeiting its claims to occupy the whole province of architecture. In churches andcollege halls where the traditional tie with the Middle Ages had never perhaps been completely broken, its triumphs have been genuine; but although Mr. J. G. Rogers’ Harkness Memorial at Yale, or Messrs. Goodhue and Cram’s St. Thomas’ Church, for example, leave little to be desired in themselves, they have established no precedent for the hundred other kinds of building which the modern community requires; and it is not without significance that in his most recent efforts Mr. Goodhue, for one, had abandoned the molds of romanticism. Unlike Richardson, the surviving romanticists now demand a certain insulation from the modern world; the more intelligent exponents of the movement believe with Dr. Ralph Adams Cram that there is no hope for its achievement throughout the community without a return to “Walled Towns.”
Such a retreat is the equivalent of surrender. To hold to Gothic precedent in the hope of re-creating the medieval community is to hope that an ancient bottle will turn potassium permanganate into claret. The romanticists have never fully faced the social and economic problems that attend their architectural solutions: the result is that they have been dependent upon assistance from the very forces andinstitutions which, fundamentally, they aim to combat. Isolated on little islands, secure for the moment, romanticism must view the work on the mainland with a gesture of irate despair; and the only future it dares to face lies behind it!