13. H. H. RICHARDSON AND McKIM, MEAD & WHITE…

13. H. H. RICHARDSON AND McKIM, MEAD & WHITE

THE story of Shaw’s career is a fascinating one, far more interesting in fact than the general history of English architecture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was a success-drama in four or five acts, of which the last was by no means the least brilliant. Richardson’s career was less eventful, even though, at its peak in the mid eighties, it was at least as successful as Shaw’s. It was also incomplete, since death brought his production to an end at that peak when he was only forty-eight. Yet Richardson’s achievement must be considered greater than Shaw’s, qualitatively if not quantitatively, because his work was better integrated and his development more intelligently directed. Moreover, his influence operated on two levels: on one it was as wide, if more evanescent, than Shaw’s—say, what Shaw’s might have been if he had died at the age of forty-eight, that is, in 1879—on another level it was more like that of Webb, affecting deeply several of the most creative American architects of the next two generations.

Henry Hobson Richardson was born in 1838 near New Orleans in Louisiana. Upon graduation from Harvard in 1858 Richardson, bilingual on account of his Louisiana birth, not unnaturally proceeded to Paris to the École des Beaux-Arts, entering there the atelier of L.-J. André (1819-90), a pupil of Lebas who had become a professor at the École in 1855. But after two years the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States cut off his remittances from home and he had to find work in order to maintain himself. His experience in the office of Théodore Labrouste, notably in working on the designs for the Asile d’Ivry outside Paris, was perhaps of more ultimate value to him than what he learned in André’s atelier and at the École. Several of his earliest works in America, designed immediately after his return from Paris in 1865, have been discussed already (see Chapter 11). It was with the Brattle Square (now First Baptist) Church on Commonwealth Avenue at Clarendon Street in the new Back Bay residential district of Boston, the commission for which he won in a competition held in 1870, that his career seriously began. During the years that this was in construction, 1871-2, he had in his office a young assistant, Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), who had returned from Paris at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. It may well be that the forceful McKim helped Richardson to crystallize the divergent elements evident in his earlier work into a coherent personal style. The Brattle Square Church somewhat resembles in its round-arched medievalism such a Paris church of the sixties as Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge, which Richardson himself may have seen and admired in the early stages of its construction. But the squarish T-shaped plan, without aisles but with transepts, would have been as unusual in France at this period as in England. The material is the richly textured Roxbury Puddingstone rising in broad plain surfaces to the medium-pitched gables. The detail strikes a sort of balance between the French Romanesquoid and the English High Victorian Gothic, the forms being more French, the execution more English. The varied polychromy of the deep voussoirs of the arches is certainly English, but with a personal note in the great variety of the coloured banding. The corner placing of the tall tower, with its fine frieze by the French sculptor Bartholdi, is English in spirit, but its shape is rather more campanile-like than any English church tower had been since the forties.

A similar stylistic crystallization can be seen in the very extensive plant of the State Hospital at Buffalo, N.Y., a commission also won by Richardson in competition in 1870. This was largely re-designed before construction began in 1872 and was in building throughout the whole decade. It was, functionally, the sort of commission for which Richardson’s French training best prepared him, and the planning is French. The other sources of the design seem to have been mostly English, particularly the projects of Burges.

Two buildings in Springfield, Mass., where Richardson had been working on and off since his return from Paris, are even more significant than the Buffalo asylum for the rather definite evidence they offer as to his chief contemporary sources of inspiration at this point. The spire of the North Congregational Church there—commissioned as early as 1868, but built in 1872-3, after being re-designed in 1871 or 72—is a rather squat pyramid of quarry-faced brownstone with four corner spirelets rising from the same square base, apparently a version of the spire Burges designed for his Skelton church begun in 1871 or that of Street’s St James the Less. The tower of the Hampden County Courthouse of 1871-3 also comes from Burges, in this case from the project that he entered in the London Law Courts competition of 1866. The general composition owes more to the slightly earlier English town halls at Northampton and Congleton by Godwin, who was also Burges’s collaborator on the Law Courts project. But the magnificent scale of the random ashlar walls of quarry-faced Monson granite, their coldness relieved by bright red pointing, is as personal to Richardson as the similar brownstone masonry of the North Church and the Buffalo Hospital.

Richardson’s American Express Building,[277] his first work in Chicago, which was begun in 1872, and his contemporary Andrews house in Newport, R.I., both showed comparable evidence of generic influence from contemporary England (see Chapters 14 and 15:ch15#). In this same year, 1872, Richardson won the competition for Trinity Church[278] in Boston, which was to occupy a conspicuous site on the east side of Copley Square, the principal open space in the new Back Bay district. Preceding by a year the Panic of 1873, which slowed building almost to a standstill, this commission and that for the Buffalo Hospital kept him busy through five lean years. As Trinity rose to completion over the years 1873-7, this big Boston church established Richardson’s reputation as the new leader among American architects (Plate 108A). Even before Trinity was finished others were producing crude imitations of it; and over the next twenty years many prominent American churches, particularly in the Middle West, followed in some degree the paradigm that it provided.

Trinity is in plan an enlarged and modified version of the Brattle Square Church. A deep semicircular chancel provides a fourth arm, and a great square lantern rises over the crossing. The elaborate porch, so archaeologically Provençal Romanesque, was added by Richardson’s successors, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, in the nineties, as were also the tops of the western towers; the present decorations of the chancel are much later and by Charles D. Maginnis (1867-1955).

The materials of Trinity are pink Milford granite in quarry-faced random ashlar for the walling and the Longmeadow brownstone that he had first used on the Unity Church in Springfield for the profuse trim. The detail changed in character as the work proceeded; in the earliest portions executed it is heavy and crude, with the foliage carved in a naturalistic High Victorian Gothic vein. But the logic of the round arches that Richardson had been consistently using since he designed the Brattle Square Church in 1870 led him to study Révoil’s Architecture romane du midi de la France,[279] and such a characteristic feature as the polychromy on the outside of the apse is specifically Auvergnat. Moreover, the executed lantern was rather closely based on that of the Old Cathedral of Salamanca in Spain—a model that Richardson’s assistant Stanford White (1853-1906), who succeeded McKim in his employ in 1872, seems to have suggested.

Most contemporaries, supposing all worthy nineteenth-century architecture to be necessarily derivative from this or that style of the past, believed that Richardson had initiated a Romanesque Revival here. But Richardson remained really as responsive to contemporary English ideas as he had been earlier. For example, the curious double-curved wooden roof with kingpost trusses derives from published examples of similar roofs built or projected by Burges. Equally symptomatic of English influence is the use of stained glass by Morris and Burne-Jones in the north transept windows. That glass, however, is inferior in richness of tone to the small windows in the west front designed by the American artist John LaFarge. LaFarge was also responsible for the painted decoration on the walls and the roofs.

To take over Fuller & Laver’s New York State Capitol at Albany when already partly built in the way that Richardson and Eidlitz—a foreign-born exponent of Romanesque of the earlier Rundbogenstil sort, it will be recalled—were asked to do in 1875 was a thankless job; but this call for Richardson’s aid illustrates the rapidity with which he achieved a national reputation. More important, both historically and intrinsically, than what he was able to carry out in Albany—chiefly the Senate Chamber—were a second house that he built in Shepard Avenue in Newport, R.I., in 1874-6 and a building in Main Street in Hartford, Conn., of 1875-6 (see Chapters 14 and 15). The Sherman house is the first example of a Shavian manor successfully translated into American materials; the Cheney Block (now Brown-Thompson Store) is not Shavian at all, but very similar to the arcaded façades common in England since the late fifties (Plate 116A).

To the late seventies belong two remarkably fine buildings, still obviously related to slightly earlier English work, but more personal than either the Newport house or the Hartford commercial building. With the Winn Memorial Library in Woburn, Mass., of 1877-8 Richardson initiated a line of small-town public libraries that reached its climax in the Crane Library in Quincy, Mass., of 1880-3 (Plate 110). The high window-bands of the stack wings, a monumental stone version of Shaw’s ‘ribbon-windows’, and the stone-mullioned ‘window-walls’ at the ends are more significant than the round stair-turrets and the cavernous entrance arches—Early Christian from Syria[280] in origin, not Southern French Romanesque, it should be noted—that romanticize their generally compact massing. The highly functional planning is asymmetrical yet very carefully ordered, perhaps the one remaining trace of his Paris training.

In building Sever Hall, a classroom building for Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., in 1878-80 Richardson abandoned rock-faced granite and brownstone, materials whose common use would, a little later, mark the extent of his influence on other architects, for the red brick of the nearby eighteenth-century buildings in the old Harvard Yard. He even imitated the plain oblong masses of these Georgian edifices under his great red-tiled hip-roof; but the front, with its deep Syrian arch and two tower-like rounded bays, and the rear, with a broader and shallower central bow, are wholly Richardsonian. There is a rather Shavian pediment over the centre of the front, however; while the moulded brick mullions of the banked windows and the very rich cut-brick panels of floral ornament seem to reflect current English work by Stevenson and by Godwin as well as by Shaw. Yet the whole has been amalgamated into a composition quite as orderly as anything the English ‘Annites’ had produced. At the same time Sever Hall is almost as vigorous and manly in scale as his contemporary libraries of granite and brownstone.

Two domestic buildings of 1880, one entirely shingled, the other of rough glacial boulders, are even more personal works; and both, particularly the former, represent the American domestic mode of this period now called the ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter 15). The John Bryant house in Cohasset, Mass., of 1880 first illustrated his emancipation from the direct Shavian imitation that had begun with the Sherman house and continued in several projects—probably mostly White’s work in actual fact—that were prepared in the later seventies but never executed. Quite a series of later shingled houses by Richardson followed the Bryant house between 1881 and 1886 (Plate 124B).

The contemporary Ames Gate Lodge[281] in North Easton, Mass., has a sort of antediluvian power in the bold plasticity of its boulder-built walls—a theme exploited once before in Grace Church in Medford, Mass., of 1867 it will be recalled—as remote from the Romanesque as from the Queen Anne. A similarly absolute originality of a more gracious order can be seen in the Fenway Bridge of 1880-1 in Boston; its tawny seam-faced granite walls happily echo the easy naturalistic curves of the landscaping by his friend F. L. Olmsted (1822-1903),[282] of which it is a principal feature.

1881 saw the initiation of a more monumental building for Harvard, Austin Hall,[283] then the Law School, which was completed in 1883. Rich Auvergnat polychromy and a great deal of rather Byzantinesque carved ornament somewhat confuse the direct structural expressiveness of the thoroughly articulated masonry walls; as a result Austin Hall provided a multitude of decorative clichés for imitators to abuse. Much more modest and also much more significant was the station at Auburndale, Mass., also of 1881, built for the Boston & Albany Railroad. This was the first and the finest of a series of small suburban stations notable for the simplicity of their design and for the compositional skill with which the open elements, carried on sturdy but gracefully shaped wooden supports, were related to the solid masonry blocks of granite and brownstone beneath sweeping roofs of tile or slate. If Shaw was called on in the nineties to design the interiors of an ocean liner for the White Star Line, Richardson had already provided in 1884 a railway carriage for the Boston & Albany. This was neither Romanesque nor Queen Anne in inspiration, but had domestically scaled interiors lined with small square oaken panels and no carved ornament of any sort.

Stations, libraries, and houses form the bulk of Richardson’s production from 1882 until his death. But two much larger buildings, which he himself judged to be his master works, were also fortunately initiated, one in 1884 and the other in 1885, well before his last illness began, though both had to be finished by his successors Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge after his death. The Allegheny County Buildings[284] in Pittsburgh, Penna., consist of a vast quadrangular courthouse dominated by a very tall tower that rises in the centre of the front and a gaol across the street to the rear. Except for the courtyard walls, interesting for the variety and the openness of their ranges of granite arcading, the courthouse offers on the whole only a sort of summary of his talents; the detail, above all, is afflicted with an archaeological dryness that must be due to the increasing dependence of his assistants on published documents of medieval carving. The courthouse provided, however, the model for many large public buildings in the next few years. Among these, the City Hall in Minneapolis, Minn., begun by the local firm of Long & Kees in 1887, is not unworthy of comparison with the original, particularly as regards the tower. That of Toronto in Canada, built by E. J. Lennox in 1890-9, is less interesting but even more monumental; it also signalizes the supersession of English by American influence in Canadian architecture at this point, as does the almost equally Richardsonian Windsor Station in Montreal begun by the American architect Bruce Price in 1888.

The Pittsburgh Jail is a masterpiece of the most personal order, Piranesian in scale, nobly expressive of its gloomy purpose, and as superb an example of granite masonry as exists in the world (Plate 108B). It epitomizes Richardson’s genius where the courthouse merely summarizes his talents.

Richardson’s highest achievement, however, was in the field of private building not in that of the public monument. By a happy coincidence his ultimate masterpiece rose in Chicago where, at this very moment, technical advances in construction were being made that would soon bring to a climax the whole story of nineteenth-century commercial architecture (see Chapter 14). Chicago retains Richardson’s last great masonry house, that of 1885-7 for J. J. Glessner, almost as perfect a domestic paradigm of granite construction as the Pittsburgh Jail. To her shame, however, Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store, built during the same years, was torn down a generation ago to provide a car park.

The Field store occupied an entire block with a dignity and a grandeur no other commercial structure had ever attained before (Plate 116B). Internally it was of iron-skeleton construction; externally the arcaded masonry walls represented a development from those of the Cheney Building of ten years earlier (Plate 116A). Segmental arches covered the broad low openings in the massive ground storey, all built of great ashlar blocks of rock-faced red Missouri granite. The next three storeys, built of brownstone, were combined under a single range of broad arches, yet also articulated within these arched openings by stone mullions and transoms. Above this stage the rhythm doubled, with the windows of the next two storeys joined vertically under narrower arches. The scale of the quarry-faced ashlar was graded down as the walls rose, quite as were the window sizes, and the non-supporting spandrels were filled with small square blocks. The full thickness of the bearing masonry walls was revealed at all the openings. Finally there came a trabeated attic of somewhat Schinkel-like character over which appeared almost the only carved detail on the building, a boldly crocketed cornice. That was ‘Early French’, i.e., of twelfth-century Gothic rather than Romanesque or Byzantine inspiration.

The result was a monument as bold and almost as Piranesian in its scale and its forcefulness as the Pittsburgh Jail; but the walls were also as open, as continuously fenestrated, as those of the court of the Pittsburgh Courthouse. The logical and expressive design of commercial buildings with walls of bearing masonry could hardly be carried further. But in the very year that the Field Store was finished Holabird & Roche, in designing the Tacoma Building, also in Chicago, first showed how the exterior of such edifices might express instead a newly developed sort of construction that allowed the internal metal skeleton to carry the external cladding of masonry (see Chapter 14).

In one last commercial building, much more obscurely located and built of far less sumptuous materials, which was started just before Richardson’s death—it was only commissioned after his last illness had begun—he carried the logic of the design of the Field Store one step farther. It was almost as if he had already sensed, like Holabird & Roche, the implications of the Home Insurance Building in Chicago of 1883-5 by their former employer William Le Baron Jenney, in which the new sort of construction was first used but not at all expressed. On Richardson’s Ames Building in Harrison Avenue in Boston a tall arcade rose almost the full height of the wall beneath a machicolated attic; the depth of the reveals around the sash at the sides of the brick piers was minimized; and above the ground storey the spandrels were of metal panels set almost flush with both piers and sash.

When Richardson died in 1886 the evidence of his great late works indicates that his powers were at their highest. His office, moreover, had never been busier. How Richardson might have developed further it is impossible to say. In the hands of his imitators the Richardsonian mode did not grow in any very creative way during the decade or more that it continued a favourite for churches, public buildings, and even houses built of masonry. Those who had been closest to Richardson when his style was maturing, McKim and White, rarely imitated him; even before his death, in fact, they had already set under way a reaction against the Richardsonian. Their buildings and not his provide the real American analogue to the later work of Shaw in England. Moreover, their leadership succeeded his in many professional circles from coast to coast almost before he was dead.

Leaving aside the modes inherited from the sixties, in any case transmuted almost beyond recognition by the early eighties if not yet entirely superseded, there were at the time of Richardson’s death three main currents in American architecture as against the four or five more or less Shavian modes then popular in England. One was the Richardsonian.[285] This was practised with some success by various Boston firms such as Peabody & Stearns and Van Brunt & Howe. It had been carried to Kansas City, Missouri, by Van Brunt, moreover, and it was being developed with some originality by other Middle Westerners such as George D. Mason (1856-1948) in Detroit, D. H. Burnham (1846-1912) and his partner J. W. Root (1850-91), H. I. Cobb (1859-1931) and his partner Frost, and several other firms in Chicago. The very able designer Harvey Ellis (1852-1904),[286] working for L. S. Buffington (1848?-1931) in Minneapolis, should also be mentioned. Another current was represented by the development leading towards the Chicago skyscrapers of the nineties, in Richardson’s last years more in the hands of technicians than of architects (see Chapter 14).

The third, and for the next few years the most expansive, current was what can already be called the Academic Reaction. This was parallel to, yet already pushing well ahead of, Shaw’s somewhat coy approach to a programmatic revival of eighteenth-century forms; and McKim, Mead & White were its acknowledged leaders.[287] During the years that White was working for Richardson he seems to have been devotedly Shavian. Certain unexecuted house projects from the Richardson office which White signed, done for the Cheney family of Manchester, Conn., the clients for Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, make this particularly evident. When White replaced Bigelow in the firm of McKim, Mead & Bigelow, on his return from the European trip that he took after leaving Richardson in 1878, he found McKim designing Shavian houses with a considerably less sure decorative touch than his own. The McKim, Mead & White country houses that followed, however, such as that for H. Victor Newcomb in Elberon, N.J., of 1880-1 (Plate 125A), that for Isaac Bell, Jr, in Newport, R.I., of 1881-2 (Plate 126), and that for Cyrus McCormick in Richfield Springs, N.Y., of the same years, represent in several ways a real advance over Richardson’s Sherman house.[288] Such an advance is equally to be observed in various houses built around Boston in these years by W. R. Emerson (1833-1918) and by Arthur Little (1852-1925), the very earliest of which doubtless influenced Richardson when he designed the Bryant house (see Chapter 15).

For McKim, Mead & White’s Tiffany house in New York of 1882-3, all of tawny ‘Roman’ brick with much moulded brick detail, the inspiration was largely Shavian also; only the rock-faced stone base and the broad low entrance arch were at all Richardsonian. In the New York house that they began the next year, however—really a group of houses arranged in a U around an open court across Madison Avenue from the rear of St Patrick’s Cathedral—for the railway magnate Henry Villard an entirely different, even quite opposed, spirit appears (Plate 109B). The Villard houses, although on Villard’s insistence still built of brownstone rather than of light-coloured limestone, are as much a High Renaissance Italian palazzo as anything Barry or his contemporaries on the Continent ever designed in the preceding sixty years. Reputedly Joseph M. Wells (1853-90), an assistant in the McKim, Mead & White office who later refused membership in the firm, was responsible for the decision to follow Roman models of around 1500, most notably the Cancelleria Palace, as that was known to him—he had never been abroad—through the plates of Letarouilly’s Édifices de Rome moderne.

This type of design represented a conscious reaction against the Neo-Picturesque, whether Richardsonian, Shavian, or François I, a return to formal order of the most drastic sort. It represented also a return to close archaeological imitation of a style from the past such as had ended in America, on the whole, with the decline of the Greek Revival a generation earlier. Curiously enough this turn was also something of a declaration of independence from Europe, since the American Academic Reaction as initiated in the design of the Villard houses seems to have had no contemporary sources abroad. However much Shaw’s Queen Anne had, for about a decade, been moving towards an equivalent formality—of a more eighteenth-century sort—Shaw had neither gone as yet so far in this direction nor did he ever turn to the High Renaissance for his models. Continental parallels in the eighties are not hard to find in the work of such men as Balat in Belgium, Koch in Italy, and Wagner in Austria; but their current production was probably not known in the United States, whose foreign relations in architecture had always been largely restricted to England, France, and Germany.

This American return to order was at first more significant for its absolute aspect than for its archaeological bent. Although McKim, Mead & White used a Renaissance arcade at the base of their Goelet Building erected in Broadway at 20th Street in New York in 1885-6, the upper storeys of this modest skyscraper offer a very free, and at the same time a highly regularized, expression of the hive of offices behind, and even of the metal grid of the internal skeleton. Certain houses by McKim, Mead & White in New York of these years were even freer from the imitation of specific Italian precedents; while their Wm. G. Low house of as late as 1886-7, on the seashore south of Bristol, R.I., is a masterpiece of the ‘Shingle Style’ despite the tightness and formality of its plan (see Chapter 15). Carefully ordered under its single broad gable, which even subsumes the veranda at the southern end, the Low house is yet quite without reminiscent detail or, indeed, much of any detail at all (Plate 127). In a group of small houses at Tuxedo Park, not at all academic in their exterior treatment, Bruce Price (1845-1903) was reorganizing the open plan of the Americanized Queen Anne in a schematically symmetrical way at just this time also (Plate 125B; Figure 28).

The possibility of a revival of the American Colonial and Post-Colonial in all their successive phases from the medievalism of the seventeenth-century origins to what can be called the ‘Carpenters’ Adam’ of 1800 had been in the air ever since the early seventies, when McKim had added a Neo-Colonial room to a real Colonial house in Newport, R.I. In the local Colonial architecture Americans found obvious parallels to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedent that Shaw was exploiting in England.[289] The ‘Shingle Style’ employed various features and treatments—such as the all-over covering of shingles itself—that recall American work of the periods before 1800. But because of the continued strength of inherited Picturesque ideals there was no programmatic imitation of formal eighteenth-century house design before the mid eighties. Even such a highly orderly example as Little’s Shingleside House at Swampscott, Mass., of 1880-1 was still quite un-archaeological. Interestingly enough, this seems to have been about the first up-to-date American house to be published in a foreign magazine[290] since the Allgemeine Bauzeitung in 1846 presented examples of Greek Revival terrace-houses in New York.

Following on the completion of the Bramantesque Villard houses in New York in 1885, McKim, Mead & White built in Newport, R.I., in 1885-6 the H. A. C. Taylor house, lately destroyed, which was as Neo-Georgian, in its American Colonial way, as the Fred White house Shaw began in London two years later. For this the American architects adopted the symmetrical Anglo-Palladian plan of the mid eighteenth century and capped the resultant rectangular mass with the special gable-over-hip roof of Colonial Newport. Elaborately embellished with Palladian windows and with much carved detail of a generically Georgian order, the Taylor house provided a new formula of design for domestic work that soon superseded almost completely the ‘Shingle Style’. From the Taylor house stems that mature Colonial Revival which was to last longer in the end in America than had the Greek Revival.

Down to the early nineties, however, McKim, Mead & White were rarely so programmatic in their Neo-Colonial work, and their principal public building of the late eighties, the Boston Public Library, was entirely Italianate (Plate 111). In 1887 they were commissioned to build this major monument on the west side of Copley Square. There it was to face the Trinity Church that had initiated the Richardsonian wave more than a decade earlier—a monument in whose designing, moreover, both McKim and White had actually participated. The Library as built in 1888-92 was a major challenge to the Richardsonian, at least as contemporaries then generally understood and employed what they thought was Richardson’s mode. The contrast it offers to the church opposite is almost as great as to the prominent but low-grade High Victorian Gothic structures that flanked the new site to north and south, the New Old South Church by Cummings & Sears of the mid seventies, still standing across Boylston Street, and the contemporaneous Museum of Fine Arts by John H. Sturgis (?-1888) and Charles Brigham (?-1925) which long occupied the south side of the square.

Trinity is dark and rich in colour, a complex pile rising massively to its large central lantern. Moreover, it was flanked at the left on the Boylston Street side, where Richardson took Picturesque advantage of the corner cut off his site by Huntington Avenue, with an asymmetrically organized and domestically scaled parish house. The Library is light coloured and monochromatic, all of a smooth-cut Milford granite ashlar originally almost white and even today much lighter than the rock-faced pink Milford granite of Trinity. It is, moreover, a simple quadrangular mass, capped by a pantiled[291] hip-roof of moderate height; the scale throughout is monumental and the detail sparse but eminently suave. Yet if the contrast with Richardson’s Trinity of 1873-7 is so great—and even greater with the ponderous vernacular Richardsonian as that was long illustrated south of the Library in the all-brownstone S. S. Pierce Store just built by S. Edwin Tobey in 1887—the continuity with Richardson’s work of the mid eighties is equally notable.

For example, none of Richardson’s own late work was polychromatic. Three of his more prominent edifices, the Allegheny County Buildings in Pittsburgh and the Glessner and MacVeagh houses in Chicago, were all of light-coloured granite, while the Warder house in Washington is of smooth-cut limestone such as Wells had wished to use for the Villard houses. Above all, the quadrangular block of the Boston Library with its regular arcuated fenestration parallels rather closely the design of Richardson’s just completed masterpiece, the Marshall Field Store. Thus, in fact, Richardson’s former assistants, for all the Renaissance precedent of their detailing—and the courtyard of tawny Roman brick is almost more Bramantesque in treatment than the Villard houses—were to a very notable extent only proceeding farther in a direction that he himself had already taken.

Since most contemporaries, in their innocence, thought the Richardsonian merely a Romanesque Revival, it is understandable that they saw in such things as the Villard houses and the Boston Public Library an alternative—and anti-Richardsonian—Renaissance Revival. Nor can it be denied that the handling of the exterior of the Library derives from the sides of Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini almost as directly as the arcade in the court is copied from that of the Cancelleria Palace in Rome.[292]

The stair-hall, the reading-room, and even the minor corridors reveal clearly their Letarouillian origins when they are studied in the architects’ drawings, drawings which imitate the very style of draughtsmanship of Letarouilly’s plates. The stair-hall, executed in yellow Siena marble, has walls decorated allegorically by the French painter Puvis de Chavannes, generally considered the greatest muralist of the age; the delivery room has an entirely different sort of illustrative Shakespearean frieze painted by Edwin A. Abbey; the hall in the top storey contains John Singer Sargent’s most ambitious murals. The associated sculpture by Augustus St Gaudens and others is less interesting; but these notable decorative increments from the hands of painters and sculptors of considerable reputation help to explain why for a generation this building was thought to have initiated a real ‘American Renaissance’ in which all the arts participated. Of this ‘Renaissance’ an international exhibition represented the moment of early triumph.

When, in 1891, it was decided to hold in Chicago the first American international exhibition in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, the initial architectural responsibility lay with the Chicago firm of Burnham & Root. They were working at that very moment on two of the most remarkable of early Chicago skyscrapers, the Reliance Building (Plate 115B) begun in 1890, which eventually offered the frankest expression of the new all-skeleton construction, and the Monadnock Building begun the next year, which was the last very tall building to have exterior walls of bearing masonry (see Chapter 14). The more representational Chicago skyscrapers of this period by Burnham & Root, the Women’s Temple and the Masonic Building, were of generically Richardsonian character; and Richardsonian influence was never stronger and more general in Chicago than in the five years following his death. But the principal buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition,[293] as they rose in 1892-3, proved to be neither Richardsonian nor at all expressive of metal construction in the way of those at the Paris Exhibitions of 1878 and 1889 (see Chapter 16).

Burnham in 1891 called in various leading Eastern architects to assist him in designing the World’s Fair, as the Chicago exhibition was usually called. Then in that same year his partner Root, the designer of the pair, died. So it came about that the Easterners, not so much the ageing Hunt, dean of the profession, as the energetic and executive McKim, called the tune; McKim even provided Burnham with a new designer in the person of Charles B. Atwood (1849-95) to replace Root. The Fair, with the landscape architect Olmsted to collaborate on the planning, came out a great ‘White City’, the most complete new urbanistic concept[294] to be realized since the replanning of Paris and of Vienna in the third quarter of the century (Figure 20).

The metal-and-glass construction of the regular ranges of vast exhibition buildings was almost entirely hidden by the elaborately columniated façades of white plaster that were reflected, dream-like, in Olmsted’s formal lagoons. The architects’ inspiration was generically academic, not specifically Italianate or Classical, and only one or two small State pavilions followed Colonial Revival models. The dominant scale was very large indeed, and the façades of the various buildings, although by many different architects both Eastern and Western, were surprisingly harmonious. The young men back from the École in Paris must have worked overtime to bring up to McKim’s increasingly academic standards the projects of various well-established architects who had been doing more or less Richardsonian work for the last decade.

Despite the major importance of the Shavian influence in America around 1880, after the designing of the Villard houses in 1883 American architects moved far more rapidly than Shaw himself along the path towards abstract order and stylistic discipline. The H. A. C. Taylor house introduced, in an American version, the formal eighteenth-century revival—whether one calls it ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ or ‘Neo-Georgian’—before Shaw began his house for Fred White. It is even perhaps significant that this was done for an American client. The World’s Fair of the early nineties brought to the fore a more Classical and ordered sort of Neo-Academicism than Shaw ever reached. By the standards of the next generation, for example, Atwood’s Fine Arts Building at Chicago (Plate 109A), though based on a Prix de Rome project of 1857, was more advanced than Shaw’s Piccadilly Hotel of 1905-8 (Plate 107). The Paris Exhibition of 1889 was notable for its great feats of metal construction, Eiffel’s Tower (Plate 130A) and Contamin’s Galerie des Machines (see Chapter 16). But the façades of the Grand Palais built for the Paris Exhibition of 1900, executed permanently in stone, seem merely a solider realization of the plaster ‘dream-city’ that Burnham and McKim had conjured up on the Chicago lake-front earlier in the decade.

Whether or not there was really influence from Chicago on Paris in the late nineties, there can be no question that the influence of the Fair in America was very great indeed. While the buildings of the Fair were rising in 1892 the young Frank Lloyd Wright built his Blossom house in Chicago in rather obvious emulation of McKim, Mead & White’s Taylor house (see Chapter 15). The following year he submitted in competition a completely academic project for a Museum and Library in Milwaukee. Moreover, this project, based on Perrault’s east front of the Louvre, was more suave in its academicism than the buildings that Richardson’s successors, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, who had already gone over like almost everyone else to the McKim camp, were erecting that year for the Chicago Public Library and for the Chicago Art Institute on Michigan Avenue.

It is the great historical paradox of this period in Chicago that at the very time the academic triumph of the Fair was being prepared, nineteenth-century commercial architecture was also reaching its climax there. Even before Richardson died, his tradition had split in the mid eighties. One side of it, that related to his own French training and his dependence on various styles of the past, limited though that was, as also his growing concern with architectonic order, went forward under the leadership of McKim (see Chapter 24). The other side, derived from his sense of materials, at once intelligent and intuitive, and his interest in functional expression—the qualities that were most notable in his shingled houses and his commercial buildings—provided the platform from which first Sullivan and then Wright in the late eighties and the nineties advanced to the creation of the first modern architecture (see Chapters 14 and 15).

If the importance of Richardson and, indeed, that of Shaw—as regards the development of domestic architecture—are to be fully appreciated the stories of the general development of the commercial building and of the dwelling-house in England and America down to 1900 must be known. Of the two, that of commercial architecture is the simpler and also the more dramatic. The culmination of this story in the American skyscrapers of the nineties has been recognized, from the time when so many foreign visitors came to Chicago in 1893 on account of the Fair, as one of the major and most characteristic architectural achievements of the whole period with which this volume deals.

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14. THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

THE line of technical development which runs from the cast-iron-framed textile mills of the 1790s in England to the steel-framed skyscrapers of the 1890s in America seems to posterity a simple and obvious one. But, in fact, various lags and cul-de-sacs make the story long and complex. The most significant technical advances in iron construction of the first half of the century were not in the commercial field, and the account in this chapter is by no means merely a repetition and a continuation of the story of iron construction down to 1855 that has been provided earlier (see Chapter 7).

The great difference between the Benyons, Marshall & Bage mill of 1796 at Shrewsbury, which initiated metal-skeleton structure, and Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y., of a century later is that the English mill is purely and simply a technical feat of construction quite without architectural pretension. If not literally anonymous, the mill was certainly the work of a millwright rather than an architect; the skyscraper, on the other hand, is a prime architectural monument of the long period of a century and a half that this book covers, and the masterpiece of one of the greatest and most creatively original designers that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have produced (Plate 119). But the skyscrapers of the 1890s do represent also the culmination of developments in the field of construction that began with the English mills of the 1790s, even if those developments are far from being the whole story of nineteenth-century commercial architecture. How office buildings were gradually received into the realm of architecture and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had risen so high in that realm that few productions of the 1890s in other fields of building can compare in quality of design with the great early skyscrapers is perhaps more significant for western culture in general than the purely technical aspect of the story. The weaving together of these two strands makes the full story one of the most interesting and complex in the history of nineteenth-century architecture.

Nineteenth-century commercial building need not be very precisely defined. It includes several slightly different sorts of edifices suitable for the needs of business, all consisting of a succession of identical upper storeys subdivided into offices or storerooms, with or without shops or representational premises below. Highly specialized and very lucrative concerns such as banks and insurance companies, to whom prestige of various sorts increasingly appeared a major desideratum, were the first to seek dignity and architectural display by employing architects of established reputation. Such agencies also desired buildings that were fire-resistant quite as much as did contemporary mill-owners. Already in Soane’s earliest work at the Bank of England he emulated, as has been noted, certain French technical advances that had just been employed by Louis in the Théâtre Français in Paris before these advances were first adopted in an English textile mill (see Chapters 1 and 7). Along Regent Street, around 1820, Nash and others housed less pretentious types of business in structures of mixed character and of less completely fireproof construction. But the premises on the ground floor here generally required very wide shop-windows of the sort that the use of iron supports made possible, even though the upper storeys were still nearly identical with those of domestic terraces.

In Boston in the mid twenties Parris was designing for the streets flanking his Market Hall commercial façades of a much more novel character, using not iron but granite in monolithic posts and lintels to provide a masonry skeleton filled with wide and close-set windows in all the storeys (Plate 112B).[295] In later Boston work of the next two decades in this tradition architects such as Isaiah Rogers and various builders employed iron for internal supports and sometimes also on the exterior at ground-floor level. But the granite ‘skeleton’ front preceded the skeletonized all cast-iron front in America by precisely a quarter of a century.

In England in the forties complete internal skeletons of iron carrying jack arches of brick or tile, hitherto used chiefly in textile mills, were increasingly adopted for superior commercial work, but the characteristic exteriors of commercial buildings[296] remained entirely of bearing masonry construction. However, in one case at least, a small block at 50 Watling Street in London which was probably built before 1844, the iron came through to the outer surface in the continuous window-bands of the upper storeys, even though the corner piers and the sections of wall between the storeys were of solid brickwork.

From C. R. Cockerell, titular Architect of the Bank of England after Soane’s retirement in 1833, and other architects such as Hopper, banks and insurance companies in London and other large cities obtained in the thirties and forties distinguished buildings all of masonry. In one especially fine edifice, erected in 1849-50 purely for use as offices, Bank Chambers behind Cockerell’s monumental Branch Bank of England of 1845-8, in Cook Street in Liverpool, he closely approached the directness of trabeated masonry expression of the contemporary Boston architects and builders (Plate 112A). The fireproof construction was of vaulted masonry throughout, moreover, with iron used only for the skylights over the stair-wells.

For the general character of commercial architecture down to the late fifties, however, A. & G. Williams’s Brunswick Buildings of 1841-2, also in Liverpool, were more significant. In this very large quadrangular block of general offices they followed the palazzo model provided by Barry’s newly completed Reform Club almost as closely as George Alexander had already done in his Bath Savings Bank the year before. The palazzo mode soon became the favourite one for imposing commercial architecture in Britain and, before long, in the United States as well.[297] With its regular rows of good-sized windows and its special prestige of having housed a commercial aristocracy in Renaissance times, this had certain aspects of suitability, both real and symbolical, to the needs of business-men. It also had serious disadvantages which soon led to a gradual modulation away from the earlier formulas of design.

The wide spacing of the windows demanded by correct palazzo precedent was awkward for offices requiring that maximum of natural light which was so readily provided by Parris and others in their granite buildings in Boston and by the unknown designer of 50 Watling Street in London. Therefore windows were soon much enlarged and also set closer together. Sometimes, moreover, as in a large cotton warehouse built in Parker Street in Manchester in 1850 by J. E. Gregan (1813-55), the increasingly heavy frames were applied only to every other opening. Properly, such ‘palaces’ ought not to be more than three storeys high, but the rapidly rising value of good sites in urban business districts made it ever more desirable to carry office buildings to four and five storeys like the terrace houses of the period.

Already in the Sun Assurance Offices in Threadneedle Street in the City of London, designed in 1839 and built in 1841-2, which do not in fact conform at all closely to the standard palazzo formula, Cockerell not only opened the ground floor with an arcade of haunched-segmental arches but also linked his two topmost floors behind an engaged colonnade in order to reduce the apparent height of the façade to three storeys. Across the street in the Royal Exchange Buildings of 1844-5 Edward l’Anson (1812-88) in 1844-5 lifted his whole palace front above a tall glazed arcade and tied the top-storey windows into a sort of frieze as Barry had already done in the second storey of the Reform Club (Plate 35B). In Manchester l’Anson’s cousin Edward Walters (1808-72) in the Silas Schwabe Building of 1845 at 41 Mosley Street linked the windows of the first and second storeys by an applied arcade.

The building with an exterior entirely of cast iron that James Bogardus (1800-74) designed and built for his own use in New York in 1848-50 was well publicized at the time,[298] and is still famous although long since demolished. On the corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New York another Bogardus building, the Laing stores erected in two months in 1849, is still extant (Plate 67B). Although there was never any such general use of cast-iron fronts in Great Britain as in America in the fifties and sixties, it seems probable from contemporary evidence that some architect, probably Owen Jones, built one at 76 Oxford Street in London a year or so before 1851. However that may be, an ironfounder named McConnel provided the structural elements for an office building that still stands[299] in Jamaica Street, Glasgow, in 1855 with an exterior all of cast iron. A curious feature of the design of this structure is the delicate iron membering that forms a series of arcades between the major structural piers. This decorative device, structurally meaningless in iron except for bracing although employed by Paxton at the Crystal Palace, is probably an imitation of the masonry arcading that was, in the mid fifties, gradually modifying the earlier palazzo paradigm quite beyond recognition.

In 1849 Wild used two ranges of Italian Gothic arcades on his St Martin’s Northern Schools in London, and the perspicacious Street remarked in an article on the obvious suitability of the theme for commercial fronts, as has already been noted. In Manchester in 1851 Starkey & Cuffley in a pair of shops employed ranges of three arches on each of the two fronts in the four storeys, binding them in with coupled columns marking the ends of the party walls.

The lifting of the window tax in 1851 encouraged great increases in window area. In jubilant recognition of this H. R. Abraham the next year made all his windows triplets in the first and second storeys of the W. H. Smith Building at 188-192 Strand in London, but without using any arches at all. Two years later, however, in a building for Heal’s furniture store in Tottenham Court Road in London, James M. Lockyer (1824-65) carried a quattrocento arcade all across the first storey.

By this time architects and public alike had become aware of a different High Renaissance formula from Barry’s (see Chapter 4). Beside the Reform Club in Pall Mall Sydney Smirke’s new front of the Carlton Club, designed in 1847, was coming to belated completion in the mid fifties. Moreover, its Sansovinesque arcades were already echoed in the first storey of Parnell & Smith’s Army and Navy Club of 1848-51 across the way. These London models were closely followed by William B. Gingell (1819-1900) in his West of England Bank in Corn Street, Bristol, of 1854 and quite outranked by the great Venetian palazzo that David Rhind (?-1883) erected in 1855 in Prince’s Street in Edinburgh for the Life Association of Scotland.

Possibly the fine warehouse at 12 Temple Street in Bristol with three groups of triplet arches in each of the upper storeys is by Gingell and of this date. There is none of the Sansovinesque lushness of his bank here, but the fine workmanship of the quarry-faced Pennant stone walls laid up in random ashlar, with smooth-cut Bath stone trim and coloured voussoirs banding the arches, bears some resemblance to the Bristol General Hospital he was building in 1853-7, notably in the very bold rustication of the ground-storey arches.

However that may be, two London buildings of 1855 advanced nearly as far towards the all-arcaded front. Hodgson’s Building by Knowles in the Strand at the corner of Chancery Lane had the general character of a palazzo, but all the windows were arched, as in buildings of the Rundbogenstil; moreover their trim sank into the wall rather than projecting from it, so that the wall sections between were reduced visually to mere piers, even though they had no imposts. The Crown Life Office, in New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, was built in 1855-7 by Ruskin’s friends Deane & Woodward, with whom he was most closely associated precisely in those years. The round-arched medieval arcading of this façade, with the piers hardly narrower than on Knowles’s building yet articulated by bases and imposts, may surely claim Ruskinian sanction. Here, at any rate, was the first important contact between advanced High Victorian Gothic and the commercial world, a contact destined to be very fruitful over the next fifteen years or so. Henceforth even architects of no aesthetic pretension were ready to exploit arcading.

The English development of arcaded masonry façades can be closely matched in America, specifically in Philadelphia.[300] There S. D. Button (1803-97), Napoleon Le Brun (1821-1901), and others in buildings of 1852-3 in Chestnut Street—that at 239-241 by Button is still extant—consistently used arched openings between slim piers; and Notman in 1855 provided for the Jackson Building at 418 Arch Street a façade even more completely articulated by arcading in all its four floors than the Crown Life Office. By this time, moreover, the trabeated design of Bogardus’s first iron fronts had likewise given way to ornate arcading in emulation of masonry fronts.[301]

Iron remained behind the scenes in most of the English arcaded buildings. In Waterhouse’s Fryer & Binyon Warehouse in Manchester of 1856, however, whose upper walls had the polychrome diapering of the Doge’s Palace so much admired by Ruskin, the first storey was opened up by an arcade carried on coupled iron columns. In the Wellington Williams Warehouse of 1858 in Little Britain in London, the obscure City firm of J. Young & Son used arcades in all the five storeys with iron columns to support the outer orders; thus the width of the piers could be considerably reduced, and the effect of over-all articulation was much enhanced as in the Philadelphia buildings.

Deane & Woodward’s very Ruskinian project of 1857 for the new Government Offices, with its endless Italian Gothic arcading, and a small warehouse in Merchant Street in Bristol of 1858 by Godwin gave some impetus to the use of pointed instead of round arches. But on the whole the best designed among the innumerable arcaded façades in England retained the rounded form, however Gothic their other detailing may be. In one of the largest and finest examples of the early sixties, moreover, Kassapian’s Warehouse in Leeds Road, Bradford, perhaps by Lockwood & Mawson, the detailing is academically Roman (Plate 114B).

Different as they are, this Bradford façade and that of Godwin’s contemporary warehouse at 104 Stokes Croft in Bristol, so much more subtly Ruskinian than anything by Deane & Woodward, are the two masterpieces of the genre at its best moment (Plate #113:pl113). Of very high quality also is 60 Mark Lane in the City of London built by George Aitchison in 1864-5. There the existence of a complete iron skeleton, presumably but not certainly present in most of the other examples, is fully documented. Moreover, on the rear the metal comes through to the outer face of the wall much as it did at 50 Watling Street, built some twenty years earlier.

In Philadelphia William Johnston had begun in 1849 the seven-storey Jayne Building in Chestnut Street,[302] introducing a new vertical formula of design for commercial façades. Above a conventional ground floor, narrow granite piers in the forms of clustered colonnettes rise the full height of the building, merging into Venetian Gothic tracery below a terminal parapet. Whether or not Samuel K. Hoxie, the contractor who provided the Quincy granite for this and other Philadelphia buildings, was familiar with the ‘granite-skeleton’ work of Parris, Rogers, and others in Boston is not clear. But in the next few years a good many façades with a similarly vertical and ‘skeletonized’ treatment were built in Philadelphia by J. C. Hoxie and his sometime partner Button. That across the street from the Jayne Building has already been mentioned, since the openings between the piers are covered with segmental arches throughout. Button’s building at 723-727 Chestnut Street of 1853 and his extant Leland Building at 37-39 South Third Street are even more ‘proto-Sullivanian’, so to put it. Louis Sullivan probably saw and admired such things as the Jayne Building and the Leland Building when he was working for Frank Furness in Philadelphia in the seventies; certainly they are very premonitory of his characteristic work of the eighties and even the nineties.

Various other ways of reducing the wall to little more than a masonry cladding of the iron structural members were also in use in England as well as in America by this time. A notable small edifice in the City of London, of uncertain date and authorship but probably by Thomas Hague and of 1855, is at 22 Finch Lane, with another front to the court at the side. On both these façades the two lower storeys are joined together visually by setting back the horizontal spandrel between them, and the moulded stonework of the very narrow piers is of almost metallic scale and crispness.

Still more striking is Oriel Chambers[303] in Water Street in Liverpool, built in 1864-5 by Peter Ellis (fl. 1835-84), and another smaller building by him at 16 Cook Street of a year or two later. On the front façades of these the masonry is scaled down quite as much as at 22 Finch Lane but given a more decorative treatment, in both cases of rather metallic character. At Oriel Chambers, oriels of plate glass held in delicate metal frames are cantilevered out in every bay of all the upper storeys, producing a regular rhythm broken only by the clumsy cresting on the top (Plate 114A). At 16 Cook Street all the stone spandrels are set back, thus emphasizing even more strongly than at Oriel Chambers the continuous vertical lines of the mullions. The over-all pattern is once more somewhat confused, however, by the arches across the top that link the mullions together. The rear walls of both of Ellis’s buildings are even more open in design and directly expressive of the metal skeleton. Towards the narrow court at the side of Oriel Chambers only every third iron pier is clad with masonry; those between rise free behind the glass of the horizontally sashed windows whose upper planes are slanted inward. This is, in effect, an early example of the ‘curtain-wall’ (see Chapter 22).

If in some technical respects the Chicago skyscraper of the nineties seems almost to have come to premature birth in Liverpool in the sixties, as in some other respects it had done in the Philadelphia commercial buildings of the fifties, the immediate influence of these buildings by Ellis seems to have been almost nil. Eventually Owen Jones, in a façade at Derby of 1872, and Thomas Ambler, in a corner building at 46-47 Boar Lane in Leeds of 1873, did come to use only iron and glass, omitting all masonry; but more characteristic commercial work of these years is to be seen in such warehouses by unknown hands as the one at 1-2 York Place in Leeds, with an arcade crisply detailed in moulded brick rising through all the upper storeys, somewhat as on the Philadelphia buildings of the fifties, or a larger example in Strait Street in Bristol, with a much heavier arcade subsuming several upper storeys, handsomely executed in stones of different colours and textures and very boldly and simply detailed. Such things, however, very soon seemed to the English not advanced but retardataire as contemporary attention focused on the Queen Anne of Shaw’s New Zealand Chambers of 1872-3.

Richardson’s very un-Shavian American Express Building[304] in Chicago of 1872-3 first brings that Mid-Western metropolis into this story. That had no arcading, but the windows were very closely set, sometimes (it would appear) with only light metal colonnettes as mullions between them. There was also a directness and a ‘realism’ of treatment throughout comparable to that of Richardson’s more monumental work of this date, notably the Hampden County Courthouse and the Buffalo State Hospital, both designed the previous year and at this time still in construction. But Richardson’s dependence on English commercial work of the preceding fifteen years became closer still in his first really fine business building, the Cheney Block (now the Brown-Thompson Department Store) built in Hartford, Conn., in 1875-6 (Plate 116A). Here the wide ground-storey arcade, including a mezzanine, and the narrower arcade above, subsuming several storeys—as on the very proto-Richardsonian warehouse in Strait Street in Bristol—are carried out with typically Richardsonian stoniness in quarry-faced brownstone. But the banded arches introduce a bold note of High Victorian Gothic polychromy, and the carved detail is in the harsh but richly naturalistic vein—also High Victorian Gothic in spirit—of the ornament on the earliest executed portions of Trinity Church in Boston, probably of a year or two before.

Already, in New York, the skyscraper[305] had been born by this date, and leadership in commercial architecture had crossed the Atlantic for good and all. None of the structures dealt with so far in this chapter except the Jayne Building were more than five or six storeys high, since it could not be expected that business clients would climb more than four or five flights of stairs. But the average height of buildings in the financial districts of cities had, even so, almost doubled since the eighteenth century, partly because of the general rise in the number of storeys, partly because of much increased storey heights. Vertical transportation of human beings, which would allow the erection of office buildings considerably more than five storeys high—industrial buildings were often much taller already—became increasingly feasible during the forties and fifties. Hoists for goods were a commonplace of English warehouse design after 1840, and in 1844 the Bunker Hill Monument had a passenger-hoist operated by a steam engine. In New York the Haughwout Store on Broadway had in 1857 the first practical passenger lift or elevator to be installed in an ordinary urban structure. This was of the type developed by Elisha G. Otis. A lift of another sort was introduced in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York later that year. Those of 1860 in the Westminster Palace Hotel in London apparently did not function, at least for some years. The Equitable Building, for which Arthur Gilman and Edward Kimball, with George B. Post (1837-1913) as the associated engineer, won the competition in 1868, was the first office building in New York to have a lift from the time of its completion in 1871. Immediately after this lifts were introduced in several other comparable structures, and one- or two-storey mansards were often added to the tops of existing buildings. A great change was thus at hand in New York in the early seventies.

Despite the Panic of 1873, the mid seventies saw the construction of what may properly be considered the first skyscrapers, the nine-storey (260-foot) Tribune Building and the ten-storey (230-foot) Western Union Building. Both were therefore about double the height even of the tallest office structures, such as the five-storey (130-foot) Equitable Building erected during the preceding boom period. These first skyscrapers rose to altitudes reached hitherto in America only by church spires, as general views of the New York skyline around 1875 make evident. Neither Hunt’s New York Tribune Building, extant but since carried many storeys higher, nor Post’s Western Union Telegraph Building, long since demolished, incorporated any other technical innovations;[306] nor was their design at all closely related, like that of Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, to the advanced English commercial work of the previous decade. Paradoxically, the French-trained Hunt’s building is somewhat the more English of the two in character; but, for all the direct expressiveness of the window grouping in triplets in each bay, the detail throughout is coarse and gawky, and the silhouette of the very tall mansard and the asymmetrically placed tower was from the first overbearing. The later addition of many more storeys has made the building even more top-heavy in appearance. The Tribune Building was of interest chiefly for its relatively great height, now unnoticeable among the much taller skyscrapers built around it later. Its almost complete avoidance of any sort of archaeological styling, however, such as the Romanesquoid of Richardson’s Cheney Block or the violently polychromatic and spiky Gothic of Hunt’s own Divinity School at Yale, on which construction was still at this date proceeding, is certainly worth remark also.

The Western Union Building of Post was only nominally French, for its rather heavy-handed Second Empire treatment owed more to earlier English and American designs in this mode than to anything Parisian (Plate 115A). But the exterior was more orderly, if less expressive, than that of Hunt’s skyscraper and the mansards on top piled up as grandly to the centrally placed tower as on the big contemporary Post Office near by. Yet stylistically both Post’s and Hunt’s buildings were out of date almost as soon as they were finished; and after the hiatus caused by the depression of the seventies the locus of the skyscraper story moved westward to Chicago.

Chicago, already the metropolis of the Middle West, had almost no architectural traditions at this time. First developed as a city in the thirties, the need for rapid building in timber had led to the invention or development of what is called ‘balloon-frame’ construction, in which relatively light studs or scantlings, rising wall high, form a cage or crate whose members are fastened together by a liberal use of machine-made nails. Balloon-frame construction, thus, is a typical offshoot of the industrial revolution, becoming feasible only with the mechanization of the saw-mill and of the manufacture of nails. Theoretically, there might be thought to be some analogy between this New World method of carpentry, so different from the heavy framing of the Old World, hitherto always used in America as well, and metal construction. There is no evidence, however, that Chicago took to iron with any greater enthusiasm in the fifties and sixties than did New York or various other cities; indeed, St Louis seems to have had more and finer examples of cast-iron fronts, particularly in the early seventies. As late as that, moreover, the new cities of the American Northwest were obtaining cast-iron fronts prefabricated from Britain, just as San Francisco had obtained many of her warehouses and immigrant dwellings in 1849-50.

At the opening of the seventies a terrific conflagration[307] all but wiped out Chicago. The need for rapid rebuilding drew thither ambitious architects and engineers from all over the East, but the immediate results of their activities were anything but edifying. Architectural leadership was still centred in Boston and New York; in any case, that leadership had rarely been more confused than in the early seventies when even Richardson was only just maturing his personal style. Richardson’s own Chicago building for the American Express Company was doubtless too indeterminate in character to attract a local following; nor did he build again in Chicago until the mid eighties, by which time various versions of the Richardsonian were already reaching Chicago at second or third hand.

If the Chicago architectural scene had any virtues around 1880 they were largely negative ones: no established traditions, no real professional leaders, and ignorance of all architectural styles past or present. Among the architects who had settled in Chicago in the seventies was a Dane, Dankmar Adler (1844-1900). Into his office in 1879, first as chief draughtsman but soon as partner, came the young Bostonian Louis Sullivan. As has been noted before, Sullivan had been trained first in Ware’s school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later, until he revolted against its rigid doctrines, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Having worked for Frank Furness, wildest of American High Victorians, Sullivan picked Chicago not alone for its evident professional opportunities but also because he liked the idea of working where there were no hampering traditions. (Moreover, his parents had moved there from Boston.)

The earliest building of any real originality designed by Sullivan, the Rothschild Store in Chicago of 1880-1, seems at first a turgid compilation of barbarisms. Examined more closely, however, and compared with the Leiter Building on its right, which was built two years earlier by the engineer-architect William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907), the two sorts of innovation that Sullivan essayed here can be readily recognized. On the one hand there is the ornament,[308] undefinable in historic terms yet with a kind of similarity—almost certainly accidental—to the Anglo-Japanese detail of Nesfield and Godwin. At this stage in Sullivan’s career the originality of his ornament must be remarked but can hardly be admired. Below his elaborate ornamental cresting, on the other hand, Sullivan handled the main architectonic elements of his façade with considerable novelty and most admirable logic. Although the building is not tall—no skyscraper, that is, even by the modest standards of 1880—Sullivan did not hesitate to follow the lead of the Philadelphia commercial architects of the fifties in emphasizing the vertical. This he accomplished by continuing the mullions that subdivide his bays across the spandrels, somewhat as Ellis had done fifteen years before in his buildings in Liverpool, rather than by using a multiplicity of masonry piers.

Sullivan’s next Chicago building, the Revell Store erected for Martin Ryerson in 1881-3, continued the theme of the Rothschild Store, but extended it over a much larger corner block with considerable chastening of the ornamental treatment at the top. The Troescher Building of 1884, which came next in sequence, is very much finer. Widely-spaced piers of plain brickwork rise the full height of the façade above a slightly Richardsonian ground-storey arcade of rock-faced stone; between them there are no oriels, as on Ellis’s Oriel Chambers or his Ryerson Building[309] of the previous year, but broad horizontal windows separated by recessed spandrels. These spandrels are rather like Ellis’s on his other building at 16 Cook Street, but their actual prototypes are to be found, more probably, in Philadelphia buildings by Button such as the one at 723-727 Chestnut Street. The ornament here, now still further chastened, is largely confined to these spandrels. The curved cresting across the top, however, recalls a little the turgid crown of the Rothschild façade.

Sullivan’s early buildings were not very tall, and they did not advance the technical development of the skyscraper. In these same years, however, other Chicago architects were doing so to notable effect. For the ten-storey Montauk Block of 1882-3, tall, but no taller than the first New York skyscrapers of ten years before, Burnham & Root introduced spread foundations to carry its great weight on the muddy Chicago soil, out of which earlier buildings had, literally, to be hoisted every few years. In design they were content, however, with a range of ten almost identical storeys of plain brick pierced by regularly spaced segmental-arched windows. Obvious as this treatment may seem, it took courage to use it at a time when most architects were still trying to disguise the embarrassing height of buildings only half as tall by grouping their storeys together in twos and threes.

The Home Life Insurance Building begun in 1883 was also only ten storeys tall.[310] But in building it Jenney invented, or at least introduced in Chicago, what is specifically called ‘skyscraper construction’, that is a method of carrying the external masonry cladding on metal shelves bolted to the internal skeleton. Jenney, however, probably thought he was merely tying together his metal skeleton and his brickwork, not carrying the latter entirely, though this was found to be the case when the structure of the building was carefully examined during its demolition. The Home Insurance Building, in any case, looked far more as if its external walls were bearing than do any of Sullivan’s early works. Jenney, moreover, fought shy of the frankness of Burnham & Root’s treatment of the Montauk Block; instead he phrased his storeys in groups, almost as if several buildings of normal three- or four-storey height had been casually piled one on top of the other.

Before the Home Insurance was finished in 1885 two more major commercial monuments were rising in Chicago, Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store (Plate 116B), last but one of the large buildings erected in Chicago with walls entirely of bearing masonry, and Burnham & Root’s Rookery Building (see Chapter 13). Both were begun in 1885, Richardson’s being finished in 1887 and Burnham & Root’s a year earlier in 1886. The exterior of the eleven-storey Rookery Building is not an example of the stripped ‘functionalism’ that these architects had introduced in their Montauk Block but rather a provincial imitation of the Richardsonian. In the court walls, however, the architects used—and with complete awareness of its implications—the new structural method of Jenney’s Home Insurance Building, carrying the brickwork above the sides of the central glass-roofed lobby entirely on the internal metal[311] skeleton.

With the advent of Richardson in 1885, the main lines of development in commercial architecture, both as regards design and as regards construction, might seem to have been concentrated in Chicago. It is well therefore to note again that McKim, Mead & White in their Goelet Building on Broadway in New York of 1885-6 provided almost as frank an expression of the skyscraper, or tall office building of many identical storeys, at least above their Renaissance ground-floor arcade, as did Burnham & Root in the Montauk Block. Their windows, however, were phrased in triplets like Hunt’s on the Tribune Building and also grouped vertically within tall bay-width panels of moulded brick rising with only one break to the cornice. This was a quite frank solution of the problem, and is hardly to be castigated as ‘traditional’ or even as ‘un-functional’. Moreover, another New York building, Babb, Cook & Willard’s De Vinne Press of 1885 in Lafayette Street, is not altogether unworthy of comparison with the Field store. It lacks the regularity and the grandeur of scale of Richardson’s masterpiece, but George F. Babb used his fine red brick in a belated Rundbogenstil way, and not without some conscious reminiscence, one may presume, of Durand’s exemplars of the beginning of the century.

Richardson’s last commercial work, the Ames Building in Harrison Avenue in Boston of 1886-7, on which the arcade was carried the full height of the building and the reveals much reduced, had no immediate influence in Chicago (see Chapter 13). Sullivan’s first really great work, the Auditorium Building (now Roosevelt College) in Chicago, derived for the most part straight from the Field store, at least as regards the exterior. Designed in 1886 and built in 1887-9, this is a vast and complex edifice, or group of edifices, with a hotel on the Michigan Avenue front, an opera-house entered in the middle of the Congress Street side, and offices along Wabash Avenue at the rear. The walls are all of bearing masonry still. In order to incorporate more storeys than Richardson had ever done, Sullivan carried up his heavy rock-faced granite base through two mezzanine levels and increased the number of floors subsumed by the main arcade which rises from the first storey (Plate 117A). He also used light stone throughout, instead of the red granite and the brownstone of the Field store, with its surfaces all smooth-cut above the mezzanines.

This flattening of the wall-plane was carried even further on the tower which rises above the portal of the opera-house in Congress Street. On that wide arched panels of very slight projection are filled with articulated screens of stone in which the windows are arranged in a continuous grid with no evident storey lines. The eaves gallery at the top of the tower, a stubby colonnade set in a long horizontal panel with a continuous ribbon-window behind—the window in fact of the Adler & Sullivan office—is so like Thomson’s on the front of his Queen’s Park church of the sixties in Glasgow that it is hard to believe Sullivan did not know it. Yet other evidence indicates that he continued to abjure all European influence at this point in his career.

In the interiors, particularly the bar and the banquet hall at the top of the hotel, Sullivan’s ornament changed even more markedly than his exterior design. Here also there is possibly Richardsonian influence, but coming from the Byzantinizing detail worked out by John Galen Howard of the Richardson office for the MacVeagh house of 1885-7 in Chicago rather than from the Field store.

However, one cannot entirely discount the possibility of a contribution in the field of ornament by a brilliant young man of twenty, Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Sullivan and Adler had just taken on as a draughtsman in 1887 and who was soon given charge of the innumerable detail drawings that this vast project required. Nurtured on Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament,[312] which the Paris-trained Sullivan claimed not to have known, as well as on the writings of Ruskin, Morris, and Viollet-le-Duc, Wright may perhaps have encouraged Sullivan to move away from the bold coarseness of his earlier ornament towards the lush elaboration of intricately plastic surface decoration henceforth characteristic of his work. It is tempting, even, to believe that Jones’s page of Celtic ornament particularly attracted the Irish Sullivan’s fancy.[313]

Together with the Auditorium, though commissioned a year later, there was also rising in Chicago in 1887-9 the Tacoma Building of William Holabird (1854-1923) and Martin Roche (1855-1927), two young architects trained in Jenney’s office. Here the exterior walls on the two fronts were entirely carried by the metal skeleton within, only the rear walls and some of the interior partitions being of bearing masonry like the walls of the Auditorium. Moreover, this fact was made evident in the frank if not particularly distinguished treatment of the two fronts. Vertical ranges of oriels were carried the full height of the building, and there was only a minimal brick and terracotta sheathing of the structural verticals and horizontals. A more or less Richardsonian cornice capped the whole, but the general effect was closer to Ellis’s Oriel Chambers of the sixties in Liverpool or to some of Sullivan’s earlier buildings than to the Field store.

Despite the general swing of Eastern architects towards the Neo-Academic in these years, some who were doing commercial work were not out of step with what was happening in Chicago. For example, there are office buildings and warehouses in Boston and New York of relatively modest height built in the late eighties and early nineties that emulate in brick the arcading of the Field store with almost as much success as Sullivan. Similar things can be seen in many Middle and Far Western cities, but these derive more probably from Sullivan or Burnham & Root than directly from Richardson.

In the Middle West, moreover, McKim, Mead & White were building in 1888-90 two very large business buildings, still with bearing masonry walls, for the New York Life Insurance Company, one in Omaha, Nebraska, and one in Kansas City, Missouri, of effectively identical design. Unlike the already characteristic Chicago ‘slabs’—the quadrangular plan of the Rookery Building is exceptional—these are U-shaped, and each has a tower rising above the main mass at the rear of the court. The treatment of the walls with tall arcading follows as evidently from the Field store as does Sullivan’s at the Auditorium; like that of the contemporary Boston Public Library, however, the fairly simple detailing is of High Renaissance rather than Richardsonian Romanesque character.

Before these towering blocks were finished in the West the new ‘skyscraper construction’ had been introduced in New York by Bradford Lee Gilbert (1853-1911). His Tower Building of 1888-9, as its name implies, was a tower, not a slab, with more or less Richardsonian detailing. It is worth noting that the Tower Building—ten storeys, 119 feet—was not as tall as the first New York skyscrapers built in the early seventies with bearing walls. Indeed, Post’s World or Pulitzer Building of 1889-90 in New York with twenty-six storeys, the tallest built up to then—309 feet—still had bearing walls. Of course, the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, exceeded in height by a great deal all the skyscrapers of its day whatever their construction; indeed, it was not overtopped until the Empire State Building in New York rose from the designs of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon in the early 1930s at the end of the second wave of skyscraper building following the First World War.

Post’s Western Union Building of the early seventies was in the Second Empire mode; his World Building was still French, but what can better be called ‘Beaux-Arts’. It is designed like a series of three- or four-storey Renaissance palaces, one on top of the other, and crowned with a large and ornate dome. The next New York skyscrapers all followed the new structural method introduced by Gilbert in the Tower Building; but Post, Price, and the other architects who designed them used an ornate paraphernalia of Renaissance ornamentation with none of the discretion of McKim, Mead & White on their Kansas City and Omaha insurance buildings. Characteristic of the period are Price’s American Surety Building at Broadway and Wall Street, begun in 1894, and his St James Building of 1897-8 at 1133 Broadway, both in New York, and Post’s Park Building in Pittsburgh, completed in 1896. The latter’s Havemeyer Building in New York, completed earlier, in 1892, was still somewhat Richardsonian however.

The maturing of an original sort of skyscraper design around 1890 is a Middle Western, and almost specifically a Chicago, story to which New York architects made no contribution. Boston’s architectural leadership had ended with the death of Richardson; despite the prominence of McKim, Mead & White and their large Eastern following, leadership in this field passed almost at once to Chicago. It was most appropriate that Richardson’s masterpiece, the Field store, should have been built there; the inspiration it provided, as we have already seen in the case of the Auditorium Building, played an important part in the succeeding Middle Western development.

In 1889-90 Jenney built for Levi Z. Leiter a large building on South Clark Street in Chicago now occupied by Sears, Roebuck & Company. In this he not only used the new ‘skyscraper construction’ for the exterior walls but also—with the presumptive aid of his assistant and later partner William Bryce Mundie (1863-1939)—arrived at an expression of its structural character almost as logical as that of the Tacoma Building yet much more monumental. Like most other Chicago designers in these years, Jenney and Mundie were influenced here by the Field store. The uncompromisingly block-like shape of this tremendous building, with its heavy plain entablature and pilaster-like corner piers, is Richardsonian both in its scale and in its simplicity (Plate 117B). The various groupings of stone mullions that clad the main piers and subdivide the bays, lithe and light though they are, were clearly envisaged as Romanesque colonnettes and even carry modest foliate capitals. Despite the dichotomy of the solidly Richardsonian silhouette and the open screen-like treatment of the walls, the effect is coherent and dignified. In this respect the Sears, Roebuck Building is superior to Sullivan’s very Richardsonian[314] Opera House Building in Pueblo, Colorado, of 1890 which was burned in the 1920s. The Walker Warehouse in Chicago of 1888-9 better displayed his great talent.

Three buildings of the early nineties, two in Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham’s firm and one in St Louis by Sullivan, illustrate the wide range of creative possibilities in skyscraper design at this point. The most advanced is surely the Reliance Building, at least in terms of direct structural expression. This was carried up only four storeys in 1890, though extended to its present thirteen storeys by D. H. Burnham & Company in 1894. As completed, this is a refined and perfected version of Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building (Plate 115B). The light-coloured terracotta cladding of the vertical members, particularly on the flat oriels, is reduced to a minimum; the terminal member is a thin slab, not a cornice or an entablature; and the only stylistic reminiscence is in the cusped panelling—neither Romanesque nor Renaissance, but slightly Late Gothic in character—of the spandrels. What we see was presumably designed as well as built in 1894.[315]

Burnham & Root’s other significant skyscraper of this particular moment, the sixteen-storey Monadnock Building begun in 1891, the last tall Chicago building with bearing walls of brick, was and still remains more famous than the Reliance; doubtless it is also finer, although much mid-twentieth-century critical opinion has favoured the Sears, Roebuck Building of Jenney & Mundie and the Reliance because they are more advanced technically. The smooth shank of the Monadnock, varied only by the slight projection of the recurrent oriels, has a most subtle and elegant taper or reverse entasis. The final bending outward of the brickwork to provide a cove cornice unifies the whole formal concept with extraordinary effectiveness. Few large buildings have ever achieved such monumental force with such simple means. There is almost literally no detail of any sort, whether derivative or original.

Sullivan’s Wainwright Building of 1890-1 in St Louis, Missouri, in which he and Adler used ‘skyscraper construction’ for the first time, no longer dominates two- and three-storey neighbours as it did when newly built; thus the prominence that the relatively great height gave it in the city picture of the nineties can hardly be realized today. But Sullivan undoubtedly sought to emphasize what seemed to contemporaries, as they do not to posterity, its very tall proportions (Plate 118). Continuous pilaster-like piers of brick, quite like those on his Troescher Building of 1884, clad the vertical elements of the steel skeleton, yet identical brick piers with no major structural members behind them also serve as intervening mullions. But at the base the wide windows of the ground storey and the mezzanine reveal the true width of the actual bays of the steel skeleton as the treatment of the shank of the building does not. The piers are considerably broader than most of those on the Sears, Roebuck Building; but they are also topped, like Mundie’s, with ornament that forms a sort of capital. Moreover, the attic storey above is quite hidden behind a deep band of the richest Sullivanian ornament elsewhere restricted, as on the Troescher Building, to the recessed spandrels. The ‘cornice’ above this frieze-like attic is merely a slab, but a much thicker one than that which caps the Reliance Building. Nothing of Richardson’s direct influence is left; but by now Sullivan had learned from the Field store the basic lessons of scale and order, applying them here in a visually sure but not particularly frank way to the new type of metal-skeleton construction. The plan is U-shaped, like those of the McKim, Mead & White buildings in Kansas City and Omaha, but the court is to the rear, so that the block appears unified from the surrounding streets.

In Sullivan’s next important work, the Schiller Building in Chicago of 1891-2, he adopted—exceptionally for him—a truly tower-like shape. Here the masonry piers that clad the structural steel stanchions are not doubled by identical mullions between; instead these piers are linked by arches below a sort of frieze. The ‘frieze’ is really a very ornately arcaded eaves-gallery, not a flat band as on the Wainwright Building, occupying a whole storey below the thick slab cornice.

Interchange of ideas was continuous in these years between the various Chicago architects’ offices, while the influence of the Academic Revival in the East, dominant in almost all the buildings at the World’s Fair of 1893 save Sullivan’s own Transportation Building, was still negligible in the commercial field. Thus Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building of 1893-4 in Chicago borrowed its rather clumsy ground storey and mezzanine, with a cavernously Richardsonian arched entrance, from Burnham’s Ashland Block of 1892 and its oriels from the Tacoma or possibly the Reliance Building. These oriels alternate with horizontal openings of the type known as ‘Chicago windows’ sharply cut through the smooth light-coloured terracotta of the wall plane. ‘Chicago windows’, with a wide fixed pane in the centre and narrower sashes that open on either side, were used by most Chicago architects in this decade and the next. A heavy moulded cornice, not just a thick slab, crowns the whole above a colonnaded eaves-gallery somewhat like the one at the top of the Auditorium tower.

What should probably be considered Sullivan’s masterpiece, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y., followed in 1894-5 (Plate 119). One of the most significant new themes in the design of this skyscraper, whose premonitory character can only be fully appreciated in relation to the use of pilotis in later modern architecture (see Chapter 22), is already to be found in a project of Sullivan’s of the previous year for the St Louis Trust & Savings Bank. This is the treatment of the ground storey, where the terracotta sheathed piers were isolated from the wall plane by bending back the tops of the shop-windows. The piers are thus nearly free-standing and seem to lift the shaft of the building above them right off the ground. This allows circumambient space to penetrate under the main volume of the building. Thus the fact that the edifice is a hollow cage is very strongly suggested, and the wide shop-windows do not appear to undermine the walls above them as in so much commercial work of the nineteenth century.

There are several reasons, not intrinsic to Sullivan’s design, that explain why the Guaranty remains the most effective of all the early skyscrapers. Since downtown Buffalo has not filled up with buildings of equal or greater height in the way of downtown St Louis and the Chicago Loop, the Guaranty still rises high above most of its modest neighbours, in effect a tower as well as a slab, although actually of U-shaped plan like the Wainwright. In this city, moreover, which has in the last sixty years remained considerably cleaner than Chicago, the colour of the tawny terracotta sheathing has not been so much obscured by grime as on the Stock Exchange Building. These were happy local conditions that Sullivan could not foresee.

The plastic handling of the crown of the Guaranty was perhaps suggested to Sullivan by the effectiveness of the cove at the top of Burnham & Root’s Monadnock Building. Here the crowns of the arched façade bays—two to each structural bay, as the wide spacing of the piers at ground-storey level so clearly reveals—are related to the outward curve of the top of the wall below the terminal slab. The profuse and melodious curvilinear ornament, subsuming the round attic windows, echoes and complements the plastic theme. This is an example, rare even in Sullivan’s most mature work of the mid and late nineties, of the successful integration of architectonic and decorative effects. The treatment of the terracotta cladding throughout the exterior of the Guaranty, moreover, covered all over as it is with lacy geometrical ornament in very low relief, seems to lighten the whole. The cladding is read as a mere protective shell carried by the underlying steel structural members and not as solid brickwork like the piers of the Wainwright Building.

Just as the Wainwright Building may be contrasted on the one hand with the still greater solidity of the Monadnock Building—in that case justified by the bearing-wall construction—and on the other with the openness of the Reliance, so it is of interest to compare the Guaranty with two other big business buildings of 1895 by other Chicago architects. In the Ellicott Square Building, also in Buffalo, Burnham was strongly influenced by his close association with McKim at the World’s Fair. With the assistance of his designer Atwood, whose short life ended this same year, he adopted the elaborate Renaissance membering and the heavy masonry vocabulary of the New York skyscraper architects, although he retained the quadrangular plan and the glass-roofed central court of the Rookery. On the other hand, in Chicago Solon S. Beman (1853-1914) in the Studebaker (now Brunswick) Building came very close to providing an all-glass front, despite the profusion of Late Gothic frippery with which he detailed his very restricted terracotta cladding.

Adler had parted from Sullivan in 1895, but Sullivan’s career as a skyscraper builder continued for a few more years at a very high level. In his next skyscraper, the Condict Building in New York of 1897-9, he reduced very considerably the width of the mullions between the piers so that they became mere colonnettes, and even these are omitted in the first storey. But this highly logical differentiation between pier and mullion, related to the treatment of his Rothschild Store of 1880-1, still gets lost at the top in a flurry of ornamentation almost as turgid in its very different and almost quattrocento[316] way as the top of that very early façade. The treatment of the ground storey was originally like that of the Guaranty, but has been modified by later shop-fronts.

The next year Holabird & Roche built three contiguous buildings on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for Harold McCormick (Plate 120). The two southerly ones are excellent examples of the work of the Chicago School; they are a little less extensively glazed than Beman’s Studebaker Building or Holabird & Roche’s own McClurg Building of 1899 but with crisp and simple, if quite conventional, moulded brick detail on the piers and rather plain cornices of wholly academic character. Standard Chicago windows are used throughout. The third façade on the north, that of the Gage Building at 18 South Michigan Avenue, while fronting a structure also by Holabird & Roche, is itself by Sullivan. A different arrangement of the windows, a bolder moulding of the terracotta cladding of the piers—there were no intervening mullions now, any more than on his Troescher Building of 1884—and a strategic spotting of the chicory-like ornament—as well as, originally, a rich picture-frame-like band around the ground-storey shop-window—produce an entirely different effect. This effect is no less expressive of the underlying structure, but it represents a fuller and subtler deployment of architectural resources than Holabird & Roche provided on the façades next door.

The Gage Building was Sullivan’s penultimate major work. With the Carson, Pirie & Scott Department Store his career as an architect of big commercial buildings came to an end. This was designed in 1899 and the original three-bay and nine-storey section on Madison Street built in 1899-1901 for Schlesinger & Mayer; it was completed in 1903-4 for the present owners with the erection of the twelve-storey section that runs along State Street.[317] This building, which was Sullivan’s swan song, has also seemed to many critics his masterpiece (Plate 121). It lacks, however, the unity of the earlier Guaranty Building, having been built in two—indeed actually in three—successive campaigns. Despite the prominence of its site in the Chicago Loop, the store is inevitably overshadowed today by later and taller neighbours; nevertheless, it occupies a very high place in the Sullivanian canon.

There is no vertical emphasis except on the rounded pavilion at the corner, where continuous colonnettes rise the full height between the rather narrow bays; this feature was intended from the first but not built until 1903-4. The wide Chicago windows are crisply cut through the white terracotta sheathing just like the windows between the oriels on the Stock Exchange Building. The underlying grid of the structural steel frame—always more horizontal than vertical in effect, as the Reliance Building so clearly reveals—completely controls the surface pattern of the fenestration. On the Guaranty Building Sullivan emphasized the structural piers at their base by bending back the shop-windows of the ground storey; here it was the topmost storey that he set back, revealing the tops of the piers like little free-standing columns beneath the terminal slab in the spirit of his earlier eaves galleries. This treatment—most unfortunately replaced in 1948 by a flush parapet—increased very notably the effect of volume in much the same way as the parallel treatment at the base of the Guaranty.

At the base here, however, the shop-windows are carried up two storeys and given picture-frame-like surrounds, somewhat as on the Gage Building. In the cast-iron ornamentation of these frames, now much simplified, as also in that of the canopy on the north side and around the entrances in the rounded corner pavilion, Sullivan reached a peak of virtuosity in the lush decoration that has seemed to later critics quite at odds with the severe rectangularity of the façades above. There can be no question, however, that Sullivan considered ornament of the greatest importance in architecture and gave to its invention and elaboration his best thought and energy. It is certainly an interesting coincidence, moreover, rather than a matter of influence either way, that in these very years in Europe the newest architectural mode, the Art Nouveau, also put heavy emphasis on a somewhat similar sort of curvilinear decoration, often in association with exposed metal construction, and most notably on department stores (see Chapters 16, 17).

Sullivan’s ornament never had much influence either at home or abroad. Although Sullivanian skyscrapers of varying size and quality exist in many Middle Western and Far Western cities, most of them built in the first two decades of the new century, only the Rockefeller Building in Cleveland, built in 1903-6 by Knox & Elliot and extended laterally in 1910, really employs ornament, although of a drier and more geometrical order deriving from Owen Jones’s Grammar, in anything like Sullivan’s way. On Sullivan’s own late buildings, mostly tiny banks in small Middle Western towns, and in comparable work by his former assistant George G. Elmslie (1871-1952)[318] and William G. Purcell (b. 1880) the ornament tends to get more out of hand than on any of his skyscrapers of the nineties except perhaps the Condict Building. The best of Sullivan’s is the National Farmers’ Bank at Owatonna, Minn., of 1908; but Purcell & Elmslie’s Merchants’ National Bank in Winona, Minn., completed in 1911, might easily be mistaken for Sullivan’s work, for it is of comparable quality.

In the skyscrapers of the late nineties and the first two decades of the twentieth century designed in other Chicago architectural offices, such as D. H. Burnham & Co., Jenney & Mundie, and Holabird & Roche, there was rarely any attempt to vie with Sullivan as an ornamentalist but rather a continuance of the straightforward sort of design of the last-named firm’s Michigan Avenue buildings of 1898-9. A particularly fine and very large example is their Cable Building in Chicago of 1899. In the Fisher Building of 1897, also in Chicago, the Burnham firm more or less repeated the formula of the Reliance Building, but with a profusion of rather archaeological Late Gothic detail, eschewing the New York influence apparent in the Ellicott Square Building of 1895. Jenney & Mundie, rather more than the others, tended to follow the leadership of the New York architects of the day in using academic detail.

On the whole, the Chicago School continued to be vigorous, if not especially creative, down to the First World War, all the way through a period during which New York skyscrapers, still usually conceived as shaped towers rather than as plain slabs, received a succession of different stylistic disguises as they rose higher and higher. The forty-seven-storey (612-foot) Singer Building[319] of 1907 by Ernest Flagg (1857-1947) with its curious bulbous mansard—’Beaux-Arts’ of a quite aberrant sort—was followed by the campanile-like 700-foot Metropolitan Tower in Madison Square of 1909 by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons;[320] and that in turn by the cathedral-like Late Gothic elaboration of the Woolworth Building[321] of 1913 by Cass Gilbert (1859-1934), fifty-two storeys and 792 feet tall, which is still one of the major landmarks of downtown New York (Plate 178). A new flurry of skyscraper building followed in the twenties (see Chapter 24). The story with which this chapter is concerned, however, had reached its climax with the Chicago skyscrapers of the nineties, even though they were soon overshadowed in height and in contemporary esteem by the taller and more spectacular towers of Manhattan. Moreover, most of the big cities of the country, including Chicago, eventually sought to imitate the New York mode. But size is not, even in this period, a measure of quality, and the tallest skyscrapers are not the best, any more than the longest bridges are the most beautiful. So far the results of the revival of skyscraper building in the last fifteen years have rather confirmed this judgement (see Chapter 25).

A difficult question remains to be asked, even if it cannot be very satisfactorily answered: Why was the nineteenth-century development of commercial architecture, from Nash’s Regent Street to Sullivan’s skyscrapers, so completely an Anglo-American achievement? A few reasons may at least be suggested. On the Continent business activity was less concentrated in special urban districts in the nineteenth century, and was hence less likely to develop its own architectural programme. The big new nineteenth-century blocks in cities like Paris and Vienna and Rome generally serve a variety of purposes and almost always consist of residential flats in the upper storeys. In England and in America, on the other hand, most dwellings were still not flats but houses before 1900, and these fled farther and farther from the commercial areas as the nineteenth century progressed. The high property values in the central urban districts of the big Anglo-American cities, rising very rapidly in the second half of the century, encouraged the exploitation of their sites with taller and taller buildings. These values also helped to drive out the earlier inhabitants, leaving such areas as the London City and the Chicago Loop all but deserted after office hours.

Neither the office blocks of London and the big provincial English cities of the fifties and sixties nor, a fortiori, the skyscrapers of New York of the seventies and those of Chicago of the nineties can readily be matched elsewhere—except, of course, to some extent in the British Dominions and Colonies. Yet European cities do offer certain nineteenth-century commercial structures that are of real interest. The covered passages and galeries, from the modest ones of the early decades of the century in Paris to Mengoni’s great Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan (Plate 75B) of the sixties, offered an urbanistic device of real significance. This is barely to be appreciated in the various extant English and American examples, such as the still flourishing Burlington Arcade in London or the Arcade in Providence, R.I., which is maintained as a historic monument though all but deserted by commerce.

Related to these structures serving multiple business purposes was the gradual development of the department store, a grouping together of various separate shops under one management and one roof, of which the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie in Paris of 1838 were a relatively early example (Plate 62A). Exploiting like the galeries the possibilities of iron-and-glass roofing, the early Continental examples of the department store had their more modest English and American counterparts such as Owen Jones’s Crystal Palace Bazar of 1858 in London or the Z.C.M.I. in Salt Lake City, founded by the Mormon leader Brigham Young himself and housed in cast iron in 1868.

The most notable later nineteenth-century department stores were in Paris and Berlin. In Paris the still extant Bon Marché of 1876 in the Rue de Sèvres by L. C. Boileau (1837-?), son of the builder of several Second Empire churches of iron, and the engineer Eiffel and the Printemps at the corner of the Rue de Rome and the Boulevard Haussmann of 1881-9 by Paul Sédille (1836-1900) were remarkable in conception if without much distinction of design. However, the Bon Marché is now completely masked externally by a masonry façade of the 1920s, and little of interest remains visible inside the Printemps. Of the portion of the Wertheim Department Store in Berlin built by Alfred Messel (1853-1909) in 1896-9 nothing survives.

Just after 1900, when the metal-and-glass construction of the interiors of department stores came to be generally exposed externally, this line of development came to its climax (Plates 131B and 133). This climax is so closely associated with the decorative and architectural development called Art Nouveau that the later Continental department stores may better be discussed in connexion with that (see Chapters 16, 17). Being of exposed metal, however, not of masonry-sheathed ‘skyscraper construction’ and relatively low, these stores are closer in character to the cast-iron commercial buildings of the third quarter of the century in America and Britain than to the tall Chicago structures of 1890-1910.

Steel construction of the American type, with the internal skeleton carrying a protective cladding of masonry, has gradually spread since the opening of the century to all parts of the world that produce or can afford to buy structural steel. It was, for example, introduced into London by the Anglo-French architects Mewès & Davis in building the Ritz Hotel there in 1905. Yet it remains typically American. In most other countries reinforced concrete rivals or completely takes its place as the characteristic material for building large structures of all sorts. The story of reinforced concrete had its technical beginnings in the mid nineteenth century; but it was not before the nineties that it first began to be exploited on a large scale and for conscious architectural effect. The first important reinforced concrete buildings, French like most of the best department stores of around 1900, will be mentioned later (see Chapter 18).

The whole picture of architecture in the twentieth century, so different from the picture of architecture before 1850, was modified by the developments that culminated in the Chicago skyscrapers. However important this has been for all later architecture both technically and aesthetically, it is important to stress here, as with the mid-century monuments of iron and glass, that the successive stages in the development are not solely, or even primarily, of premonitory and historical interest. From Parris’s granite buildings in Boston of the twenties, through the arcaded English commercial work of the fifties and sixties, to Richardson’s Field store and Sullivan’s skyscrapers in Chicago, St Louis, Buffalo, and New York, enlightened commercial patrons demanded and often received the best architecture of their day. The functional and technical challenges of commercial building seem to have brought out the creative capacities of three generations of architects as no other commissions did so consistently. Compare Parris’s Grecian temple church, St Paul’s in Boston, with his granite ‘skeleton’ fronts beside the Quincy Market (Plate 112B); set Godwin’s Stokes Croft Warehouse beside his town halls (Plates 113 and 92A); measure Richardson’s Field store even against his Pittsburgh Jail (Plates 116B and 108B). Then the strictly architectural, as well as the technical and social, significance of the major commercial monuments of the nineteenth century will be evident.

This chapter has summarized what was probably the greatest single innovation in nineteenth-century architecture, the rise of a new type of building to a position of prestige and of achievement comparable to that of churches and palaces in earlier periods. The same cannot be said of domestic architecture. The house was hardly a nineteenth-century invention like the office building. It was, however, modified almost beyond recognition as the century progressed, at the hands of several generations of creative architects. Around 1900 there are few if any churches, for example, to rival Sullivan’s skyscrapers in quality; but there are some houses, especially several by his disciple Wright and by his English contemporary Voysey.

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15. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DETACHED HOUSE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA FROM 1800 TO 1900

IN the long story of man’s dwellings from prehistory to the present, the Anglo-American development that took place in the hundred years between the 1790s and the 1890s is of considerable significance, particularly as it provides the immediate background of the twentieth-century house. Architectural history has generally been little concerned, in dealing with periods earlier than the eighteenth century at least, with the habitations of any but the upper classes. The study of rural cottages in various regions of the world has been more a matter for anthropological investigation; the housing of the urban poor, when that was other than the makeshift adaptation of grander structures fallen into decay, remains for most early periods a matter of mystery. We know that ancient Rome had its blocks of middle-class flats of many storeys; although the links are not easy to recover, there was certainly some continuity in Mediterranean lands between that form of urban housing in antiquity and what can be traced from the medieval period down to the nineteenth century. Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages saw rather the development of individual urban dwellings with party walls, ancestors of the terrace-houses that first appeared in England in the seventeenth century.

The detached house of moderate size, so familiar today, the principal type of dwelling to undergo notable development in the nineteenth century in Anglo-Saxon countries, has no such remote Classical origins as the Continental flat or apartment. It made its appearance as the dwelling of the yeoman when economic conditions in late medieval England encouraged the rise of a class between the feudal landowner and the peasant parallel to the skilled artisan class in the towns. The conditions of settlement of the British colonies in America, particularly in New England, encouraged the continuation through the seventeenth century of this type of dwelling almost to the exclusion of any other sort, since towns were then small and large estates rare. Around 1700 in America, though considerably earlier in England, relatively advanced contemporary modes began to have some influence on the design of such houses. With a lag of as much as a quarter of a century, the architectural developments of the home country were generally followed in the colonies; nor did political independence much affect the dependent cultural relationship in this field after the American Revolution.

The effects of the Picturesque point of view on the development of the house in England around 1800 were several (see Chapter 6). On the one hand, the newly fashionable attitude gave prestige to modest detached dwellings, raising the social status of the ‘cottage’ from an agricultural labourer’s hovel to a middle-class habitation or even on occasion a holiday ‘retreat’ for the upper classes—at first by adding the French adjective orné (Plate 122A). At the same time the status of the ‘villa’ tended to be reduced from a large Italianate mansion on its own estate to a moderate-sized house at the edge of town. In much of the prolific architectural literature of the period, the hierarchy of residential building types was Rousseauistically inverted as rustic models, both native and Italian, were proposed for emulation in edifices of fairly considerable size. Thus several modes of informal design that had made their eighteenth-century debut in garden ornaments received more serious attention from architects as they came to be considered suitable for medium-sized dwellings and even sometimes for quite large mansions. As we have already seen, the towered Italian Villa was first introduced as a modest detached house by Nash at Cronkhill in 1802. It was similarly utilized by Schinkel (Plate 14A) and Persius at Potsdam a generation later, although Royalty still preferred to dwell there in Grecian dignity or Castellated pomp (see Chapter 2). Somewhat later, however, the Italian Villa provided (none too happily) a Royal retreat when Prince Albert decided on this mode for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in the mid forties.

Not all Picturesque modes were equally adaptable to middle-class dwellings. The Indian found its most notable realizations in a large country house, S. P. Cockerell’s Sezincote, and a Royal folly, Nash’s Brighton Pavilion (Plate 48). There were, however, considerably later American examples[322] on a somewhat more modest scale, such as Iranistan at Bridgeport, Conn., built for Barnum in 1847-8, and Longwood, near Natchez in Mississippi, designed by Samuel Sloan in 1860 that have been mentioned earlier. But the Indian mode contributed the veranda, henceforth an integral feature of American domestic architecture, though rare after the Picturesque period in England. Verandas very early lost the Oriental detail, however. In front of Rustic Cottages they were often supported by bark-covered logs, but they could also acquire the formal character of Italian loggias, Tudor arcades, Swiss galleries or, most frequently, Classical porticoes and ‘pilastrades’ when adapted for use with other current modes.[323] In some cases the veranda, carried on occasion to two storeys in height, became the main theme of the exterior, yet was detailed so simply that no modish name properly applies (Plate 122A).

Even the Castellated mode, although used mostly for rather large houses (Plate 49), encouraged loose asymmetrical massing of the sort that is still more characteristic of the towered Italian Villa.

The Picturesque was thoroughly eclectic, in both possible senses of the word, as well as occasionally original. On the one hand, the point of view encouraged the parallel use of diverse modes. In theory, these were to be chosen according to their suitability to various sorts of natural settings, but in practice several were often employed side by side, as in Nash’s Park Villages in London, begun in 1827, and in the contemporary and later development of comparable suburban areas both in England and in America. On the other hand, the combination in one design of features derived from several different modes was allowable, even praiseworthy—low-pitched roofs with very broad eaves borrowed from the Swiss Chalet, towers from both the Castellated Mansion and the Italian Villa, bay-windows from the Tudor Parsonage, and verandas from the Indian were all part of a common repertory exploited rather indiscriminately. Basic to the Picturesque point of view and often determinant of choice of mode and even of individual features was the preoccupation with the natural setting; verandas, loggias, bay-windows and prospect towers were desirable, even necessary, features because they made possible the fuller enjoyment of the circumambient scene.

All these features affected house-plans in detail; but domestic planning in general was not as consistently re-organized as might have been expected, if only because the Picturesque point of view was so predominantly visual rather than practical in its usual concerns. Asymmetrical massing allowed, even forced, asymmetrical planning, however, thereby encouraging functional differentiation of the disposition and the sizes of various rooms (Figure 21). Yet very often, behind irregular exteriors, the plans were only slightly dislocated from the formal patterns of the preceding Palladian period. Although the increased articulation of most house-plans allowed the introduction of windows on several sides of many rooms, more significant at this stage was the frequent use of irregular shapes for the larger rooms, their main rectangular spaces complicated by external oriels and by internal ingle-nooks. None of these individual changes can be very precisely dated, at least in the current state of knowledge of the development of the house-plan in this period. Almost all of them were generally familiar in England by 1810. Tudor Parsonages, whether or not occupied by members of the clergy, were likely to be most adeptly planned.[324] In them the well-defined needs of a family of relatively high social status but low income encouraged a more efficient grouping of the rooms and a clearer distinction of separate functions—entrance hall, drawing-room, dining-room, study, kitchen, scullery—than had been common earlier in such medium-sized dwellings.

In the first third of the century the various Picturesque modes of house-design were very widely exploited in England for middle-class habitations in the new suburbs, having generally made their first appearance a decade or so earlier in lodges or other accessories to large private estates. They were also popular at the new seaside resorts, such as Sidmouth in Devon and Bournemouth in Hampshire, where they often housed more exalted clients. At Sidmouth, for example, what is now the Woodlands Hotel was remodelled from a barn into a barge-boarded Cottage Orné by Lord Gwydyr in 1815; the nucleus of the Knowles Hotel there was Lord Despenser’s cottage of a few years earlier; and the Royal Glen Hotel, a modest Castellated house then known as Walbrook Cottage, was built early enough to house Queen Victoria as a baby. Although the prestige of the Picturesque declined rapidly in high aesthetic circles after 1840, the rigorous principles of Pugin and the ecclesiologists had little effect on the operations of suburban builders, who continued for decades to follow the various well-established modes of a generation earlier.

As Latrobe’s ‘Gothick’ Sedgley, built outside Philadelphia in 1798, and various other Neo-Gothic structures in Philadelphia and Boston of the first decade of the new century make evident, the Picturesque came early to the United States. Yet it was hardly before the thirties that the various Cottage and Villa modes began to compete at all with the Greek temple and the formal post-Palladian house modernized by the use of Grecian detail; only with the appearance in 1842 of Cottage Residences by A. J. Downing (1815-52)[325] were they enthusiastically propagated.

Earlier, new developments in the planning of the ubiquitous moderate-sized free-standing houses were not very notable in America. In the 1790s the influence of Adam, and possibly of the French, encouraged some experimentation with variously shaped rooms; but this largely died out as the necessary rectangularity of the Greek temple house, only extended by one or more wings in the largest examples, reimposed the formal Anglo-Palladian plan with central stair-hall and four nearly equal-sized corner rooms. For smaller houses with pedimented fronts, however, a sort of terrace-house plan was increasingly popular, with stair-hall at one side, two principal living rooms one behind the other, and a narrower kitchen wing extending to the rear. A planning innovation that first appeared in America in the 1790s, by no means unknown earlier in England but rare except in terrace-houses, was the opening together of two rooms—front and back parlours—by means of broad sliding doors. This became increasingly common after 1800. Moreover, the temple portico provided the equivalent of a shallow veranda across the front of the house and was sometimes replaced or supplemented by a deeper colonnaded porch at the sides or rear. The veranda, indeed, had reached the southern states fairly early in the eighteenth century, arriving from the East via the West Indies. In its usual two-storeyed form it was easily merged with the monumental colonnades demanded by the Grecian mode (Plate 38B).

Thus, even before a rather belated wave of strong Picturesque influence began to drive out the temple house in the forties, early nineteenth-century American houses had certain definitely post-Colonial characteristics in their plans. Of later house-planning in the United States in the forties and fifties almost everything that has been said about English planning in the preceding decades applies (Figure 22). By this time in England, however, newer planning ideas were being introduced by leading architects in relatively large houses. At Scarisbrick, for example, where the remodelling and extension of the existing Georgian house began in 1837, Pugin revived the medieval great hall (see Chapter 6). A few years later in his own house, The Grange of 1841-3 at Ramsgate,[326] by no means a mansion in size or scale, the more modest two-storey hall incorporates the staircase and also provides, with the galleries above, the central core of communication. Parallel with these examples, which were of Gothic inspiration, Barry at Highclere adapted the glass-roofed central cortile of the Reform Club to domestic use, associating with it the main staircase rising in a contiguous vertical space.

At the hands of High Church architects the parsonage, by definition no mansion but a modest free-standing gentleman’s residence, was also undergoing a characteristic development. No longer Tudor, of course, it was still not forced to be archaeologically decorated in its planning, since there were few if any relevant medieval models to imitate. The doctrine of ‘realism’ condemned the shabby construction and careless use of materials that had too often been characteristic of Picturesque house-building in the previous decades, while the need for economy discouraged the ornamentation common on contemporary churches.

Such a vicarage as that which Butterfield built in 1844-5 to go with his ‘first’ church, St Saviour’s at Coalpitheath, Gloucestershire, is a model of simple masonry construction. In the random ashlar walls are set wide banks of plain mullioned windows, Gothic only in the arching of their heads, where they can serve best to light the various rooms (Plate 122B). The massing also is irregular yet orderly with several high gables, a porch, many tall chimney stacks, and a broad bow-window elaborating the basically rectangular block. But, in the language of the ecclesiologists, ‘the true Picturesque derives from the sternest utility’, and so all these projecting features were such as could be readily justified functionally, like the ritualistic articulation of contemporary churches. The plan of Butterfield’s vicarage has the virtues of those of the Picturesque Tudor Parsonages in the variety of room-sizes and shapes provided and also in the opportunities that the windows offer to enjoy surrounding nature. There is also at Coalpitheath a very modest version of Pugin’s stair-hall at The Grange, not a mere lobby but a central space designed for easy horizontal and vertical communication.

Any serious revival of medieval craftsmanship in masonry was all but impossible in America; in any case it was largely irrelevant in a land where most houses were built of wood. But in reaction to the white-painted clapboards and the smooth Grecian trim of the previous decades, echoing however humbly the marble of Greece, Downing in the early forties proposed and many at his behest adopted variant treatments for the exterior sheathing of Picturesque villas and cottages that were rather more expressive. The distinguished native craftsmanship evident in the more monumental edifices of the Greek Revival executed in fine ashlar of granite or other light-coloured stone, or else in smooth red brick, died out. Such materials had no more appeal than did crisp white-painted wood to a generation indoctrinated with the Picturesque point of view. Yet clapboards remained the usual surfacing material for wooden houses, even if they were now painted, not white, but in the stony hues—grey or beige—that Downing recommended in his books with actual coloured samples.

The treatment Downing preferred was board-and-batten.[327] This he made a constituent element of the very original Bracketted mode that he offered as an American alternative to the imported Italian Villa and Tudor Parsonage which he was energetically engaged in nationalizing. Board-and-batten provides a stronger pattern of light and shade, and also the verticalism that appealed increasingly to mid-century taste. This sheathing also offers a sort of symbolic expression of the light ‘balloon-frame’[328] construction that was beginning to come into general use by the fifties, though this method of wooden framing was apparently never known to Downing, since he died in 1852 before it reached the eastern states where he lived and worked.

With their board-and-batten walls, their ample verandas, and their bay-windows, what are still usually called ‘Downing houses’ constitute a largely original American creation in spite of the frequent use of Tudoresque detail on barge-boards and veranda supports and even of elaborately moulded terracotta chimney pots. Yet in their planning the houses designed by Downing and his architect friends Davis and Notman do not advance much beyond the models published in the English books of the previous decades that were their immediate prototypes (Figure 22). The verandas are usually wider and more prominent, however, and the front and rear parlours are likely to open into one another, as sometimes also into a modest central hall.

In America as in England, the Picturesque period came to no sudden end. The recurrent publication of Downing’s books even after the Civil War[329] indicates how long his models remained favourites with American builders and their small-town and suburban clients. However, even before the Civil War a mansarded Second Empire mode was beginning to become popular (see Chapter 9). With the wide acceptance of this and of the High Victorian Gothic there developed a rather sharp split between autochthonous and imported types of house-design, drastically though the imported types were usually Americanized outside the bigger eastern cities. To this situation we must return later.

Something has already been said of the major turn that took place in the development of the English house around 1860 (see Chapters 9 and 12). When seen in relation to the parsonages that his master Street and also Butterfield had been building in the previous fifteen years, Webb’s Red House built in 1859-60 for William Morris is considerably less revolutionary than has sometimes been supposed. Had this been built in Gloucestershire rather than in Kent, it would certainly have been of stone like Butterfield’s Coalpitheath Vicarage; as it is, the entrance porch is no simpler or less Gothic than Butterfield’s. The particular window forms, moreover, can be matched in Butterfield’s Clergy House and School at All Saints’, Margaret Street, and the somewhat rustic ease of composition in his cottages at Baldersby St James. Yet the planning here is highly individual, suited to the special needs of a client who was an artist and a writer, not a parson.

The next house that Webb built, now known as Benfleet Hall, Cobham, begun in 1860 for the painter Spencer Stanhope, has been less publicized, and it never had the rich furnishings that Morris and his associates designed and executed for the Red House. Yet it is perhaps more significant in the general history of the Anglo-American house. There is here, for example, a small stair-hall of the order of Pugin’s at the Grange or Butterfield’s at Coalpitheath around which the other ground-storey rooms are loosely grouped. The particular character of the plan can, in fact, best be matched at Hinderton, a small country house in Cheshire that is hardly more of a mansion than Benfleet, which Waterhouse built in 1859. This house is in Waterhouse’s gawkiest High Victorian Gothic, with none of the simplicity and delicacy of Webb’s early houses. It is rather unlikely that Webb was actually emulating it, but the plan was twice published[330] and hence soon known abroad.

Webb’s Arisaig in Inverness-shire was begun in 1863 (Figure 23). Built of local stone, it is somewhat more conventionally Gothic externally; moreover, it is of country-house size, a mansion rather than a modest artist’s dwelling like the Red House or Benfleet Hall. The plan has two major aspects of interest: the two-storeyed hall, with gallery above, occupies a central position and the principal rooms on both storeys are very efficiently grouped about it within the bounding rectangle of the main block of the house. In other words, Arisaig’s hall seems to derive as much from the Highclere sort of glazed central court as from Pugin’s revival of the medieval great hall.

Cloverley Hall, which was built by Nesfield and Shaw in 1865-8, attracted much favourable contemporary attention largely because of the superb craftsmanship of the brickwork and the originality of the japoniste ornament (see Chapter 12). It is destroyed now except for the extensive service and stable wings and the gate lodge; but the amount and the character of the fenestration, providing in some areas what amounted to window-walls of stone-mullioned and transomed lights, and the character of the plan make it still memorable. It was also the first of the many notable Late Victorian manor houses which both Nesfield and Shaw would build when working alone.

Like Arisaig, Cloverley was a large country house. The medieval great hall, first rather modestly revived by Pugin at Scarisbrick, here returned at full scale; but it was placed in a corner of the main block—as was occasionally its position in the sixteenth century—so that it might receive light from one end as well as from the side (Figure 24). From the entrance, however, one passed by this hall through the ‘screens’ under a gallery to arrive at a stair-hall, more in the manner of Waterhouse’s and Webb’s, around which the other principal rooms were compactly grouped. There was also here a very skilful play with levels, the hall being lower than the rest of the main floor, and therefore part-way down to the basement—containing a billiard room and so forth—which was entirely above ground at the rear of the house.

While Cloverley Hall was still in construction, Shaw had begun his own personal career as a house-builder at Glen Andred in 1866-7 (Plate 102B), where he introduced a more vernacular manner (see Chapter 12). Following this came his Leyswood in 1868-9, a mansion as large as Cloverley Hall and in some of its decorative features more archaeologically Late Medieval. As at Cloverley Hall, the amplitude of the fenestration, however, arranged here in long mullioned bands as well as in tall window-walls, has seemed more significant to posterity than the stylistic detailing[331] (Plate 123). Above all, Leyswood marked a further stage in the development of the ‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure 19), of which the first well-publicized example was Waterhouse’s at Hinderton. Here the great hall and the stair-hall of Cloverley are combined to form a central spatial core of communication, somewhat as at Webb’s Arisaig, but the shape of this is quite irregular and the reception rooms are grouped very loosely about it, more as at Benfleet Hall. Projecting well out of the main block, the dining-room and the drawing-room both receive light from three sides. Moreover, the space of these rooms is articulated, as in certain Picturesque houses of forty and fifty years earlier, by ingle-nooks, oriels, and various other irregularities. Perspectives of Leyswood—not the plan[332]—were published in the supplement to the Building News of 31 March 1871 and made at once a tremendous impression both in England and in America (Plate 123).

In a house by Webb of the same date as Leyswood, Trevor Hall at Oakleigh Park, Barnet, in Hertfordshire, the arrangement of the rooms about the central hall was much more compact (Figure 25). The whole formed a square and allowed a quite symmetrical treatment of the three principal fronts. This house is now destroyed except for the gate lodge. Less interesting in plan but significant for its very modest size is Webb’s Upwood Gorse, Caterham, Surrey, built for Queen Victoria’s dentist Sir John Tomes also in 1868. The consistency and the simplicity with which the local vernacular of brick below and tile-hanging above is handled in connexion with plenty of white-painted Queen Anne sash-windows regularly but not symmetrically spaced offers a curiously close prototype of the American ‘Shingle Style’, although the initiators of that mode a decade later can hardly have known of this house, since it was never published. It was rather Shaw’s houses of the next decade, of which his drawings were exhibited each year at the Royal Academy and given great prominence in the professional Press, that provided the exemplars which architects generally imitated both at home and abroad; from 1874 on the plans were usually illustrated as well as Shaw’s own very virtuoso pen-drawn[333] perspectives (Plate 123).

Webb’s houses for the painters Val Prinsep and G. B. Boyce in Kensington and Chelsea, of 1865 and 1869 respectively, were the first English ‘studio-houses’—houses, that is, in which the studios, naturally equipped with very large windows, were the principal rooms. These provided a more livable alternative to the great halls that Shaw generally provided in his country houses; but it was the larger artists’ houses of the seventies and eighties which Shaw built for his fellow academicians that received contemporary publicity.

By the mid seventies Shaw was moving in the formal and symmetrical direction initiated by Webb at Trevor Hall and soon carried much further by Nesfield at Kinmel Park as regards both the planning and the external organization of his larger London houses. Lowther Lodge in Kensington Gore of 1873-4 is the first of his domestic commissions that may properly be called Queen Anne rather than Manorial. The even more formally designed Cheyne House and Old Swan House, of 1875 and 1876 respectively, on the Chelsea Embankment followed shortly after (Plate 103); but he long continued to build more loosely composed houses in the country, as has been noted earlier.

Before turning to the results of Shaw’s very notable influence in the United States in the seventies, something should be said of the situation there in the preceding decade. The Second Empire mode had been increasingly popular for houses from the mid fifties and was especially fashionable during the boom period that followed the Civil War. It had no positive contribution to make to the general Anglo-American development in these decades, however. In the domestic field more or less Gothic modes were its significant rivals; first Downing’s wide-veranda-ed version of the Tudor Cottage; then, after 1860, what Vincent Scully has christened the ‘Stick Style’.[334]

On houses in this mode, which is really hardly Gothic at all, a sort of imitation half-timbering panels the exterior walls, suggesting, like Downing’s board-and-batten sheathing, the underlying wooden stud-structure of balloon-frame construction. This construction came to be generally used in the East as well as in the Middle West, where it originated, after it had been explained by William E. Bell in his Carpentry Made Easy in 1858. More striking is the open stickwork of the ubiquitous verandas. This can be seen in an early form on the Olmsted house in East Hartford, Conn., of 1849 by the English architect Gervase Wheeler,[335] who obviously derived it from Picturesque models in England dating back at least to the thirties. In the J. N. H. Griswold house of 1862 in Bellevue Avenue in Newport, R.I., by the French-trained Hunt, now the Newport Art Association, the ‘sticks’ of the wall surface are so sturdy that they may well be the actual framing members.

Very characteristic of the maturity of the mode is the Sturtevant house at nearby Middletown, R.I., built by Dudley Newton (1845?-1907) a decade later in 1872. Here the gawky vigour of the Stick Style, its intense woodenness, and its descent from several different Picturesque modes—not least the Swiss Chalet—is very evident (Plate 124A). Extensive surrounding verandas are of the very essence of the mode; but the internal planning, while informal and often asymmetrical, is rarely very open. Several books by Eugene C. Gardner (1836-1905)[336] of Springfield, Mass., give a sophisticated architect’s rationale of the mode. But the exemplars that G. E. Woodward[337] offered in the sixties are more typical, and were more widely imitated in actual production; for the Stick Style had almost run its course by the time Gardner began to present his excellent house designs. Woodward was no architect, and for the most part the Stick Style should not be considered an architect’s mode. It represented rather a popular attempt, remarkably successful for a few years, to create an American domestic vernacular, suited to the materials in general use and to the current methods of building, comparable to Downing’s earlier Bracketted mode. Like the Second Empire vogue the Stick Style died out, at least in the East, during the general hiatus in building production after the financial Panic of 1873.

By that time Shaw’s influence had begun to reach America.[338] Moreover, the possibilities of agglutinative planning about a great hall had been realized by Richardson well before a Shaw plan—that for Hopedene—was first made available in the Building News in 1874. It is, of course, possible that McKim, in passing through England on his way home from Paris in 1870, had seen (or merely heard of) the character of Webb’s, Nesfield’s, and Shaw’s houses of the sixties and transmitted that information to Richardson.

An undated project of about 1871 by Richardson for a house to be built in Newport, R.I., for Richard Codman includes his first great hall[339] of the Shavian sort; but the Codman plan is already in advance of, or at least rather different from, those of Shaw. This hall, out of which the stairs would rise in an L-shaped at the rear, was to be very large in relation to the other rooms, and thus definitely a principal living area not a mere foyer or centre of circulation. The drawing room and dining room were to open out of the hall through wide doorways so that some sort of spatial continuity would have extended through all the reception rooms of the ground storey. There was to be a large veranda at the rear in the well-established local tradition. The exterior as shown in the elevations is not at all Shavian but rather related to the Stick Style, like Richardson’s own house at Arrochar on Staten Island of 1868.

Richardson’s first executed country house, the F. W. Andrews house of 1872-3 at Newport, R.I., was much more Shavian in plan. Four or five rooms were grouped about a relatively smaller central stair-hall and most of these were articulated by bay-windows and ingle-nooks. But the main block was also surrounded by verandas, features which are rare and always of modest extent on Shaw’s houses. The Andrews house was burned a long time ago, but from the existing elevations it would appear that the external treatment represented a sort of transition between the Stick Style, then at its apogee, and Shaw’s Surrey vernacular translated into American materials. The verandas were still detailed in a Stick Style way, and flat stickwork interrupted the continuity of the wall surfaces; but the clapboarding of the lower walls evidently took the place of the brickwork Shaw used—it was almost certainly painted red—and the wooden shingling of the upper walls was a happy substitute for English tile-hanging. Shingles were, of course, an old though largely forgotten American sheathing material long used especially for roofs.

By the time Richardson came to design his next large house, that for William Watts Sherman on Shepard Avenue in Newport in 1874, the perspectives of several of Shaw’s manors had appeared in the Building News and the plans of two. As a result, probably, of his assistant Stanford White’s Shaw-like skill with the pencil, the Sherman house was notably Shavian externally. Above the ground storey, which is of Richardsonian random-ashlar masonry in pink Milford granite with brownstone trim, the walls and the high roofs are covered with shingles cut in various decorative shapes suggested by those of Shaw’s tile-hanging. Many of the casement windows are grouped to form window-walls in the ground storey and arranged in long horizontal bands above. The half-timbering of the front gable, with painted decoration on the intervening plaster, was taken straight from Shaw’s Grim’s Dyke; the carved ornament on the barge-boards is almost Nesfieldian in its suggestion of japonisme. Thus the whole is as perfect a specimen of Shaw’s Manorial mode as anything any architect other than he or Nesfield ever produced in England. The house has since been much enlarged, partly by White in 1881, partly by Newton very much later, but always with due respect for the character of the original design.

The plan has more of the independent virtues of that of the Codman project. The hall provides a principal portion of the living area, and the other main rooms open into it through wide doors; thus there is some flow of space throughout the whole original block. The original library at the rear corner, later replaced by a large ballroom, ended in a Shavian rounded bay with a continuous window band, a feature Wright would copy later. Yet otherwise the house was less articulated than Shaw’s earlier ones, having rather the compactness though none of the symmetry of Webb’s Trevor Hall.

The mid seventies saw many other American reflections of Shaw’s Manorial mode and soon of his Queen Anne also, none of them so successful as the Sherman house. But the deep business recession that followed the Panic of 1873 led to a general mood of repentance after the extravagances, architectural and otherwise, of the post-war boom. From the resultant nostalgia for the simpler ways of the American past there began to develop at this time a great interest in the houses of the Colonial period, an interest that readily merged, however, with the current English preoccupation with the vernacular of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To an extent difficult for posterity to appreciate, the nascent ‘Shingle Style’,[340] which crystallized towards the end of the decade with the revival of building production, was to its protagonists already a sort of Colonial Revival. Although its origins are partly Shavian, it represents above all a reaction, as did Shaw’s Manorial mode in England, against the ‘modernism’ of the High Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire, now grown thoroughly unfashionable except in the West.

Boston was still the architectural metropolis of the United States, and it was around Boston, especially in the work of Emerson and Little, the latter a serious early student of old Colonial work, that this crystallization of the Shingle Style first took place (see Chapter 13). But it was at once taken over and given a somewhat more Shaw-like elaboration by the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, formed in 1879. From the early eighties, and for over a decade, the Shingle Style was widely practised by architects from coast to coast, and not least happily in the Far West. The characteristic use of shingles as an all-over wall-covering emphasized the continuity of the exterior surface as a skin stretched over the underlying wooden skeleton of studs, in contrast to the way the preceding Stick Style had echoed that skeleton in the external treatment. The shingles properly provide the name for a most characteristically American domestic mode; but it was in planning that American architects made the really original contribution in what was the most significant development of the detached house since the Picturesque period.

One of the first mature examples of the Shingle Style, a house built by Emerson on Mount Desert in Maine in 1879, well illustrates the virtuosity of the new planning (Figure 26). Rooms of varied shape and size are loosely grouped about the hall and open freely into one another. The various levels of the different areas are related to the landing levels of the elaborate staircase. Above all, it should be noted that the verandas are not mere adjuncts or afterthoughts, as they were even on Richardson’s Andrews house, but major elements, both space-wise and visually, of the whole composition. Such houses parallel in their three-dimensional complexity the massing of the Italian Villas of the earlier nineteenth-century decades with their loggias, pergolas, and prospect towers, yet they bear little or no visual resemblance to them, since the later houses are always much more sculpturally plastic and less articulated in composition. The windows are generally of double-hung small-paned sashes of a type at once Queen Anne and Colonial, but they are frequently grouped in the Shavian way, as well as being ingeniously placed in order to vary the internal lighting effects, so that the pattern of fenestration is not at all of an eighteenth-century order.

Richardson certainly did not initiate the Shingle Style; but he took it over in 1880 and made it very much his own, using it for all his later country and suburban houses. Dropping all detail, whether Richardsonian Romanesque, Shavian Manorial, Queen Anne, or American Colonial, he retained much of the ease and casualness of Shaw’s best early houses. But there is also a great deal of similarity to the simple massive effects of the old Colonial houses also. Spiritually, so to say, if not so much visually, Richardson’s shingled houses most resemble Webb’s best work; of these Richardson presumably had no knowledge, although it is just possible that he might have seen some when he was in England in 1882, well after the Shingle Style was fully established.

Richardson’s Stoughton house in Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., of 1882-3 is perhaps his best shingled one, at least in the relatively untouched form in which it, almost alone, alas, has come down to us (Plate 124B). It certainly shows little evidence of the interest that he is known to have taken in Burges’s and Shaw’s work while he was abroad just before this. The entrance, originally, was through the loggia recessed into the main mass of the house (it is now from Ash Street on the left). The living-hall extends, as in the Sherman house, from front to back and the stairs sweep up in a quarter-circle over the entrance. The drawing room at the corner and the dining room behind the loggia both open into the hall through wide doors; only the small library is isolated from the general flow of space. Externally, the shingled surfaces, broken only by banks of double-hung windows, model the complex mass into a unified composition, the almost submerged stair-tower successfully linking the two gabled wings at right angles to one another by its rounded form. There is no ornament of any sort, and the weathered grey of the shingles is varied only by the dark-green paint of the window sash.

McKim, Mead & White’s houses of the early eighties, several of them equally fine, are usually rather more elaborate in their massing and are likely to be enlivened with much imaginative detail.[341] Some of the detail recalls this or that style of the past, but all of it is thoroughly personalized by White’s delicate hand. One of their best houses is the one for Isaac Bell, Jr, built in 1881-2 in Bellevue Avenue in Newport, R.I. (Plate #126:pl126). This is less unified externally than the Stoughton house but more open in plan (Figure 27). A wide veranda, with very elegant bamboo-like supports, extends around two fronts, expanding into a two-storeyed open pavilion on the right. This pavilion provides a semicircular void to balance the round tower at the rear left corner. The patterns of the original cut shingles on this house, although obviously suggested by English tiling, are much softer and more graceful, almost bringing to mind birds’ plumage.

Inside, the hall is articulated by a wide ingle-nook, rather dark and low, in sharpest contrast to the great flight of stairs beyond down which floods light from the window-wall at the half landing. Twenty-five-foot sliding doors, hung from above, make it possible to open the drawing room through almost its entire length into the hall. The Bell dining room, connecting at its end through French windows with the curved portion of the veranda, has some of the finest of White’s orientalizing detail. This is much more original than that in the new library he decorated at this time in the Sherman house or the dining room he added to Upjohn’s Kingscote, both also in Newport.

McKim, Mead & White’s slightly earlier H. Victor Newcomb house of 1880-1 in Elberon, N.J., is at once clumsier and more Shavian externally than the Bell house; but the spatial treatment of the living-hall is most original and very significant for later developments (Plate 125A). The main rectangular space, of which the shape is emphasized by the ceiling beams and by the abstract geometrical pattern of the floor, seems to flow out in various directions into other rooms and into several bays and nooks; but the actual room-space is sharply defined by a continuous frieze-like member that becomes an open wooden grille above the various openings. There can be little question that the major influence here is from the Japanese[342] interior, but from the Japanese interior understood as architecture. This is not just a superficial matter of Nesfieldian japonisme such as White was employing so much in his ornament in these years. The Kingscote dining room has somewhat similar spatial qualities but more eclectic detailing and richer materials: marble, Tiffany glass tiles, cork panels, stained glass, etc.

In 1879 Cyrus McCormick had his Chicago mansion built by the local architect Adolph Cudell (1850-1910) and his partner Blumenthal in the form of a very corrupt Second Empire hôtel particulier. It is good evidence of the rapidity with which taste changed at this time that two years later he called on McKim, Mead & White to build for him in Richfield Springs, N.Y., one of the finest and most carefully composed of all their Shingle Style houses. This house is notable not only for the subtly Japanese character of the various sorts of veranda supports but even more for the way the composition is unified under the broad front gable by the long horizontal line of the veranda roof repeating that of the stylobate-like stone wall of the terrace below. It is most unfortunate that this house is now in a state of near-collapse.

Little’s contemporary Shingleside House of 1881 in Swampscott, Mass., has been mentioned already. Soberer than the Bell or the McCormick houses in its rectangular shape and almost total lack of exterior detail, this had a galleried two-storey hall with a window-wall as the principal living area. In the combining of different levels this house recalled a little Cloverley Hall, but it was completely Americanized in scale and in detail without being archaeologically Neo-Colonial.

By the mid eighties J. Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913) had introduced the Shingle Style to Chicago, and other Eastern architects were building good houses of this order in such Western towns as Cheyenne, Idaho; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Pasadena, California. In Philadelphia Wilson Eyre (1858-1944) developed the mode with a very characteristic personal difference, often eschewing the use of shingles. If his exteriors are rather English in their frequent use of brick and real half-timbering, his plans are most original. The long rooms of varied and irregular shape are strung out on either side of halls from which rise stairs within grilled enclosures of a sort that appeared in England only in the houses of the nineties by Voysey and his contemporaries.

The heyday of the Shingle Style was brief, even though it continued in use well down into the nineties. The Colonial Revival implications, present from the first, soon encouraged more and more comprehensive use of eighteenth-century detail, and this supported the general tendency of the mid eighties in America away from the irregular and towards more formal order (see Chapter 13). Something of this change could be seen in Richardson’s latest houses in masonry such as the Glessner house of 1885-7 at 18th Street and South Prairie Avenue in Chicago, which still stands, and the contemporary Mac Veagh house, long since destroyed, also in Chicago, both of which were almost symmetrical as regards their front façades. The most drastic examples, of course, of this Academic Reaction were such houses as McKim, Mead & White’s Villard group in New York (Plate 109B) and their H. A. C. Taylor house in Newport with its formal Anglo-Palladian plan of central hall and four corner rooms. Despite its even tighter plan, however, their extant W. G. Low house in Bristol, R.I., of 1887—a year later therefore than the demolished Taylor house—can properly be cited again as a masterpiece of the Shingle Style (Plate 127). This illustrates very well how the loose massing of the houses of the early eighties could be organized into a carefully balanced composition without succumbing to any historical mode of design, whether Italian Renaissance or American Colonial.

Particularly interesting in this connexion are the small houses at Tuxedo Park, N.Y., which Price designed for Pierre Lorillard in 1885-6, some years before he began to build Renaissance skyscrapers (see Chapter 14). Lorillard’s own house has a rather tight plan of the Neo-Colonial sort; but the exterior with its paired chimneys on the front, a Richardsonian entrance arch between them, and the verandas and terrace treated as voids carefully related to the solid mass behind is still in the earlier tradition (Plate 125B). In such other houses by Price at Tuxedo as those for William Kent and Travis C. Van Buren, the loose open plans of the immediately preceding years were organized into T and X patterns, and the verandas and terraces were even more formally treated as important elements in compositions made up of well-defined voids and solids (Figure 28).

This brings us to the beginning of the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, already introduced as an important coadjutor of Sullivan from 1887 to 1893. Although Wright’s mature career begins only about 1900 (see Chapter 19), his apprentice years as a builder of houses provide a very significant episode that is closely related to the earlier story of the nineteenth-century house in England and America. By the late eighties a full-dress Colonial Revival was under way in the East. But it was the particular combination of freedom and order that had been achieved by Richardson in his latest houses, by McKim, Mead & White in their Low house, and by Price in his Tuxedo houses which was the immediate tradition from which Wright’s domestic architecture grew far more than the work of Sullivan.

Born in 1867, Wright had had some two years in the Engineering School—there was no architectural school—at the University of Wisconsin when he came to Chicago at the age of twenty in 1887. He first found work in the office of Silsbee whom Wright’s uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones had brought to Chicago a year or two earlier to design All Souls’ Unitarian Church, of which he was minister. The young architect’s first work, nominally a Silsbee commission, was the Hillside Home School built in 1887 for his aunts near Spring Green, Wisconsin. This was a rather provincial specimen of a Shingle Style house and was later demolished by Wright himself.

Shifting over the following year to the Adler & Sullivan office, Wright by 1889 was married and ready to build a house for himself on the strength of a five-year contract with his new employers. This house, at 428 Forest Avenue in Oak Park, Ill., still extant but much pulled about, derives almost entirely from Price’s cottages at Tuxedo except that the plan is much less formal. In the interior, the wide openings between the rooms are not framed by architraves but seem to have been produced by pulling back the walls beneath the continuous frieze. In this treatment, rather Japanese in concept, Wright would seem to have been influenced by White’s handling of the hall of the Newcomb house, even though that is rather Japanese also in some of the detailing and Wright’s is not.

Wright’s next important work is the James Charnley house at 1365 Astor Street in Chicago, built in 1891-2. This was actually a commission of the Adler & Sullivan firm, but one of which he had entire charge. A city house built of tawny Roman brick like that used for the court of the Boston Public Library, this is as formal[343] as anything McKim, Mead & White had yet designed. But there is no High Renaissance or Colonial reminiscence whatever in the external detailing. The Charnley house is rather a conscientious attempt to emulate in a modest three-storey residence the highly original design of Sullivan’s newly completed Wainwright Building in Saint Louis.

Wright was also accepting various private commissions on the side, mostly very small ones, by this time. The George Blossom house of 1892 at 4858 Kenwood Avenue on the south side of Chicago, however, is of more consequence. Externally, this follows rather closely McKim, Mead & White’s Taylor house in the curved Ionic entrance porch and the recurrent Palladian windows, not to speak of the use of yellow-painted clapboards and white-painted trim of simplified academic character. Even the plan is for the most part symmetrically ordered. But behind the formal range of entrance lobby and two small corner rooms at the front the whole centre of the house opens up as a single great living-hall. In this living-hall a wide ingle-nook is lined up on axis with the entrance, the elaborate staircase rises in several flights across one end, and wide openings connect with the library and the dining room. The dining room, which ends in a curved bay with a continuous window-band, is almost a copy of the original library of Richardson’s Sherman house. In another Wright house of 1892, that for A. W. Harlan, also on the south side of Chicago, at 4414 Greenwood Avenue, which Sullivan happened to see, he recognized his assistant’s hand and this brought about the break between the two before Wright’s contract ran out.

When Wright set up for himself in 1893 there were two paths open to him. That he actually considered following the path of Academic Reaction, so heavily publicized by the success of the World’s Fair, is evident from his project of this year for a Library and Museum in Milwaukee (see Chapter 13). But when Burnham at this point offered to send Wright to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and then to the new American Academy which he and McKim were planning to start in Rome, in preparation for taking him on as designing partner, the young architect turned the opportunity down.

The W. H. Winslow house of 1893 in Auvergne Place in River Forest, Ill., always considered by Wright his ‘first’, shares many qualities with the Blossom and Harlan houses, but is altogether a much more mature and original work (Plate 128A). The front is completely symmetrical and as formal as that of the Charnley house of two years before.[344] Broad and low, of fine Roman brickwork with a rich band of moulded terracotta the full depth of the upper-storey windows below the wide eaves, the general effect of this has usually been considered very Sullivanian. But as Wright himself was responsible for the Adler & Sullivan work that this house most resembles—the Charnley house, certainly; and the Victoria Hotel of 1892 at Chicago Heights, probably—it is more accurate to consider that the Winslow house represents a continuation of his own manner of the previous year or two. The plan is more axial and less open than that of the Blossom house, the still rather Richardsonian dining room with its rounded bay being placed here at the centre of the rear. The staircase, still so prominent in the Shingle Style way at the Blossom house, is here pushed out of sight between walls.

Wright’s next important house, that of 1897 for Isidore Heller at 5132 Woodlawn Avenue on the south side of Chicago, perhaps shows some Japanese[345] influence in the succession of eaves-lines, one above the other. It is the development of the plan, however, that is most significant, as also the effect of the planning on the treatment of the exterior (Figure 29). The two principal living rooms are linked by a stair-hall into which they both open through wide apertures—no more mere doorways than in his own house of 1889, but tall breaks in the continuity of the walls. Although these rooms have ingle-nooks, they are not casual and cosy in the Shingle Style way but carefully ordered; both, indeed, are of regular cruciform shape. This shape, moreover, is given external expression in the plastic articulation of the external massing, an articulation that the multiple eaves echo above.

Two years later, in the Joseph W. Husser house, now destroyed, in Buena Park on the north side of Chicago, Wright’s personal development of domestic planning was carried much farther (Figure 30). Here the main living rooms were all raised to the first storey in order to have a good view of Lake Michigan, and the interior space was continued uninterrupted along the main axis of the house from the dining-room fireplace across the landing and through to the living-room fireplace. But the dining room was also articulated along a cross axis, extending outward into a large polygonal bay facing the lake, somewhat like the more Richardsonian bays of the Blossom and Winslow dining rooms.

Between the two houses just described, in which Wright’s planning developed so rapidly and so boldly towards unified but articulated space, came the River Forest Golf Club in River Forest, Ill. The front wing of this, built in 1898,[346] showed a comparable maturing of his vocabulary of wooden construction. The two Chicago houses were both of brick with rather lush Sullivanian terracotta decoration below the eaves not unlike that on the Schiller Building. At the Golf Club the characteristic feeling of the Shingle Style for rough natural wood surfaces was revived by Wright but made more architectonic in scale. Below continuous window bands protected by his characteristic hovering eaves, the lower walls and the terrace parapets were sheathed with boards and battens, not applied vertically as by Downing, but horizontally. Uncovered terrace, covered veranda, glazed foyer, all were closely related spatial areas, the last two unified by the continuous roof. The only solid element was the broad stone chimney marking the point where the main axis and the subsidiary axis of the low side-wings crossed. In 1901 the building was much enlarged by Wright, but quite in the original spirit (Plate 128B).

In 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, with which this account of Wright’s beginnings may properly close, he built two houses side by side in Kankakee, Ill. He also designed for the Ladies Home Journal ‘A Home in a Prairie Town’ which was published in February 1901. The larger of the two Kankakee houses, that for B. Harley Bradley at 701 South Harrison Avenue, is a large, loosely cruciform composition with low-pitched gables projecting in blunt points well beyond the ends of the wings. The smaller Hickox house, next door at 687 South Harrison Avenue, has a more advanced plan under similar roofs. Wood stripping suggests the stud structure underneath the stucco of the walls as do also, and rather more directly, the wooden window mullions (Plate 142A). The living room here, flanked by semi-octagonal music and dining rooms, extends across the ‘garden front’ and opens by french doors on to the uncovered terrace (Figure 31). Here the articulated but unified space of the Husser house was reduced in scale and simplified until it provided a quite new concept of domestic planning, later to be widely influential internationally (see Chapter 22). Towards that new concept much of the development of the Anglo-American house since as far back as the 1790s may seem—not too exaggeratedly—to have been tending.

The Ladies Home Journal project for a ‘House in a Prairie Town’, from which the term ‘Prairie Houses’ for Wright’s characteristic production of the next decade derives, is larger than the Hickox house, but the living area was intended to be very similarly unified and articulated. In one version Wright even proposed carrying this space up two storeys in the centre, somewhat like one of Shaw’s manorial halls. As on the River Forest Golf Club, the long lines of the low hip roofs shelter very long window-bands—out of Shaw, via Richardson, presumably. Although the Ladies Home Journal house was intended to be stuccoed like the Kankakee houses, the window mullions echo the underlying wooden stud structure. As at the Golf Club, the chimneys would be the only really solid elements, passing up through the crossing volumes defined by the two levels of roof. The lower line of eaves extends, somewhat as on McKim, Mead & White’s McCormick house, over the porte-cochère on one side and over the veranda on the other, a treatment Wright had already tried out somewhat clumsily on the Bradley house.

In considering the significance of these Wright houses of 1900 it must be recognized that even in America they were highly exceptional. Despite the fact that the ‘Prairie house’ project was published in a general magazine of national circulation, its immediate influence was very slight indeed. For all the vigour of the two great Chicago achievements of the nineties, Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Wright’s earliest houses, the main direction of American architecture in 1900 was quite different. So also in the England of these years, where Shaw’s house for Fred White and his Bryanston had introduced by the nineties almost the same sort of Academic Revival as had McKim, Mead & White’s Villard and Taylor houses, the work of Voysey, the English architect most comparable to Wright, was also almost as exceptional. The line of architectural development had already split as sharply as in America, with the difference that the longer-lived Shaw himself had taken the lead in the academic direction that Richardson’s pupils, McKim and White, took in America.

Although Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941)[347] was ten years older than Wright, it is understandable with English conditions that his architectural career got under way little earlier. From 1874 to 1880 he worked as a pupil in the office of Seddon; from 1880 until he set up for himself in 1882 he was assistant to Devey.[348] In 1883 Voysey sold his first designs for wallpapers and printed fabrics, but for several more years he did little building. His first house, The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington in Warwickshire, was built only in 1888; in the next two years various projects of his, increasingly original in character, were published in the British Architect; of these the one for a house[349] at Dovercourt of 1890 was the most advanced.

By the late eighties Nesfield and Godwin were both dead and leadership in English architecture, particularly as regards the domestic field, rested more firmly than ever in Shaw’s hands. The forces of innovation in English art were concentrated in the decorative field, thanks in part to Webb’s continuing activities with the Morris firm. But there is some question how well younger men like Voysey really knew Webb’s architectural work; almost none of it was published, and some of the best is hidden in remote parts of Scotland and the North of England. The work of A. H. Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was perhaps somewhat better known, but he was much more active with furniture, chintzes, and wallpapers than with building in the eighties. A project for a ‘House for an Artist’ that he published in his magazine The Hobby Horse in 1888 was of considerable promise, however. In any case Voysey soon rivalled Mackmurdo as a designer of furniture, wallpapers, and chintzes, and quite outclassed him as an architect. Mackmurdo’s most significant influence was probably abroad (see Chapter 16).

The existence of an earlier project dated 1888 for Voysey’s house for J. W. Forster at Bedford Park has led to some confusion. The executed house dates from 1891. Sometimes known as the Grey House, it is very different indeed from its neighbours, by this time some fifteen or more years old, by Godwin, Shaw, and their pupils. For one thing, its walls are covered with roughcast, already used by Voysey on The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington; for another, it is a three-storey rectangular box, severe and rather formal beneath its low hipped roof, not quaint and irregular like even the simplest of the earlier houses. The casement windows are arranged in bands between stone mullions, regularly but not symmetrically, and the eaves troughs are supported by delicately curved iron brackets. Otherwise there is no external detail.

The plan of the Forster house is also compact and regular, with entrance on the left side and living room across the front. In other words this house represents as much of a reaction against the picturesqueness of the earlier Queen Anne as does Shaw’s Fred White house, yet is quite without eighteenth-century reminiscence.[350]

More interesting and more prominent than the contemporary storey-and-a-half house known as The Studio at 17 St Dunstan’s Road in West Kensington are a pair of terrace-houses, also designed in 1891 but begun only the next year, at 14-16 Hans Road off the Brompton Road in London. Here Voysey dropped the roughcast he had originally proposed and used Webb-like red brickwork with the windows characteristically arranged in bands between plain stone mullions. The elegantly original detailing of the projecting stone porches and the curved line of the parapets at the top are related to his contemporary decorative work and in notable contrast to the almost ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ treatment of Mackmurdo’s slightly later house next door at No. 12.

A moderate-sized country house, Perrycroft, Colwall, near Malvern, begun in 1893, may be considered Voysey’s first mature production, introducing in executed work the personal mode of design for which the Ward project of 1890 had already shown the way, and from which he never moved very far in later years. This is comparable, not to Wright’s ‘first’ house in River Forest of the same date, but to his more advanced work of the end of the decade, the River Forest Golf Club and the Hickox house. Roughcast walls, windows arranged in bands between plain mullions,[351] a regular composition approaching but not quite reaching symmetry, these all follow from the Grey House and the Studio. But, being in the country, the house could spread out more. Moreover, the roofs were raised to a medieval pitch—45 degrees—so that their conspicuously heavy slating is as much a part of Voysey’s simple craftsman-like mode as are the off-white roughcast walls. The planning is closer to Webb’s than to Wright’s, the rooms being less symmetrically shaped and not opening at all into one another in the way of the Ward project.

A rather larger house, begun in 1896 on the Hog’s Back near Guildford in Surrey for the American Julian Sturgis, presumptive original of Santayana’s Last Puritan, has a somewhat less balanced composition with a prominent cross gable near one end (Plate 129A). The characteristic stone-mullioned lights of several of the rooms are here so extensive in their grouping as to constitute window-walls of the earlier Shavian sort.

In what is doubtless Voysey’s finest work, Broadleys on Lake Windermere, designed in 1898, the roofs are lower once more, and the window-walls are concentrated in three rounded bays along the lakeside terrace (Plate 129B). Here the hall in the middle is carried up two storeys, quite as Wright proposed to do in one version of his first Ladies Home Journal house (Figure 32). In its horizontality, its concentration of fenestration, and its avoidance of medieval feeling, this house represents the extreme point of innovation and originality in Voysey’s work.

His own house, The Orchard, at Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, was completed in 1900. Externally this resembles closely his earlier houses, but The Orchard has two cross gables and hence a stronger feeling of symmetry. Towards this the more regular and carefully balanced spacing of the window bands further conduces. In studying the vocabulary of this house, a vocabulary destined to be parodied ad infinitum by architects and then by builders in the next twenty-five years, one can understand his feeling that he was a reformer not an innovator—the last disciple of Pugin, so to say, to whose secular work a line can be traced back via Webb, Street, and Butterfield. In Voysey’s special sense of continuity, which grew on him in later years, lies his great difference from Wright; for Wright was certainly determined, from the time he designed the Winslow house, to be as great an innovator—as much of an architectural creator—as was Sullivan in his skyscrapers. None the less, to look forward a little, such a house by Voysey as that now called Little Court at Pyrford Common in Surrey, built in 1902, is quite worthy of comparison with Wright’s masterpieces of that year (see Chapter 19). It shows little further development beyond his houses of the late nineties, however, except for a certain increase in horizontal emphasis.

Just before and just after 1900, Voysey’s work was very much better known and more influential in England, and increasingly in other countries,[352] than was Wright’s either at home or abroad at that time. Moreover, many contemporaries in England were building rather similar houses. One of them, M. H. Baillie Scott (1865-1945), who also worked a good deal on the Continent, developed his planning much farther in the direction of Wright-like openness along the lines suggested by Voysey’s project of 1890 for the Ward house. The many houses, both executed and projected, that Baillie Scott published in Houses and Gardens in 1906 made his planning known to the young architects of the Continent (Figure 33). Characteristic is his Blackwell house on Lake Windermere of about 1900 with an enormous two-storey living-hall elaborated spatially by various ingle-nooks and so forth. The plan was published by Muthesius in 1904, and may well have influenced Adolf Loos in Vienna and other Europeans even before his own book appeared (see Chapters 20 and 21). After 1906 Baillie Scott’s work became quite ‘traditional’, and it is hard to believe that the projects published in the later version of his Houses and Gardens in 1933 are by the same man.

The name of W. R. Lethaby (1857-1931), later the biographer of Webb and an influential writer on architecture, should also be at least mentioned here. When Lethaby left Shaw’s office, where he had been chief assistant, he began his career by building Avon Tyrrell in Hampshire in 1891, a large brick country house closer to Webb’s than to Shaw’s in character. But his main contribution was not in the field of domestic architecture.[353]

Already by the mid nineties, the most successful English house-builder, more than rivalling Voysey in the quantity and occasionally even in the quality of his domestic work, was Sir Edwin L. Lutyens (1869-1944). Beginning like Voysey in the late eighties by building cottages, his first house of real distinction was the one he built for his cousin and frequent collaborator, the garden-designer Gertrude Jekyll, at Munstead Wood near Godalming in 1896. Several other good houses followed shortly, including notably The Orchards, Godalming, in 1898; but this early period of his work really culminates in Deanery Gardens at Sonning in Berkshire of 1901 (Plate 182B). In these houses are preserved all the best of the Shavian Manorial—the great timber-framed bay-window of the two-storeyed hall at Deanery Gardens is exemplary—simplifying and regularizing that mode under the influence of Webb and even approaching Webb’s standards of craftsmanship in the execution.

Like Webb in his later work, Lutyens used almost from the first a good deal of stylistic detail in interiors; he also turned back towards the ‘traditional’ in his exteriors considerably earlier than Baillie Scott when designing such houses as Overstrand Hall in Norfolk and Tigbourne Court at Witley in Surrey, both built in 1899 two years before Deanery Gardens. Lutyens became from about 1906 the leading architect of his generation in England, and his later work will be treated elsewhere (see Chapter 24). His increasing material success after the opening years of the century, rivalling Shaw’s in the previous generation, is to a certain extent the measure, though not the cause, of Voysey’s decline in popularity.

C. R. Ashbee (1863-1942) and George Walton (1867-1933)[354] were other domestic architects active in the nineties and the early years of the new century. The latter belongs to the Glasgow School, of which Mackintosh was the principal figure, and like Mackintosh he was more decorator than architect (see Chapter 17). One house in England, The Leys at Elstree of 1901, may be mentioned here. The interiors are fine examples of the Arts and Crafts mode, as it is sometimes called, more stylized than Voysey’s but less original than Mackintosh’s. The plan is organized symmetrically around a large two-storey hall rivalling Baillie Scott’s of the period in its complex spatial development.

Ashbee was one of the first Europeans to appreciate the significance of Wright, and was appropriately chosen by Wasmuth to write the introduction to his second publication of Wright’s work in 1911 (see Chapter 19). Three houses by Ashbee side by side in Cheyne Walk in London, No. 37 of 1894 and Nos 38-39 of 1904, represent the chronological span of his significant architectural production and illustrate clearly his characteristic progress from the Shavian to an originality at least comparable to Voysey’s. Closely associated with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Ashbee was like most of these men except Voysey[355] and Lutyens generally more active in the field of decorative art than in building. Right through this period English decorative art exercised a major influence on the Continent (see Chapters 16 and 17). So close is Mackintosh’s tie with the Continent that his schools and even his houses are better discussed in relation to the Art Nouveau.

Of all these English architects who have just been mentioned, Voysey was the most creative in the field of domestic architecture and, except for Lutyens, the most productive down at least through the early years of the twentieth century; after 1910 he built almost nothing at all. Yet Voysey did not die until 1941, by which time a younger generation, to his confusion, had accepted him as a father of a modern architecture that he disapproved as strongly as did Lutyens. In 1940 he returned almost from the grave to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

From the Picturesque cottages of the opening decades of the nineteenth century to the early masterpieces of Wright and Voysey around 1900 is a far cry, further perhaps in the drastic revision that it represented of so old-established a building type as the dwelling-house than from Parris’s Market Street buildings in Boston of 1824 to Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott Store in Chicago as completed eighty years later in 1904. Yet in Anglo-American domestic architecture, quite as was the case with commercial architecture, real achievement recurred all through the century.

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PART THREE

1890-1955

16. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ART NOUVEAU: VICTOR HORTA

THE two preceding chapters, in entering the nineties, crossed what is perhaps the major historical frontier within the century and a half covered by this book. The skyscrapers of Sullivan and the early houses of Wright and Voysey—despite Voysey’s own disavowal of modernism—are among the first major manifestations of the period of architectural history that extends down to and includes our own time. The contemporaries of these men who were the new leaders on the Continent in the nineties had as sharp a sense of the novelty of the innovations they were making as did Sullivan or Wright, and the most characteristic stylistic formulation of this decade in Europe was appropriately known from an early date[356] as ‘Art Nouveau’. Before discussing the Art Nouveau itself, two related developments that precede it must be considered at least briefly. In France, various feats of metal construction of the sixties, seventies, and eighties had prepared the way for the Art Nouveau on the technical side, and these have, moreover, considerable intrinsic interest in their own right. English innovations in decorative art of the eighties and nineties are accepted by most historians as providing one of the most important immediate sources of the Art Nouveau,[357] and English architecture and architectural theory of the later decades of the nineteenth century certainly offered a generic stimulus to Europeans between 1890 and 1910 that was of vital consequence to subsequent developments.

By the early nineties advanced English work began to be widely known on the Continent. In 1888 the German architect Alexander Koch (1848-1911) started to publish annually his Academy Architecture bringing current English production, and many significant projects also, to the attention of designers abroad. L’Architecture moderne en Angleterre by the French architect Paul Sédille (1836-1900) appeared in Paris in 1890. The architect Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927), who was stationed at the German Embassy in London from 1896 to 1903 primarily to study low-cost housing, issued two folio volumes devoted to Die englische Baukunst der Gegenwart in 1900-2, another on Die neuere kirchliche Baukunst in England in 1902 and, in 1904-5, three thick quarto volumes on Das englische Haus. These richly illustrated books made much of the story of the development of English architecture in the second half of the century available in German long before it was pieced together by the English (see Chapters 12 and 15).

Voysey never worked abroad; but his houses, known internationally from an early date thanks to their publication in the Studio, an English periodical founded in 1893, were soon much studied on the Continent, and to a lesser extent in America. Voysey’s contemporaries Baillie Scott and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), however, both received foreign commissions as early as 1898; in fact, Mackintosh and his highly original ideas—he was no Voyseyan ‘reformer’ but a very bold innovator—received more support abroad than at home and were much more influential on the Continent than in Great Britain.

Historians of modern architecture have generally emphasized, and rightly, the special importance of the advances in metal construction[358] that were made in France in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The great name of the period is not that of an architect but of an engineer, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923). At the International Exhibition of 1855 in Paris and again at the World’s Fair of 1893 in Chicago the vast metal-and-glass structures were masked externally by real or imitated masonry façades. Between these dates, however, came a series of French exhibition buildings that were increasingly bold in scale and frank in design; with the construction of most of them Eiffel was directly concerned. Yet his bridge over the Douro at Oporto in Portugal of 1876-7 quite overshadowed the Galerie des Machines that he and Krantz built for the Paris Exhibition of 1867, as his later Pont de Garabit of 1880-4 outclassed the pavilion that he designed for the Exhibition of 1878 and that portion of the Bon Marché Department Store on which he collaborated in 1876 with the younger Boileau. In the exhibition buildings the metalwork was completely exposed and in that of 1878[359] a serious attempt was made to develop appropriate embellishments, quite as Wyatt had done for Brunel at Paddington Station in London twenty-five years earlier. The rather tawdry result helps to explain why innovations in architectural design had so little public support in France in this period—a period, of course, when the bold innovations of the Impressionists were revolutionizing another art in Paris.

Beside Eiffel’s gallery, the Anglo-Japanese room[360] which Whistler and Godwin showed at this same exhibition must have seemed infinitely sophisticated, and even the Late Stuart detailing of the cement-brick front of Shaw’s Jury House most agreeably urbane. Such things might well have turned the attention of foreign architects towards England earlier than was generally the case. Sédille, one of the less tradition-bound French professionals of this period, did visit England in the eighties, publishing his book on current English architecture, which has just been mentioned, ten years before Muthesius’s. His selections, however, were not very discriminating, nor is there evidence that he profited much from what he saw. The Printemps department store of 1881-9, designed of course well before his trip, certainly shows no English influence.

For the Paris Exhibition of 1889[361] Eiffel early proposed and, in 1887, was commissioned to build the tremendous all-metal tower[362] which still dominates Paris (Plate 130A). As has been noted, this 984-foot edifice was, down to the erection of the Empire State Building in New York by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon more than forty years later, the tallest structure in the world. The Eiffel Tower, which appropriately carries its designer’s name, is no more a building in the ordinary sense than are his great bridges, however. Although scraping so much higher skies than did Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building in Chicago, which was erected in precisely the same years, the Paris tower was far less significant either technically or functionally. Except the painter Seurat, most contemporaries disliked it, considering it a monstrous blemish on the Parisian skyline; today of course, it is rightly deemed a nineteenth-century masterpiece, but a masterpiece of engineering rather than of architecture.

As with Eiffel’s pavilion at the Exhibition of 1878, there is considerable ambiguity in the design of the Eiffel Tower. Seen from a distance its four legs have much of the vigorous spring of his bridges and the tapered shaft of criss-crossed metalwork seems—but in fact is not—an almost inevitable expression of large-scale construction in metal. Seen from nearer to, however, the arbitrarily arched forms that link the legs are very conspicuous and also the coarse ornamentation of curvilinear strapwork—recalling a little Wyatt’s at Paddington Station of nearly forty years before, but much less just in scale—with which the basic forms are bedecked. The close similarity of this mixture of frank construction and applied decoration to the Art Nouveau approach to the design of metal structures will shortly become evident. Over-impressed, perhaps, by the more functional engineering feat of construction at the 1889 Exhibition provided by the wide-spanned metal-and-glass Palais des Machines of the engineers Contamin (1840-93), Pierron, and Charton—in which the contribution of the associated architect C.-L.-F. Dutert (1845-1906) was relatively unimportant—certain later critics have preferred that structure to the Eiffel Tower. Yet it is the tower which clearly has more of the magnificence of Eiffel’s bridges despite its irrelevant and (from a distance) almost invisible ornamentation. The tower, moreover, is premonitory of the Art Nouveau; the Galerie des Machines rather of later modern architecture (see Chapters 20 and 22).

One other line of innovation in France in these decades deserves mention. In 1871 Jules Saulnier built a factory for Chocolat Menier near Paris at Noisiel, S.-et-M., with an exposed metal skeleton. The iron frame consists of diagonally set members rather similar to the late medieval timber-framing of France, and the infilling of the panels is of varicoloured bricks and tiles. This structure attracted the attention of Viollet-le-Duc, who saw in it a realization of certain of his theoretical ambitions for nineteenth-century architecture. He not only mentioned it very favourably in the second volume of his Entretiens, which appeared in 1872, but in several illustrations suggested similar and variant combinations of iron and masonry. In a colour plate, for example, he showed a striking urban façade with its visible iron framework filled with brilliantly coloured glazed tiles. By the nineties quite a few buildings in France had exploited very successfully this structural system;[363] it is perhaps more important, however, that Viollet-le-Duc’s text and illustrations made the idea familiar internationally.

When one learns that Horta or Gaudí or various Americans ‘read Viollet-le-Duc’ in the seventies and eighties one must assume that the Entretiens, of which the first volume appeared in 1863, is meant—and perhaps even more specifically the second volume of 1872 with its accompanying set of plates. These last could be ‘read’ by architects to particularly good purpose. The Entretiens were available to most Europeans in the original language and to the English and the Americans in translation.[364]

The characteristic employment of metal by Art Nouveau architects in the nineties and the first decade of this century undoubtedly owed a great deal both to the inspiration of Eiffel’s large engineering structures, culminating in his tower of 1887-9, and to the vigorous critical support of Saulnier’s ideas which Viollet-le-Duc provided, not to speak of the projects of his own that he published in 1872. The knot is tied tighter—although with a different sort of structural development—when one notes that de Baudot, of all French architects most particularly the disciple and heir of Viollet-le-Duc as well as a former pupil of Henri Labrouste, was the first to exploit ferro-concrete architecturally and not merely technically (see Chapter 18). Moreover, he employed as his contractor to construct his epoch-making concrete church of St Jean de Montmartre in Paris of the nineties (see Chapter 17), Contamin, one of the engineers responsible for the Galerie des Machines at the Exhibition of 1889. But the European Art Nouveau was even less a matter of structural innovation, pure and simple, than Sullivan’s contemporary skyscrapers in America (see Chapter 14).

This brief and curious episode in the history of art,[365] starting in the early nineties and subsiding little more than a decade later, has always been called in English by a French name, perhaps because it never became acclimatized in England but was always considered a dubious import from Belgium and France. Despite the diffidence of the English—which Americans fully shared—the Art Nouveau was an international mode. It was as frequently called in France by the English name ‘Modern Style’, while to the Germans it was ‘Jugendstil’ and to the Italians ‘stile Liberty’. The German term comes from the magazine Jugend, whose illustrations and typography were fairly consistently in the new mode; the Italian from Liberty’s, the shop in London whose orientalizing fabrics became widely popular at this time (but with overtones from the obvious pun involved). In Italian it is also, and much more descriptively, the ‘stile floreale’.

The Art Nouveau is not primarily an architectural mode. Many of the finest and boldest of the large edifices built between 1890 and 1910, however, beginning with Sullivan’s skyscrapers, are certainly related to its ethos; and the Art Nouveau leaders produced quite a few buildings of real distinction that can be defined by no other term. Like the Rococo of the early and mid eighteenth century—which the Art Nouveau sometimes closely resembled and to whose revived forms it was often vulgarly assimilated—it was most successful as a mode of interior decoration. Generally linear rather than plastic,[366] the Art Nouveau was also very closely associated with the graphic arts; indeed they provide many of the most characteristic examples, as well as the earliest items that can be considered possible prototypes.

How far back the ultimate sources of the Art Nouveau should be sought, and precisely where, continues to be a subject of active research. In the graphic arts there are certainly significant similarities to be noted in William Blake’s[367] way of designing book pages. Through the Pre-Raphaelites, moreover, a line of descent from Blake can be traced down to the eighties and nineties when, indeed, his characteristic pages were sometimes reproduced in facsimile. But oriental,[368] specifically Japanese, influence certainly played some part also in the gestation of the mode. There is early evidence of that influence on western architecture in the decorative work of Godwin and Nesfield in England, beginning already in the sixties, as also in the painting of the Impressionists in France (see Chapters 10 and 12). But the earliest designs that can be readily mistaken for Continental work of 1900 are certainly by the English architect-decorator Mackmurdo and date from just after 1880. Many of the textile and wallpaper patterns that Mackmurdo, Heywood Sumner (1853-1940), and others created for the Century Guild, founded in 1882, already have the characteristic semi-naturalistic[369] forms, swaying lines, and asymmetrical organization of the mature decorative mode of the nineties. Even more striking is the design of Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883 for his book on the London churches of Sir Christopher Wren[370]—a curious conjunction, this, of two opposed stylistic developments of the eighties, the one towards the Baroque and the ‘Monumental Queen Anne’, the other towards a wholly novel mode of ornamentation.

English products, such as were shown by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from its foundation in 1888, soon reached the Continent. Moreover, even before the Studio began publication in 1893 Koch’s Academy Architecture (from 1888), which has already been mentioned, and (from 1890) his review Innendekoration, as well as less specialized English magazines such as (from 1884) Mackmurdo’s Hobby Horse and (from 1891) The Yellow Book, with its highly stylized and very curvilinear illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, were eagerly studied all over western Europe. The younger men were reading William Morris, too, and responding enthusiastically to his ethical and social demands for a reform of the household arts. At the same time the novel styles of the most advanced Post-Impressionist painters offered a powerful stimulus to architects.

This matter of the relationship between advanced painting and advanced architecture in the nineteenth century, a relationship destined to be of rather greater importance in the early twentieth, deserves some broader comment and recapitulation here. A hundred and fifty years before, when Romantic Classicism was being born in Rome, painters, sculptors, and architects shared common ideals and worked with a full understanding of each other’s problems (see Chapter 1). The backgrounds of David’s bas-relief-like early paintings show architecture in the most advanced taste of the day, and no more beautiful Romantic Classical furniture was actually produced than that which he invented for his Classical scenes and occasionally introduced in his modern portraits. The Classical sculptor Thorwaldsen at the Glyptothek in Munich and later at the Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen collaborated closely with the architects Klenze and Bindesbøll. Schinkel was himself a Romantic painter of some distinction before he matured as a Romantic Classical architect, and he collaborated later on the mural for the front of the Altes Museum with the painter Peter Cornelius, as did Klenze on the decorations of the Glyptothek in Munich.

With the gradual decline of Romantic Classicism architects and painters had more difficulty in developing parallel programmes; and the results of collaboration between them in the decoration of buildings were rarely as happy as the backgrounds the architects sometimes supplied to the painters. Ingres’s stained-glass windows of the forties in the Chapelle d’Orléans at Dreux and the Chapelle Saint-Ferdinand at Neuilly have been mentioned. More successful are the murals by Delacroix in Joly’s library at the Chambre des Deputés in Paris; but there is hardly that real visual harmony between picture and setting that the previous period had often achieved. However, the rising interest in architectural polychromy and the extension of the range of acceptable stylistic models to include the Early Renaissance and even the Middle Ages were both encouraged by the turn that the art of painting was beginning to take on the Continent around 1815. Hübsch, for example, was a sort of Nazarener among architects. Later Ingres was a close friend of Hittorff, even though he never collaborated with him to any good purpose (see Chapter 3), much less with Viollet-le-Duc, with whom he was also on good terms. The degree of stylization that Early Christian, Romanesque, or Gothic architectural modes properly demanded was not yet acceptable in figural art. Indeed, the rather quattrocento early pictures of Ingres were much too ‘Gothic’ for most of his contemporaries and are generally less esteemed than his more Classical work even today.

Above all, the ever-rising importance of landscape in the painting of all countries was necessarily without real parallels in architecture, except in so far as the increasing desire to open up houses towards the circumambient view reflects a similar preoccupation with the natural scene. As to Realism, the principal artistic movement of the mid century in French art, that could only be echoed in architectural theory. Impressionism may seem even more difficult to relate to architecture.[371]

In England in the fifties, however, a loose alliance did exist between the new Pre-Raphaelite painters and some of the leading High Victorian Gothic architects, both supported for a time by the critic Ruskin. In the sixties and seventies Morris on the one hand, developing as a decorator out of the Pre-Raphaelite milieu of Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, and Whistler on the other hand, chiefly nurtured in the advanced artistic world of Paris but also influenced in England by Rossetti, collaborated closely with architects—Morris with Webb and with Bodley, Whistler with Godwin. As has been noted, the strikingly novel results of the latter collaboration were displayed in Paris in their Anglo-Japanese room at the Exhibition of 1878. Europeans became generally aware of Morris’s decorative work only somewhat later.

In France in these decades fewer painters than in England commissioned talented individualists of the order of Shaw or Webb or Godwin to build their houses.[372] If they were Realists or Impressionists they could not have afforded to do so; if they were prosperous Academicians they would not have wished to. Even in England, Millais, after he became really successful, preferred to build a dull house in South Kensington of quite conventional character rather than to employ Shaw or Webb or Godwin.

In the eighties the most advanced European painters, not merely those of France but more generally, turned away from Realism and even from Impressionism in order to concern themselves more with pattern or with expression. The two French leaders of this reaction whose art seems to posterity most architectonic, Cézanne and Seurat, did not affect architecture or design at this time at all. Even Van Gogh and Gauguin, whose styles have a more decorative inflection, were less influential than such almost forgotten painters as the Dutch Toorop and the Belgian Khnopff, the better-known Belgian Ensor, or the Swiss Hodler and the Norwegian Munch, not to speak of the English Beardsley.

The general admiration in avant-garde circles for the work of these artists—with which went paradoxically a continuing and even growing estimation of the anti-architectonic pictures of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists both French and native—ran parallel everywhere with the rapid rise and spread of the Art Nouveau. In some sense, indeed, the Art Nouveau may be considered the equivalent as a mode of design of what is somewhat ambiguously called Impressionism in music—the work of Debussy, Delius, etc. Some of the chief critical supporters of the new painters in the nineties such as Julius Meier-Graefe were also active proponents of the Art Nouveau. Yet advanced painting, in fact, provided little more than a sympathetic atmosphere for the birth of the Art Nouveau, somewhat as the young painters and critics of the third quarter of the eighteenth century had done in Rome for the gestation of Romantic Classicism in architecture.

Why the Art Nouveau should have been initiated full-fledged by Victor Horta (1861-1947)[373] in Brussels in 1892 remains a mystery. The rather similar stylistic crystallization in Sullivan’s architectural ornament, henceforth almost equally organic and sinuous in character, had begun several years earlier even before the interiors of the Auditorium were designed in 1887-8. These will hardly have been known in Belgium, for few foreigners were aware of Sullivan’s work at all until they came to Chicago to visit the World’s Fair in 1893. Illustrations of the remarkable ironwork on Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona are not likely to have reached Brussels either, though several of its interiors were published in The Decorator and Furnisher in New York in 1892. In any case Gaudí’s ultimate style was only beginning to take form in the early nineties. A certain amount of quite original decoration was being done in New York from the beginning of the eighties by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), but it is unlikely that it was known abroad. Tiffany’s ‘Favrile’ glass came a good deal later and is precisely contemporaneous with the Art Nouveau,[374] of which it continued to be for a decade and more one of the most internationally distinguished products.

It is generally assumed that Horta knew the rather similar glass designed earlier by Émile Gallé (1846-1904) in France and that he already had some familiarity with the work of such painters as Ensor, Khnopff, and Toorop, if not with that of Hodler, Munch, or Beardsley. Yet such familiarity would hardly by itself have counter-balanced the academic training he received from his master and later employer Balat (see Chapter 9). This explains, however, the very Classical character of his Temple des Passions Humaines, erected in 1884 in the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Horta did no building on his own between 1885 and 1892. Presumably, however, it was knowledge of the theories and the projects of Viollet-le-Duc acquired in those years that encouraged him to make frank and expressive use of iron in association with masonry when he really began to practise. Yet the influence of Viollet-le-Duc hardly provides an explanation for the specific character of his innovations in ornament or the consistency of style that he achieved almost at once.

Against such rather negative assumptions, a more positive one may be set. In the Tassel house in Brussels, completed in 1893, Horta’s first mature work, he introduced an English[375] wallpaper between the exposed metal structural elements of the dining-room walls. It is highly likely, therefore, that the new English decorative products were already known to him the previous year[376] when he designed and began this epoch-making house.

The Tassel house at 6 Rue Paul-Émile Janson, just off the Avenue Louise, initiated a new architectural mode as definitely as one modest terrace-house could possibly do. How long before 1892, when the Tassel house was begun, Horta may have been designing on paper in this way does not seem to be known. When one considers how important the innumerable projects of the second half of the eighteenth century are to our understanding of the architectural revolution that established Romantic Classicism as the successor to the Baroque, the absence of such clues concerning the gestation of the Art Nouveau is most exasperating; but considerable research by students of the period has so far brought little that seems relevant to light.

In plan there are no very great novelties in the Tassel house, although the interior partitions of the principal floor are bent to give varying shapes and sizes to symmetrically disposed spaces that open rather freely into one another. The major innovation lay in the frank expression of metal structure and in the characteristic decoration, particularly that of the stair-hall (Plate 130B). There at the foot of the stair an iron column rises free and svelte out of which iron bands branch at the top, like vines from the trunk of a sapling, to form brackets under the curved openwork beams of iron above. Other lighter and less structural bands interlace to form the stair-rail. The organic, swaying, and interweaving lines of the metalwork, both structural and decorative, were originally rather boldly echoed in purely ornamental curvilinear decoration painted on the walls, and they are still so echoed in the patterns of the extant floor mosaic.

These patterns in the stair-hall are each unique, not repeated like those on the English chintzes and wallpapers they so much resemble. The lines, whether moving freely in space like those of the ironwork, painted on the curved wall, or inlaid in the flat floor plane, all form part of complex organic motifs. The result is therefore more comparable to Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883, or even to some of the repoussé brasswork on his furniture. (Like the very few buildings Mackmurdo designed, this furniture is quite rectilinear otherwise, it might be noted.) During the brief life of the Art Nouveau hardly even Horta himself, much less those who followed in his footsteps, achieved an ensemble more exemplary than this stair-hall. It is truly a work of interior architecture, not merely a matter of applied decoration as is most of the ornament used in association with the English wallpaper in the dining-room.

The façade of the house is much less striking than the interiors. However, the linear curves of the internal structural elements are reflected plastically, so to say, in the bowing forward of the entire central window area. This is so extensive as to approach, but not to equal, English window-walls of the preceding decades. In the upper storeys the lights in this broad bay-window are subdivided only by iron colonnette-mullions and topped with exposed iron beams. There is no archaeological reminiscence of any past style here; yet it must have been from local stucco-work of the Rococo period that Horta drew the inspiration for his carved stone detail. It certainly does not derive either from England or from Viollet-le-Duc. Horta was, and continued to be, much less happy in devising such plastic ornament than in his metalwork; but he felt obliged to apply it here and there on capitals, cornices, brackets, and so forth, just as conventional architects of the time used the common coin of the Renaissance or Gothic vocabularies.

The Tassel façade may be almost unnoticeable today unless one looks carefully for its exposed metalwork and its rather original detailing, but it evidently had an almost instant appeal in the Brussels of the nineties. The somewhat similar Frison house at 37 Rue Lebeau was built in 1893-4, and in 1895 three more houses were begun, of which the finest is the much larger Hôtel Solvay at 224 Avenue Louise.[377] This house was built, together with a laboratory started a year later, over a period of several years for the famous chemist Ernest Solvay. It remains the most complete of Horta’s domestic commissions, since it retains all the original furniture designed by the architect, though now a maison de couture. The broad façade is much more plastic than that of the Tassel house with the walls curving forward in the first and second storeys to enframe two tall flanking bays subdivided by metal colonnettes and transoms (Plate 131A). The ironwork of the balconies is especially rich and characteristic. In the interiors the exposed metal structure and various elaborate incidental features, such as the lighting fixtures, participate fully in the general pattern of organic curvature. Although plant-like in feeling, Horta’s metalwork is quite as abstract as Gaudí’s grilles in the entrance arches of the Palau Güell (Plate 96B) and often achieves a comparable distinction considered as craftsmanship.

The house of Baron Van Eetvelde of 1895 at 4 Avenue Palmerston—the extension to the left numbered 2 is considerably later—has a quite different exterior from the Solvay house. The front has an almost Sullivanian range of arched bays consisting entirely of exposed metalwork. Inside, the salon is even more of a masterpiece than the stair-hall of the Tassel house. A circle of iron columns, curving up into elliptical arches, supports a low dome of glass across which long leaf-like bands of transparent colour continue the sinuous structural curves below. In a happy floral metaphor the lighting fixtures bend and droop, each electric bulb shaded by a coloured glass bell of over-blown tulip shape. Not since Nicholas Pineau developed the pittoresque version of the Rococo in the second quarter of the eighteenth century had such elegant consistency and originality been seen in the decorative exploitation of plant-like elements.

Horta’s other fine houses in Brussels range in date down to the Wiener house of 1919 in the Avenue de l’Astronomie. After the very elegant and restrained Hallet house of 1906 at 346 Avenue Louise they became so dry and so formal that the term Art Nouveau hardly applies to them, however. There are two much earlier examples at 23-25 Rue Américaine, built in 1898, which are of special interest because Horta occupied them himself. The virtuoso elaboration of the interwoven structural and decorative ironwork of the oriel on the one to the left and the continuous ribbon-window set behind iron mullions in the top storey of the other are among the most striking and original external features he ever designed. These years at the very end of the century undoubtedly represent the peak of his career. His most advanced domestic planning was to be seen in the Aubecq house of 1900 at 520 Avenue Louise, demolished in 1950 (Figure 34). There the interflow of space between the interlocking octagonal reception rooms of the ground storey comes very close to that found in certain early houses by Wright (see Chapters 15 and 19).

Certainly Horta’s most important single work is the Maison du Peuple of 1896-9. This was built for the city authorities of Brussels on a curiously-shaped site of which Horta took the fullest advantage. Extending around a segment of a circular place and part way along two radial streets, the façade forms a continuous but irregular series of curves, mostly concave, but with the main entrance placed in one of the shorter convex portions. The greater part of the exterior wall consists of a visible skeleton of iron with solid masonry sections defining the ends and the entrance bay. The vertical stanchions are not curved, but many of the horizontal members are slightly arched. Decorative metal elements at some of the intersections attempt, not altogether successfully, to give to the structural grid the over-all organic quality so happily achieved in the Van Eetvelde entrance hall. As in his houses, Horta had difficulty in assimilating the carved detail of the stonework, here associated with wall panels of brick, to the metalwork; where the two come close together, as in the entrance arch of mixed materials, the result is very awkward indeed.

Comparison with Sullivan’s work of these years is inevitable—there is really nothing else of the precise period with which the Maison du Peuple can properly be compared. With Sullivan the main structural members of metal are always covered with terracotta and the visible metalwork is almost entirely decorative. Yet there is considerable similarity in the way Sullivan handled the metal mullions at the entrances of the Carson, Pirie & Scott Store, mullions which rise into and interweave with the ornament above, to Horta’s attempt to merge the structural and the decorative in his framework of visible metal elements here.

His greatest success at this was certainly in the auditorium at the top of the Maison du Peuple. In this the openwork iron beams that support the roof, forming a sort of hammerbeam system with the side galleries, have graceful and expressive but essentially structural curves (Plate 132B). To these the decorative railings of the galleries provide a delicate and harmonious counterpoint in their intricately plant-like detailing. Around the structural frame the auditorium is enclosed only by glass or by very thin panels held in metal frames, rather like the ‘curtain-walls’ of the mid twentieth century; thus there is in this permanent edifice a good deal of the volumetric lightness previously associated with temporary exhibition buildings only.

Among Horta’s commercial buildings in various Belgian cities the most conspicuous was the Innovation Department Store of 1901 in the Rue Neuve in Brussels (Plate 131B). The front, almost entirely of metal and glass though set in a granite frame, was a remarkable example of Art Nouveau decorative design at fully architectural scale. The Innovation completely overshadowed the equally bold but extremely coarse and clumsy Old England Department Store just off the Place Royale in Brussels, also almost entirely of iron and glass, that was built by Paul Saintenoy (1832-92) two years earlier. In the Gros Waucquez Building in the Rue de Sable of 1903-5 and the Wolfers Building of 1906 in the Rue d’Arenberg, as in his houses of those later years, Horta’s treatment is much more restrained than in the department store. Stone piers subdivide their façades, curves are fewer and more structural, and there is much less ornament and almost no exposed iron.

It is a historical paradox that Horta’s architectural career should have continued long after the Art Nouveau was forgotten, bringing him in the end such public esteem and material success as few other innovators of his generation ever knew. Yet his later work, beginning with his Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, designed in 1914 just before the First World War but begun only in 1923, and continuing down to his Central Station there, begun in 1938 and only lately completed, is of purely local significance. What brought him a peerage and a street named after him—that at the side of his Palais des Beaux-Arts—was not his early work of the Art Nouveau years, standing with Sullivan’s skyscrapers like a landmark at the beginning of modern architecture, but this later official work which is almost totally without intrinsic interest and, in the case of the station, actually rather monstrous. The contrast with Sullivan’s barren later years after 1904 is very striking.

Despite the poetic justice that there might be in ignoring a Belgian who long falsely claimed the credit for the invention of the Art Nouveau, one cannot turn to other countries without mentioning the name of Henri Van de Velde (1863-1957).[378] In 1892, when Horta designed the Tassel house, Van de Velde had not even begun to practise architecture. His first work, which is his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle near Brussels, though still rather conventional externally in a simple, almost peasant way perhaps influenced by Voysey, included furniture more functional than Horta’s, if much less elegant and imaginative. He also brought to Brussels—and later to Paris, Berlin, and Weimar—an interpretation of Ruskin’s and Morris’s sociological approach to the arts that had a wide and growing influence, for he pursued his mature career as decorator, architect, and educator largely outside Belgium[379] (see Chapters 17 and 20).

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