25. ARCHITECTURE AT THE MID CENTURY…

25. ARCHITECTURE AT THE MID CENTURY

TO describe the state of architecture in the late forties and early fifties, before and after the mid-point of this century, is far more difficult than to sketch its condition a hundred and fifty years earlier, as the first chapter of this book attempted. The western world was enormously larger in geographical extent, vastly more populous, and as a result very much more productive of buildings of all types and at all levels of quality. Many of the types most important in the twentieth century—big business buildings, low-cost public housing, facilities for transportation such as bus stations and airports—did not exist in 1800. These difficulties are objective and merely imply that the sampling of executed work must be relatively much more limited. But the very limited selection provided here is inevitably influenced by subjective criteria. The activity of two generations of historians writing on the architecture of the early nineteenth century has produced something approaching a consensus of opinion as to what is and what is not important or characteristic in that period. There remains, of course, much to be discovered concerning building in the decades around 1800, particularly as interest rises in the technical aspects of the story; yet the engineers[534] are unlikely ever to force the Soanes and the Schinkels out of the centre of the picture: moreover, men like Latrobe and Mills were themselves as much engineers as architects.

Already, in carrying the story of the production of the leading architects of the first and second generations of modern architecture down to the mid fifties, a certain emphasis has been given to their work in the production of the last decades. The decisions as to what to include in rounding out the picture are critical ones hardly comparable to the relatively objective historical process of selection that controls in the First and Second Parts of this book. The very extent in time of what should be considered ‘the present’ is a subjective matter. I have known American architectural students whose present was so limited that they had never heard of Perret! To anyone under thirty the effective present will hardly extend backward more than five or ten years. To keep this chapter still more or less historical I have saved consideration of the years since the later fifties for an Epilogue.

In most countries of the western world the Second World War occasioned a hiatus in construction that lasted nearly a full decade from the slowing down that came with Munich in the late thirties to the general revival of building activity in the late forties. There is therefore a real lack of continuity between pre-war and post-war building except in those countries that remained neutral. But just as the break in the continuity of building production around 1800 resulting from the Napoleonic Wars was a limited, not an absolute, phenomenon, since the truly revolutionary developments in architecture preceded rather than followed its onset, so there was in the last post-war period very little to be recognized at first that had not had its beginnings well before 1939.

The perspective of the war seemed somehow to flatten out some of the architectural episodes deemed to be significant in the mid thirties, not alone the Nazi and late Fascist reaction but such minor symptoms of dissatisfaction with the general line that architectural development had taken internationally since the early twenties as the rise of the Bay Region School[535] in America and of the New Empiricism in Europe. Historians are still rather uncertain how much weight to give to these matters. Once they lost the topicality of current events they seemed no more and no less significant than the rather similar critical flurries that came later concerning the ‘New Brutalism’ and ‘Neo-Liberty’.[536] Such flurries cannot be entirely ignored;[537] yet the general emendation of the rigid doctrines of the ‘International Style’ was more strikingly illustrated by the continued high esteem of Wright’s latest productions and, a fortiori, by the warm critical reception of Le Corbusier’s remarkable church at Ronchamp than by any of the buildings that illustrated the schismatic reactions of the decade of the thirties. The accepted definitions of modern architecture had undoubtedly become very much looser than they were a generation earlier, partly as a result of various abortive attempts at more thoroughgoing revolt. But the greatest individualists were, paradoxically, not young men[538] in their thirties, but older masters in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties.

The greatest change in the post-war architectural scene, a change that began gradually during the pre-war years, was the shift in the geographical pattern. No longer did France, Germany, and Holland occupy the centre of the stage. The rise of the United States to great prominence, continuing a development already begun in the 1870s, was not surprising. Far more surprising was the rise in the importance of Italy and Japan, not only because of their actual achievements, especially in concrete construction in both cases, but as major influences. This was presaged in Italy by the work of Terragni and of Figini & Pollini in the mid thirties and was hardly inhibited there by the ambiguities of the later Fascist attitude towards architecture just before the Second World War. The post-war British achievement was more canalized; yet it was of an autochthonous character which a long-term consideration of English architectural abilities and disabilities makes more intelligible than that flurry of new ideas, so largely of foreign origin, characterizing the mid thirties in England.

The Scandinavian countries retained their position of prominence but not pre-eminence in the international architectural scene. In contrast to their long-recognized virtues, some rather less relevant today than they once were, must be set the very different contribution of the Latin American countries, whose entry on the international scene all but post-dates the war. Production there was hardly worth mentioning a hundred and fifty years ago; by the late forties Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela were making a contribution on a par, in quantity and even in quality, with older and richer countries. Moreover, while the West was more and more losing political control of Africa and Asia, its cultural influence on those continents did not necessarily decline, indeed as regards architecture it probably increased. Modern architecture, originally developed to utilize to the full the most advanced technologies, was found to serve especially well also in areas where technology was least advanced. Indeed, the most characteristic building material of modern architecture, ferro-concrete, is often exploited most ingeniously in countries where materials are dear and labour cheap.

Not only did many outlying parts of the world import architects along with other technicians from the West; Asia, which lay almost entirely outside the field of western culture a century and a half ago, produced a great modern school in Japan. Various Dominions and dependencies—South Africa, Australia, Puerto Rico, for example—likewise began to have active groups of local practitioners operating in close consort of principle with those of Europe and North America.

With so wide a range of lively activity, no continent-by-continent, much less country-by-country, survey of modern architecture is possible in a single short chapter. Even allowing for all the enormous climatic and cultural differences that still affect architectural production, there was still sufficient identity of principle in architecture throughout most of the world to justify an international consideration of post-war achievement in terms of various building types, moving from the macrocosm down to the microcosm—from the whole city as a planned product of architectural design to the individual dwelling-house.

Despite its vast productive capacity, the old western world in the mid twentieth century created rather fewer urban entities of distinction than did the nineteenth. Partly, this was because the building of cities necessarily remains a slower process than the building of individual structures, even in an age when there are many fiat towns and also much concerted rebuilding of older cities partially cleared by bombing in the Second World War. Even more, perhaps, it is because it takes far longer for the ‘planning’ ideals of architects in any period to achieve a degree of public acceptance sufficient to ensure over decades proper control of layout and construction—or reconstruction—of whole cities than to find clients, even governmental clients, for single buildings or for extensive, but piecemeal, social projects.

Perret’s Le Havre (Plate 140A) has earlier been characterized as the realization—notable even if belated—of ideals that date back before the First World War. None of the post-war ‘New Towns’ of England were complete enough by the mid fifties to be apprehensible as urban entities; for the most part they were still only large-scale housing developments—suburbs in search of a city, so to say—realizing at a considerably lower economic level the ideals of the Garden Cities of fifty years before. Better than the English examples and indicative of the widespread acceptance of Garden-City ideals was Vållingby in Sweden.

More complete urban entities of the mid century could be seen in such heavily bombed and largely rebuilt cities as Coventry in England or Hanover in Germany; yet in neither case was the architectural achievement of the highest contemporary order. They should be compared for quality with Napoleon III’s Paris or Francis Joseph’s Vienna rather than with Alexander I’s Petersburg or Ludwig I’s Munich, and even that comparison is not always very favourable to them.

In the extensive and almost explosive expansion and reconstruction of various Latin American cities it was only in Caracas that the planner Maurice Rotival was able to keep a bit ahead of the builders. But even Caracas still had only samples of the characteristic new urbanism of the mid twentieth century: two or three isolated skyscrapers and a housing development, the Cerro Piloto, differing from those in other parts of the world chiefly by its very great extent and its superb mountain-backed site. The North American cities that were growing fastest, Houston or Los Angeles or Miami Beach or Toronto in Canada, were at least as chaotic as the Latin American ones, and neither the quantity nor the quality of the individual buildings was as high. Against the eruptive growth of a city like São Paulo in Brazil might be better balanced such a North American programme of large-scale rebuilding as that which had already cleared the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh, replacing typical nineteenth-century urban congestion with an open park and spaced cruciform skyscrapers. The new capital of Brazil, Brasilia, was not planned by Lúcio Costa even on paper until 1957.

The mid twentieth century had no full-scale cities that properly exemplified the highest ideals of modern architects. It would be necessary to wait, with fingers crossed, even to see the results of such piecemeal projects of reconstruction as that proposed by Sir William Holford for the bombed district around St Paul’s Cathedral in London,[539] and still longer for such complete cities as Brasilia and Chandigarh where, however, the public buildings by Le Corbusier were in the mid fifties rapidly rising. But there were also in existence already certain special entities of almost urban scale planned since the Second World War that deserve attention. Notable are the ‘university cities’, complete educational plants located on new terrain, planned as a whole and designed as regards their individual buildings either by a single team of architects or by several teams whose work was closely co-ordinated from start to finish. The most remarkable of these is that of the University of Mexico, but even here the difference in quality between such highly original structures as the Olympic Stadium of Augusto Perez Palacios (b. 1909), Raúl Salinas Moro, and Jorge Bravo Jiménez of 1951-2, with its fine relief mosaic by Diego Rivera, or the Central Library of Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra, and Juan Martinez de Velasco of 1951-3, with its stack tower entirely covered with mosaics designed by O’Gorman, and certain of the other equally large and prominent buildings is very notable (Plate 184). The university city of Rio de Janeiro, for which Le Corbusier was originally called to Brazil to provide a plan in 1936, was by no means so far advanced; but the control of the design of all the principal buildings by one architect, Jorge Moreira (b. 1904), who is one of the three or four ablest in Brazil, seemed to promise a homogeneity of character and a distinction of finish unique in this field. Among several other Latin American examples begun and partly built by the mid fifties, that at Caracas by Carlos Raúl Villanueva (b. 1900) rivals in its principal building, the Aula Magna of 1952-3 with its extraordinary acoustic ceiling by the technician Robert Newman and the sculptor Sandy Calder, the achievement of the Mexicans.

Of a very different character indeed, and initiated much earlier, is the University of Aarhus[540] in Denmark for which Kay Fisker, C. F. Møller (b. 1898), and Povl Stegmann (1888-1944) won the competition in 1931. Some of its many buildings date from before the Second World War: professors’ houses of 1933, student residences of 1934, museum of natural history of 1937-8; while most of the classroom buildings were actually erected in the war years 1942-6. The work continues in the hands of Møller, and the layout of the beautiful sloping site was by C. Th. Sørenson (b. 1893). Built of buff brick with tile roofs of medium pitch, the general effect is much quieter than that of the Latin American university cities with their tall ferro-concrete buildings, crisply shaped and distinguished both by a bold use of colour and the conspicuous incorporation of work by distinguished painters and sculptors. At first sight—and to the prejudiced—the University of Aarhus may appear more conservative; but the range of the new architecture is recognized today as being wider than it was thirty years ago, and Møller’s aula in its very different way is quite as advanced as Villanueva’s; or even, for that matter, as the shell-domed auditorium of 1952-5 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., by Eero Saarinen (1910-61).

One of the earliest individual building types to find wholly untraditional expression was the large block of offices. The skyscraper reached maturity early in the hands of Sullivan in Chicago; the later vagaries of the form in New York did not recommend it to European emulation, although skyscraper projects by Mies, by Gropius, and by Le Corbusier were among the most notable early evidences of the birth—on paper—of a new architecture in the years 1919-22. Howe & Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building of a decade later was the first large-scale example of the acceptance in America of the new architecture of Europe; but during the thirties skyscraper-building languished, and many critics thought that their day was already over. In many parts of the world that day had yet to dawn, and Europe still had very few notable examples to offer, but in the New World the fifties saw the start of a new wave of skyscraper building by no means confined to the United States. For the first time since the nineties a rather considerable number of really distinguished examples were being built in both North and South American cities. Wright’s Price Tower at Bartlesville, Okla., a relatively modest one, and Mies and Johnson’s Seagram Building in New York have both been mentioned already. Diagonally across Park Avenue in New York from the site of the Seagram tower stands the first epoch-making post-war skyscraper in New York, Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft (b. 1909) of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill firm and built in 1950-2 (Plate 189). The almost completely glazed curtain-walls of the east and west sides of the United Nations Secretariat in New York—built in 1947-50 by Wallace K. Harrison (b. 1895) and his partner Max Abramowitz (b. 1908) but incorporating ideas provided by an international panel of which Le Corbusier and Niemeyer were members—are carried round three sides of Bunshaft’s slab. More significant, however, is the fact that this slab, rising like the isolated United Nations building with no setbacks, covers only a portion of the available site. Thus it stands in its own envelope of space carved, as it were, out of the solid canyon of Park Avenue, just as Mies and Johnson would later set their building back 100 feet from the avenue and well in from both the side streets also. Their ‘plaza’ is unconfined; Bunshaft’s open space is defined by a mezzanine on pilotis carried round an unroofed court.

Reacting against the almost totally glazed curtain-wall of his U.N. Secretariat, a type of sheathing for large urban structures then spreading very rapidly to other countries, Harrison on the Alcoa Building of 1952 in Pittsburgh used storey-high panels of aluminium cut by relatively small windows. This alternative type of sheathing has been less exploited since, however, than the more completely glazed sort. There was a curious revival of Expressionist feeling in the complex angular design of the glazed lobby of the Alcoa Building that contrasted sharply with the paradigmatic expression of the ‘International Style’ seen in the Equitable Building in Portland, Ore., of 1948 by Pietro Belluschi (b. 1899), the earliest of the interesting post-war skyscrapers. A later Western skyscraper, the Mile-High Center in Denver, Col., completed by I. M. Pei (b. 1907) in 1955, followed almost more closely the formula of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago than he did himself in the design of the Seagram Building.

It is invidious to mention only these few North American examples, but production of similar skyscrapers was already so nation-wide in the United States and in Canada that one can still hardly hope to see the individual trees for the forest. There are good reasons why those selected for illustration or mention are likely to remain conspicuous and not become lost in the crowd. But skyscrapers are no longer a prerogative of North America; some of the finest were rising in Latin America, and these would before long be rivalled by European examples already projected or even under construction by 1955.

It is a mistake to assume that North Americans housed business only in skyscrapers. More and more large corporations were moving their headquarters to the open country. Quite as significant as Lever House in the production of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the mid fifties was the 700-foot-square but only four-storeyed office plant of the Connecticut General Insurance Company of 1955-7, set in a park of eighteenth-century size and amenity at Bloomfield, Conn., some ten miles outside Hartford, the insurance capital. Luxury of materials, white marble and granite as well as aluminium, makes up somewhat for the rigid asceticism of the standardized walls, while four interior court gardens by Noguchi and three pink granite figures by him on the slope beyond the ‘artificial water’ in which swans swim about below the all-glass cafeteria further balance the expression of crisp efficiency with something warmer and more humane.

In most Latin American cities all-glass walls are impractical because of the heat and the glare of the sun. As a result, architects have developed various versions of the sun-break system introduced twenty years ago on the first tall modern building to be erected in that part of the world, the Ministry of Education in Rio; glazed curtain-walls were by no means unknown, however. The egg-crate sun-breaks of the Edificio C.B.I. of 1948-51 in São Paulo by Lucjan Korngold (b. 1897) and the horizontally patterned grid of the Retiro Odontológico of 1953-4 in Havana by Antonio Quintana Simonetti and Manuel A. Rubio give these buildings a very different look from such examples of more North American character as the building in the Calle de Niza at the corner of the Calle de Londres in Mexico City of 1952-3 by Juan Sordo Madaleno (b. 1916), or that of the Suramericana de Seguros in the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada in Bogotá of 1954 by Cuéllar, Serrano, Gomez & Co.

The most ingenious and best designed Latin American skyscraper of the fifties, however, is the completely isolated Edificio Polar of 1953-4 at the Plaza Venezuela in Caracas. This was built by Martin Vegas Pacheco (b. 1926), a pupil of Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and his partner José Miguel Galia, a pupil of the one distinguished South American architect of the first modern generation, Julio Vilamajó, at the University of Montevideo. Here the structure was reduced to four ferro-concrete piers from which the curtain-walls were cantilevered out 11 feet on all four sides. The curtain-walls have a varied infilling, part solid sandwiches of plywood and aluminium sheeting, part louvres that transmit air but not light, and part glass. These are combined in different proportions on each side according to the orientation in order to control the glare and the heat of the sun while providing direct ventilation. Since this tower was isolated, it needed no envelope of space; in fact, however, the wider mezzanine extending under the base of the tower does provide this. The two open storeys, one at ground level and one above the mezzanine, give a lightness of effect and a frank view of the essential structure that is even more striking than at Lever House, where the relation of the towering slab to the mezzanine is less boldly handled.

European skyscrapers[541] as yet rarely rivalled North American ones in height, and few large urban office buildings reached even the median level of quality of those in Latin America. In rebuilding bombed cities, however, there were opportunities that could readily be exploited for carrying certain buildings very high over a portion only of their sites, as was first done in North America at Lever House, but using the ampler spaces provided by the replanning of the cities to extend lower blocks from the main slab. One of the best examples of this treatment is the Continental Rubber Building of 1952-3 in Hanover by Werner Dierschke and Ernst Zinsser, which replaces Behrens’s ponderous block of thirty years earlier that was destroyed in the war. The surfacing materials, mostly various stones, are serviceable and the general composition well studied, but the proportions lack the elegant lightness of the Edificio Polar. Yet the whole achieved a ‘reality’ of effect lacking in the C.B.I. in São Paulo, which looks, despite its great size, rather like a cardboard model; or Lever House, which too much resembles a slick cellophane-wrapped package. Some German commercial work at smaller scale was more refined, as, for example, the Haus der Glas-Industrie of 1951 at Düsseldorf by Bernhard Pfau and Pempelfort Haus there of 1954 by Hentrich & Petschnigg, or the Burda-Moden Building of the same date in Offenburg by Egon Eiermann. Hentrich & Petschnigg are also responsible for the striking BASF skyscraper at Ludwigshafen, the tallest built in the Old World up to the mid fifties.

Post-war Italian commercial work was more varied and imaginative than in other countries, but the tallest examples were not the best. Very often it was the fine marble or mosaic surfacing—echoed in the BASF—and the high quality of the craftsmanship that seemed to give them interest and an effect of luxury rarely yet found in other countries, rather than real distinction of design. Interestingly enough, since post-war Latin America has tended to follow Italian models, one of the best Italian buildings of this decade, the Olivetti offices in Milan of 1954-5 by G. A. Bernasconi, Annibale Fiocchi (b. 1915), and M. Nizzoli, has a very Latin American air because of its prominent sun-breaks. This was one of the few buildings premiated by the international jury at the São Paulo Biennal in 1957, and the only non-Brazilian one.

Industrial construction has not even yet been as fully accepted into the realm of architecture as has commercial building for the last hundred years. Ever since the factories of Behrens and the warehouses of Perret, however, industrial commissions have played an increasingly important part in modern architectural production. Probably the largest acreage of good factory-building just after the war, as earlier in the century, was in North America. With rising standards of amenity, moreover, and the substitution of road haulage for rail transportation, factories came out from behind the railway tracks and took their proper place visually as well as functionally, with well-maintained grounds as important features, in regional planning. It is hard to single out particular factories for mention, if only because their design, whether it is by engineers or by specialist architectural firms like Albert Kahn, Inc., had arrived at a largely anonymous standardization—the fate, incidentally, towards which some critics see all twentieth-century architecture as inevitably moving.

The General Motors Technical Institute at Warren, Mich., completed by Eero Saarinen in 1955 after a decade of planning and construction, is almost more comparable in scale and complexity to a university city than to a factory; yet this group of twenty-five buildings organized round a large rectangular artificial lake is also in its use and in its character a major example of American industrial building raised at the behest of a corporate client into the realm of distinguished architecture (Plate 168B; Figure 55). Little or no link remained between this and even the latest buildings designed by Eliel Saarinen on which his son collaborated, although the former was involved in this commission down to his death in 1950. Instead, the influence of Mies was very strong, since in the younger Saarinen’s estimation the Miesian discipline was specially suitable for giving order to such a project, in terms both of over-all planning and of the characteristic structural vocabulary of curtain-walling. Yet the necessary variety of size and shape of the buildings, determined in part by the very different activities that they house, from power-houses and engine-test cells to the Styling Centre for new motor-car models, made impossible the imposition of so classic a pattern as Mies had aimed to produce at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Figure 52). In conscious avoidance of the monotony of the motor-car factories around Detroit, which run on without modification for thousands of feet, and in pursuit of ideals which most modern planners have realized only on paper, Eero Saarinen accented his long lake-front with a water-tower all of stainless steel rising out of the water and provided a special domed unit at the south end to house the display of new models beside the one section of the complex to which the outside world has some access. Moreover, he varied the characteristic metal-and-glass vocabulary of the façades—the metal in general black oxidized aluminium, the glass greenish in tone to reduce glare in the interiors—with solid walls of glazed brick in various brilliant colours, almost rivalling the Mexicans in the intensity of the reds, blues, yellows, and greens that he chose. As with the later Connecticut General plant, sculpture of distinction, here by Antoine Pevsner, provides a note of humane interest amid all the expression of mechanistic efficiency.

In Europe the Olivetti Company were more consistent patrons of distinguished design in architecture than General Motors. The main plant at Ivrea, designed by Figini & Pollini, is small by American standards, and has been in existence for some time—since 1942. It is chiefly notable because it is the heart, as it is the raison d’être, of an architectural programme of almost urbanistic scope at Ivrea that is still in process of realization by Figini & Pollini and by the resident architect Fiocchi, whose small foundry of 1954-5 is an exemplary industrial unit of almost Miesian elegance. Characteristic now of most Latin countries are the sun-breaks on the south-west side of the large Ivrea factory; while the north-east façade rises four storeys in sheer glass like a vast extension of Gropius’s studio block at the Bauhaus. Of the present period of the fifties, and better sited, more articulated, and more self-complete, is the later Olivetti factory at Pozzuoli near Naples by Luigi Cosenza. Structurally, however, the industrial work of the engineer Nervi is more original.

Factories are still more likely to be designed by engineers than by architects; but the contribution of engineers to their design is by no means always standardized and monotonous. Particularly in those countries where the lack of steel encourages the use of ferro-concrete, engineers were devising notably imaginative solutions to the problems of space-coverage and lighting. The Spanish-born engineer Candela in Mexico worked with ferro-concrete vaults in industrial construction with the casual ease and ad hoc ingenuity of a twelfth-century Frenchman building in stone; yet his church of Nuestra Señora de los Milagros of 1953-5 gave the impression of being a reversion to Expressionism, despite the unassailable mathematical and structural logic of the hyperbolic paraboloid forms of its ‘ruled surfaces’. The Italian-born José Delpini, in such factories as his S.I.T. Spinning Shed of 1949-50 at Pilar in Argentina, easily rivalled the work of the leading modern architects of Argentina in the distinction as in the scale of his buildings. The Danish-born Ore Arup in England, working with the Architects Co-Partnership on the artificial rubber factory at Bryn Mawr in Wales, provided one of the most notable large-scale buildings in post-war Great Britain, and deserves much of the credit for it. To return to the work of architects, it should be noted that in England, where most post-war industrial building was rather modest in size, the power-stations of Farmer & Dark, culminating in that of 1955-7 at Marchwood, have a grandeur of scale and a logic of partially open design that ordinary factories can almost never rival.

Industrial building, still at the frontier of architecture despite the great contribution it has made to more general developments since the English mills of the 1790s, was notably international in its twentieth-century standards and its achievements. The leading industrial firms, such as Albert Kahn, Inc., and that of Frankland Dark were asked to build in many parts of the world, for the traditions of the old-established technologies are of especial value in such work. The continued existence of cultural empires, so to call them, is still made manifest when English firms build power-houses and factories in the Middle and Far East. James Cubitt & Partners[542] completed in Rangoon in 1955, for example, a pharmaceutical plant that was probably the largest post-war factory of architectural interest to be built by an English firm, just as their Technical College at Kumasi in Ghana built at the same time was a more considerable example of a mid-twentieth-century university city than England had yet seen.

The provision of housing by organs of the State had come to be recognized almost everywhere as an essential social service, quite as modern architects always insisted that it should be. Le Corbusier’s Unité at Marseilles is doubtless the most striking single example of the tall structures, slabs or ‘point-blocks’, which were increasingly the characteristic form of such housing, but the most notable general programmes of production were still found in England, in certain Latin American countries, and in Denmark and Sweden. The pressure of population-growth and the need for rebuilding after war-time destruction motivated such programmes almost everywhere, but in several countries notable otherwise for the high standard of their current architecture—the United States and Italy, for example—the results were disappointing indeed. A strong social tradition of public housing, moreover, as in Holland, even with the precedent there of the notably fine work of thirty and forty years ago, seemed then to be no guarantee of continued excellence in this field. Although the rising popularity of housing in tall structures is still balanced in England by a strong attachment to small houses built in pairs or in terraces, such as comprise the greater part of the New Towns, English achievement in this field on the whole exceeded that of most other countries in the ten years after the war, both in quantity and in quality. The post-war pace was set by the Churchill Gardens of A. J. Philip Powell (b. 1921) and his partner Hidalgo Moya in Pimlico, London, for which the Westminster Borough Council was the client. For over a decade the planning and building of this vast urban project went forward towards completion with rising standards of design and finish. Perhaps the finest single block is De Quincey House, with its ingenious section of duplexes approached by access galleries. But the Architect’s Department of the London County Council, under the successive leadership of Robert Matthew (b. 1906) and of Sir Leslie Martin (b. 1908), in the last seven years equalled and perhaps exceeded in quality, as many times over in quantity, the achievement of Powell & Moya. Whether on urban sites, such as that at Loughborough Road in South London (Plate 186B), or on more open sites, as at the Ackroydon estate in Putney or at Roehampton, by the combination of tall blocks, some square in plan, some slab-like, with ranges of lower blocks of maisonettes and terraces of houses the L.C.C. has provided—piecemeal at least—examples of mid-twentieth-century urbanism more impressive than anything the New Towns yet offered. A provincial English example of comparable excellence is the Tile Hill Estate outside Coventry by the Borough Architect’s Office.

The forty-eight slabs of the Cerro Piloto development of 1955 built by the Banco Obrero, the Venezuelan public housing corporation, and designed by Guido Bermudez (b. 1925), rising against the mountains outside Caracas more than rival in extent and in scale the English examples. And in the Cerro Grande blocks of flats there, built in 1953-5, Bermudez rivalled the ingenuity of Powell & Moya and the L.C.C. in the use of duplexes. Interesting for the mixture of types—tall slabs, lower blocks of flats, and houses—is the Centro Urbano Presidente Juarez in Mexico City by Mario Pani (b. 1901); the handsome colours used here were chosen by the painter Carlos Mérida. But the most exemplary of the Latin American estates is Pedregulho outside Rio de Janeiro begun in 1948 by Affonso Eduardo Reidy (b. 1909). Here the tall serpentine block at the rear is entered at middle level from the hill slope, a scheme suggested by certain of Le Corbusier’s projects of the thirties for North Africa, and various community buildings provide something of New Town character in the development, as does a range of low blocks with shops at their base in the Tile Hill Estate at Coventry. Most notable is Reidy’s school at Pedregulho with its murals of azulejos—glazed tiles—by Cándido Portinari and its characteristic repertory of the architectural forms of the Cariocan School. Of that Reidy, a member of the original group who designed and built the Ministry of Education, was as much one of the founders as Oscar Niemeyer.

In the mid twentieth century, however, it is England that leads in school design and construction even more definitely than in the design of tall housing blocks. In particular, the Hertfordshire County Architect’s Office under C. H. Aslin (1893-1959) developed a system of construction using a light-metal skeleton and prefabricated concrete slabs of very great technical interest. Not all the Hertfordshire schools are designed in the County Architect’s Office, however, and some of the best were by private architects, such as the Architects’ Co-partnership and James Cubitt & Partners (Plate 186A). The new architecture has been more widely and successfully used for schools than for most other types of buildings. Outside England those of Donald Barthelmé in Texas, such as his Elementary School at West Columbia of 1952, and by Ernest J. Kump (b. 1911) in California may be especially noted, although they represent no such concerted programme of design and construction as has spread in England from Hertfordshire to other parts of the country. Outright ‘traditional’ schools are rare anywhere today.

In church architecture the post-war situation was rather different. Although Perret and Wright, Moser and Böhm, among the older generation of modern architects, all built notable churches, until Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp the international leaders of the next generation were rarely called on to design them; and from Oud’s church of the late twenties at Oud Mathenesse through Mies’s Chapel of 1950 at the Illinois Institute of Technology it seemed that the extreme rationalism of these men made it difficult if not impossible for them to provide ecclesiastical edifices which differed in any expressive way from meeting-halls. Something was said earlier of the more emotional concrete-vaulted church architecture of Böhm and the line of related advance in the last two decades from the semi-traditional, somewhat Gothic or Baroque, effects of the twenties to work of completely original character. Niemeyer’s São Francisco at Pampulha (Plate 190C), completed in 1943, was one of the buildings that early established his reputation as one of the most imaginative architects of his generation anywhere in the world. Soon Latin American churches as different as Candela’s Nuestra Señora de los Milagros in Mexico City and the unvaulted Beato Martín Porres at Cataño outside San Juan in Puerto Rico by Henry Klumb (b. 1905), a pupil of Wright, were illustrating a wider range of possibilities; while Juvenal Moya’s Nuestra Señora de Fatimá and his chapel at the Ginnásio Moderno in Bogotá, the one of 1953-4, the other of 1954-5, followed—with considerable vulgarization—the more lyrical line of Niemeyer’s São Francisco.

Less operatic, but doubtless better adapted to Protestant use, are the churches in the American Northwest by Belluschi, notably the First Presbyterian of 1951 at Cottage Grove in Oregon. Various Swiss churches, some Catholic but more of them Protestant, followed also in this line, to which such earlier-mentioned churches as Moser’s Sankt Antonius in Basel of 1927 and the elder Saarinen’s Christ Lutheran, Minneapolis, of 1948 belong (Plate 157B). The younger Saarinen’s silo-like circular chapel of red brick at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of 1954-5, however, reverted to something much more emotional. There is great ingenuity in the handling of the lighting, which streams down from above over a screen by Harry Bertoia and also penetrates more subtly round the edges of the low-arched base through the water of a surrounding moat.

Johnson’s synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., of 1955-6, while severe in its general character, uses coloured glass in slots between the vertical slabs with which the visible steel frame is filled and also a curved awning-like ceiling of plaster to warm and enrich the basically Miesian paradigm. Accessories by the sculptor Ibrahim Lassaw also play an important part in the interior; while the oval domed entrance vestibule is an element of almost Baroque formal interest despite its ascetic simplicity of execution. Thus, two Mies disciples have offered in their ecclesiastical work correctives to the classroom-like coldness of his own chapel in Chicago.

Such large-scale constructions as factories and tall housing blocks, together with skyscrapers, represent the new architecture’s preoccupation with building problems that the nineteenth century had already essayed, but of which the development was not carried to its logical extremes, either technically or architecturally, before the present period. Curiously enough, in the provision of new edifices to serve the needs of transportation, the nineteenth century in its middle decades was rather more successful in bringing the railway station to quite early maturity than was the twentieth century with the airport. One of the largest and finest post-war buildings of Italy is the Rome railway station (Plate 183B), and within a few years the active campaign of modernizing and rebuilding stations in Italy was notably reflected in other European countries. But airports had still to find so satisfactory an expression, partly because the expansion of traffic everywhere made them inadequate almost before they were completed. Too often the necessity for continual extension has destroyed such integrity of conception as the architects were able to give them in the first place. Some of the world’s busiest, such as Idlewild near New York and Midway near Chicago, were through the nineteen fifties near-shambles beside which century-old railway stations appeared as masterpieces of up-to-date organization! Here, as in many other fields of contemporary building, there seem to be two main lines of approach, but not properly to be distinguished as ‘rational’ versus ‘emotional’, since both are almost entirely dependent on the structural solutions chosen. Of the first sort a relatively early example (which now carries only local traffic and has therefore not had to be expanded), the Santos Dumont Airport by the Roberto brothers begun in 1938 and largely completed after 1944 at the bay’s edge in downtown Rio de Janeiro, remains one of the best; for it is compactly planned, clear and direct in design, and elegant in the choice of materials and the use of colour. The San Juan Airport completed in 1955 by Torro, Ferrer & Torregrossa[543] in Puerto Rico is larger and somewhat less refined in detail, but an excellent example of planning in terms of circulation. The vast London Airport by Gibberd was still incomplete.

Two other airports of much the same date, the very large one at St Louis by Minoru Yamasaki (b. 1912) and Joseph W. Leinweber, and the small one by Pani and his partner Enrique del Moral at Acapulco, used concrete shell vaults with very dramatic effect. It would seem that the ‘classic’ stage of airport design, reached in railway stations between 1845 and 1855, was only beginning in the late fifties, and its climax may well lie many years ahead.

From the airport to the individual dwelling, from the newest sort of structure to what is presumably the oldest, represents a considerable jump. Yet it is at least debatable whether the best houses of the mid twentieth century, continuing a line of development that has earlier been traced forward from 1800 (see Chapter 15), were not more satisfactory solutions of the problems their designing and building poses, both practically and aesthetically, than any of the airports mentioned. To a considerable extent they were as novel.[544] The dwelling may not, in the years after 1925, have developed primarily as a ‘machine for living in’, according to Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, but it certainly became more and more a ‘box for housing machinery in’. As the relative proportion of the total cost spent for mechanical equipment went up, the shell had to shrink. As the shell shrank, planning was increasingly simplified. Only rarely was the ultimate in unification of space reached, as in Mies’s Farnsworth house or Philip Johnson’s own house in New Canaan, Conn., where only the bathroom is enclosed and the other subdivisions of the interior are but ranges of cupboards not reaching to the ceiling. Equally rare is the exclusively glass walling of these two houses, clearly the extreme point of a crescendo that goes back at least to the window-walls of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But if they represented the end-point of several developments, from which there has since been a return even on the part of their own architects (Plate 190A), the extremes that they illustrate were in many respects those towards which houses in general were then tending.

The house as a detached, individually-designed edifice was still for most people the ideal dwelling. But at no time since 1800 had such a dwelling been more of a luxury. Convenience and economy drove rich and poor alike towards more communal forms of habitation, whether they were the cabañas of the millionaires’ motels at Palm Springs or the low-cost flats in suburban ‘point-blocks’. In between these poles were all the varieties of terrace-housing, ‘semi-detachery’, and builders’ standardized products, ranging from conservative parodies of the individually designed houses of a generation ago through various vulgarizations of more modern houses to the prefabricated package-dwelling which seemed to be no nearer to receiving that general acceptance which would make it economical than it was a hundred years ago. Mass housing, no matter what form it took, whether the forty-eight tall slabs of the Cerro Piloto or the forty-eight hundred, more or less, semi-detached two-storey dwellings of an English housing estate, belongs increasingly to the world of bureaucratized architecture. The house, on the other hand, conceived as an individualized entity, remained almost as much a specialized and exceptional product as the church; yet the changes first made in individual houses gradually affected all housing standards. Particularly in North and South America they still provided architectural opportunities of the greatest interest and variety. Most Latin American houses, for example, retained the semi-oriental ideals of seclusion of the Iberian tradition; yet behind the walls surrounding their plots to cut out the world, they were often opener than houses in the United States, since a warm climate makes of the patio or garden the principal living area. Niemeyer’s own house of 1954 at Gávea outside Rio de Janeiro is almost as much a glass box as Mies’s or Johnson’s, although its glass walls are set under a slab whose outline is a continuous free curve. The house of Osvaldo Arthur Bratke (b. 1907) at 3008 Avenida Morumbí outside São Paulo is also closer in plan and conception to houses in the United States, protection of various sorts being provided by grilles and movable shutters (Figure 56).

There was considerable variety in mid-century house-design in Latin America, ranging all the way from such Mexican houses as those of Francisco Artigas (b. 1916) or Sordo Madaleno that present a blank wall to the street and yet open up completely to a patio or a garden, to Niemeyer’s open pavilion at Gávea. In North America there was perhaps even wider diversity. Despite the equalization of climate by then readily provided by heating and cooling facilities, there were still great differences between one region and another in the forces of nature that must be controlled or protected against, from the insects and hurricanes of Florida to the blizzards of Minnesota, than between the various countries of Latin America. Johnson’s Davis house at Wayzata in Minnesota was enclosed, however, not because of the climate, but in order to provide hanging space for an art collection, while it opens within on to a patio that can be roofed in winter (Figure 57). Neither screening nor anchorage against high winds is conspicuous in the design of most of the Florida houses of Paul Rudolph (b. 1918). On the West Coast the aberrant casualness of the Bay Region manner of the thirties and forties now became increasingly disciplined. Wooden construction, pitched roofs, and a certain discursiveness of planning still contrasted, however, with more rigidly Miesian design; yet the finest houses of Joseph Esherick in and around San Francisco or of John Yeon in Portland, Ore., to mention only two West Coast architects, sometimes rivalled in distinction those of Johnson and Rudolph.

Whether the building of individual houses in other countries will ever again have the significance it still retains in the New World depends on many extra-architectural factors. The last thing a historian should pretend with regard to this or to any other aspect of the near-present is that he is capable of prophecy. The history of architecture in the second half of this century can only be written in the future. The glimpses—for they are no more than that—of post-war production given here represent a critic’s and not an historian’s selection, and a selection that has inevitably been much influenced by what that critic knows best at first hand.

* * * * *

Despite the obligation to provide in the Introduction some sort of eighteenth-century foundation, this book had a real historical turning-point for its actual beginning; it had, in the mid 1950s, no such point at which to end. From Wright, near ninety, to men two generations younger, some of whom have been mentioned in this chapter, the work of the architects of the western world showed then no convincing evidence of a major and general turn, however surprising in the light of his work of the twenties Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp might seem. We stopped in mid-stream and even the Epilogue which follows can provide no true peroration. Fortunately the contemporary history of architecture is being recorded more promptly and completely than ever before in the professional press. It does not seem necessary to footnote this chapter or the Epilogue with references to periodicals when every issue of the principal journals inevitably includes material illustrative of current production throughout the world. Yet when one leaves the world of history for the world of ‘current events’, the time has come to turn from books to periodicals. In the Bibliography there are naturally few ‘monographs’—i.e. books or summary articles—devoted to the men first mentioned in this chapter, since many of them were still at the outset of their careers.[545]

From Papworth’s ‘Cottage Orné’ (Plate 122A) to the slabs of Loughborough Road (Plate 186B)—’model’ dwellings both; from the Bank of England to Thyssen Haus (Plate 191), both housing business as it was never housed before the period with which this book deals; from Baltimore Cathedral (Plate 5) to Notre-Dame-du-Haut (Plate 167), the range of notable achievement recorded in this book is not readily outranked in variety by any other hundred-and-fifty-year period in the history of the western world. As to the absolute quality of that achievement, as distinguished from what may be called the ‘plot’-interest of various relatively coherent developments continuing over the last century and a half, it requires a very catholic taste indeed even to pretend to pronounce. The ‘revivals’ of the nineteenth century and the ‘traditionalism’ of the twentieth century accepted the dangerous challenge of meeting the earlier past on its own ground, and this in itself is enough to reduce the absolute value of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century production. Yet there were renaissances long before there were revivals; and at almost any given moment of the past most production has been the equivalent in stylistic retardation of the traditional architecture of the twentieth century. If one must have originality, these hundred and fifty years have not lacked it, from Ledoux and Soane to Gaudí and Wright. Of the hundreds of names mentioned in these twenty-five chapters there are few doubtless equal to Bramante or to Bernini, but how many were there in the preceding hundred and fifty years? while the variety of approach represented, from a Schinkel to a Le Corbusier, from a Butterfield to a Mies, is hardly to be equalled in any comparable period of history. Above all, this is the stage of architectural history that lies between the unhallowed present and the hallowed past, between the cultural certainties—if they were so certain—of the eighteenth century and the cultural anxieties of the present. What we are we can only hope to understand by exploring the immediate ancestry of our own present. Only revivalists could afford to denigrate and ignore all that lay between them and some ‘golden age’ they sought to emulate. The future must build upon the foundations—so very various, so often nearly contradictory—of the architecture of the last hundred and fifty years.

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Epilogue

THE five years since the original edition of this book appeared have seen a building boom throughout the western world such as has rarely been equalled in other post-war periods; nor has this boom been confined to those countries of Europe and the Americas with which this account has chiefly been concerned. These have also been years of continuing—indeed increasing—uncertainty in architectural doctrine. As might have been expected, various tendencies already touched on in the preceding chapter—both positive (although often apparently reactionary) tendencies towards greater individuality, and negative or, at least in the present context, conservative tendencies towards somewhat tired repetition of pre-war clichés—have not only continued but become much stronger. The tonality of the over-all picture of current architectural production has by now definitely changed. That relative balance between what may, at their best, be called the Miesian and the Corbusian, still maintained almost everywhere in the mid fifties, had by the early sixties been upset. In hindsight, for example, it must now seem that such mature and established architects as the Finnish Alvar Aalto and the American Louis Kahn were inadequately treated in previous chapters—not to speak of such still older men whose activity has continued or been renewed as the Germans Hans Scharoun and the late Rudolf Schwarz. Various new names call for attention also: the Dutchman Aldo van Eyck, for example, the Norwegian Sverre Fehn, the Japanese Tange and Maekawa, the Italian Viganò, and the English firm of Stirling & Gowan, to mention but a few that were all but unknown internationally in the mid fifties whose work is now of rising consequence.

For all the evidences of change, it is almost as difficult as it was five years ago to isolate the common denominator of the new tendencies except in negative terms. It is still easier to be explicit about what architects are moving away from—what they are rejecting—than whither they are headed. Any attempt in a few words to describe positively the present architectural climate faces the difficulty that only in certain extreme works are novel architectural ideals and ideas wholly dominant; while by no means all the current building that does not follow in the newer directions, either by older architects such as Mies himself or by those who have stayed faithful to his canons—whether intentionally or by default of any alternative allegiance—can yet be dismissed as merely vulgar, provincial, or retardataire.

The rejection of the advanced doctrines of the 1920s and 1930s has rarely been total. The assumption of some writers, moreover, that there has yet been any serious and concerted return to Beaux-Arts or other pre-modern standards is, as regards the attitude of most mature architects—even those who actually have such backgrounds—still something of an exaggeration. On the other hand, the current sensibilities to which architects such as Aalto and Kahn, at least, have been successfully appealing—and in Aalto’s case for some twenty-five years already—are certainly very different from the sensibilities that once responded to the crisp geometries, the smooth surfaces, the glass walls, and the minimal detailing of the Bauhaus (Plate 161A), the Savoye house (Plate 159), and the Barcelona Pavilion (Plate 165A). ‘Neo-Brutalism’, or brutalismo, is as dangerous a term to use indiscriminately as any other critical catchword that has been prematurely popularized. But it does suggest, at least by a play upon words in several languages, a current climate of taste which favours béton brut—naked concrete—and rough, usually rather dark-coloured, materials. Bricks, pre-cast slabs with a coarse aggregate in relief, or even stone masonry of rubble or quarry-faced granite, with rather heavy trim of raw or varnished wood and wrought iron, are widely preferred to the slicker, more highly finished elements that are the natural product of the increasing industrialization of the building crafts. But this is literally superficial.

Associated with the notable shift of preference as regards the texture of the skin, so to say, of buildings there has been a comparable rise of interest in broken silhouettes, uneven skylines, masses that are articulated rather than unified, and expressive exposure of individual structural elements, themselves often sculptural rather than mechanistic in character. This has affected in varying degree the work of almost all architects from the most Corbusian to the most Miesian. Windows, moreover, tend to be fewer and smaller, and their shapes are very likely to be vertical rather than horizontal, slots instead of ribbons. So also plans now emphasize the particularity of various internal functions and over-all organization tends towards additive compilation of contiguous spatial units, in some cases equal or modular, in others disparate in both size and shape. All this would once have been disapproved by most critics as under-studied, not to say amateurish, before Aalto’s mature work became a major international influence (Plates 173B and 182A). There is surely some reflection of the painting and the sculpture of the past decade, even perhaps of its most advanced music, in the apparent intention to suggest freehand improvisation and randomness in an art whose works, however their designing may have been initiated, are necessarily in the end products of relatively long periods of preparatory study and of complex collaborative execution.

Yet to hazard such statements as these, even though they have long applied to much of the work of Aalto and are now true in varying degree of the production of architects as different in many basic ways as the Frenchman Guillaume Gillet or the Italian Franco Albini, is to be reminded of the prevalence of another kind of interest in more elaborate effects of detail—often denigrated as merely decorative—that is being exploited not only by such well-established architects as the Americans Edward Stone or Minoru Yamasaki, on the one hand, and by the German Egon Eiermann, on the other—otherwise quite opposed as a result of their very different training, experience, and personal dispositions—but by many others from Latin America to Asia and Africa.

Perhaps it may be said in very simple terms that what is widely recognized as the newest architecture has two aspects, one exaggeratedly masculine, the other almost daintily feminine. Both are in some cases to be found illustrated, in a curious kind of rhythmic alternation, by successive works of the same architect; both contrast with the neutral severity of the architecture of the immediately preceding period. Yet both clearly have their half-admitted precedents in the varied and even contradictory work over many decades of Frank Lloyd Wright and that of the Expressionists forty years and more ago.

Even if it could be accepted, for the moment, that these two tendencies represent the whole story, few would be impartial enough to admit that they are equally characteristic of the more serious architectural production of the present. Thanks to a revival of near-Puritanical asceticism in some quarters, sharply contrasting with the readiness in others to beguile with somewhat saccharine ‘beauty’, the more masculine aspect has been presented as superior morally and even as more ‘advanced’; for there are still those ready, as in the 1920s and 1930s, to plead near-Hegelian necessities for one or another direction in which architecture may be moving, necessities that are often in patent opposition to the actual pressures from the aesthetically neutral realm of technology.

But the two aspects so far noted do not, in any case, even suggest the full complexity of the present situation. A third, not necessarily related to the other two yet also, possibly, subsuming both, is more evident to historians than it is to most architects. Admitting the danger of pressing analogies with the morphology of earlier periods—the Gothic, say, or the Renaissance—there is at least a presumption that what we have known as ‘modern architecture’ is (rather prematurely, it must seem) already in a ‘late’ phase. Recurrent in late phases there have usually been two distinguishable but often closely related aspects of academicism: a return towards principles that dominated the arts before the stylistic revolution with which the particular cycle began, on the one hand, and on the other the reduction to an easily applied system of formal elements of the painfully evolved features that were peculiar to the preceding ‘high’ phase.

But reaction, to give this aspect of the current architectural scene an unnecessarily denigratory name, is quite likely in particular instances to be more due to the special circumstances of the current building boom than to any hypothetical life-pattern of modern architecture. In the first half of the twentieth century economic influences were supposed, at least, to favour both technological advance in the building sciences and, concommitantly, ‘advanced’ design in the aesthetic sense. Not always, however, were the theoretical economies actually realized—or not, at any rate, before considerable time had passed—and ‘advanced’ design often proved in practice not only expensive but physically uncomfortable. Then other kinds of technological development, by setting up even more expensive new standards of amenity, notably in such things as vertical transport, glare-control, and air conditioning, were already cancelling out the economies that mechanized methods of large-scale production were eventually making real. At the same time the inherent practical difficulties of such things as all-glass walls and completely open plans were increasingly realized as they were ever more generally and uncritically exploited. By the 1960s some of the technical improvements in building advocated since the 1920s, notably in the field of partial prefabrication and prefabrication of larger and larger components—whole sides of houses and flats, for example—had become widely viable, not to speak of new materials and structural methods that made certain features relatively easy and inexpensive to provide. Yet total prefabrication of dwelling units was remoter from realization—except in mobile units such as caravans—than a quarter of a century earlier, in part because the public’s willingness to accept the results of partial mechanization of house-production seemed actually, in many countries, to have diminished.

The major building problems of the post-war world were not and still are not the production of individual monuments: opera houses, churches, stadia, and the like, on which professional as well as public attention has tended to focus and for which drastically new kinds of architectural expression can most readily be invented. What has been more significant are the large-scale reconstruction of bombed or blighted cities, the rehousing of very considerable segments of the population, and the provision of the manufacturing facilities, the offices, and the stores required by greater industrial, financial, and commercial activity. Inevitably, in a boom period, the very large volume of production over large sectors of the total range of building has led, in such work, to a sort of stasis in stylistic development. A vast amount of architectural energy everywhere must go into the mere carrying out of unprecedentedly extensive plans the major decisions for which were made as many as ten or fifteen years ago. An inertial lag is very evident wherever large urban areas, whether cleared twenty years ago by bombing or in the last few years by schemes of urban renewal, have been or are being rebuilt. Large parts of the world outside North America, moreover, are only now first learning how to build very tall structures and hardly yet ready to modify creatively what they have just learned to do at all.

The last decade, and particularly the last five years, have seen the production of a great part of the urban and suburban settings in which we will probably be living for the rest of this century, and doubtless well into the next. Somewhat as the post-Napoleonic period carried out at an ever lower level of quality the ambitions and aspirations of the revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, so in the post-war years—and particularly the last five—there has come about the realization of many urbanistic ideals that once seemed fantastic or Utopian when they were first proposed some forty years ago. Inevitably there has been a diminution of visual interest when certain modes of design, first adumbrated in a few unique individual structures or in relatively modest housing projects in the 1920s by architects of intense conviction and high inventive power, have been applied wholesale, almost as clichés, by countless other men, usually much less able and less dedicated, throughout the whole world. Moreover, serious errors in the original ideals, perhaps only recognizable as those ideals came to large-scale actuality, have been discovered and denounced. To some critics certain earlier urban conditions, against whose vices those ideals were first invoked as correctives, have come to seem, by nostalgia, preferable in various human ways to the ‘brave new world’ of the 1920s which has, to such a surprising extent, become the real world of the 1960s.

But the reaction against the International Style, thus to describe in over-simplified form what seems to be the consensus of many of the changes of attitude in the last years, is by no means as yet a counter-revolution. If the canons of the permissible and the desirable have been broadened by current theory and practice towards various aspects of what may still be called the traditional—including, as by now also traditional, much that was common to various pre- or extra-international Style aspects of earlier modern architecture—certain of the presuppositions of the most advanced architects of the 1920s still seem, though usually in revised form, quite as forward-looking as ever. For the rather limited aspects of function recognized by the Functionalists (if there ever were architects truly meriting that name), for example, far more sophisticated conceptions of function have come to be accepted by most architects whose fields of work are not industrial or commercial.

Yet some engineers—the Italian Nervi, whose practice has become international in scope, the late Spaniard Torroja, the Mexican Candela, the Danish Arup, and the American Fuller, to mention but a few of the best known—have today reputations throughout the architectural profession, and even with the public, which neither the Swiss Maillart nor the lately deceased Frenchman Freyssinet had in their heyday half a century ago. None the less architecture is not more largely in the hands of the engineers today than it was earlier despite many prognoses, both pessimistic and optimistic, that the engineers are, or should be, taking over. Moreover the architectural quality, as distinguished from the technical ingenuity, of the works of the great engineers is often as notable as is that of those buildings by certain architects in which engineering principles are dominant such as Eero Saarinen’s Chantilly airport (Plate 190B).

These paragraphs have necessarily been of the most general nature and critical rather than historical. Properly they should be illustrated by a considerable body of carefully described photographs, plans, and sections such as fortunately can be found in several current books covering either the whole world, or single countries, individual architects, or particular types of building. Some of the most useful of those that had appeared by the summer of 1962 will be found among the additions to the Bibliography. The few plates that it has been possible to add in this new edition cannot hope to present a conspectus of the various aspects of the current situation that have been at least mentioned in this Epilogue. But the plates of the Seagram Building (Plate 192) and the Guggenheim Museum (Plate 188A and B) may serve as a reminder that some of the dichotomies of the third quarter of this century in architecture could, in the late 1950s, be almost as well illustrated in the work of long-recognized masters of architecture as in that of men a generation or more younger. The illustrations of the work of Aalto, work actually of an earlier date, show clearly whence one of the winds of influence has for some time been blowing; while the plate of Japanese buildings (Plate 187) in contrast to the Thyssen Haus (Plate 191), illustrate the international Corbusian and the international Miesian of these last years at levels that are notably high, both in the size and prominence of the structures and, what is more important, in intrinsic quality.

Throughout its length this book has been less concerned with urbanism, with the architectural macrocosm, than with individual buildings; nor, for that matter, can photographs give the feeling of the newly rebuilt central and peripheral areas of our cities even as well as for the nineteenth century. The character of the Ludwigstrasse (Plate 10B) or the Place de l’Opéra (Plate 70C) can be fairly well apprehended from photographs; Park Avenue above the Grand Central Station, as rebuilt beginning with Lever House (Plate 189) in the last decade, or the cities, as distinguished from the individual public monuments, of Chandigarh and Brasilia—or even Cumbernauld in Scotland or Vållingby in Sweden—cannot.

Despite all the confusion of architectural doctrine in the early 1960s, despite the vast areas of undistinguished and even manifestly bad building, these last years have seen their share of new masterworks, or at least of structures which in our present myopic view have already been accepted as such. Yet, on the negative side, several of the older leaders have left us: Wright, Freyssinet, Torroja, Skidmore, Schwarz, and, alas, a few rather younger men as well: Yorke in England, for example, and in America Eero Saarinen.

Saarinen’s work, since the General Motors Technical Institute completed in 1955 and illustrated here (Figure 55; Plate 168B) which was so very Miesian, came by the late 1950s to epitomize the variety, not to say the incoherence, of the ambitions of many architects throughout the world in those years. Happily, after a mature career which lasted only eleven years compared to his father Eliel’s fifty, his contribution to American, indeed to world, architecture, culminated in two works, his colleges at Yale (Plate 185B) and his airport outside Washington (Plate 190B) that in their differing, even apparently opposed, ways express many of the aspirations of our day at as high a level, perhaps, as earlier modern architecture ever reached except in the greatest works of Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies. But what make Eero Saarinen in retrospect the typical architect of the late fifties and early sixties are, on the one hand, his Miesian beginnings, in sharp reaction to his father’s half-traditional romanticism, and on the other the fact that his oeuvre included many works which in their wilfulness and even, one may say, their frivolity were well below the median standards of serious achievement in those years. Thus he stood, to an extent not always realized in his brief lifetime when the kaleidoscopic diversity of his buildings dazzled those it did not shock, at the centre of his age. His remarkably successful career, remarkable even in a period—so unlike several of the earlier decades of this century—when few architects of quality, even the most ascetic or most fanciful, were wholly without employment, made plain one of the central facts about these last few years: that the style or movement we call ‘modern architecture’ had in many, perhaps in most, countries achieved such total acceptance that clients were willing, almost too willing, to trust their architects in whatever novel direction they might wish to move, in terms of structure, of materials, and of either asceticism or decorative elaboration, not to speak of philosophical content.

Remembering the extraordinary new developments in architecture that were under way in the 1760s two hundred years ago in the period with which the Introduction has dealt, the historian can only end by wondering whether in the welter of innovation of the last few years there lie somewhere the particular seeds from which the architecture of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries will grow; whether, to use another dubious historical analogy, the stylistic development of this quarter of our century corresponds to the Mannerism of the central decades of the sixteenth century in Italy. May we look forward, towards 2000 perhaps, to some such immanent movement, at once a synthesis of many preceding technical and stylistic innovations and a return to some at least of the principles of the preceding ‘high’ phase, yet above all a vital new creation with a life-expectancy of a hundred years and more, as was the Baroque around 1600? From the latest Baroque Western European architecture turned away two centuries ago; to the Baroque, in any revivalistic sense, it is hardly likely to return. Yet after the ever-increasing divergencies, which have been as characteristic of the mid century as convergence was of twentieth-century architecture down to the 1930s, will we—perhaps before another decade has passed—begin to sense the beginnings of a new synthesis?

Today, the problem must be posed in world terms. So far Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa have, on the whole, been learners and disciples of the West. Will the countries of Eastern Europe and the new countries of Asia and Africa soon be making contributions towards a new world-style, such as in the last few decades first the North Americans, then the Latin Americans, and now the Japanese have made? Will the history of Western European architecture continue to be the principal story (which thanks to political conditions has been largely true up to the present) or will the Western European tradition, to which this volume has been almost completely devoted, become in the succeeding period somewhat peripheral and even alien to a basically changed situation in which under-developed countries will increasingly, as they come of age, tend to throw off cultural tutelage as they have mostly already thrown off political tutelage?

The Brazilians could design and build in these last years Brasilia by themselves as well, perhaps better than Europeans or North Americans—above all, certainly, the architects of their own Portuguese homeland—could have built it for them. The Indians, on the other hand, have employed Le Corbusier and other Europeans, and the Iraqis have assigned the designing and building of their University to an American firm headed by an architect of German origin. The Japanese, who are in this respect already at the forefront, had employed Wright half a century ago for the Imperial Hotel; today it may perhaps be said that their own best work is superior to the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo whose designs they obtained from Le Corbusier. Yet current Japanese architecture is not and is not intended to be—witness the foreign-language editions of two of their architectural periodicals—outside the tradition of Western European architecture; indeed, it represents the latest notable contribution to that architecture with which this book has hitherto dealt. It is appropriate, therefore, that the roster of plates in this book, which began with buildings conceived—in effect at least—in Rome and built in France, in England, and even in North America, should end with buildings built in Asia following principles first adumbrated by a Swiss in France. The later eighteenth century turned inward in architecture towards the Rome and the Greece that were at the fountain-head of the Western European tradition; today we should perhaps be turning outward towards the new non-European world which is still in the mid twentieth century, in architecture as in so much else, the child of Europe. Symbolically, at least, the best hope of a new architectural synthesis in the decades to come may lie in this fact; so that later histories of twentieth-century architecture will perhaps give as much attention and space to India or to some of the new African states as little Holland or vast North America have received in this account of the architecture of the last two hundred years.

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NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION - Notes

Footnote 1:

Sigfried Giedion introduced this term in his Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus in 1922 and provided an extended discussion of the concept. Fiske Kimball first used the term in English in his article ‘Romantic Classicism in Architecture’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XXV (1944), 95-112.

Footnote 2:

See Hautecœur, L., Rome et la renaissance de l’antiquité à la fin du XVIII^e siècle, Paris, 1912. However, the deeper background of theory was French, not Roman. Unhappily the brevity with which this whole matter must be treated here, where it is merely prefatory to an account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, makes it impossible to discuss such French theorists of the early eighteenth century as J.-F. Félibien (1656-1733), A.-L. Cordemoy, and A.-F. Frézier (1682-1773); even Laugier appears somewhat out of context, since he was active not in Rome but in France. Hautecœur in Histoire de l’architecture classique, vols III and IV, and Kaufmann in Architecture in the Age of Reason—particularly in Chapter XI—elaborate this background of theory in France centring round the Cours d’architecture ..., Paris, 1770-7, of J.-F. Blondel (1705-74).

Footnote 3:

See Harris, J., ‘Robert Mylne at the Academy of St Luke’, Architectural Review, CXXX (1951), 341-52.

Footnote 4:

Monographs on major architects will be found listed alphabetically by architect in the Bibliography and are not referenced from the text.

Footnote 5:

The changing attitudes towards the Greek Doric order provide a measure of the rise of Romantic Classicism. It is noteworthy that Soufflot was one of the first to make drawings of the very archaic Doric of Paestum, but it never occurred to him to emulate it in his own work. See Pevsner, N., and Lang, S., ‘Apollo or Baboon’, Architectural Review, CIV (1948), 271-9.

Footnote 6:

Winckelmann’s major work is the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 2 vols, Dresden, 1764.

Footnote 7:

Interest in Egyptian forms can be traced all the way back through the Baroque period to the early Renaissance, but it undoubtedly increased after 1750 and lasted well into the next century. See Pevsner, N., and Lang, S., ‘The Egyptian Revival’, Architectural Review, CXIX (1956), 242-54. For a remarkable, rather late (1838-41) example of an ‘Egyptian’ mill, see Bonser, K. J., ‘Marshall’s Mill, Holbeck, Leeds’, Architectural Review, CXXVII (1960), 280-2. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century Egyptian forms were most likely to be used, especially in America, for prisons and cemetery accessories.

Footnote 8:

Adam studied, with the assistance of the French pensionnaire C.-L. Clérisseau (1722-1820), the Late Roman ruins of Diocletian’s Palace at Spalatro in 1757, and began his brilliant career in London two years later with the Admiralty Screen in Whitehall. See Adam, R., Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, London, 1764, and Fleming, J., Robert Adam and his Circle, London, 1962.

Footnote 9:

The present dome is a relatively late emendation; the original crowning feature was much less severe. Soufflot sent a pupil named Roche to London to make measured drawings of St Paul’s in 1776, the year before he prepared this design.

In general, the Panthéon appears much more Romantic Classical today than what Soufflot actually built. The towers which once rose over the corners of the portico—in any case disapproved by Soufflot—were removed by Antoine Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) in 1791, and he also filled up the windows that originally cut into the plain wall surfaces. The murals are all of the nineteenth century.

Footnote 10:

Actually many of the spans are much too great to be covered by single stones and the entablatures are really flat arches. There is also considerable use of iron.

Footnote 11:

See Petzet, M., Soufflot’s Sainte Geneviève und der französische Kirchenbau des 18. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1961.

Footnote 12:

See Rosenau, H., ‘George Dance the Younger’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, LIV (1947), 502-7. Even more significant of developing Romantic Classical taste at this point was the character of the designs in Peyre, M.-J., Livre sur l’architecture, Paris, 1765.

Footnote 13:

See Rosenau, H. (ed.), Boullée’s Treatise on Architecture, London, 1953; and Boullée, E.-L., Mémoire sur ... la Bibliothèque du Roi ..., [Paris] 1785.

Footnote 14:

This more classical arrangement was first proposed in the 1760s by Pierre Patte (1723-1814), a theorist in the Blondel tradition, on the analogy of Palladio’s theatre in Vicenza.

Footnote 15:

This is not true, however, of much of his executed work at Arc-et-Senans which has heavily plastic roofs of various shapes.

Footnote 16:

So did Friedrich Gilly in Germany and—according to Kaufmann—Valadier in Italy.

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1. Notes

Footnote 17:

See Steel, H. R., and Yerbury, F. R., The Old Bank of England, London, 1930, for photographic coverage of this monument of which the interiors were largely destroyed in the 1920s, and even the exterior considerably—and unnecessarily—modified (see Chapter 24).

Footnote 18:

See Britton, J., Illustrations of Fonthill Abbey, London, 1823; Rutter, J., An Illustrated History and Description of Fonthill Abbey, Shaftesbury, 1823; and Storer, J., A Description of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, London, 1812. The most extensive modern account of the building of Fonthill Abbey is given by Brockman, H. A. N., The Caliph of Fonthill, London [1956].

Footnote 19:

See Pevsner, N., ‘The Genesis of the Picturesque’, Architectural Review, XCVI (1944), 139-46, and Pevsner, N., ‘Richard Payne Knight’, Art Bulletin, XXXI (1949), 293-320.

Footnote 20:

Hussey in The Picturesque lists many of these books and gives good examples of their illustrations.

Footnote 21:

First, that is, in this period. The columnar Monument in the City of London by Robert Hooke, commemorating the Great Fire, dates from the 1670s.

Footnote 22:

See Telford, T., An Account of the Improvements of the Port of London, London, 1801. Splendid later examples also survive in Liverpool, built by the Corporation engineer Jesse Hartley (1780-1860); see Waldron, J., ‘Measured Drawings of the Albert Dock Warehouses in Liverpool’, Architectural History, IV (1961), 103-16.

Footnote 23:

See Kimball, F., Thomas Jefferson and the First Monument of the Classic Revival in America, Harrisburg, 1915.

Footnote 24:

See Kimball, F., ‘The Genesis of the White House’, Century Magazine, February 1918.

Footnote 25:

See Brown, G., History of the United States Capitol, 2 vols, Washington, 1900-3.

Footnote 26:

See Kimball, F., ‘Origin of the Plan of Washington, D.C.’, Architectural Review (New York), VII (1918), 41-5; and Kite, E., L’Enfant and Washington, Baltimore, 1929.

Footnote 27:

See Davison, C. V., ‘Maximilien and Eliza Godefroy’, ‘Maximilien Godefroy’, Maryland Historical Magazine, March, September 1934.

Footnote 28:

See Alexander, R. L., ‘The Public Memorial and Godefroy’s Battle Monument’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVII (1958), 19-24.

Footnote 29:

See Hislop, C., and Larrabee, H. A., ‘Joseph-Jacques Ramée and the Building of North and South College’, Union College Alumni Monthly, February 1938.

Footnote 30:

The idea probably originated with Soufflot, who had earlier proposed a similar plan for the cathedral of Rennes.

Footnote 31:

See Blondel, J.-F., Plan, coupe, et élévations du nouveau marché Saint Germain, Paris, 1816, and Délespine, P.-J., Marché des Blancs Manteaux, Paris, 1827.

Footnote 32:

See Chierici, G., La Reggia di Caserta, Rome, 1937; and Mongiello, G., La Reggia di Caserta, Caserta, 1954.

Footnote 33:

See Hautecœur, L., L’Architecture classique à Saint Pétersbourg à la fin du XVIII^e siècle, Paris, 1912.

Footnote 34:

See Loukomski, G., Charles Cameron, London, 1943.

Footnote 35:

See Thomon, T. de, Recueil des principaux monuments construits à Saint Pétersbourg, Petersburg, 1806; repeated in his Traité de peinture, Paris, 1809; and Loukomski, G., ‘Thomas de Thomon’, Apollo, XLII (1945), 297 ff.

Footnote 36:

See Lancere, N., ‘Adrien Zakharov and the Admiralty at Petersburg’ (in Russian), Starye Gody, (1911), 3-64.

Footnote 37:

Kaufmann, who illustrates the Belanger project in Architecture in the Age of Reason, figure 169, dates it around 1808 on the ground that slaughterhouses first began to be built in Paris in that year. It is extremely unlikely, of course, that Hansen ever saw this project; but the similarity of his tower to Belanger’s indicates how closely he was in tune with his French contemporaries. In any case similar towers are to be found in the projects published by Durand in his Précis of 1802-5, which Hansen must have known (see Chapter 2).

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2. Notes

Footnote 38:

Allais and others, Projets d’architecture ... qui ont mérités les grands prix, Paris, 1806, and at different dates subsequently with varying authors and titles. For a collection of earlier projects, see Rosenau, H., ‘The Engravings of the Grand Prix of the French Academy of Architecture’, Architectural History, III (1960), 17-180, since the original publication is very rare.

Footnote 39:

Durand was already well known as the compiler of the Recueil et parallèle des édifices en tout genre, anciens et modernes, Paris, 1800, a curious work in which the drawings of important buildings of all periods are freely modified to bring them into conformity with the author’s modular theories of proportion. This is conventionally known as ‘Le grand Durand’.

Footnote 40:

Rondelet, J. B., Traité théorique et pratique de l’art de bâtir, 4 vols, Paris, 1802-17. There were several later editions. From 1806 Rondelet taught at the École Spéciale d’Architecture, which was shortly afterwards merged with the École Polytechnique.

Footnote 41:

French designs of this period for houses were provided in profusion in the publications of J. C. Krafft. See Krafft, J. C., and Ransonette, N., Plans, coupes, élévations des plus belles maisons et des hôtels construits à Paris et dans les environs, Paris [c. 1802]; reprint, Paris, 1909; and Krafft, J. C., Recueil d’architecture civile, Paris, 1812; later ed., 1829. Krafft, J. C., and Thiollet, F., Choix des plus jolies maisons de Paris et de ses environs, édifices et monuments publics, Paris, 1849, may also be mentioned here although very much later. It is significant of the international availability of the earliest work listed here that it was provided with texts in French, English, and German.

Footnote 42:

Klenze, L. von, Walhalla in artistischer und technischer Beziehung, Munich, 1842.

Footnote 43:

See Hitchcock, H.-R., Early Museum Architecture, Hartford, 1934.

Footnote 44:

Grandjean de Montigny, A.-H.-V., and Famin, A.-P.-Ste-M., Architecture toscane, Paris, 1815.

Footnote 45:

See Klenze, L. von, Anweisung der Architektur des christlichen Kultus, Munich, 1834.

Footnote 46:

See Möllinger, K., Elemente des Rundbogenstiles, 2nd ed., Munich, 1848. It is convenient to retain the German term for this very Germanic round-arched style, even though it flourished in several countries besides Germany (see below in this chapter for Scandinavia, and Chapter 5 for America).

Footnote 47:

See Hübsch, H., Die altchristlichen Kirchen nach den Baudenkmalen und älteren Beschreibungen, 2 vols, Karlsruhe, 1862-3.

Footnote 48:

Durand, Précis, II, plate 13.

Footnote 49:

See Häberlin, C. L., Sanssouci, Potsdam und Umgebung, Berlin and Potsdam, 1855; Poensgen, G., Die Bauten Friedrich Wilhelms IV in Potsdam, Potsdam, 1930; Huth, H., Der Park von Sanssouci, Berlin, 1929; Kania, H., Potsdamer Baukunst, Berlin, 1926; Potsdam. Staats- und Bürgerbauten, Berlin, 1939; and Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Romantic Architecture of Potsdam’, International Studio, 99 (1931), 46-9.

Footnote 50:

See Sievers, J., Das Palais des Prinzen Karl von Preussen, Berlin, 1928.

Footnote 51:

Notably Séheult, F.-L., Recueil d’architecture dessiné et mesuré en Italie ... dans 1791-93, Paris, 1821.

Footnote 52:

See Persius, L., Architektonische Entwürfe für den Umbau vorhandener Gebäude, Potsdam, 1849; Architektonische Ausführungen, Berlin [1860?]; and Fleetwood Hesketh, R. and P., ‘Ludwig Persius of Potsdam’, Architects Journal, LXVIII (1928), 77-87, 113-20.

Footnote 53:

Ettlinger, L., ‘A German Architect’s Visit to England in 1826’, Architectural Review, XCVII (1945), 131-4.

Footnote 54:

See Poensgen, G., Schloss Babelsberg, Berlin, 1929.

Footnote 55:

See Frölich, M., and Sperlich, H. G., Georg Moller, Baumeister der Romantik, Darmstadt, 1959.

Footnote 56:

See Semper, G., Das königliche Hoftheater zu Dresden, Brunswick, 1849.

Footnote 57:

Gärtner’s design for the Palace owes a good deal to a project prepared by Klenze for a palace on the Kerameikos hill which was never begun. Fortunately Schinkel’s more ambitious project for a palace on the Akropolis was also not carried out.

The digging away of the ground, which originally sloped up to the Palace above the square, and the introduction in the 1930s of the present retaining wall with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier have diminished somewhat the effectiveness of the front of the Palace.

Footnote 58:

See Amodeo, A., ‘La Giovinezza di Pietro Nobile’, ‘La Maturità di Pietro Nobile’, L’Architettura, I (1955), 49-52; 378-84.

Footnote 59:

See Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, 1953.

Footnote 60:

See Hekker, H. C., ‘De Nederlandse Bouwkunst in het Begin van de Negentiende Eeuw’, Bulletin van de Kon. Ned. Oudh. Bond, IV (1951), 1-28.

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3. Notes

Footnote 61:

The idea for the two-towered façade is probably derived from a project of 1809 by Lebas, but could also come from Gisors’s Saint-Vincent in Mâcon of 1810.

Footnote 62:

Three pieces only of the enamelled lava decoration were put in place; owing to the ensuing outcry they were soon removed.

Footnote 63:

Hittorff and other architects of his generation such as Henri Labrouste and Duban, who supported his proposal to revive the external polychromy they had noted on the Classical temples of Sicily, were closer in fact to Ingres than to Delacroix. Ingres in 1828 backed Labrouste’s controversial rendering of the Paestum temples showing external colour. Duban, one of the first to introduce polychrome decoration—the plaques of enamelled lava used in the entrance courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts are his—was a close friend and on occasion a collaborator of Ingres. Hittorff collected paintings by Ingres and assisted him with the architectural backgrounds of his pictures, though that in the ‘Stratonice’, which gives perhaps the best idea of the sort of polychromy intended by these architects, was supplied by Victor Baltard.

Footnote 64:

Actually the original paintwork on the beams and panels of the vestibules of the Gare du Nord is still there, but so dulled and begrimed that one hardly notices it. To the twentieth century the remarkable roof of Hittorff’s Rotonde des Panoramas in the Champs Élysées of 1836 would be, if extant, of more interest, since it was suspended from iron cables.

Footnote 65:

As has been noted in Chapter 2, both de Chateauneuf and Meuron studied with Leclerc.

Footnote 66:

The history of this project is very complicated. As might be surmised from its character, a design was at one point prepared by Gilbert, the principal Louis Philippe architect for this sort of work. The actual construction of the Hôtel Dieu by Diet followed only after a decade of changes of plan, yet the executed work probably incorporates something of Gilbert’s design; in any case, what was built is still wholly in the spirit of Gilbert’s Louis Philippe work and not at all in that of the Second Empire (see Chapter 8). Diet was Gilbert’s son-in-law.

Footnote 67:

Begun by John Harvey, continued by Thomas Hardwick, and completed by Sir Robert Smirke.

Footnote 68:

See Venditti, A., Architettura neoclassica a Napoli, Naples, 1961.

Footnote 69:

See Missirini, M., Del Tempio eretto in Possagno da Antonio Canova, Venice, 1833. Some give credit to Selva, but not Bassi his biographer. See also Meeks, C. L. V., ‘Pantheon Paradigm’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 135-44.

Footnote 70:

See Falconetti, A., Il Caffè Pedrocchi, dagherrotipo artistico descrittivo, Padua, 1847; and Cimegotto, C., and others, [Centenary volume on the Caffè Pedrocchi], Padua, 1931.

Footnote 71:

See Montferrand, A.-R. de, L’Église cathédrale de Saint-Isaac, description architecturale, pittoresque, et historique, Saint-Pétersbourg, 1845.

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4. Notes

Footnote 72:

Many additions and changes in the house were made from 1816 on; a top storey and a Picture Room of 1825-6 behind No. 14 were the most consequential. See Soane, J., Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1832; enl. ed., 1835-6.

Footnote 73:

See Note [17], Chapter 1. The new interiors were built in 1818; the front and side façades were rebuilt in 1823.

Footnote 74:

St Pancras is really based on Gibbs’s St Martin’s-in-the-Fields as regards the exterior; but all the features have, so to say, been translated into the Greek of the Erechtheum. See Inwood, W. and H. W., St Pancras New Church. Specifications ..., London, 1819; and Inwood, H. W., The Erechtheion at Athens, London, 1827.

Footnote 75:

See Smith, H. C., Buckingham Palace, London, 1931.

The palatial character of Cumberland Terrace is due to the fact that it faced the site of an intended summer palace in the Park planned for George IV but never even begun.

Footnote 76:

See Pevsner, N., ‘British Museum 1753-1953’, Architectural Review, CXIII (1953), 179-82.

Footnote 77:

See Rolt, L. T. C., George and Robert Stephenson, London, 1960.

Footnote 78:

See Fort, M., ‘Francis Goodwin, 1784-1835’, Architectural History, I (1958), 61-72.

Footnote 79:

See Whiffen, M., The Architecture of Sir Charles Barry in Manchester and Neighbourhood, Manchester, 1950.

Footnote 80:

See Dobson, J. J., Memoir of John Dobson, London, 1885.

Footnote 81:

In one sense the Baths of Caracalla provided Elmes’s model, since the size of the great interior there was intentionally exceeded here; in another sense, this was a grandiose development of Wren’s relatively modest interior of St James’s, Piccadilly. Just as Gibbs was translated into Greek by the Inwoods at St Pancras’, Wren was translated into Latin here, but with less precision of vocabulary.

Footnote 82:

See Parker, C., Villa Rustica, 3 vols, London, 1832, 1833, 1841; 2nd ed., London, 1848.

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5. Notes

Footnote 83:

When railway stations were needed in Brazil after the mid century they were actually imported, in prefabricated iron, from England.

Footnote 84:

See Haviland, J. A Description of Haviland’s Design for the New Penitentiary ..., Philadelphia, 1824; Anon., A Description of the Eastern Penitentiary ..., Philadelphia, 1830; Crawford, W., Report on the Penitentiaries of the United States, London, 1834; Demetz, F.-A., and Blouet, A.-G., Rapport sur les penitenciers des États Unis, Paris, 1837; and Markus, T. A., ‘Pattern of the Law; Bentham’s Panopticon Scheme’, Architectural Review, CXVI (1954), 251-6.

Footnote 85:

See Haviland, J., The Builder’s Assistant, 3 vols, Philadelphia, 1818-21—the first to include plates of the Greek orders; 2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1830; Benjamin, A., The American Builder’s Companion, Boston, 1827 (the first edition is of 1806, but Greek orders were not included until this latest edition); The Practical House Carpenter, Boston, 1830, with later editions to 1857; Practice of Architecture, New York, 1833, with later editions to 1851; Elements of Architecture, Boston, 1843, 2nd ed., 1849; The Builder’s Guide, Boston, 1839, with later editions to the Civil War; Lafever, M., The Young Builder’s General Instructor, Newark, 1829; The Modern Builder’s Guide, New York, 1833, with later editions to 1855; The Beauties of Modern Architecture, New York, 1835, with later editions to 1855; The Architectural Instructor, New York, 1856; Shaw, E., Civil Architecture, Boston, 1830, with later editions to 1855; and Hills, C., The Builder’s Guide, Hartford, 1834, with later editions to 1847.

Footnote 86:

See Willard, S., Plans and Sections of the Obelisk on Bunker’s Hill, Boston, 1843.

Footnote 87:

See Mills, R., The American Pharos; or, Lighthouse Guide, Washington, 1832; and Waterworks for the Metropolitan City of Washington, Washington, 1853.

Footnote 88:

See Thayer, R., History, Organization and Functions of the Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, Washington, 1886; and Strobridge, T. R., ‘Archives of the Supervising Architect—Treasury Department’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 198-9. See also Overby, O., ‘Ammi B. Young in the Connecticut Valley’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 119-23.

Footnote 89:

See O’Neal, W. B., Jefferson’s Buildings at the University of Virginia, I, Charlottesville, 1960. Like the hill-top siting of Monticello, Jefferson’s own nearby house—begun before the American Revolution and finally completed only in 1808—this provision of an open end towards the view illustrates his active response to the ideals of the Picturesque. For Monticello, moreover, drawings of Gothick garden fabricks exist. The fact that McKim, Mead & White blocked the view at the bottom of Jefferson’s layout with a new building in the twentieth century is curious evidence of the lack of understanding of the essential qualities of the architecture and planning of this period on the part of even the most sophisticated ‘traditional’ architects—men who professed the greatest admiration for the work of such predecessors as Jefferson and yet proceeded to destroy its essence whenever the opportunity arose!

Footnote 90:

From the time of Latrobe’s Bank of 1798 the Greek temple paradigm for public buildings characteristically and quite inconsistently included vaulted interiors for protection against fire.

Footnote 91:

In Nicholson, Peter, The Carpenter’s Guide, London, 1849. See also Walter, T. U., Report(s) of the Architect of the Girard College ... [Philadelphia, 1834-50].

Footnote 92:

Once more, as with Latrobe and Mills, the importance of Strickland’s work as an engineer should at least be noted. The principal publications of the period in this domain are his Reports on the Canals, Railways, Roads and other Subjects, Philadelphia, 1826, and his Reports, Specifications and Estimates of Public Works in the United States, London, 1841.

Footnote 93:

The history of the building is so complex that it is difficult to know to whom the credit should be assigned for its distinguished design. The competition held in 1838 was won by Walter, who actually laid the foundations in 1839-40; but the executed design certainly owes more to the competition project of the painter Thomas Cole (1801-48). See Cummings, A. L., ‘The Ohio State Capitol Competition’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XII (1953), 15-18. Modifications of the scheme initiated in 1839-40 were made with Walter’s assistance in 1844, and building was resumed in 1848 under the direction of William Russell West of Cincinnati. On his resignation in 1854 Nathan B. Kelly (1808-71) of Columbus succeeded, and the work was finally brought to a finish by Isaiah Rogers in 1858-61.

Footnote 94:

See Wheildon, W. W., Memoir of Solomon Willard, Boston, 1865.

Footnote 95:

Greenough is better known today as the ‘herald of functionalism’ than as a sculptor. See Wynne, N., and Newhall B., ‘Horatio Greenough: Herald of Functionalism’, Magazine of Art, XXII (1939), 12-15. For his theories, see Greenough, H., Aesthetics at Washington, Washington, 1851; Travels, Observations, and Experience of a Yankee Stone-cutter, New York, 1852; and Form and Function: Remarks on Art (H. A. Small, ed.), Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1947.

Footnote 96:

There are measured drawings of these commercial buildings in Hitchcock, H.-R., Guide to Boston Architecture, New York, 1954.

Footnote 97:

The most thorough study of American industrial building of this period, including the housing of operatives, is Coolidge, J. P., Mill and Mansion, New York, 1942, which deals with Lowell, Mass. Considerable Rhode Island work is illustrated in Hitchcock, H.-R., Rhode Island Architecture, Providence, R.I., 1939.

Footnote 98:

See Eliot, W. H., A Description of the Tremont House, Boston, 1830.

Footnote 99:

Davis intended to include a central domed space on the model of Latrobe’s Bank of 1798. This was omitted when the design of the interior was revised by Samuel Thomson or William Ross and executed by John Frazee. See Torres, L., ‘Samuel Thomson and the Old Custom House’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 185-90.

Footnote 100:

See Schuyler, M., ‘A Great American Architect; Leopold Eidlitz’, Architectural Record, XXIV, 163-79, 277-92, 364-78, and, for a more general treatment, Meeks, C. L. V., ‘Romanesque before Richardson in the United States’, Art Bulletin, XXXV (1953), 17-33.

Footnote 101:

See Stone, E. M., The Architect and Monetarian: a Brief Memoir of Thomas Alexander Tefft, Providence, R.I., 1869, and Wriston, B., ‘Architecture of Thomas Tefft’, Rhode Island School of Design Bulletin, XVIII (1940), 37-45.

Footnote 102:

See Meeks, C. L. V., ‘Henry Austin and the Italian Villa’, Art Bulletin, XXX (1948), 145 ff.

Footnote 103:

See Smith, R. C., John Notman and the Atheneum Building, Philadelphia, 1951.

Footnote 104:

See Young, A. B., New Custom House, Boston, Boston, 1840. The tower that now replaces the dome was built by Peabody & Stearns in 1913-15; it was the first real skyscraper in Boston.

Footnote 105:

See Young, A. B., Plans of Public Buildings in Course of Construction under the Direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, [Washington] 1855-6.

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6. Notes

Footnote 106:

Hussey devotes only a portion of his book to the Picturesque in architecture. See also Pevsner, N., ‘The Picturesque in Architecture’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, LV (1947), 55-61. C. L. V. Meeks in ‘Picturesque Eclecticism’, Art Bulletin, XXXII (1950), 226-35, extends the range of the Picturesque to include considerably more of nineteenth-century architecture than is usual. As with ‘Romantic’ or ‘Classical’, it makes a difference whether or not one uses a capital; with a capital it seems best to restrict the term Picturesque to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although the point of view lasted down into the fifties, and it is also possible to recognize a sort of ‘Neo-Picturesque’ in the seventies and eighties (see Chapters 12 and 13 particularly).

Footnote 107:

See Note [19], Chapter 1.

Footnote 108:

Thomas Hopper was even more addicted to the ‘Neo-Norman’, as Gosford Castle in Ireland, begun in 1819, and the rather late Penrhyn Castle of 1827-37 near Bangor in Wales, all built of Mona marble and with a keep copied from that of twelfth-century Hedingham Castle in Essex, splendidly illustrate. See Fedden, R. R., ‘Thomas Hopper and the Norman Revival’, in Studies in Architectural History, II (1956).

Footnote 109:

See Musgrave, C., Royal Pavilion; a Study in the Romantic, Brighton, 1951; and Roberts, H. D., A History of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, London, 1939.

Footnote 110:

See Stroud, D., Henry Holland, London, 1950.

Footnote 111:

Repton’s scheme was much less eclectic than Nash’s, being entirely based, like Sezincote, on the Daniells’ book on India (see Chapter 1).

Footnote 112:

See Dale, A., Fashionable Brighton, 1820-1860, London, 1947; and History and Architecture of Brighton, Brighton, 1950.

Footnote 113:

The work was begun in 1818 and continued down into the thirties. See Thompson, Francis, A History of Chatsworth, London, 1949.

Footnote 114:

See Clark, E., The Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges, 2 vols and album, London, 1850.

Footnote 115:

This was begun only in 1837 and completed, without the elaborate Egyptian decoration that Brunel originally intended, by W. H. Barlow (1812-1902) in 1864.

Footnote 116:

See Donner, P., ‘Edensor, or Brown come True’, Architectural Review, XCV (1944), 39-43; and Chadwick’s The Works of Sir Joseph Paxton, 162-5, which gives primary credit to Paxton.

Footnote 117:

See Loudon, J. C., Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture, London, 1833; 2nd ed. with Supplement, 1842. This is the culminating anthology of the Picturesque, summarizing and all but concluding some forty years of Cottage and Villa Book production in England.

Footnote 118:

In addition to the treatises of C. L. Eastlake, Sir Kenneth Clark, Basil F. L. Clarke, and Marcus Whiffen listed in the Bibliography, see Kamphausen, A., Gotik ohne Gott: ein Beitrag zur Deutung der Neugotik und des 19. Jahrhunderts, Tübingen, 1952.

Footnote 119:

See Britton, J., The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain, 5 vols, London, 1804-14; Cathedral Antiquities of Great Britain, 14 parts, 1814-35; etc.

Footnote 120:

See Pugin, A. C., and Willson, E. J., Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 2 vols, London [1821]; Examples of Gothic Architecture, London, 1831. Two more volumes of the Examples were published by A. W. N. Pugin after his father’s death.

Footnote 121:

See Rickman, T., An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, London [1817]; many later editions. The terms Rickman introduced here—Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular—for the successive phases of the English Gothic are still in general use. For Rickman’s use of iron in his early churches in Liverpool, see Chapter 7.

Footnote 122:

See Whiffen, M., ‘Rickman and Cambridge’, Architectural Review, XCVIII (1945), 160-3.

Footnote 123:

Pugin’s really important books concerning architecture were three: Contrasts, or a Parallel between the Architecture of the 15th and 19th Centuries, London, 1836; The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, London, 1841; and An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, London, 1843. All of these have later editions which sometimes show significant omissions and additions.

Footnote 124:

Founded at Cambridge University in 1839 and later known as the Ecclesiological Society. The Society’s periodical, The Ecclesiologist, which began to appear in 1841, together with their other publications, had a notable influence on architectural development in England and English-speaking countries in the forties and fifties and even later. See White, J. F., The Cambridge Movement, Cambridge, 1962.

Footnote 125:

See Bonnar, T., Biographical Sketch of G. Meikle Kemp, Edinburgh and London, 1892.

Footnote 126:

The palace-planning of one Durand pupil, Klenze, behind the regular façade of his Königsbau in Munich is actually very unsymmetrical and episodic, as Giedion points out in his Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus.

Footnote 127:

See Summerson, J., ‘Pugin at Ramsgate’, Architectural Review, CIII (1948), 163-6.

Footnote 128:

An influential publication of this period was Hopkins, J., Essay on Gothic Architecture, Burlington, 1836. Bishop Hopkins himself designed and built several churches of the rather feeble Gothick order of the plates in this book.

Footnote 129:

See Upjohn, R., Upjohn’s Rural Architecture, New York, 1852.

Footnote 130:

See Wills, F., Ancient English Ecclesiastical Architecture ..., New York, 1850, which includes designs for new churches. Similar is Hart, J., Designs for Parish Churches in the Three Styles of English Church Architecture, New York, 1857.

Footnote 131:

Downing’s major work, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening adapted to North America, New York and London, 1841, with later editions to 1879 (and twentieth-century reprints), devotes only a chapter to house design. His really influential architectural books were Cottage Residences, New York, 1842, with later editions to 1887, and The Architecture of Country Houses, New York, 1850, with later editions to 1866.

Footnote 132:

See Scully, V. J., ‘Romantic Rationalism and the Expression of Structure in Wood: Downing, Wheeler, Gardner and the “Stick Style”, 1840-1876’, Art Bulletin, XXXV (1953), 121-42.

Footnote 133:

See Robinson, P. F., Rural Architecture, London, 1822, with later editions to 1836, and also his Designs for Ornamental Villas, London, 1827, again with later editions to 1836.

Footnote 134:

The handsomest and one of the most authoritative mid-century books on chalets was by Graffenried and Sturler, Architecture suisse, Berne, 1844.

Footnote 135:

See Vaux, C., Villas and Cottages, New York, 1857, with later editions to 1874.

Footnote 136:

See Lancaster, C., ‘Oriental Forms in American Architecture’, Art Bulletin, XXIX (1947), 183-93. For other work of Samuel Sloan, a very productive mid-century architect and architectural writer, see Coolidge, H. N., ‘A Sloan Checklist, 1849-1884’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 34-8.

Footnote 137:

See Owen, R. D., Hints on Public Architecture, New York, 1849.

Footnote 138:

Of the Seven Lamps, of the first volume of the Stones of Venice, and of the Lectures on Architecture and Painting, American editions appeared respectively in 1849, 1851, and 1854, the same years as the original London editions, and were succeeded by new issues and new editions at a pace far exceeding that maintained by the original publishers in England. In part this may merely mean that the American editions, all pirated, were smaller; but it is certainly evidence of an avid and extensive body of American readers from the mid century down to 1900.

Footnote 139:

See Chenesseau, G., Sainte-Croix d’Orléans; histoire d’une cathédrale gothique réedifiée par les Bourbons, 1599-1829, 3 vols, Paris, 1921.

The design of 1707 for the façade was by Robert de Cotte, J.-H. Mansart’s principal lieutenant. The work was carried on more actively by A.-J. Gabriel under Louis XV. With the Restoration in 1816 Louis XVIII took up the completion of the project—which Napoleon had actually ordered before Waterloo—as part of the general preoccupation of the Restoration with a strengthening of the Church, and Charles X opened the finished church in 1829. Thus the renewal of activity here in the second decade of the nineteenth century precedes the other Neo-Gothic work described below by some twenty years. But credit—or discredit—for its Rococo-Gothic character belongs to the eighteenth not to the nineteenth century.

Footnote 140:

See Rotrou, E. de, Dreux, ses antiquités, Chapelle St Louis, Dreux, 1864.

Footnote 141:

The aesthetic climate of the period is presented in several books: Rosenthal, L., L’Art et les artistes romantiques, Paris, 1928; Robiquet, J., L’Art et le goût sous la Restauration, Paris, 1928; Schommer, P., L’Art décoratif au temps du Romantisme, Paris, 1928. These were published in advance of the ‘Centenaire du Romantisme’ in 1930.

Footnote 142:

See Thiénon, C., Voyage pittoresque dans le Bocage de la Vendée, ou vues de Clisson et ses environs, Paris, 1817.

Footnote 143:

In 1836 Viollet-le-Duc wrote to his father that every greengrocer had a small Italian Villa with a tower, but this is patently a rhetorical exaggeration.

Footnote 144:

See Kaufmann, E., Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu, Philadelphia, 1952.

Footnote 145:

See Heideloff, K., Nürnberg’s Baudenkmale der Vorzeit, Nuremberg, 1839; and Die Kunst des Mittelalters in Schwaben, Stuttgart, 1855. His Ornaments of the Middle Ages (to give it its English title), which began to appear in Nuremberg in 1838, had several editions with French and English text.

Footnote 146:

This is least true in France, where the Neo-Catholic intellectuals were Gothic enthusiasts and succeeded in imposing Gothic on the architects, few of whom ever took to it with whole-hearted enthusiasm. Even Viollet-le-Duc, after the forties, was confusedly eclectic in most of his newly designed buildings as distinguished from his ‘restorations’ and his completions of unfinished medieval monuments (see Chapter 11).

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7. Notes

Footnote 147:

See Sheppard, R., Cast Iron in Building, London, 1945, and Gloag, J. and Bridgwater, D., A History of Cast Iron in Building, London, 1948. These accounts require considerable revision in the light of later research by T. C. Bannister and by A. W. Skempton. See Note [151], infra, and for further illustrations, ‘The Iron Pioneers’, Architectural Review, CXXX (1961), 14-19, and Richards, J. M., The Functional Tradition in Early Industrial Buildings, London, 1958.

Footnote 148:

Problems of fire-resistance were already under discussion in England in the forties. The London Fire Department even refused to enter burning buildings with internal skeletons of iron because of the danger of their collapse; while the effectiveness of fireproofing iron columns with masonry sheathing was already being tested in 1846. I owe this information, as well as that on many other significant points in this chapter, to Turpin C. Bannister.

Footnote 149:

See Harris, J., ‘Cast Iron Columns 1706’, Architectural Review, CXXX (1961), 60-1.

Footnote 150:

See Raistrick, A., Dynasty of Ironfounders, London, [1953].

Footnote 151:

See Giedion, S., Bauen in Frankreich: Eisen, Eisenbeton, Leipzig, 1928, an account which its own author and others have considerably emended since.

Footnote 152:

This was replaced a quarter of a century later when a new stair-hall was built by Percier & Fontaine.

Footnote 153:

See Bannister, T. C., ‘The First Iron-Framed Buildings’, Architectural Review, CVII (1950), 231-46; Skempton, A. W., and Johnson, H. R., ‘The First Iron Frames’, Architectural Review, CXXXI (1962), 175-86. In 1803-4 came two more iron-framed mills, the North Mill at Belper and one at Leeds.

Footnote 154:

See Fairbairn, W., On the Application of Cast and Wrought Iron to Building Purposes, London, 1854.

Footnote 155:

See Buckler, J. and J. C., Views of Eaton Hall, London, 1826.

Footnote 156:

See Mock, E., The Architecture of Bridges, New York, 1949; Whitney, C., Bridges; a Study in their Art, Science and Evolution, New York, 1929; De Maré, E., The Bridges of Britain, London, 1954; Andrews, C., ‘Early Iron Bridges of the British Isles’, Architectural Review, LXXX (1936), 63-8; and ‘Early Victorian Bridges in Suspension in the British Isles’, Architectural Review, LXXX (1936), 109-12; and Mehrtens, G., Der deutsche Brückenbau in XIX Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1900.

Footnote 157:

In addition to Telford’s own superbly illustrated autobiography and the two modern monographs, see Sutherland, R. J. M., ‘Telford’, Architectural Review, CXIV (1953), 389-94.

Footnote 158:

The American James Finley built an iron-chain suspension bridge as early as 1801 and patented the system in 1808 after he had built several more. See Pope, T., Treatise on Bridge Architecture, New York, 1811, which was probably known to Telford.

Footnote 159:

These early French bridges—and several important early English ones too—are illustrated in later editions of Rondelet’s Traité (See Note [40], Chapter 2), and in Bruyère, L., Études relatives à l’art des constructions, Paris, 1823. Delon’s name is also given as Dilon and Dillon.

Footnote 160:

See Séguin, M., Des ponts en fil de fer, Paris, 1824.

Footnote 161:

See Ellet, C., The Wheeling Bridge [Philadelphia, 1852]. For this bridge Roebling provided the cables but not the design.

Footnote 162:

Sec Conant, W., The Brooklyn Bridge, New York [1883].

Footnote 163:

Hautecœur lists nearly forty built before 1848 in Paris alone. For the Galerie d’Orléans, see Fontaine, C., Histoire du Palais Royal, Paris, 1834.

Footnote 164:

Thiollet, F., Serrurerie de fonte et de fer récemment exécutés, Paris, 1832, illustrates several examples.

Footnote 165:

See Pevsner, N., ‘Early Iron: Curvilinear Hothouses’, Architectural Review, CVI (1949), 188-9.

Footnote 166:

Sec Meeks, C. L. V., ‘The Life of a Form: A History of the Train Shed’, Architectural Review, CX (1951), 163-74, and his book The Railroad Station, New Haven, 1956.

Footnote 167:

See Arschavir, A. A., ‘The Inception of the English Railway Station’, Architectural History, IV (1961), 63-76, for the story before Crown Street.

Footnote 168:

See Clark, E., The Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges, 2 vols and atlas, London, 1850.

Footnote 169:

See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘The Coal Exchange’, Architectural Review, CI (1947), 185-7.

Footnote 170:

See Bannister, T. C., ‘The Genealogy of the Dome of the United States Capitol’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, VII (1948), 1-16.

Footnote 171:

Bogardus’s priority in this matter is by no means absolute. Certainly earlier in America was the Miners’ Bank, built by Haviland in Pottsville, Penna., in 1829-30; but here cast iron was used only to provide a decorative sheathing of the brick walls in the absence of available stone. Also earlier was a steam flour-mill three storeys high prefabricated by Sir William Fairbairn in London in 1839 and sent to Turkey, where it was erected in Istanbul in 1840. This was more like Bogardus’s building, and he had probably actually seen it when it was exhibited in London in Fairbairn’s shops at Millwall before being disassembled and shipped away. Daniel D. Badger (1806-?) also claimed priority because of the many one-storey shops he had built of iron, one of which was just across Center Street in New York from Bogardus’s factory. But Bogardus deserved the publicity he received at home and abroad; undoubtedly it was his activity which really started the general vogue of cast-iron fronts in the United States. See Bogardus, J., Cast Iron Buildings: their Construction and Advantages, New York, 1856 (written for Bogardus by a friendly ‘ghost’, John W. Thomson), and Bannister, T. C., ‘Bogardus Revisited, Part One: The Iron Fronts’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XV (1956), 12-22.

Footnote 172:

See Sturges, W. K., ‘Cast Iron in New York’, Architectural Review, CXIV (1953), 233-8.

Footnote 173:

See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Early Cast Iron Façades’, Architectural Review, CIX (1951), 113-16.

Footnote 174:

See Hitchcock, H.-R., The Crystal Palace ..., 2nd ed., Northampton, Mass., 1952.

Footnote 175:

See Carstensen, G., The New York Crystal Palace, New York, 1854.

Footnote 176:

The date of this is often given as 1855, when Labrouste took charge of the work at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the original project for it may well be more nearly contemporaneous with the Reading Room of the British Museum.

Footnote 177:

Six pavilions were built first and four more before 1870; the remaining two were not erected until the 1930s. See Baltard, V., and Callet, F., Monographie des Halles centrales de Paris construites sous le régne de Napolèon III, Paris, 1865.

Footnote 178:

Technically the architect of Saint-Eugène in Paris was L.-A. Lusson, and in his monograph on the church, Plans, coupes, elevations, et details de l’église ... de Saint Eugène, Paris, 1855, he does not even mention Boileau’s name. However, the credit—or, to many contemporaries, the discredit—for the character of the cast-iron Gothic interior of the Paris church has always been given to Boileau.

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8. Notes

Footnote 179:

A notably extreme early example is Visconti’s Fontaine Molière of 1841-4 in the Rue de Richelieu in Paris.

Footnote 180:

Here Visconti’s taste also proves to have been premonitory. His project of 1833 for a library already had a bulbous roof over the central pavilion; while that of 1849 for the Bibliothèque Nationale in the Rue de Richelieu had bold engaged orders on the central pavilion and a tall straight-sided mansard as well.

Footnote 181:

See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Second Empire “avant la lettre”’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, XIII (1953), 115-30. The existence of French analogues in the forties was insufficiently stressed there, however.

Footnote 182:

See Kramer, E. W., ‘Detlef Lienau, an Architect of the Brown Decades’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV (1955), 18-25. Lienau was born in Schleswig-Holstein, then Danish, but received his early education in Germany. For a still earlier mansard than Lienau’s, see Dallett, J. F. ‘John Notman’s Mansard, 1848’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 81.

Footnote 183:

See Aulanier, C., Le Nouveau Louvre de Napoleon III, Paris [1953], and Hautecoeur, L. Histoire du Louvre, Paris [n.d.]

Footnote 184:

See Pinkney, D. H., Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, Princeton, N.J., 1958. Work began on the extension of the Rue de Rivoli in 1851; but it was only in 1853 that the Emperor found in G.-E. Haussmann (1809-91), whom he made Prefect of the Seine and later a baron, an adequate collaborator and executant for his tremendous urbanistic programme.

Footnote 185:

A tour which can be taken vicariously is provided in a splendid set of lithographs of the period, Paris dans sa splendeur; from this Plates 19 and 55B are taken.

Footnote 186:

The degree of control exercised by public authority over the façades varied. For the extension of the Rue de Rivoli, continuation of Percier & Fontaine’s original design was required; and for the Place de l’Étoile and the Place de l’Opéra comprehensive designs established in advance were enforced (see below). Elsewhere only the height of the cornice line and the silhouette of the mansard were ordinarily standardized by regulation.

Footnote 187:

Built in 1855 as the Hôtel des Chemins de Fer, but now the Hôtel du Louvre, and the work of Hittorff, Rohault de Fleury, Armand, and Pellechet. Hittorff and Rohault were also collaborating on the houses surrounding the Place de l’Étoile at this time. T. L. Donaldson, reporting on the new hotel at the Royal Institute of British Architects on 22 June 1855, remarked: ‘The roof plays an important part in the design ... much of the majesty of French buildings is derived from these lofty roofs.’ Donaldson supervised the erection of the Hope house, and had thus played a personal part in the introduction of the French mansard into England six years earlier.

Footnote 188:

It is curious that there should be uncertainty about the authorship of a complex so central to the building activity of its era. The Grand Hotel which occupies the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens to the left of the Opéra was by the team responsible for the Hôtel des Chemins de Fer at the other end of the avenue (see Note [187]). Pinkney in Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, the latest to discuss the subject, gives credit for all the façades around the Place de l’Opéra to Rohault; Hautecoeur assigns the rounded pavilions opposite the front of the Opéra to Blondel and mentions no other architect. Whoever was responsible, Garnier felt they were much too tall and confining for his Opéra.

Footnote 189:

See Garnier, J.-L.-C., Le nouvel Opéra de Paris, 2 vols text and 6 vols plates, Paris, 1875-81.

Footnote 190:

By this time Viollet-le-Duc was far more ‘Victorian’ than Garnier, yet his secular work had become so eclectic and even original in detail as hardly any longer to be Neo-Gothic at all (see Chapter 11.

Footnote 191:

See Daly, C., and Davioud, G.-J.-A., Les théâtres de la Place du Châtelet, Paris, 1860.

Footnote 192:

See Notice du Palais de Longchamps à Marseille, Marseilles, 1872.

Footnote 193:

See Daly, C., L’Architecture privée au XIX^e siècle ... sous Napoléon III; nouvelles maisons de Paris et des environs, 3 vols, Paris, 1864; Calliat, V., Parallèle des nouvelles maisons de Paris, vol. II, Paris, 1864; Adam, Leveil, and LeBlanc, Recueil des maisons les plus remarquables, Paris, 1858; and Maisons les plus remarquables de Paris, Paris, 1870. César Daly, as editor of the Revue de l’architecture, also determined the character of the material that periodical offered in this period.

Footnote 194:

It is awkward that the long career of Viollet-le-Duc, like that of Semper, does not fall largely within any single chapter of this book. Active from the forties until the seventies, leading restorer of medieval monuments of his age in France, leading medieval archaeologist of Europe, controversial reformer of French architectural education (at least in posse), author of influential critical books, he was the inspirer—by his writings rather than his executed work—of a later generation of architectural innovators abroad perhaps even more notably than at home. His failure to conform to the normal pattern of architectural life that usually confines a particular man’s significant activity within some one phase of architectural development—such as, on the whole, each chapter of this book deals with—makes it necessary to present his career in piecemeal fashion. It is partly covered in Chapter 6, with a few further mentions in this chapter, and—more significantly—in Chapter 11 in this Part and Chapter 16 at the beginning of Part Three. It is worth noting that Viollet-le-Duc is the only architect who enters this book in each of its three parts, even though it is only as an influence, not an executant, that he comes into the last part.

Footnote 195:

And some contemporaries were ready to say Sicilian! It was started—or at least commissioned—some years before the first volume of the great treatise on Syrian architecture appeared: Vogüé, C.-J.-M. de, Syrie Centrale, 2 vols, Paris, 1865-77. But Vaudremer must have seen the drawings of Kalat Seman published by Duthuit in the Gazette des architectes et du bâtiment, 1864, No. 7, 79.

Footnote 196:

See Daumet, H., Notice sur M. Abadie, Paris, 1886. It is relevant that Abadie became Diocesan Architect of Périgueux in 1874, the same year he began the Sacré-Cœur, the competition for which he had won two years earlier.

Footnote 197:

For characteristic French prize projects that were admired and emulated abroad, see Les grands prix de Rome d’architecture de 1850-1900, Paris [n.d.]

Footnote 198:

For the Massachusetts institution, see Ware, W. R., An Outline of a Course of Architectural Instruction, Boston, 1866; for Columbia, see idem, ‘The Instruction in Architecture at the School of Mines’, School of Mines Quarterly, X (1888), 28-43.

Footnote 199:

Yet one of the boldest modern architects of Latin America, Carlos Raúl Villanueva (b. 1900) of Venezuela, was educated at the École des Beaux-Arts itself; and most of the other modern architects in these countries—those over forty at least—were trained in the local Escuelas de Bellas Artes based on the Paris original.

Footnote 200:

The most conspicuous exception, dominating the whole city, is the Mole Antonelliana. This extraordinary edifice, begun by Alessandro Antonelli (1798-1880) in 1863, more than rivals his very tall earlier dome on San Gaudenzio in Novara, designed in 1840. Never really completed, the construction of the Mole continued intermittently down to Antonelli’s death. By its great height and in some of the technicalities of its construction it rivals the Eiffel Tower and the early American skyscrapers which are posterior to it by several decades. Yet Antonelli arrived at no coherent expression of his structural innovations and, to judge from the successive purposes for which the structure has been intended to serve or has served, no real capacity to provide a functionally viable building. On the whole, as its present name implies, this is a monument chiefly to its designer’s megalomania.

Footnote 201:

See Reed, H. H., ‘Rome: The Third Sack’, Architectural Review, CVII (1950), 91-110.

Footnote 202:

The third prominent edifice, surprisingly enough, is High Victorian Gothic. St Paul’s, the American church, is by the English architect G. E. Street, and its curious relation to the characteristic academic blocks by Koch and his contemporaries can be appreciated on Plate 100 (see Chapter 11).

Footnote 203:

See Acciaresi, P., Giuseppe Sacconi e l’opera sua massima, Rome, 1911.

Footnote 204:

The best-maintained later equivalent in northern Europe is probably the Passage, as it is called, in The Hague. Built in 1882-5, this hardly rivals the Galleria Mazzini in Genoa in length and breadth, much less Mengoni’s. There are many other examples, some of them considerably later, but few are in good condition today, and none have the scale of the three principal Italian examples. For earlier French examples, see Chapter 3.

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9. Notes

Footnote 205:

See Kreisel, H., The Castles of Ludwig II of Bavaria, Darmstadt [n.d.] and Schloss Linderhof, Munich, 1959.

Footnote 206:

The design derives from the results of a competition held in 1876. Of the nine architects involved in the execution of the building, Grotjan, Lamprecht, Robertson, and Martin Haller (1835-1925) had won prizes in the competition. The tower is attributed specifically to the last and sometimes, more loosely, the whole structure.

Footnote 207:

It should be pointed out that tall mansards allowed the addition of a full storey—sometimes even two—without increasing the height of the masonry work of the façade itself; thus there were reasons of economy as well as of fashion for their spread at this time (see Chapter 14).

Footnote 208:

For that matter the London Ritz Hotel, built in 1905-6 by Mewès & Davis, is capped with a high mansard, although the vocabulary of their façades is a discreet and academic, if overscaled, style Louis XVI and the construction—reputedly—the first example of the use of a steel skeleton of the American skyscraper type in England.

Footnote 209:

Thomas Cundy II (1790-1867) died in this year; if provided by the Estate Architects’ office, the designs were either initiated before his death or else they were entirely by his assistants, perhaps directed by his surviving brother Joseph (1795-1875). A. T. Bolton believed that the responsibility for the design lay with the builder Trollope; the Grosvenor Estate office, however, names not Trollope but the Cubitt firm as the builders. As with the Place de l’Opéra, the credit—or discredit—for this most notable and conspicuous piece of Second Empire urbanism remains rather uncertain.

Footnote 210:

See, however, Castermans, A., Parallèle des maisons de Bruxelles, Paris, 1856, which illustrates much work that is not at all Parisian.

Footnote 211:

See Poelaert, J., Le Nouveau Palais de Justice de Bruxelles, Brussels, 1904.

Footnote 212:

Semper was in England for several years after he left Dresden as a result of the revolution that also led to Wagner’s expulsion in 1848. He did no building in England, but was closely associated with Cole and his Department of Practical Art. The catafalque of the Duke of Wellington, used at the State funeral in 1852, was of his design. His Swiss period was followed by a triumphant return to Dresden to rebuild the opera-house there and his final settlement in Vienna in 1871. Since this relatively important architect appears, like Viollet-le-Duc, in unrelated contexts in several different chapters of this book, it seems well to recall here the total range of his career from its beginnings in Hamburg in the forties to its conclusion in Vienna in the seventies, passing by Dresden, London, Zurich, and Dresden a second time.

Footnote 213:

See Burnham, A., ‘The New York Architecture of Richard M. Hunt’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XI (1952), 9-14.

Footnote 214:

Of course Daly’s Revue de l’architecture reached some American architects and also his Architecture privée (see Note [194], Chapter 8). See also Liénard, M., Specimens of the Decoration and Ornamentation of the XIXth Century, Boston, 1875, although by that date the vogue for such Second Empire detailing was all but over.

Footnote 215:

See Walter, T. U., Letter to the Committee on Public Buildings, in reference to an Enlargement of the Capitol [Washington, 1850], and Report of the Architect of the United States Capitol and the New Dome, Washington, 1864.

Footnote 216:

See McKenna, R. T., ‘James Renwick, Jr, and the Second Empire Style in the United States’, Magazine of Art, XLIV (1951), 97-101.

Footnote 217:

See Boston. Committee on Public Buildings, The City Hall, Boston, Boston, 1866. A considerably larger early project of 1861 emulates much more closely the new Louvre.

Footnote 218:

See Bunting, B., ‘The Plan of the Back Bay Area in Boston’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIII (1954), 19-24.

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10. Notes

Footnote 219:

Despite the ‘correctness’ of Butterfield’s detailing, an idiosyncratic coarsening can be noted at St Augustine’s College in Canterbury and in other work by him done several years before All Saints’; yet, by contrast to other aspects of his mature style, his moulded detail remained conventional.

Footnote 220:

Since building Christ Church, Streatham, at the opening of the decade, Wild had been busy in Egypt. His curious St Mark’s, Alexandria, as Saracenic as his detractors accused the Streatham church of being, was unhappily never brought to completion. Designed in 1842, work was suspended for lack of funds in 1848 and Wild then returned to England.

Footnote 221:

Deane owed his knighthood to having been Mayor of Cork, not to his professional attainments. It would appear that Woodward did all the firm’s designing and, after his death in 1861, Deane’s son Thomas Newenham took over.

Footnote 222:

See Viollet-le-Duc, E.-E., Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI^e au XVI^e siècle, 10 vols., Paris, 1854-68.

Footnote 223:

See Mackail, J. W., The Life of William Morris, London, 1899.

Footnote 224:

Burges designed this in 1868 in his most archaeological and articulated French Gothic manner. Construction began only in 1893, long after Burges’s death, and the suave quality of the execution, so uncharacteristic of the still High Victorian date of the original design, is thereby explained; at best the design was singularly out of key with what Bodley had built.

Footnote 225:

Since this is a Catholic church, and by a man who knew French Gothic architecture well, it provides the fairest possible comparison with Viollet-le-Duc’s own new church of Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée at St-Denis designed at almost precisely the same time (Plate 98). Viollet-le-Duc is world-famous; Clutton is not generally considered even in England one of the leaders of his generation; yet the superiority of the Leamington church to the St-Denis church is very considerable indeed both inside and out.

Footnote 226:

See Harbron, D., ‘Thomas Harris’, Architectural Review, XCII (1942), 63-6, and Donner, P., ‘Harris Florilegium’, Architectural Review, XCIII (1943), 51-2.

Footnote 227:

This is spoilt externally by an unfortunate tower added by his son A. E. Street (1855-1938) in 1884-5.

Footnote 228:

See The National Memorial to H.R.H. the Prince Consort [London], 1873.

Footnote 229:

Scott’s aspirations for architecture, in general more sympathetic than what he built, will be found in his Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future, London, 1858.

Footnote 230:

Although Woodward’s death occurred in the same year 1861 that this club was begun, it is possible, even probable, that the original design was his.

Footnote 231:

See Nesfield, W. E., Specimens of Mediaeval Architecture ... in France and Italy, London, 1862.

Footnote 232:

The intentions of the church builders in this decade are well presented in Micklethwaite, J. T., Modern Parish Churches, their Plan, Design, and Furnishing, London, 1874.

Footnote 233:

An extraordinary example of the use of Victorian Gothic for a somewhat unexpected purpose was Columbia Market by H. A. Darbishire (1839-1908) set down in 1866-8 among the grim housing blocks that he built for the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. See Wilson, F. M., ‘Ypres at Bethnal Green’, Architectural Review, XCVI (1944), 131-4.

Footnote 234:

Godwin’s active and distinguished Victorian Gothic period concluded with the building of two castles in Ireland, Dromore at Pallaskenny for the Earl of Limerick in 1867-9 and Glenbegh in 1868-71. Burges was with him in Ireland when he designed Dromore, and its decorations and furnishings rival in elaboration and exceed in elegance what Burges did for Lord Bute at Cardiff and Castell Coch in these years. A row with the client for Glenbegh, who complained of drastic leakage, in which Godwin’s then partner Crisp deserted him, did Godwin much harm professionally. He was still a relatively important figure in the Late Victorian seventies, but more as a decorator than as an architect (see Chapter 12).

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11. Notes

Footnote 235:

At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia the larger pavilions were all of iron and glass; and probably the most influential buildings were the British ones designed by Thomas Harris—no longer a wild ‘Victorian’—in a mode closely approaching Norman Shaw’s ‘Manorial’ mode (see Chapter 12). However, the exhibition stimulated the publication of several books on the Colonial architecture of Philadelphia which played their part in preparing the way for a ‘Colonial Revival’ (see Chapters 13 and 15).

Footnote 236:

Separate American editions of vols 2 and 3 did not appear promptly in 1853 in the way that of vol. 1 did in 1851. However, the three-volume American edition of 1861 was the first of the complete work.

Footnote 237:

See Tunnard, C., ‘Deviation by the Brothers Potter, Collegiate Gothic at Union College, Schenectady’, Architectural Review, CIII (1948), 67.

Footnote 238:

See Note [197], Chapter 8.

Footnote 239:

They had, after all, first met when they were both working for R. M. Hunt.

Footnote 240:

See Ware, W. R., The Memorial Hall, Harvard University, Boston, 1887.

Footnote 241:

In the 1936 edition of my book on Richardson a later Dorsheimer plan is incorrectly associated with this Buffalo house. The house is properly identified in Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Richardson’s American Express Building: A Note’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 25-30 and in the new 1961 edition.

Footnote 242:

This is also missing from my 1936 Richardson book, but will be found in the article cited above and in the 1961 edition of the book.

Footnote 243:

See Wight, P. B., ‘Reminiscences of Russell Sturgis’, Architectural Record, XXVI (1909), 123-31. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Farnam Hall, together with Sturgis’s contiguous Battell Chapel of 1876 and his Durfee Hall at right angles to it, although neither are of at all comparable excellence, give this corner of the Old Campus at Yale a consistent High Victorian Gothic character interesting to study both in relation to the earlier Romantic Gothic of Henry Austin’s library (now Dwight Chapel) of 1842-4 on the other side of the campus and the ‘traditional’ Collegiate Gothic of James Gamble Rogers’s twentieth-century Harkness Quadrangle across High Street.

Footnote 244:

See Schuyler, M., ‘The Work of William Appleton Potter’, Architectural Record, XXVI (1909), 176-96.

Footnote 245:

See Holly, H. H., Church Architecture Illustrated, Hartford, 1871. Much more extreme models can be found in general compendia of architectural design published in the late sixties and early seventies.

Footnote 246:

See Campbell, W., ‘Frank Furness, an American Pioneer’, Architectural Review, CX (1951), 310-15.

Footnote 247:

See ‘Another Furness Building: Provident Life and Trust Company Building, Philadelphia’, Architectural Review, CXII (1952), 196, ‘Provident Trust Company Banking Room, Philadelphia’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XI (1952), 31; and Massy, J. C., ‘The Provident Trust Buildings’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 79-80.

Footnote 248:

See Withers, F. C., Church Architecture, New York, 1871.

Footnote 249:

See Upjohn, R. M., The State Capitol, Hartford, Conn., Boston, 1886.

Footnote 250:

It was the selection of the old Trinity College property to provide a site for the new Capitol that led to the rebuilding of the college elsewhere, for which Burges provided the designs (see Chapter 10).

Footnote 251:

It is worth recalling that much the same could evidently be said of Fuller & Laver’s San Francisco municipal group; characteristically enough for the period, this was Second Empire like their Albany Capitol, not High Victorian Gothic (see Chapter 9).

Footnote 252:

See Viollet-le-Duc, E.-E., Entretiens sur l’architecture, 2 vols, Paris, 1863, 1872; and translations, Discourses on Architecture, 2 vols, Boston, 1875, 1881, and Lectures on Architecture, 2 vols, London, 1877, 1881. Originally the Entretiens appeared in parts, those in the first volume beginning to come out about 1860 and those in the second some six years later.

Footnote 253:

The two most sumptuously illustrated publications concerning Viollet-le-Duc offer very few examples of new buildings designed by him; these must be sought in periodicals and other general contemporary sources. See Compositions et dessins de Viollet-le-Duc, Paris, 1884, and Baudot, A. de, and Roussel, J., Dessins inédits de Viollet-le-Duc, 3 vols, Paris [n.d.]

Footnote 254:

The most extravagant compilation of idiosyncratic detail in Viollet-le-Duc’s work is to be seen on the tomb of Napoleon III’s half-brother the Duc de Morny, erected in 1858 in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Hardly any element of the ornamentation is clearly referable to a particular stylistic source, and the whole effect is as ‘Victorian’ as anything the wildest High Victorians ever produced in England.

Footnote 255:

It should not be forgotten that Street’s Law Courts in London were completed only a year before Steindl began the Budapest Parliament House; but the Law Courts were, for England, extremely retardataire.

Footnote 256:

Burges won the competition for this in 1857, but in the end Street received the commission and built the church in 1864-9.

Footnote 257:

See Meeks, C. L. V., ‘Churches by Street on the Via Nazionale and the Via del Babuino’, Art Quarterly, XVI (1953), 215-27.

Footnote 258:

See Martinell, C., La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 1952, and Puig Boada, I., El Templo de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 1952. A phenomenal number of articles have appeared concerning this church, all listed up to his date of publication (1952) by Ráfols in the later edition of his monograph on Gaudí.

Footnote 259:

Mixing the elements of several styles in individual buildings provided the liveliest aspect of eclecticism at this time; the mere use of alternative modes had chiefly the effect of blurring the edges of all the styles of the past.

Footnote 260:

Compare, for example, Sigfried Giedion’s presentation of the period in Space, Time, and Architecture.

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12. Notes

Footnote 261:

Many serious and conscientious English students of this period would precede such a list with the name of George Devey (1820-86). Of Devey, in whose office C. F. A. Voysey, the most original English architect of the next generation, chose to work after completing his apprenticeship with Seddon, Voysey later wrote: ‘Providentially an invitation came to enter the Office of the most extensive practitioner in homes for the Nobility and Gentry. No domestic practice has equalled his in extent before or since his death.’ As in the case of William Burn, whose aristocratic practice of the forties and fifties Devey’s more than rivalled in the sixties and seventies, neither he nor his clients cared for publicity, and so none of his work was published, even to the slight extent that the work of Nesfield and Webb was illustrated in the professional journals. Still today his houses are known to posterity chiefly through a few articles: Godfrey, Walter ‘The Work of George Devey’, Architectural Review, XXI (1907), 23-30, 83-8, 293-306; and ‘George Devey, F.R.I.B.A., a Biographical Essay’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XIII (1906), 501-25.

But just as the work of Nesfield and Webb was in actuality familiar from the first to their professional friends and rivals, as also to prospective country house clients, so was that of Devey. Many of the stylistic trends so vigorously exploited by Shaw in the seventies can be traced back to Devey’s houses of the preceding decade—or so such experts on the period as H. S. Goodhart-Rendel and John Brandon-Jones, who know Devey’s work intimately, always insist. Foreign students of this period, from Muthesius to the Editor of this series and this author, perhaps merely because of lack of direct or even adequate indirect knowledge of Devey’s houses, have never been ready to grant him so important a place in the story. Here particularly, where the story is told in an international context, the evident strength of the influence of Shaw’s work abroad even more than at home justifies giving his primacy and referring only incidentally to that of Devey.

Footnote 262:

Shaw did not immediately succeed Webb, since the latter stayed on in Street’s office until the middle of 1859. There must have been close contact between them over a period of up to a year, and they remained in touch from then on. Blomfield, Shaw’s biographer, being himself prejudiced against Webb, underestimates the reality and the importance of this relationship. It is only one of the many errors of fact or emphasis in his book.

To quote from a private communication from Brandon-Jones concerning Shaw and Webb: ‘Each must have had a good idea of the work the other was doing. Their two offices, in Gray’s Inn and Bloomsbury Square, were within a stone’s-throw of one another, and Lethaby while working for Shaw was in close touch with Webb and was in his spare time assisting him with the architectural work of Morris & Co. It is quite obvious from the dates of various executed works that Lethaby was carrying over Webb’s ideas and details and trying them out in work he was doing for Shaw. As for the mutual respect and friendship between Webb and Shaw, I [Brandon-Jones] have recently come across a letter written at the time of Shaw’s death in which he [Webb] pays a tribute to his “old friend”, and I have also seen a letter from Sydney Barnsley to Sydney Cockerell in which Barnsley says that he had called on Shaw only a few months before his death and that Shaw had been talking of Webb and saying that he still treasured some photographs given him by Webb nearly fifty years earlier.’

Footnote 263:

Devey’s incidental work at Penshurst Place in Kent, where that notable fourteenth-century manor house was restored by him, having been done more than a decade earlier, probably prepared the way for this. It is extremely likely that Nesfield was familiar with what Devey had done there; but the line forward leads, in the late sixties, from Nesfield to Shaw, not directly from Devey to Shaw.

Footnote 264:

See Pevsner, N., ‘Art Furniture of the Seventies’, Architectural Review, CXI (1952), 23-50.

Footnote 265:

The most famous instance of japonisme in decoration is Whistler’s ‘Peacock Room’, now in the Freer Gallery in Washington. See Ferriday, P., ‘Peacock Room’, Architectural Review, CXXV (1959), 407-14.

Footnote 266:

Once again Devey had prepared the way, in this case at Betteshanger, Kent, a house built precisely ten years earlier. This will doubtless have been known both to friends of Devey’s clients and to various young architects. But the Kew lodge was located where everyone could see it, even though it was not published until the nineties.

Footnote 267:

For this also there was precedent at Devey’s Betteshanger; but Betteshanger initiated no popular mode in the way that the conspicuous London schools by Robson and Stevenson’s highly touted house did at this point. For the schools, see Jones, D. G., ‘Towers of Learning’, Architectural Review, CXXIII (1958), 393-8.

Footnote 268:

See Harbron, D., ‘Queen Anne Taste and Aestheticism’, Architectural Review, XCLV (1943), 15-18.

Footnote 269:

See Shaw, R. N., Sketches for Cottages and Other Buildings ..., London, 1878.

Footnote 270:

See ‘The Ballad of Bedford Park’, St James’s Gazette, 17 December 1881 (reprinted by Blomfield, Shaw, 34-6). This is an amusing but not entirely accurate contemporary description in verse.

Footnote 271:

The handling of this building in section is particularly ingenious, the area of the service portions at the rear of the flats being much increased by the use of lower storey heights than in the reception rooms at the front. This device has been revived since, but its earlier invention by Shaw has rarely been noted Brandon-Jones pointed out to me.

Footnote 272:

At least they are now so painted; it is probable they were originally of ‘white’ Suffolk brick, actually a very pale yellow when newly laid and unbegrimed, but more likely to be black after a few decades of exposure to the air of London!

Footnote 273:

Hyde, H. M., ‘Wilde and his Architect’, Architectural Review, CIX (1951), 175-6.

Footnote 274:

It is characteristic of Shaw’s prestige in America and the rapidity with which architectural ideas crossed the ocean at this time that Shaw’s handsome perspective of the Alliance was published in America a few months earlier than in England.

Footnote 275:

White first approached Webb but, finding him too difficult to deal with, went to Shaw—a significant episode as regards both architects.

Footnote 276:

See Brandon-Jones, J., ‘Notes on the Building of Smeaton Manor’, Architectural History, I (1958), 31-59.

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13. Notes

Footnote 277:

See Webster, J. C., ‘Richardson’s American Express Building’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 21-4, and my article cited in Note 7 to Chapter 11.

Footnote 278:

See Richardson, H. H., Trinity Church, Boston, Boston, 1888.

Footnote 279:

3 vols, Paris, 1868-73. It will be noted that the last volume of this appeared after the original competition drawings for Trinity Church were prepared.

Footnote 280:

The source was probably the book by Vogüé of which the second volume appeared only in 1877 (see Note [196], Chapter 8). The motif first appeared in the North Easton Library, designed and begun in that year.

Footnote 281:

See Richardson, H. H., The Ames Memorial Building[197], Boston, 1886.

Footnote 282:

See Olmsted, F. L., and Kimball, T., Frederick Law Olmsted, 2 vols, New York, 1922-8.

Footnote 283:

See Richardson, H. H., Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, Boston, 1885.

Footnote 284:

See Richardson, H. H., Description of Drawings for the Proposed New County Building for Allegheny County, Penn., Boston, 1884.

Footnote 285:

See Schuyler, M., ‘The Romanesque Revival in New York’, Architectural Record, I (1891), 7-38, 151-98.

Footnote 286:

See Bragdon, C., ‘Harvey Ellis’, Architectural Record, XXV (1908), 173-83.

Footnote 287:

Hunt, of the older generation, was generally recognized as a leader in this camp also, although his energies in these years were principally engaged in designing and building a series of François I châteaux for the Vanderbilts and other millionaires that are anything but academic in their involved picturesqueness.

This curious episode, which has been given exaggerated importance by some historians of American architecture, began with the designing of the W. K. Vanderbilt house in New York in 1879-80 (see Andrews, W., The Vanderbilt Legend, New York, 1941). Other architects were also briefly affected by what was hardly more than a recrudescence of a mode popular in France under Louis Philippe in Hunt’s youth (see Chapter 3).

A few houses by McKim, Mead & White of the early eighties are definitely François I, and Richardson used François I dormers, probably independently of Hunt, on the Albany Capitol. Moreover, the round towers of the ‘Shingle Style’ undoubtedly owe something to Stanford White’s sketching trips in France. This episode obviously parallels the interest in revived Northern Renaissance modes of design in Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia in these decades, and has analogies also to the contemporary work in England of George & Peto and Collcutt (see Chapters 9 and 12).

Footnote 288:

In the designing of the Sherman house—particularly in the Shavian detailing—White had probably played an important part; he was, moreover, called on by the Shermans to enlarge the house in 1881. The library, of this date, is one of his finest pieces of interior decoration.

Footnote 289:

One of the earliest examples of the serious study of Colonial precedent is Arthur Little’s Early New England Interiors, Boston, 1878. However, his own work remained relatively free for some years.

Footnote 290:

See Building News, 28 April 1882.

Footnote 291:

These tiles wore out some years ago and have now been replaced. The smooth black roof seen on Plate 111 lacks the fine scale and rich texture the pantiles provide.

Footnote 292:

The conceptual organization of the exterior has seemed to most critics to have been borrowed from a much later monument, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris of the 1840s, even though McKim would not admit it. There is certainly none of Labrouste’s exposed metalwork in the interior; but the extensive use of Guastavino tile vaults, at this time a real technical innovation, is worth noting.

Footnote 293:

See Burnham, D. H., World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1894, and Ives, H., The Dream City, St Louis, 1893.

Footnote 294:

The area round the ‘Wooded Isle’ was much less regular than that round the Lagoon in continuance of Olmsted’s earlier and more naturalistic sort of landscaping. Into this area were shunted most of the buildings by local architects, doubtless because McKim distrusted their capacity to conform to the academic standards he was setting.

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14. Notes

Footnote 295:

See Note [97], Chapter 5.

Footnote 296:

Somewhat fuller accounts of English commercial architecture in this period will be found in Hitchcock, ‘Victorian Monuments of Commerce’, Architectural Review, CV (1949), 61-74, and in Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, Chapters XI and XII. Most of the English buildings mentioned in this chapter are illustrated either in the book or the article.

Footnote 297:

See Weisman, W., ‘Commercial Palaces of New York’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XXXVI (1954), 285-302.

Footnote 298:

See Bogardus, J., Cast Iron Buildings: Construction and Advantages, New York, 1856.

Footnote 299:

See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Early Cast Iron Façades’, Architectural Review, CIX (1951), 113-16.

Footnote 300:

See Weisman, W., ‘Philadelphia Functionalism and Sullivan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 3-19.

Footnote 301:

See Sturges, W. K., ‘Cast Iron in New York’, Architectural Review, CXIV (1953), 233-8.

Footnote 302:

See Peterson, C., ‘Ante-bellum Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 27-9; X (1951), 25. The Jayne Building, begun by Johnston, was completed by Thomas U. Walter. It has unfortunately been demolished since 1958.

Footnote 303:

See Woodward, G., ‘Oriel Chambers’, Architectural Review, CXIX (1956), 268-70. Fine measured drawings by students of the University of Liverpool School of Architecture were published in Architectural History, II (1959), 81-94.

Footnote 304:

See Note [277], Chapter 13.

Footnote 305:

See Weisman, W., ‘New York and the Problem of the First Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XII (1953), 13-20. For a rather different opinion, see Webster, J. C., ‘The Skyscraper: Logical and Historical Considerations’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVIII (1959), 126-39.

Footnote 306:

It is worth noting that neither cast-iron façades nor the vertical articulation of the Philadelphia buildings of the fifties was used in either case. Both developments of the mid century proved cul-de-sacs since the New York architects followed the established modes of the sixties for monumental buildings in these first two skyscrapers. In the same years 1873-4, however, Hunt did build the five-storey edifice at 478-482 Broadway in New York with an all cast-iron front, employing a sort of attenuated ‘giant order’ subsuming the three middle storeys.

Footnote 307:

Giedion first called attention to the importance of ‘balloon-frame’ construction in Space, Time and Architecture in 1941; but see Field, W., ‘A Re-examination into the Invention of the Balloon Frame’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, II (1942), 3-29.

Footnote 308:

See Randall, G., The Great Fire of Chicago and its Causes, Chicago [1871].

Footnote 309:

See Hope, H., ‘Louis Sullivan’s Architectural Ornament’, Magazine of Art, XL (1947), 110-17. Sullivan thought of his early ornament as somehow ‘Egyptian’, but it is not very easy to see why. A later, so far unpublished study by Etel Kramer seems to establish, contrary to his own statements, that Sullivan owed a good deal to the theories of Owen Jones and that his ornament matured, earlier than has hitherto been supposed, in 1884-5.

Footnote 310:

This is not the same as the Revell Store.

Footnote 311:

Several more storeys were added later and appear in many of the published views.

Footnote 312:

One must say ‘metal’, because structural steel was only gradually replacing cast and wrought iron at this time; all these types of ferrous material were probably used in the Home Insurance, the Rookery, and other skyscrapers of the mid eighties. Two books by W. Birkmire, Architectural Iron and Steel, New York, 1891, and Skeleton Construction in Buildings, New York, 1893, best present the technical aspects of large-scale metal construction as it matured in the eighties and early nineties.

Footnote 313:

An American edition of this book appeared in 1880. See Note [309], supra.

Footnote 314:

I owe this suggestion to Vincent Scully.

Footnote 315:

Incidentally, the signature Frank L[loyd] Wright on the drawings for a rather Richardsonian group of three masonry houses in Chicago, designed in the Adler & Sullivan office in 1888 for Victor L. Falkenau, suggests that it was Sullivan’s brilliant draughtsman, as it was Jenney’s assistant on the Leiter Building, who was responsible for this example of overt Richardsonian influence.

Footnote 316:

The discovery by Condit that this building was begun in 1890 seemed to lend it a special importance, up until then unrecognized. But the text gives the correct dating.

Footnote 317:

It is so generally assumed that Sullivan’s mature style is without historical antecedents that the even more definitely quattrocento character of the entrance here, as well as of those of the Guaranty Building, is rarely noted.

Footnote 318:

The five southernmost bays are an addition made in 1906 by D. H. Burnham & Co. They follow, with some slight diminution in the bay-width, Sullivan’s original design.

The form of the Burnham firm’s name in these years is significant of the increasing anonymity of architectural practice in America as the scale of operation increased (see Chapter 24).

Footnote 319:

See Purcell and Elmslie Architects (Walker Art Gallery Exhibition Catalogue), Minneapolis, 1953, and Gebhard, D., ‘Louis Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 62-8, and A Guide to the Existing Architecture of Purcell and Elmslie, Roswell, N. M., 1960.

Footnote 320:

Of more interest than the skyscraper is a smaller and earlier Singer Building, also by Flagg. Flagg was one American who retained contact with the French tradition of exposed metal construction as well as with the academic aspects of ‘Beaux Arts’ design as his first Singer Building illustrates.

Footnote 321:

See Schuyler, M., ‘The Work of N. LeBrun & Sons’, Architectural Record, XXVII (1910), 365-80. The Metropolitan Tower is, of course, the work of a firm not of a single architect; LeBrun himself had been dead for some years.

Footnote 322:

See Schuyler, M., ‘“The Towers of Manhattan” and Notes on the Woolworth Building’, Architectural Record, XXX (1913), 98-122.

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15. Notes

Footnote 323:

See Note [107], Chapter 6

Footnote 324:

For a remarkable later development of the veranda outside England, see Robertson, E. G., ‘The Australian Verandah’, Architectural Review, CXXVII (1960), 238-45.

Footnote 325:

There are many examples in various English books of the first third of the century; characteristic are those offered by T. F. Hunt, J. B. Papworth, and P. F. Robinson. See Note [134] to Chapter 6.

Footnote 326:

See Note [132], Chapter 6.

Footnote 327:

See Note [128], Chapter 6.

Footnote 328:

See Note [133], Chapter 6.

Footnote 329:

See Note [308], Chapter 14.

Footnote 330:

See Note [132], Chapter 6.

Footnote 331:

In the Builder for 15 January 1859 and in the Supplement to Kerr, R., The Gentleman’s House, 2nd ed., London, 1865.

Footnote 332:

Contemporaries saw this house rather as a reaction towards the ‘Old English’ after the ‘modernism’ of the High Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire of the preceding decade. How conscious Shaw himself was of the significance of his own innovations it is difficult to say.

Footnote 333:

The plan was first published by Muthesius in 1904; this does not mean that its character was not known to contemporary architects, however.

Footnote 334:

By this time photo-lithographic processes made it possible for Shaw’s perspectives to appear in the Building News practically as facsimiles of his originals. Had it been necessary, as in the fifties and sixties, to ‘translate’ them into wood-engravings the transmission of the Shavian influence abroad would certainly have been much less effective.

Footnote 335:

See Note [133], Chapter 6. The term ‘Eastlake’ is sometimes rather inaccurately used for the Stick Style.

Footnote 336:

See Wheeler, G., Rural Houses, New York, 1851, with later editions to 1868, and his Homes for the People in Suburb and Country, New York, 1855, with later editions to 1867.

Footnote 337:

See Gardner, E. C., Homes and How to Build Them, Boston, 1874, and also his Illustrated Homes, Boston, 1875.

Footnote 338:

See Woodward, G. E., Woodward’s Country Houses, New York, 1865; Woodward’s Architecture, Landscape Gardening and Rural Art, New York, 1867; Woodward’s Cottage and Farm Houses, New York, 1867; and Woodward’s National Architect, New York, 1868. Of Woodward’s Country Houses there were eight successive editions within a decade, thus rivalling in this period the popularity of Downing’s Cottage Residences in the forties and fifties; however, it is worth noting that the latter still remained in print.

Footnote 339:

See Sturges, W. K., ‘Long Shadow of Norman Shaw: Queen Anne Revival’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 21-5.

Footnote 340:

Scully in The Shingle Style provides evidence that the idea of a great hall was not unknown in America well before this. It may be unnecessary to suppose that Richardson knew of the Hinderton plan, since one or two comparable ones can be found in books appearing in America in the fifties; see, for example, the Nathan Reeve house in Newburgh, N.Y., published as ‘Design No. 22’ in Vaux, C., Villas and Cottages, New York, 1857. However that may be, the great hall theme was rarely exploited in Second Empire or Stick Style houses of the sixties. It makes a notable appearance or re-appearance, as the case may be, in Richardson’s planning just after 1870. See Notes VI-4 and VIII-2 in the 1961 edition of my Richardson book.

Footnote 341:

The term is Vincent Scully’s. Various themes touched on in this and succeeding paragraphs are discussed at length in his homonymous volume and provided there with a full roster of illustrations.

Footnote 342:

It is of interest that when the Monograph of the Work of McKim, Mead & White was prepared in 1915 almost all this early work was omitted. It has been rediscovered by critics and historians in the last thirty years, beginning with Mumford in the Brown Decades in 1931.

Footnote 343:

Just how the influence reached American architects so early is not altogether clear. The first treatise in English on Japanese architecture is Morse, E. S., Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, Boston, 1886; new ed., New York, 1961. See Lancaster, C., ‘Japanese Buildings in the United States before 1900: Their Influence upon American Domestic Architecture’, Art Bulletin, XXXV (1953), 217-24.

Footnote 344:

See Hitchcock, H. R., ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and the “Academic Tradition” in the Nineties’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VII (1947), 46-63.

Footnote 345:

For an unsuspected but possible influence on Wright in this façade, see Gebhard, D., ‘A Note on the Chicago Fair of 1893 and Frank Lloyd Wright’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVIII (1959), 63-5.

Footnote 346:

Japanese influence was more evident at the Chauncey L. Williams house at 520 Edgewood Place in River Forest, Ill., of 1895, notably in the use of rough boulders at the foot of the brick wall and flanking the entrance. Wright by this time was enthusiastically interested in Japanese prints; whether he also knew Morse’s book of 1886 (see Note 20 supra) is not clear.

Footnote 347:

This was very much extended, but along the original lines, in 1901, as shown on Plate 128B. The present River Forest Tennis Club, a much smaller structure, is not the same, though it bears some superficial resemblance to the Golf Club. The building of 1898-1901 was demolished in 1905.

Footnote 348:

I am grateful to John Brandon-Jones for allowing me to read the manuscript of his unpublished monograph on Voysey. Without his assistance of various sorts this account of Voysey could not have been written and illustrated.

Footnote 349:

See Note [261], Chapter 12.

Footnote 350:

The ‘House at Doverscourt for A. J. W. Ward’, published in the British Architect, 11 April 1890, was apparently never executed any more than those illustrated the previous year. It is very like Perrycroft, built in 1893, the first of Voysey’s important country houses, thus suggesting that on paper his style had in fact largely crystallized by this date before his Forster house was begun. It is of interest that the plan of the Ward project is more open than those of any of his executed houses; it may well have influenced Baillie Scott (see below).

Footnote 351:

Brandon-Jones suggests, however, that the very plain Regency villa in which Voysey was then living in St John’s Wood may have had some generic influence on the Forster house.

Footnote 352:

At Perrycroft the mullions are of wood, originally painted green. At the Forster house they were of stone, and that is true of almost all the later houses. So also the slates here were Welsh and grey; when he began to work in the Lake District he turned to green slates, earlier used by Godwin on Whistler’s house. These became standard on his later houses wherever they were built.

Footnote 353:

For a later tribute to his influence and that of Baillie Scott abroad, see Fisker, K., ‘Tre pionerer fra aarhundredskiftet’, Byggmästaren, 1947, 221-32; the third ‘pioneer’, rather surprisingly, is Tessenow (see Chapter 20).

Footnote 354:

For a remarkable later work of Lethaby, see Pevsner, N., ‘Lethaby’s Last’, Architectural Review, CXXX (1961), 354-7. This church, at Brockhampton-by-Ross in Herefordshire, was roofed with pre-cast concrete slabs at the surprisingly early date of 1900-2; and its simplified, rather angular, Gothic design is, in effect, already proto-Expressionist.

Footnote 355:

See Pevsner, N., ‘George Walton, His Life and Work’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XLVI (1939), 537-48.

Footnote 356:

Voysey was also a notable designer of wallpapers and chintzes, perhaps the most notable of his generation in England.

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16. Notes

Footnote 357:

See Madsen’s Sources of Art Nouveau, 75-83.

Footnote 358:

See Schmutzler, R., ‘English Origins of the Art Nouveau’, Architectural Review, CXVII (1955), 108-16. The question is discussed further at a later point in this chapter (pp. 284-5).

Footnote 359:

See Note [149], Chapter 7.

Footnote 360:

The one large structure built for this exhibition in permanent form, the Palais du Trocadéro by Davioud, has since been replaced. Vaguely Saracenic in design, yet not altogether unworthy in silhouette of its splendid site on the Chaillot heights, this shared none of the qualities of Eiffel’s temporary pavilion. See Davioud, G., Le Palais du Trocadéro, Paris, 1878. As long as it lasted, however, the Trocadéro provided a sort of pendant on this side of Paris to Abadie’s Sacré-Cœur atop Montmartre, begun in the same rather dreary decade of French architectural production.

Footnote 361:

See Note [265]a, Chapter 12.

Footnote 362:

See Alphand, A., L’Exposition universelle de Paris de 1889, Paris, 1892.

Footnote 363:

See Eiffel, G., La Tour de trois-cents-mètres, Paris, 1900.

Footnote 364:

Bogardus’s shot-towers of the fifties in New York, which were of essentially similar construction, received little contemporary or later publicity. It is still uncertain whether Jenney knew of them when he built the Home Insurance Building in Chicago in 1883-5. See T. C. Bannister, ‘Bogardus Revisited, Part II’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVI (1957).

Footnote 365:

See Note [253], Chapter 11.

Footnote 366:

See Grady, J., ‘Bibliography of the Art Nouveau’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV (1955), 18-27 and Art Nouveau (Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Catalogue), New York [1960].

Footnote 367:

This applies particularly to Art Nouveau decoration; the major architectural works were frequently very plastically organized, although most of the detail was linear.

Footnote 368:

See Schmutzler, R., ‘Blake and the Art Nouveau’, Architectural Review, CXVIII (1955), 90-7.

Footnote 369:

See Lancaster, C., ‘Oriental Contributions to Art Nouveau’, Art Bulletin, XXXIV (1952), 297-310.

Footnote 370:

See Grady, J., ‘Nature and the Art Nouveau’, Art Bulletin, XXXVII (1955), 187-92.

Footnote 371:

See Mackmurdo, A. H., Wren’s City Churches, Orpington, 1883.

Footnote 372:

Not perhaps impossible: There is something a little analogous to Impressionism in the work of Shaw, though he probably had no admiration for the art of Monet and his contemporaries in the seventies even if he was at all aware of it. The same is true of the American masters of the Shingle Style. The analogy lies in the casual looseness of over-all composition and the delicacy of the touch—both tile-hanging and shingles provide a certain effect of ‘broken colour’ or at least ‘tachiste’ brushwork—even though they are usually monochrome. On the other hand, Kimball in his American Architecture, written a generation ago, saw an analogy to Cézanne in the return to architectural order in the mid eighties in America. There is no evidence that McKim or White then admired any French painters more advanced than Puvis de Chavannes however.

Footnote 373:

Some studio houses were certainly built in France by leading architects throughout the second half of the nineteenth century: The one that Viollet-le-Duc provided for the painter Constant Troyon in the late fifties was of notable interest—in fact, one of his best works. Moreover, the more modest ateliers d’ artiste erected by builders provided much later, in the 1920s, precedents of value to Le Corbusier and Lurçat. See Banham, R., ‘Ateliers d’artiste’, Architectural Review, CXX (1956), 75-83.

Footnote 374:

See Delhaye, J., ‘Hommage à mon maître; architecte Baron Victor Horta’, L’Appartement d’aujourd’hui, Liège, 1946, 6-17; Maus, O., ‘Habitations modernes, Victor Horta’, L’Art moderne, XX (1900), 221-3; Sedeyn, E., ‘Victor Horta’, L’Art décoratif, IX (1902), 230-42; and Madsen, S. T., ‘Horta. Works and Style of Victor Horta before 1900’, Architectural Review, CXVIII (1955), 388-92.

Footnote 375:

See Koch, R., and others, Louis Comfort Tiffany 1848-1933, New York, 1958.

Footnote 376:

The wallpaper was probably one of those designed by Heywood Sumner, possibly his ‘Tulip’ according to Elizabeth Aslin of the Victoria and Albert Museum. This was one of the considerable range of English papers shown by Jeffrey & Company at the Salon de l’Association pour l’Art d’Anvers in Antwerp in the winter of 1892-3. These papers, which included designs by most of the English leaders in the field of decorative art, had already been shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889. It is hard to believe that Horta became aware of them only when the Tassel house was nearly finished and not earlier in Antwerp or in Paris. For the Antwerp showing, see Van de Velde, H., ‘Artistic Wallpapers’, L’Art moderne, XIII (1893), 193-5. This article was copied in L’Emulation, XVIII (1893), 150-1, the most advanced Belgian architectural journal, where the Tassel house itself was published in 1895. It introduces the name of another important Belgian figure besides Horta in the story of the Art Nouveau.

Footnote 377:

It is of interest, although irrelevant to the inception of the Art Nouveau, that in this same year Horta became professor of architecture at the Académie like Balat before him.

Footnote 378:

See Kaufmann, E., ‘224 Avenue Louise’, Interiors, 116 (1957), 88-93.

Footnote 379:

For a late tribute to Van de Velde in English, see Shand, P. M., Architectural Review, CXII (1952), 143-55. It is a major error of emphasis—and in detail an accumulation of errors of fact—that H. Lenning offers in his book The Art Nouveau (The Hague, 1951) by accepting the legend that Van de Velde was the initiator of the Art Nouveau. There is plenty of evidence that Van de Velde was aware of English innovations in decoration from the early nineties. On the other hand, despite the wallpaper in the Tassel dining-room, it should be noted that Horta’s widow and his disciple Delhaye minimize, to the point of denying all but absolutely, the dependence of Horta on English sources at the time he designed the Tassel house.

Footnote 380:

Paul Hankar (1861-1901) was a third Belgian architectural innovator in this period. His work, however, is so crude and uneven that his name need be no more than mentioned. He is in no proper sense an exponent of the Art Nouveau. See Conrady, C., and Thibaux, R., Paul Hankar, [n.p.] 1923.

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17. Notes

Footnote 381:

See Malton, J., ‘Art Nouveau in Essex’, Architectural Review, CXXVI (1959), 100-4. For a considerably earlier and more extraordinary example of English work approaching the Art Nouveau, see Beazley, E., ‘Watts Chapel’, Architectural Review, CXXX (1961), 166-72. This chapel at Compton, Surrey, was designed in 1896 by Mary Watts, the widow of the painter G. F. Watts. The inspiration seems to have been predominantly Norse and Celtic.

Footnote 382:

See Gout, P., L’Architecture au XX^e siècle et l’Art Nouveau, Paris, 1903.

Footnote 383:

See Hostingue, G. d’, Le Castel Béranger, œuvre de H. G., architecte, Paris, 1898.

Footnote 384:

Both the main façade and the principal interior are essentially the work of Deglane. Louvet and Thomas were more responsible for other elements of the complex structure.

Footnote 385:

See L’architecture moderne à Paris, concours de façades, 2 vols, Paris, 1901, 1902.

Footnote 386:

See Uhry, E., ‘Agrandissements des magasins de la Samaritaine’, L’Architecte, II (1907), 13-14, 20, plates X-XII.

Footnote 387:

I owe my knowledge of this remarkable façade to Martin Kermacy. He was unable to find out by whom and when it was built; it is very probably an early work of Josef Urban, Novotny informs me.

Footnote 388:

For another rather independent Scottish architect of this period, see Walker, D. M., ‘Lamond of Dundee’, Architectural Review, CXXIII (1958), 269-71.

Footnote 389:

See Scheichenbauer, M., Alfredo Campanini, Milan, 1958.

Footnote 390:

See Note [259], Chapter 11.

Footnote 391:

Among other things, it is Gaudi’s use of forms inspired by primitive architecture that has appealed to later twentieth-century taste. ‘Primitivism’ in painting and sculpture has been of recurrent importance since the days of the Fauves and the Expressionists; a comparable primitivism in architecture has been much rarer, except for Gaudí.

Footnote 392:

Except as regards the theories of vaulting exemplified in successive schemes for the Sagrada Familia and his church at Santa Coloma de Cervelló, Gaudí’s technical innovations have been until lately little studied despite the very considerable literature devoted to his work. Research is proving that he made many important innovations in structure over and above those so evident in the crypt—the only portion executed—of the Santa Coloma church. George Collins showed some of the results, as yet unpublished, of the latest studies in an exhibition at Columbia University in May 1962.

Footnote 393:

While the mosaic of broken fragments of patterned ceramic on the benches at the Parc Güell suggests Cubist collages and even Dada compositions—notably the Merzbilder of Kurt Schwitters—the handling of the coloured glass on this façade is closer to the paintings of Jackson Pollock and other New York artists of the 1950s.

Footnote 394:

A curious continuation, or more accurately revival, of Gaudian modes has of late occurred in Portuguese Africa. See Beinart, J., ‘Amancio Guedes, Architect of Lourenço Marques’, Architectural Review, CXXIX (1961), 240-51.

Footnote 395:

Even Gaudí after 1910 produced little, being almost wholly occupied with the slow progress of the Sagrada Familia. Of course, in a sense Horta is another exception; but his success after 1910 was of purely local significance and dependent on his total rejection of the Art Nouveau of his youth. One can only think of the later career of Giorgio de Chirico, still today a success in Italy but ignored by the outside world except when he imitates his earlier work.

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18. Notes

Footnote 396:

See Concrete and Constructional Engineering, II (January 1956), special anniversary number reviewing the history of concrete. More important later studies are: Raafat, A. A., Reinforced Concrete in Architecture, New York [1958]; and Collins, P., Concrete, The Vision of a New Architecture, New York [1959]. See also Kramer, E. W., and Raafat, A. A., ‘The Ward House, Pioneer Structure of Reinforced Concrete’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 34-7.

Footnote 397:

See Baudot, A. de, L’Architecture, le passé, le présent, Paris, 1916, and Baudot, J. de, L’Architecture et le béton armé, Paris, 1916.

Footnote 398:

See Huxtable, A. L., ‘Progressive Architecture in America: Reinforced Concrete Construction. The work of Ernest L. Ransome, Engineer—1884-1911’ and ‘Factory for Packard Motor Car Company—1905, Detroit, Michigan, Albert Kahn, Architect. Ernest Wilby, Associate’, Progressive Architecture, 38 (1957), 139-42 and 121-2.

Such research is revealing that Albert Kahn (1869-1942) was not such a pioneer in concrete factory construction as has been generally supposed. However, the ‘Kahn Bar’ developed by his brothers’ engineering firm was a major technical contribution, and undoubtedly his motor-car factories were among the earliest major industrial works in the new material. For the alternative use of steel in American warehouse and factory construction, see Eaton, L. K., ‘Frame of Steel’, Architectural Review, CXXVI (1959), 289-90.

Footnote 399:

The detailed history of the concrete grain elevator cannot be given here. The prototypes for the great monuments of Buffalo, Minneapolis, and Duluth were certainly French. These monolithic cylinders are, of course, very different from the motor-car factories with their post-and-lintel construction, but the history of the elevator undoubtedly runs nearly parallel to that of the factory. See [Torbert, D. R.] A Century of Minnesota Architecture, Minneapolis, 1958, unpaged.

Footnote 400:

In the last few years the innovations of such engineers as Pierluigi Nervi (b. 1891) in Italy, Eduardo Torroja (1899-1961) in Spain, and Felix Candela (b. 1910) in Mexico have revolutionized earlier conceptions of the possibilities of ferro-concrete (see Chapter 25). For Torroja, see The Structures of Eduardo Torroja, New York [1960], and Torroja, E., The Philosophy of Structures, Berkeley, 1958. (See Epilogue.)

Footnote 401:

See Pfammatter, P., Betonkirchen, Cologne and Zurich, 1948.

Footnote 402:

By reaction many of the same architects, notably Le Corbusier, have in the last few years consciously sought the brutality of industrial concrete finish—he calls it béton brut—even in monumental work (see Chapter 25 and Epilogue).

Footnote 403:

The atelier was founded in 1928.

Footnote 404:

The team that worked with Perret on Le Havre consisted of P. Branche, P. Dubouillon, P. Feuillebois, A. Heaume, J. Imbert, M. Kaeppelin, G. Lagneau, M. Lotte, P.-E. Lambert, A. Le Donné, A. Persitz, J. Poirrier, H. Tougard, and J. Tournant, all of whom seem to have shared responsibility for the buildings flanking the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. Poirrier, Le Donné, and Lambert were, however, joint architects-in-chief. Specific attributions are perhaps not very significant in this kind of situation, but the characteristic Hôtel Normandie (1950) is by Poirrier and the whole sea front by Lambert.

Footnote 405:

See Garnier, T., Une Cité industrielle, Paris [1918]. The basic project goes back to 1901, but was much elaborated in the intervening years. Although it was unpublished, many architects were certainly familiar with its general character. See Wiebenson, D., ‘Utopian Aspects of Garnier’s Cité Industrielle’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 16-24.

Footnote 406:

See Garnier, T., Les Grands Travaux de la ville de Lyon, Paris, 1919.

Footnote 407:

This applies particularly to the work of Michel Roux-Spitz (b. 1888), who became in the thirties the acknowledged leader of the profession in France.

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19. Notes

Footnote 408:

See Zevi, B., Verso un’architettura organica, Turin, 1945; English translation, Towards an Organic Architecture, London, 1950.

Footnote 409:

See Pellegrini, L., ‘La decorazione funzionale del primo Wright’, L’Architettura (1956), 198-203.

Footnote 410:

Wright’s ‘Baroque’ period, running for approximately ten years from 1914 to 1924, parallels the Expressionist episode in European modern architecture (see Chapters 21 and 22). That may be considered to open with van der Meij’s Scheepvaarthuis of 1912-13 in Amsterdam and to run out in general sometime in the mid twenties. It is not apparent that there was any influence of consequence either way; indeed, the effect of studying Wright’s work in the war years and the early twenties was rather adverse to Expressionism and related tendencies, particularly in Holland where Wright’s influence was strongest.

Footnote 411:

See Life, V (26 Sep. 1938), 60-1.

Footnote 412:

See Ladies Home Journal, February 1901; June 1901; April 1907.

Footnote 413:

Wright, F. Ll., The Story of the Tower, New York, 1956.

Footnote 414:

Wright had a tendency to scoff at the work of his former junior associates and to deny the reality of their discipleship. There are at present in practice a good many architects who have been for shorter or longer periods at Taliesin, where the Fellowship has at times since the Second World War included over sixty. Those who were at Taliesin some time ago have naturally made the greater mark, since many of the post-war members of the Fellowship had, in the mid 1950s, only just begun their own practice. Alden Dow (b. 1904) in Midland, Michigan, and Henry Klumb (b. 1905) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, have over the last few years the greatest volume of work of more-or-less Wrightian inspiration to their credit. But it must not be forgotten that Richard J. Neutra (b. 1892), whose work is of a very different order, was also for a time with Wright; while there are some architects whose work is Wrightian to the point of parody who have never had any direct contact with Wright at all.

Footnote 415:

Richard E. Schmidt (1865-1959) and Hugh M. G. Garden (1873-1961).

Footnote 416:

The contribution of these men is only beginning to receive the study which it merits now the realization is growing that American architecture was far less dominated by traditionalism in the first quarter of the twentieth century, particularly in the Middle West and on the Pacific Coast, than has generally been supposed in the last thirty years. See Brooks, A., ‘The Early Work of the Prairie Architects’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 2-10.

Footnote 417:

See Thompson, E., ‘The Early Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, X (1951), 15-21; Bangs, J. M., ‘Bernard Ralph Maybeck, Architect, Comes into His Own’, Architectural Record, CIII (1948), 72-9, and ‘Greene and Greene’, Architectural Forum, LXXXIX (1948), 80-9; McCoy, E., Five California Architects, New York, 1960; and Woodbridge, J. M. and S. B., Buildings of the Bay Area, a Guide to the Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, New York, 1960, which covers both earlier and later work.

Footnote 418:

See Price, C., ‘Panama-Californian Exposition: Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and the Renaissance of Spanish-Colonial Architecture’, Architectural Record, XXXVII (1915), 229-51.

Footnote 419:

See Macomber, B., The Jewel City, its Planning and Achievement..., San Francisco, 1915.

Footnote 420:

See Lancaster, C., ‘The American Bungalow’, Art Bulletin, XL (1958), 239-53.

Footnote 421:

That is, on the West Coast; considered as an alternative to the ‘International Style’ suitable for emulation everywhere, as it was for a few years, it had no more validity than any other regional mode.

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20. Notes

Footnote 422:

Reviving interest in Expressionism has already led to considerable significant publication. See, for example, Dorfles, G., Barocco nell’architettura moderna, Milan, 1951, especially the second part; Gregotti, G., ‘L’Architettura del’Espressionismo’, Casabella, August 1961, [260]-48; Conrads, U., and Sperlich, H. G., Phantastische Architektur, Stuttgart, [1960]; and, for a particularly significant figure, Joedicke, J., ‘Haering at Garkau’, Architectural Review, CXXVII (1960), 313-18. For a remarkable Expressionist publication by an architect who was very active and influential in Germany in the 1920s, see Taut, B., Die Stadtkrone, Jena, 1919.

Footnote 423:

For the development of Van de Velde’s ideas in these years see Die Renaissance im modernen Kunstgewerbe, Berlin, 1901, and Vom neuen Stil, Leipzig, 1907. Van de Velde was a prolific writer, and it is impossible to give a complete list of his books and articles here. They will be found in Madsen’s Sources of Art Nouveau, 469.

Footnote 424:

See Bauer, C. K., Modern Housing, Boston and New York, 1934; and my Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, Chapters XIII and XIV.

Footnote 425:

See Schumacher, F., Das Wesen des neuzeitlichen Backsteinbaues, Munich, 1917. The rich and decorative use of brick is as characteristic of the Hamburg School as of the Amsterdam School in these decades (see Chapter 21).

Footnote 426:

See Bie, O., Der Architekt Oskar Kaufmann, Berlin, 1928; Hegemann, W., German Bestelmeyer, Berlin [n.d.] and Mayer, H., and Rehdern, G., Wilhelm Kreis, Essen, 1953. In the twenties a large number of such well-illustrated monographs on individual German architects were published; it is much more difficult to find adequate documentation on the work of several architects in other countries who are of considerably greater originality and historical importance.

Footnote 427:

Paraboloid domes of ferro-concrete were used with brilliant spatial effect by Jacques Droz (b. 1882) at Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc in Nice. This was built in 1932, just at the same time that Böhm was building Sankt Engelbert. The plan, consisting of three intersecting ellipses, is very nearly identical with that of J. B. Neumann’s Baroque masterpiece Vierzehnheiligen; the result is very different, however, because of the continuity of the walls and roof here. Unfortunately Droz’s church was elaborated with a tower and other features of a rather ‘Jazz-Modern’ order.

Footnote 428:

Another German church-architect of the twenties who has still a very considerable reputation is Otto Bartning (b. 1883). He moved much earlier in this direction than Böhm. For a statement of his intentions, see Bartning, O., Vom neuen Kirchbau, Berlin, 1919.

Footnote 429:

See Maria Königin [Cologne, n.d.].

Footnote 430:

This is not the place to discuss these churches. It may be remarked here, however, that Candela’s church is considerably more Expressionist in appearance, especially the interior, than anything Böhm ever built in the twenties. Yet its strangely angular piers and vaults that look so much like the settings for the ‘Cabinet of Dr Caligari’, the most famous German Expressionist film, result from this engineer’s consistent use of the hyperbolic paraboloid forms which he favours primarily for technical reasons. De la Mora, Niemeyer, and Moya were content to use barrel-vault elements of plain parabolic section such as were first introduced by Böhm in 1925-6.

Footnote 431:

The triangular bay-window lighting the stairs is still somewhat Expressionist, but the interior treatment is in general more related to geometrical abstract art. The decoration approaches what came to be known as ‘Jazz-Modern’ when it became vulgarized in the next ten years or so in England. The contrast of the interiors that Behrens designed with the fine examples of Mackintosh’s furniture, brought from a house that he had remodelled earlier for the Bassett-Lowkes, appears rather shocking a generation later. What must have been considered a bit démodé in 1925 now represents to posterity—at least in the field of furniture design—the main line of advance in the early twentieth century; what then seemed in England to be ‘the last word’ has dated badly.

Footnote 432:

‘New Objectivity’: A generic term for some of the advanced movements that succeeded Expressionism in the arts; in architecture, roughly equivalent to ‘Functionalism’.

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21. Notes

Footnote 433:

The use of aluminium in architecture became widespread only some forty years later, it should be noted, although it had supplied the cap of the pyramid with which T. L. Casey finally completed the Washington Monument as early as 1884—its first use in architecture. In the nineties Thomas Harris already foresaw its great importance in building; see his Three Periods of English Architecture, London, 1894.

Footnote 434:

See ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’ in Loos, A., Trotzdem: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1900-1930, Innsbruck, 1931, first published in the Neue Freie Presse in January 1908. A French translation of the article appeared in L’Esprit nouveau, I (1920), 159-68.

Footnote 435:

Considering that Wright’s open planning had by no means matured while Loos was in Chicago, American influence (if any) came probably from the houses of the Shingle Style. Because of his close rapport with England, however, one may assume that the influence of Baillie Scott’s plans was more important; while the treatment of interior trim comes closest to Voysey, as has been noted.

Footnote 436:

The recurrent suggestions of Richardsonian influence in Europe in the nineties are not yet adequately explained. Townsend in England knew of Richardson’s work from American and English publications, and there was in England one house by Richardson, Lululund at Bushey, Herts, now largely destroyed except for the entrance. This was designed shortly before Richardson’s death for Sir Hubert von Herkomer, who had painted his portrait, and executed without supervision. Boberg had been for a short while in Chicago and Bruno Schmitz (1858-1916) in Indianapolis; but there are others whose work also seems somewhat Richardsonian, such as Theodor Fischer, who certainly had not. Berlage did not visit America until 1911, when it was Wright’s work that most impressed him. He and Fischer might, of course, have known Richardson’s buildings from publications. For foreign publications of Richardson’s work before 1900, see pp. 333-5 in the 1961 edition of my Richardson book.

Footnote 437:

See Berlage, H. P., Gedanken über den Stil in der Baukunst, Leipzig, 1905; Grundlagen und Entwicklung der Architektur, Amsterdam, 1908; German ed., Berlin, 1908; and Studies over Bouwkunst, Rotterdam, 1910.

Footnote 438:

The work of K. P. C. de Bazel (1869-1923), a pupil of Cuijpers who represents a rather different stream in Dutch architecture of the early twentieth century, is especially close to that of the contemporary German leaders but hardly at all related to Expressionism. His massive office building for the Nederlandsche Handel Maatschappij in Amsterdam of 1917-23 is quite similar to Behrens’s nearly contemporary office blocks in Hanover and Düsseldorf, but much more intricate and inventive in its brick-and-stone detail.

Footnote 439:

Although it is unlikely that de Klerk actually owed anything to the sets that Bakst, Benois, and others were designing for the Ballet Russe, the visual investiture of the Diaghilev productions certainly had a loosening effect on Western European taste in these years just before the First World War. For the first time Russia impinged visually on European art, but that impingement had only an oblique effect on architecture, for the art that was exported was not, of course, very architectural.

Footnote 440:

See American Architect, CXXVIII (5 October 1925).

Footnote 441:

See ‘The American Radiator Company Building, New York’, American Architect, CXXVI (1924), 467-84.

Footnote 442:

It is this that makes it so difficult to decide which architects should be discussed in Chapters 18-21 and which in Chapter 24. No two critics will agree, but most now recognize that the boundary line is not a sharp one. For this reason in Modern Architecture, published thirty years ago, I labelled the work of this generation ‘The New Tradition’ and did not then reject the work of the Scandinavians as too ‘traditional’ to be classed, broadly at least, with that of Wright, Perret, Behrens, Wagner, and Loos, as I have done here.

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