Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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 https://archive.org/details/americanarchitec00schu_1 
 
AMERICAN 
 
 ARCHITECTURE 
 
 \\ ■' % V 
 
 Stubies 
 
 BY 
 
 MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 
 1892 
 
7 -£ o 
 
 Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
2 - 2 - 7 %' 
 
 TO 
 
 K. L. S. 
 
 * 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Point of View .......... i 
 
 Concerning Oueen Anne ......... 6 
 
 The Vanderbilt Houses ........ 52 
 
 The Brooklyn Bridge as a Monument . ... 68 
 
 An American Cathedral 86 
 
 Glimpses of Western Architecture: 
 
 I. Chicago 112 
 
 II. St. Paul and Minneapolis ..... 168 
 
ILL USTRA TIONS 
 
 New York: 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Recessed Balcony, W. H. Vanderbilt’s House ... 13 
 
 Doorways on Madison Avenue 17 
 
 Oriel of House in Fifty-Fifth Street .... 19 
 
 Doorway, Fifth Avenue, Below Seventy-Fifth Street. 21 
 
 House in Fifty-Sixth Street 22 
 
 Houses in Madison Avenue .... 25 
 
 Doorway at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-Seventh Street. 33 
 Glimpse of Columbia College from Madison Avenue. 35 
 
 From Governor Tilden’s House 37 
 
 Oriel in W. K. Vanderbilt’s House 39 
 
 Rear of Roof, House of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Fifth 
 
 Avenue 42 
 
 Doorway of Guernsey Building, Broadway .... 44 
 
 United Bank Building .... 46 
 
 Post Building .... . . 47 
 
 Gateway of Mills Building. ......... 49 
 
 The Vanderbilt Houses: 
 
 House of W. K. Vanderbilt 53 
 
 House of Cornelius Vanderbilt 39 
 
 Houses of W. H. Vanderbilt 63 
 
 Post and Railing, W. H. Vanderbilt’s House ... 67 
 
 The Brooklyn Bridge: 
 
 The Bridge from the Brooklyn Side 69 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 viii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Bridge at Minneapolis . 75 
 
 Section of Brooklyn Bridge Tower 77 
 
 Section of Anchorage. (Side View.) ...... 81 
 
 An American Cathedral: 
 
 Proposed Cathedrat. at Albany 87 
 
 West Elevation. 91 
 
 East Elevation ....... 95 
 
 Ground-Plan 99 
 
 Transverse Section through Choir 105 
 
 Chicago : 
 
 Clock Tower, Dearborn Station ...... 112 
 
 From the City and County Building ...... 118 
 
 The Art Institute 121 
 
 Entrance to the Art Institute . .... 123 
 
 Balcony of Auditorium 125 
 
 Tower of Auditorium 127 
 
 The Field Building 131 
 
 Arcade from the Studebaker Building 135 
 
 The Owings Building 139 
 
 Corner of Insurance Exchange ... .... 141 
 
 Entrance to the Phcenix Building ...... 145 
 
 Oriel, Phcenix Building 147 
 
 Janua Richardsoniensis 152 
 
 Oriel of Dwelling 154 
 
 Dwelling in Lake Shore Drive 156 
 
 Dwelling in Prairie Avenue 158 
 
 Front in Dearborn Avenue 163 
 
 A House of Bowlders 165 
 
 A Byzantine Corbel 166 
 
 St. Paul and Minneapolis : 
 
 Public Library, Minneapolis 176 
 
 Entrance to Public Library, Minneapolis , . . 177 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The People’s Church, St. Paul 178 
 
 Unitarian Church, Minneapolis 180 
 
 Presbyterian Church, St. Paul 182 
 
 West Hotel, Minneapolis 183 
 
 Lumber Exchange, Minneapolis 187 
 
 Entrance to Bank of Commerce, Minneapolis . . 188 
 
 Corner of Bank of Commerce, Minneapolis . . . 190 
 
 The “Globe” Building, Minneapolis 191 
 
 Entrance to “Pioneer Press” Building, St. Paul . 192 
 
 Corner of “Pioneer Press” Building 193 
 
 Bank of Minnesota, St. Paul .... .... 195 
 
 Top of New York Life Insurance Building, St. 
 
 Paul 196 
 
 Entrance to New York Life Insurance Building, 
 
 St. Paul 198 
 
 New York Life Insurance Building, Minneapolis. 200 
 Vestibule of New York Life Insurance Building, 
 
 Minneapolis 201 
 
 Dwelling in Minneapolis 202 
 
 Dwelling in St. Paul. ........... 203 
 
 Porte-Cochere, St. Paul ... 204 
 
 Porch in St. Paul .... 205 
 
 From a Dwelling in St. Paul 206 
 
 Dwellings in St. Paul 207 
 
 Porch in St. Paul ............ 209 
 

 
THE POINT OF VIEW 
 
 I "HE connection between the papers here collected, 
 in addition to their common subject-matter, is their 
 common point of view. Of this I do not know that I 
 can make a clearer or briefer statement than I made 
 in a speech delivered, in response to the toast of “Ar- 
 chitecture,” at the fifth annual banquet of the National 
 Association of Builders, given February 12, 1891, at 
 the Lenox Lyceum, in New York. Accordingly I re- 
 print here the report of my remarks : 
 
 “ Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the National 
 Association of Builders, — You will not expect from 
 me, in responding to this toast, any exhibition of that 
 facetious spirit with which some of my predecessors 
 have entertained you. It has, indeed, been said that 
 American humor has never found full expression ex- 
 cept in architecture. It has also been said by an hon- 
 ored friend of mine, himself an architect, whom I hoped 
 to see here to-night, that American architecture was the 
 art of covering one tiling with another thins: to imitate 
 a third thing, which, if genuine, would not be desirable. 
 But I hope you will agree with me that, though the 
 expression is comic, the fact, so far as it is a fact, is 
 1 
 
o 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 serious even to sadness. It is a great pleasure and a 
 great privilege for me to speak to this sentiment, and 
 it is especially a privilege for me to speak upon it to 
 an association of builders, because it seems to me that 
 the real, radical defect of modern architecture in gen- 
 eral, if not of American architecture in particular, is 
 the estrangement between architecture and building — 
 between the poetry and the prose, so to speak, of the 
 art of building, which can never be disjoined without 
 injury to both. If you look into any dictionary or into 
 any cyclopaedia under ‘architecture,’ you will find that 
 it is the art of building; but I don’t think that you 
 would arrive at that definition from an inspection of 
 the streets of any modern city. I think, on the con- 
 trary, that if you were to scrape down to the face of 
 the main wall of the buildings of these streets, you 
 would find that you had simply removed all the archi- 
 tecture, and that you had left the buildings as good as 
 ever; that is to say, the buildings in which the defi- 
 nition I have quoted is illustrated are in the minority, 
 and the buildings of which I have just spoken are in 
 the majority ; and the more architectural pretensions 
 the building has, the more apt it is to illustrate this de- 
 fect of which I have spoken. 
 
 “ It is, I believe, historically true, in the history of the 
 world, with one conspicuous exception, that down to 
 the Italian Renaissance, some four centuries ago, the 
 architect was himself a builder. The exception is the 
 classical period in Rome. The Grecian builders, as all 
 of you know, had taken the simplest possible construc- 
 tion, that of the post and lintel, two uprights carrying 
 a crossbeam, and they had developed that into a refined 
 and beautiful thing. The Romans admired that, and 
 they wished to reproduce it in their own buildings, but 
 the construction of their own buildings was an arched 
 
THE POINT OF VIEW 
 
 3 
 
 construction ; it was a wall pierced with arches. They 
 did not develop that construction into what it might 
 have been. They simply pierced their wall with arches 
 and overlaid it with an envelope of the artistic expression 
 of another construction, which they coarsened in the 
 process. According to some accounts, they hired Greek 
 decorators to overlay it with this architecture which 
 had nothing to do with it, and there was the first illus- 
 tration in all history of this difference between the art 
 of architecture and the art of building. In every other 
 country in the world the architect had been the builder. 
 I think that is true down to the Italian Renaissance ; 
 and then building was really a lost art. There hadn’t 
 been anything really built in the fifteenth century; and 
 they began to employ general artists, painters and sculp- 
 tors and goldsmiths, to design their buildings, and these 
 men had no models before them except this Grecian- 
 Roman architecture of which I speak.* These men 
 reproduced that in their designs, and left the builder to 
 construct it the best way he could, and that, I am told, 
 is a process which sometimes prevails in the present 
 time. But before that everything had been a simple 
 development of the construction and the material of 
 the building, and since that men have thought they per- 
 ceived that architecture was one thing and building 
 was another, and they have gone on to design build- 
 ings without any sort of reference to the materials of 
 which they were composed, or the manner in which 
 they were put together. That is the origin of the 
 exclusively modern practice of working in architectural 
 
 * Of course this needs modification, since the mediaeval buildings of 
 Italy were accessible to the designers of the Renaissance. What I 
 suppose I had in mind was to point out that they had no knowledge 
 of the original Grecian monuments, from which the classical Roman 
 architecture was derived. 
 
4 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 styles, as it is called. Why, before the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, I don’t suppose any man who began to build a 
 building ever thought in what style he should compose 
 it any more than I thought before I got up here in 
 what language I should address you ; he simply built 
 in the language to which he was accustomed and which 
 he knew. You will find this perfect truth is the great 
 charm of Grecian architecture, and ten or fifteen cen- 
 turies later it was the sweat charm of Gothic architect- 
 
 O 
 
 ure; that is to say, that it was founded upon fact, that 
 it was the truth, that it was the thing the man was 
 doing that he was concerned about, even in those pieces 
 of architecture which seem to us the most exuberant, 
 the most fantastic, like the front of Rouen, or like the 
 cathedral of which Longfellow speaks, as you all re- 
 member : 
 
 "‘How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! 
 
 This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves 
 Birds build their nests ; while, canopied with leaves, 
 
 Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, 
 
 And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers.’ 
 
 Even in those things there was that logical, law-abiding, 
 sensible, practical adherence to the facts of construc- 
 tion, to the art of building, which we have so long lost, 
 and which I hope we are getting back again. 
 
 “ There are examples, in the work of our modern archi- 
 tecture, of architects who design with this same truth, 
 with this same reality, with this same sincerity that 
 animated the old builders before the coming-in of this 
 artificial and irrelevant system of design, and one of 
 them is the building in which I am informed a great 
 many of you spent last evening; I mean the Casino. I 
 don’t know any more admirable illustration of real, genu- 
 ine, modern architecture than that building ; and among 
 all its merits I don't know any merit greater than the 
 
THE POINT OF VIEW 
 
 5 
 
 fidelity with which the design follows the facts of struct- 
 ure in the features, in the material, in everything. It 'is 
 a building in baked clay; there isn’t a feature in it in 
 brick or in terra-cotta which could be translated into any 
 other material without loss. It is a beautiful, adequate, 
 modern performance. I say this without any reservation, 
 because unfortunately the genius who, in great part, de- 
 signed that building has gone from us ; and there are 
 many things by living architects, whom I cannot men- 
 tion because they are living, which exhibit these same 
 merits. There is one other example that I would like 
 to mention here, because many of you know his work ; 
 I mean the late John Wellborn Root, of Chicago. I 
 shouldn’t mention him either if he hadn’t, unfortunately, 
 gone from us. Mr. Root’s buildings exhibit the same 
 true sincerity — the knowledge of the material with which 
 he had to do, the fulfilment of the purpose which he 
 had to perform. I don’t know any greater loss that 
 could have happened to the architecture of this coun- 
 try and to the architecture of the future than that man 
 dying before his prime. These are stimulating and 
 fruitful examples to the architects of the present time 
 to bring their art more into alliance, more into union, 
 more into identity, with the art of building; and it is by 
 these means, gentlemen, and by these means only, that 
 we can ever gain a living, a progressive, a real archi- 
 tecture — the architecture of the future.” 
 
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE* 
 
 HE new departure is an apt name 
 for what some of its conductors de- 
 scribe as the new “ school ” in archi- 
 tecture and decoration. It has still, 
 after nearly ten years of almost com- 
 plete sway among the young archi- 
 tects of England and of the United 
 States, all the signs of a departure — 
 we might say of a hurried departure — 
 and gives no hint of an arrival, or even 
 It is, in fact, a general “breaking-up” 
 in building, as the dispersion of Babel was in speech, 
 and we can only and somewhat desperately hope that 
 the utterances of every man upon whom a dialect has 
 suddenly fallen may at least be intelligible to himself. 
 From a “movement” so exclusively centrifugal that it 
 assumes rather the character of an explosion than of an 
 evolution, not much achievement can be looked for. In 
 fact, the “movement” has not, thus far, either in Eng- 
 land or in the United States, produced a monument 
 which anybody but its author would venture to pro- 
 nounce very good. Not to go back to the times when 
 Gothic architecture was vernacular in England, it has 
 produced nothing which can be put in competition with 
 
 of a direction. 
 
 Recent Building in New York,” 1883. 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 7 
 
 the works either of the English classical revival, or with 
 the works of the English Gothic revival — with St. Paul’s 
 and the Radcliffe Library, on the one hand, or with 
 Westminster Palace and the Manchester Town-hall, on 
 the other. Before the “ movement ” began, the architects 
 of Europe and America were divided into two camps. 
 They professed themselves either Renaissance or Gothic 
 architects. The mediaevalists acknowledged a subjec- 
 tion to certain principles of design. The classicists 
 accepted certain forms and formula; as efficacious and 
 final. They were both, therefore, under some restraint. 
 But the new movement seems to mean that aspiring- 
 genius shall not be fettered by mechanical laws or aca- 
 demic rules, by reason or by revelation, but that every 
 architect shall build what is right in his own eyes, even 
 if analysis finds it absurd and Vitruvius condemns it as 
 incorrect. 
 
 “Oueen Anne” is a comprehensive name which has 
 been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, includ- 
 ing, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise 
 defies classification, and there is a convenient vague- 
 ness about the term which fits it for that use. But it 
 is rather noteworthy that the effect of what is most spe- 
 cifically known as Queen Anne is to restrain the exu- 
 berances of design. Whoever recalls Viollet-le-Duc's 
 pregnant saying, that “only primitive sources supply 
 the energy for a long career,” would scarcely select the 
 reign of Queen Anne out of all English history for a 
 point of departure in the history of any one of the plastic 
 arts. The bloated Renaissance of Wren’s successors, 
 such as is shown in Queen’s College and in Aldrich’s 
 church architecture in Oxford, was its distinctive attain- 
 ment in architecture. The minute and ingenious wood- 
 carving of Grinling Gibbons was its distinctive attain- 
 ment in decoration. Nothing could show more forci- 
 
8 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 bly the degeneracy of art at the period which of late 
 years has been represented as an aesthetic renascence 
 than the acceptance of these wood-carvings, which in 
 execution and all technical qualities are as complete, 
 and in design and all imaginative qualities are as trivial 
 and commonplace, as contemporary Italian sculpture, 
 as works of art comparable to the graceful inventions 
 of Jean Goujon, and clearly preferable to the some- 
 times rude but always purposeful decoration of mediae- 
 val churches. 
 
 The revivalists of Queen Anne have not confined 
 their attentions to the reign of that sovereign. They 
 have searched the Jacobean and the Georgian periods 
 as well, and have sucked the dregs of the whole Eng- 
 lish Renaissance. Unhappily, nowhere in Europe was 
 the Renaissance so unproductive as in the British Isl- 
 ands. It was so unproductive, indeed, that Continental 
 historians of architecture have scarcely taken the trouble 
 to look it up or to refer to it at all. Not merely since 
 the beginning of the Gothic revival, but since the begin- 
 ning of the Greek revival that was stimulated by the 
 publication of Stuart’s work on Athens, in which for 
 the first time uncorrupted Greek types could be stud- 
 ied, what contemporary architects have ransacked as a 
 treasury was considered a mere lumber-room, and fell 
 not so much into disesteem as into oblivion. During 
 two generations nobody any more thought of studying 
 the works of English architecture from Hawksmoor to 
 “ Capability” Brown, than anybody thought of studying 
 the poetry of Blackmore and Hayley. The attempt 
 within the past ten years to raise to the rank of inspi- 
 rations the relics of this decadence, which for years had 
 been regarded by everybody as rather ugly and ridicu- 
 lous, is one of the strangest episodes in the strange his- 
 tory of modern architecture. 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 9 
 
 Mr. Norman Shaw has been the chief evangelist of 
 this strange revival. Mr. Shaw is a very clever designer, 
 with a special felicity in piquant and picturesque group- 
 ings, which he had shown in Gothic work, especially in 
 country-houses, before the caprice seized him of unit- 
 ing free composition with classic detail, and the attempt 
 at this union is what is most distinctively known as 
 Queen Anne. Whoever considers the elements of this 
 combination would hardly hope that the result could be 
 a chemical union, or more than a mechanical mixture. 
 Classic detail is the outcome and accompaniment of 
 the simplest construction possible, which was employed 
 by the Greek architects in the simplest combination 
 possible, and precisely because it was so simple and so 
 primitive they were enabled to reduce it to an “ order,” 
 and to carry it to a pitch of purity, lucidity, and refine- 
 ment to which the most enthusiastic medievalist will 
 scarcely maintain that more complicated constructions 
 have ever attained. But this very perfection, which was 
 only attainable when life was simple and the world was 
 young, this necessary relation between the construction 
 and the detail of Greek Doric, makes it forever impos- 
 sible that Greek detail should be successfully “adapted” 
 to modern buildings. A late writer on the theory of 
 architecture has said of Greek architecture: “As parti- 
 sans of its historical glory, we should desire that it re- 
 main forever in its historical shrine.” We laugh at the 
 men of two generations ago who covered Europe and 
 America with private and public buildings in repro- 
 duction as exact as they could contrive of Grecian 
 temples. But, after all, if the Greek temple be the ulti- 
 mate, consummate flower, not only of all actual but of 
 all possible architectural art, were not these men wiser 
 in their generation than their successors who have taken 
 the Greek temple to pieces and tried to construct mod- 
 
 2 
 
IO 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 ern buildings out of its fragments ? There is even some- 
 thing touching and admirable, in this view, in the read- 
 iness and completeness of the sacrifice to beauty which 
 the reproducers of the Greek temples made of all their 
 merely material comforts and conveniences, something 
 that we miss in the adapters. The Romans can scarcely 
 be said to have attempted this adaptation. They built 
 Roman buildings for purposes and by methods which 
 had never entered the minds of Greek architects to con- 
 ceive, and they built them with no more thought of art 
 than enters the mind of a modern railway engineer in 
 designing a truss bridge. After they were designed ac- 
 cording to their requirements it was that the Roman 
 engineer overlaid them with an irrelevant trellis of Greek 
 architecture, debasing and corrupting the Greek archi- 
 tecture in the process. And it is this hybrid architect- 
 ure, which analysis would at once have dissolved into 
 its component parts, that was accepted without analysis 
 as the starting-point of “ the new departure ” of the fif- 
 teenth century, and the ultimate English debasement of 
 which in the eighteenth is taken by the contemporary 
 architects of England and America as the starting-point 
 of the new departure in the nineteenth. It cannot be 
 said that Mr. Norman Shaw and his followers have suc- 
 ceeded in the task of combining free composition with 
 classic detail, which the Romans forbore to attempt, and 
 in which the French architects of the sixteenth century 
 failed. Every attempt to fit antique detail to a build- 
 ing faithfully designed to meet modern requirements 
 shows that it cannot be so fitted without being trans- 
 formed, and — since the sole excuse for the attempt is 
 that it cannot be bettered — without being debased. 
 What the Queen Anne men have done is virtually what 
 the Romans did. They have shirked the impossible 
 problem they unnecessarily imposed upon themselves, 
 
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE IX 
 
 and have either overlaid or inlaid their buildings with 
 their architecture. Of course the result of this process 
 can no more be accepted as an architectural organism 
 than if they had hung water-proof paper on the outer 
 walls instead of decorating them with carving, or mould- 
 ing, or what not, built in the walls, but no more archi- 
 tecturally related to them than the paper-hanging. But 
 this is precisely what has been done in every “free clas- 
 sic ” building, with more or less skill and dissimulation 
 of the process. It is seldom done with the winning can- 
 dor with which it has been done in the house of Mr. W. 
 H. Vanderbilt in New York, which is officially described 
 as a specimen of the “ Greek Renaissance,” possibly be- 
 cause its architectural details are all Roman. In that 
 edifice two bands of exquisite carving — exquisite in ex- 
 ecution, that is to say — which girdle the building, sim- 
 ply occur on the wall at levels where they are quite 
 meaningless in relation to the building; where, conse- 
 quently, they would not help the expression of the build- 
 ing, if the building could be said to have any expression 
 beyond that of settled gloom; and where the irrelevant 
 carving, not being framed by itself, would contradict the 
 expression of a structure which was architecturally, and 
 not alone mechanically, a building. How much this 
 carving would gain by being framed away, so that if it 
 did not help, it should at least not injure, the architect- 
 ure to which it is attached, may be seen by comparing 
 these Vanderbilt houses with a brown-stone house, in 
 formal Renaissance, in upper Fifth Avenue, near Sixty- 
 ninth Street, where the carving is neither better cut nor 
 more abundant than that of the Vanderbilt houses, but 
 where its disposition at least appears to be premeditated, 
 and not casual. 
 
 It would scarcely be worth while to point out the 
 faults of designs, if they can even be described as such, 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 2 
 
 so generally disesteemed as those of the two houses 
 built for Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, “those boxes of brown 
 stone with architecture applique.” But it is worth point- 
 ing out that the radical error, which in these appears so 
 crudely and naively as to be patent to the wayfaring 
 man who has never thought about architecture, is la- 
 tent in all the works of the Queen Anne movement — to 
 which these houses do not specifically belong — and 
 must vitiate every attempt to adjust classic detail to 
 free and modern composition. Classic detail cannot 
 grow out of modern structures faithfully designed for 
 modern purposes as it grows out of antique structure, 
 or as Gothic ornament grows out of Gothic structure, 
 like an efflorescence. It must be “adjusted” as visibly 
 an after-thought, and to say this is to say that in all 
 Queen Anne buildings the architecture is applique. 
 
 However, to disparage Queen Anne is not to explain 
 its acceptance. It looks like a mere masquerade of 
 nineteenth-century men in eighteenth-century clothes, 
 and with many of its practitioners it is no more. In 
 England it seems to have originated as a caprice by 
 which a clever and dashing but by no means epoch- 
 making architect misled the younger and weaker of his 
 brethren. In this country, which had never been much 
 more architecturally than an English colony, there 
 seemed special reasons for following the new fashion 
 of being old-fashioned. American architects, and Amer- 
 ican builders before there were any American architects, 
 had been exhorted, as they have lately been exhorted 
 again, to do something distinctively American. The 
 colonial building, which was done by trained English 
 mechanics, was of the same character as the contempo- 
 rary domestic work of England, and showed in its orna- 
 ment the same unreflecting acceptance of a set of forms 
 and formulae bequeathed as a tradition of the trade and 
 
,<ECESSED EALC0NY - w - h. Vanderbilt's house, fifth avenue. 
 Herter Brothers, Architects. 
 
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE 
 
 15 
 
 part of the outfit of a journeyman. Although Jefferson 
 complained that in his time and in rural Virginia it was 
 impossible to “ find a workman who could draw an or- 
 der,” it is evident that there was no difficulty of that 
 kind in other parts of the country. These trained work- 
 men, it is to be noted, were all carpenters, and there is 
 probably no work in stone which shows an equal pre- 
 cision and facility in workmanship. Such buildings as 
 the New York City Hall and the Albany Academy 
 were clearly the work of architects of culture according 
 to the standard of the time. The only architectural 
 qualities of the works of the mechanics were the moder- 
 ation and respectability of detail, which they had learned 
 as part of their trade, and it is quite absurd to ascribe 
 to these buildings any value as works of art. It is par- 
 ticularly absurd to assign the degradation of house- 
 building which undoubtedly followed, and which made 
 the typical American house, after the Greek temple had 
 spent its force, the most vulgar habitation ever built by 
 man, to the substitution of book-learned architects for 
 handicraftsmen. People talk as if the middle part of 
 Fifth Avenue, the brown-stone high-stoop house with 
 its bloated detail, which displaced the prim precision of 
 the older work, had been done by educated architects. 
 In fact, there was hardly a single building put up in 
 New York after the design of an educated architect be- 
 tween the works we have mentioned and the erection of 
 Trinity Church by Mr. Upjohn in 1845, which not only 
 marked a great advance over anything that had been 
 done before, but began the Gothic revival to which we 
 directly or indirectly owe whatever of merit has been 
 done since, including so much of Queen Anne as, not 
 being Oueen Anne, is good. But the bulk of the build- 
 ing which gave its architectural character to New York 
 and to the country continued to be done by mechanics, 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 16 
 
 who continued, so far as they could, to supply the de- 
 mand of the market, who gradually lost the training 
 their predecessors had enjoyed, and who lost also all 
 sense of the necessity for that training in the new 
 demand that their work should be, above all things, 
 “ American.” As the slang of to-day puts it, they were 
 exhorted, as the architects are still sometimes exhorted, 
 to “talk United States.” They might have answered 
 that there was no such language, and that a few bits of 
 slang did not constitute a poetical vocabulary. The 
 feeling which urges an artist to be patriotic by being 
 different from other people not long ago led Mr. Walt 
 Whitman to resent the absence of an “autochthonous” 
 poetry, and has lately led a newspaper writer to call the 
 attention of a New England building committee to the 
 low cabin as the most suitable motive for a town-hall 
 
 O 
 
 they are going to build. 
 
 The Northern reader notes with mild amusement the 
 occasional resentment in the Southern press of the ab- 
 sence of a “distinctive Southern literature,” and per- 
 ceives the plaint to be provincial ; but he is not so quick 
 to perceive that his own clamor for an American this or 
 that is equally provincial. The hard lot of the Ameri- 
 can painter has often been bewailed, in that, when he 
 has tried to rid himself of his provincialism by learning 
 to paint, and has learned to paint more or less as other 
 men do who have learned to paint, he is straightway be- 
 rated for not being provincial. If American literature 
 or painting or architecture be good, the Americanism of 
 it may safely be left to take care of itself. But a man 
 cannot be expected to innovate to much purpose upon 
 usages with which he is unfamiliar; and the effects 
 which Mr. Whitman’s admonition to his fellow-poets to 
 “ fix their verses to the gauge of the round globe ” would 
 probably have upon an aspiring young poet, conscious 
 
title, or without any sufficient provocation described 
 themselves as architects. They undoubtedly attained 
 3 
 
 CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE 
 
 of genius, but weak in his parts of speech, are the effects 
 which the demand for aboriginality actually had upon 
 the race of builders, whether they were content with that 
 
 DOORWAYS ON MADISON AVENUE. 
 
 G. E. Harney, and McKim, Mead, & White, Architects. 
 
i8 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 difference, and their works did not remind the travelled 
 observer of any of the masterpieces of Europe. It is quite 
 conceivable and not at all discreditable that the wild work 
 of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should have led archi- 
 tects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks 
 behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Wash- 
 ington Square, and to sigh for a return of the times when 
 the common street architecture of New York was sober 
 and respectable, even if it was conventional and stupid. 
 
 This justifiable preference for Bowling Green and 
 Washington Square and St. John’s Park over Broad- 
 way and Madison Square and Murray Hill, for an archi- 
 tecture confessedly colonial over an architecture aggres- 
 sively provincial, is no doubt the explanation why so 
 many of our younger architects made haste to fall in 
 behind the Oueen Anne standard. What we really 
 have a right to blame them for is for not so far analyz- 
 ing their own emotions as to discover that the qualities 
 they admired in the older work, or admired by compari- 
 son with the newer, were not dependent upon the actual 
 details in which they found them. To be “content to 
 dwell in decencies forever ” was not considered the mark 
 of a lofty character even by a poet of the time of Queen 
 Anne. If virtue were, indeed, “ too painful an endeavor,” 
 and if there were no choice except between the state of 
 dwelling in decencies and the state of dwelling in inde- 
 cencies forever, we could but admit that they had chosen 
 the better part. But they were not, in fact, confined to 
 a choice between these alternatives. The Gothic revi- 
 val in England, after twenty years, had succeeded in 
 establishing something much more like a real vernacu- 
 
 o o 
 
 lar architecture than had been known in England before 
 since the building of the cathedrals — an architecture 
 which, although starting from formulas and traditions, 
 had attained to principles, and was true, earnest, and 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 19 
 
 alive. It was quite inevitable that it should be crude 
 in proportion as it was alive, according to the frankness 
 with which it recognized that we live in times unknown 
 to the ancients, and en- 
 deavored to respond 
 with changes in its 
 organism to changes 
 wrought in its envi- 
 ronment by new re- 
 quirements and new 
 knowledge, with forms 
 necessarily rude, in- 
 choate, embryonic, as 
 beseems the formative 
 period of letters and 
 of arts as of life, in 
 contrast with the ul- 
 timate refinement 
 which is the mark of 
 a completed develop- 
 ment. But that these 
 crudities would be re- 
 fined was also inevi- 
 table ; that they were 
 in process of refine- 
 ment was apparent. 
 
 Another generation 
 of artists as earnest 
 as those who began 
 
 o 
 
 the Gothic revival 
 might have brought 
 this rough and swell- 
 ing bud to a splendid blossom. But in an evil hour, and 
 under a strange spell, the young architects of the United 
 States followed the young architects of England in pre- 
 
 ORIEL OF HOUSE IN FIFTY-FIFTH STREET. 
 C. C. Haight, Architect. 
 
20 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 ferring the refinements of a fixed and developed archi- 
 tecture to the rudenesses of a living and growing archi- 
 tecture. Because they did not see their way at once to 
 “supply every deficiency and symmetrize every dispro- 
 portion,” they did not leave this for their successors, but 
 abandoned the attempt at an expression of the things 
 they were doing for the elegant expression in antique 
 architecture of meanings that have grown meaningless 
 to modern men. 
 
 They have had their way in New York for seven or 
 eight years, during a period unprecedented in building 
 activity, and out of all comparison in the profusion 
 with which money has been lavished upon building and 
 decoration. What have they gained for architectural 
 art? They have, indeed, subjected many miles of sand- 
 stone to the refining influence of egg-and-dart mould- 
 ings (the designer of a house in Fifth Avenue has so 
 much faith in the efficacy of that ornament that he has 
 belted his street front with three rows of it, one above 
 the other), and triglyphs (faithfully to have contem- 
 plated which softens the manners, nor suffers to be 
 rude) have been brought within the reach of the hum- 
 blest in the decoration of tenement-houses. They have 
 built so much and so expensively that they have pro- 
 duced in minds — like some of their own — which do not 
 reflect much upon these things the impression that if 
 luxury and art be not synonymous, they are at least 
 inseparably connected, with the latter in the capacity 
 of handmaiden. But will any educated architect assert 
 that the characteristic monuments of the last five or 
 six years — greatly superior in quantity, and superior by 
 a great multiple in cost — are equal in architectural value 
 to the work of the decade preceding? Suppose that 
 Mr. Norman Shaw had not bedevilled the weaker of 
 his brethren, and that this unprecedented building ac- 
 
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE 
 
 2 i 
 
 tivity and this unparalleled spending of money that have 
 fallen under the control of architects had been directed 
 along the lines laid down by the Gothic revivalists, and 
 had extended, consolidated, and refined the work begun 
 
 O 
 
 and carried on here by such architects as Mr. Upjohn, 
 Mr. Eidlitz, Mr. 
 
 Withers, Mr. Cady, 
 
 Mr. Potter, and Mr. 
 
 Wight, will any edu- 
 cated architect main- 
 tain that the result 
 of such a process 
 would not have been 
 nobler monuments 
 than any to which 
 we can point as 
 characteristic prod- 
 ucts of the later 
 movement ? 
 
 We might ask Mr. 
 
 Harney, forexample, 
 who has been one 
 of the noteworthy 
 contributors to the 
 works of both peri- 
 ods, whether in fall- 
 ing to “ grace ” he 
 has not fallen from 
 something more im- 
 portant. One can readily understand that Mr. Harney, in 
 contemplating the effect of his completed work in the re- 
 spectable warehouse at the corner of Bond Street and 
 Broadway, should have been disappointed in the effect 
 of much of the detail he had designed for his building, 
 should have found some of it rude, some of it dispropor- 
 
 DOORWAY, FIFTH AVENUE, BELOW SEVENTY-FIFTH STREET. 
 R. H. Robertson, Architect. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 tionate to its function and position, and 
 none of it exquisite in modelling. It 
 is also intelligible that he may have 
 been dissatisfied with some parts even 
 of his still more successful house 
 at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh 
 Street, which, always a grate- 
 ful object, has lately acquired 
 an air of additional distinction 
 from the eager architectural 
 competition which has set in 
 alongside of it, and the results 
 of which give an air of un- 
 questionable animation — the 
 animation of excited contro- 
 versy — to Fifty-seventh Street 
 from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. 
 This dissatisfaction, if the 
 architect underwent it, was 
 a wholesome discontent which 
 we should have expected to 
 see allayed by more thorough- 
 ly studied detail in 
 Mr. Harney’s succeed- 
 ing work. But it 
 seems to have been a 
 morbid sensitiveness 
 to the defects of his 
 work which led Mr. 
 Harney to abandon al- 
 together, and in de- 
 spair, the practice of 
 architectural design, 
 and, when he had another commercial building to do, 
 to erect in Wall Street an entirely ineffectual structure, 
 
 HOUSE IN FIFTY-SIXTH STREET. 
 Bruce Price, Architect. 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 of which the architecture that one carries away with him 
 consists in a crow-stepped gable, an irrelevant entablature 
 applique which crosses the building half-way up, and win- 
 dows covered with flat arches, the key-stones of which 
 are “shored up” by the mullions ; and, when he had 
 another city house to do, to depute the design of it to 
 some unknown carpenter who died before he was born, 
 and to reproduce accurately in Madison Avenue a Van- 
 dam or Charlton Street house built out of due time, 
 with a familiar “old New York” doorway, in the jambs 
 of which quoins intercept sheaves of mouldings. This 
 confession that a carpenter of 1825 was a better-trained 
 designer than an educated architect of 1S80 is very 
 possibly creditable to the personal modesty of the latter ; 
 but Mr. Harney’s own earlier works sufficiently testify 
 that it does not do him justice. 
 
 Mr. Cady, one of the most important and distin- 
 guished of the contributors to the Gothic revival in 
 New York, has also of late years become a convert to 
 the new movement, and seems from our point of view 
 to have thrown himself away with even less sufficient 
 cause than that which impelled Mr. Harney to his rash 
 act. For we have distinctly admitted that Mr. Harney 
 had reason to be dissatisfied with his Gothic detail, 
 while we cannot make that admission in behalf of Mr. 
 Cady. Mr. Cady’s newer work is shown in a house of 
 red- brick and brown sandstone, which he contributed 
 to the architectural competition just noticed. This edi- 
 fice shows a desire to live at peace in the midst of very 
 quarrelsome neighbors. Mr. Cady, indeed, could scarce- 
 ly design a vulgar and vociferous work if he tried. At 
 any rate, he has never tried, and does not in the least 
 need to be put under the bonds of a style in order to 
 insure his keeping the peace. One wonders what Mr. 
 Cady believes himself to have gained in abandoning the 
 
2 4 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 style of his brilliant Art Building in Brooklyn for the 
 style of his not very noticeable house in Fifty-seventh 
 Street. 
 
 Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; 
 but it can also be attained, by architects who are really 
 in quest of it, in other styles quite as well, which admit 
 a much wider range of expression, while the student is 
 forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre reper- 
 tory of Queen Anne any other quality than quietude 
 can be expressed. Its successes in domestic architect- 
 ure are mainly the successes of unnoticeableness, which 
 is really the character not only of the dwellings just 
 mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth 
 Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, 
 and of a house, which has the great advantage of double 
 the usual frontage, by Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, 
 in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s reproduc- 
 tion ; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street 
 by these latter architects, which looks less like a work 
 of architectural art than a magnified piece of furniture 
 “with the Chippendale feeling,” can scarcely be called 
 successful, while the house they designed for Mr. Astor 
 in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street 
 front in brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called 
 Queen Anne, in spite of the three rows of egg-and-dart 
 moulding, already remarked, which crown its rock-faced 
 basement. The highest praise to which these typical 
 Queen Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thor- 
 oughly studied detail, such as the treatment of the oriel 
 in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is that they look 
 like eligible mansions for highly respectable families 
 content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also 
 the highest praise that can be bestowed upon their pro- 
 totypes of the Georgian era. We can repeat the admis- 
 sion that it is far better they should look like that than 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 like the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons, 
 without thereby admitting that the prim and prosaic 
 expression of re- 
 spectability never so 
 eminent can be 
 scored as a triumph 
 in domestic archi- 
 tecture. The do- 
 mestic architecture 
 of Venice, or Rou- 
 en, or Nuremberg 
 has something more 
 to say to us than 
 that. And a touch 
 of such spirit and 
 picturesqueness as 
 Mr. Bruce Price has 
 given us in a brick 
 house in Fifty-sixth 
 Street (p. 22), or as 
 Mr. Hunt has given 
 us not only in the elab- 
 orately ornate house 
 of Mr. W. K. Van- 
 derbilt, but in some 
 dwellings in upper 
 Madison Avenue, is 
 more to be desired 
 than a mere omission 
 to outrage decorum. 
 
 Such as the suc- 
 cesses of Oueen 
 Anne in domestic 
 architecture are, they 
 are its only successes, 
 
 HOUSES IN MADISON AVENUE. 
 R. M. Hunt, Architect. 
 
26 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 although it is only fair to say that much interesting work 
 has been clone in it, if not strictly of it, in suburban houses 
 and sea-side cottages, which do not come within our pres- 
 ent scope. A “ feature ” suffices for the architecture of a 
 narrow street front, and a feature may be compiled out 
 of the repertory of Oueen Anne by a designer who 
 thinks that result a reward of his pains, The oriel, 
 for example, in effect comprises the architecture of the 
 house just mentioned as designed by Mr. Haight. But 
 even in a house which is only a feature the classic de- 
 tail is not always adjusted without a visible incongruity 
 to the constructions, out of which classic detail cannot 
 spontaneously grow as it grew out of classic construc- 
 tions. The doorway, for example, of the house designed 
 by Mr. Robertson, which is virtually repeated in the 
 window over it, is a moulded round arch standing upon 
 pilasters of its own width, and thus apparently making 
 of the jamb and arch a complete and detached construc- 
 tion. That is to say, the pilasters seem to carry the 
 arch. The architect of the New York Post-office has 
 done the same thing in a much ruder way. But the 
 elegance of Mr. Robertson’s detail cannot rid even the 
 spectator who does not stop to analyze the source of 
 the feeling of an uneasy sensation that what is thus ele- 
 gantly expressed is not the fact. An arch does, in fact, 
 exercise a lateral as well as a vertical pressure ; and if 
 the arch and its vertical supports formed a detached 
 construction, as they here appear to do, the arch would 
 be unstable. Insensible as the classical Romans were 
 to considerations of artistic expression, they were not 
 so insensible as this. They recognized the existence of 
 a lateral pressure by marking the impost of the arches 
 with a continuous moulding, thus allying the arch with 
 its lateral abutment as well as with its vertical support; 
 and here the architect of the Post-office, wiser, or, if 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 27 
 
 thought be not predicable of his architecture, more fort- 
 unate than Mr. Robertson, has been content to imitate 
 them. . 
 
 The buildings in which these solecisms appear, we 
 repeat, are the successes of Queen Anne. For struct- 
 ures more complicated most of its practitioners have 
 shrunk from invoking it. Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, 
 indeed, took the ground, when they designed the Union 
 League Club House, that a “feature” supplied a suffi- 
 cient idea for that edifice ; and that a portico of four 
 large Roman Corinthian columns in front, subdued to 
 an equal number of brick pilasters on the side, would 
 meet the architectural requirements of the case, if they 
 let their consciousness play freely over the remaining 
 surfaces without reference to this central thought. But 
 the result has scarcely justified this belief, and the spec- 
 tator finds that the building, in spite of the unifying 
 influence of a large and simple roof, in addition to the 
 feature in question, does not make a total impression, 
 but is scattering and confused ; while its parts, taken 
 singly, are feeble in spite of their extravagant scale. 
 This, indeed, is not even a sacrifice to the conven- 
 tions, but a specimen of what can be achieved in 
 a style of gentle dulness gone rampant. If tame 
 Oueen Anne is a somewhat ineffectual thing, what 
 shall be said of wild Queen Anne? There is nothing 
 wild about two other public buildings in which archi- 
 tects have ventured upon Queen Anne — one a hospital, 
 in Park Avenue, by Mr. Haight, and one an “institu- 
 tion” of some other kind, in Lexington Avenue, by Mr. 
 Fernbach. Both of these, indeed, are tame, and what- 
 ever the differences of detail may be, both have much 
 the same expression, so that one carries away from 
 either, as from one of the commonplace faces which 
 we are always confounding, an impression which may 
 
28 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 be that of the other— in either case of a centre with 
 projecting wings separately roofed, and the whole wall 
 overlaid with a shallow trellis of brick-work, too shallow 
 to be serviceable as buttresses, and serviceable only as 
 the badge of the alleged “style.” It seems hard upon 
 an owner that he should be required to pay money for 
 rectangular applications of brick which can scarcely 
 strengthen his building appreciably, and can hardly be 
 held to beautify it, by way merely of labelling it, “ This 
 is Queen Anne.” And this resemblance, be it noted, 
 which is not so much a specific resemblance as the ex- 
 pression of an amiable characterlessness common to 
 both, is not all to be imputed to the architects, except 
 upon the ground of their choice of a style. The works 
 of both of them have character, and not at all the same 
 character, when they are working in a style which is a 
 real form-language in which meanings can be expressed, 
 and not a mere little phrase-book containing elegant 
 extracts wherewith to garnish aimless discourse. Mr. 
 Fernbach,* as is testified by such works as the “ Staats- 
 Zeitumr” building and the German Savings-Bank in New 
 York, and the building of the Mutual Insurance Com- 
 pany in Philadelphia, is one of the most accomplished 
 practitioners in this country of academic Renaissance. 
 Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is 
 a highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not 
 their fault if Queen Anne, when spread over an exten- 
 sive faqade, spreads thin. 
 
 Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the 
 temerity to attempt a Queen Anne church, and the 
 success of his essay is not such as to invite imitation. 
 The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue, 
 with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, which 
 
 Died 1883. 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 2 9 
 
 are of a rugged rusticity, with the needful openings left 
 square-headed and unmodelled ; but these walls are 
 crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow shingles, 
 under a broad gable, and its openings united under a 
 thin ogee canopy of painted pine. There is here and 
 there a little classic detail, which, if it pleases the de- 
 signer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the interior that 
 is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what 
 the German critics call the “ playful use ” of forms 
 devised for one construction and one material in an- 
 other material and with no visible construction ; and the 
 result of this pleasantry is what a German professor, 
 celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “ an important 
 joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, 
 the treatment passes a joke, for the mahogany nave 
 arches, with their little protruding key-woods, and their 
 supporting posts incased in boxed pedestals, are actually 
 doing the work of carrying the clere-story — unless, in- 
 deed, there is a concealed system of iron-work — although 
 their function is so far sacrificed to their form that they 
 are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective 
 fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne 
 contains no forms that can be even tortured into the 
 construction of an open ceiling, the architect has omit- 
 ted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere loft, 
 sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as 
 in the fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is en- 
 tirely playful, so that the interior of the church seems 
 to be a collection of pleasantries. In a dining-room, 
 for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but 
 really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes 
 seems to be ruled out by the previous question as to 
 the admissibility in the sacred edifice of levity even of 
 the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for the ap- 
 pliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeed 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 30 
 
 for the designers of “cozy” churches in general, that 
 there is no official censorship of church architecture as 
 there is of church music, and that no rubric makes it 
 the duty of every minister, with such assistance as he 
 can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to sup- 
 press all light and unseemly architecture by which vain 
 and ungodly persons profane the service of the sanctu- 
 ary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the spirit in which 
 we have been asking other architects, what he has 
 gained by abandoning such an effort as he made some 
 ten years before in the Phillips Memorial Church to 
 develop a composition out of his subject in favor of 
 these scraps of quotations, and of quotations neither 
 fresh nor very pregnant ! He might answer that the 
 church in which we admire at least the effort was a 
 somewhat untamed and obstreperous fabric, and that 
 the present edifice is much more chastened and sub- 
 dued. It is tame, no doubt, and Mr. Robertson’s talent, 
 when he works in Queen Anne, is subdued— 
 
 “subdued 
 
 To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand 
 
 but, upon the whole, it is difficult to see how the archi- 
 tect, comparing the earlier with the later work, could 
 fail to feel that the attempt to express something, how- 
 ever crude and so far unsuccessful the attempt might 
 have been, was a more manly and artistic employment 
 than this elegant trifling, in which the highest attain- 
 able success has an element of puerility. In truth, it is 
 gratifying to remark that the argument by which we 
 have supposed the architect to have solaced himself for 
 the result of his ecclesiastical labors in Queen Anne 
 does not seem to have convinced himself, and that a 
 later work still, a sandstone church farther down the 
 same avenue, is a much more serious piece of design, 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 31 
 
 being an attempt to develop the architecture out of 
 the structure itself. It would be especially unjust to 
 misapply to Mr. Robertson’s Queen Anne church the 
 saying that the style is the man, for the church last 
 mentioned shows that Mr. Robertson is a man of tal- 
 ents, when he gives his talents a chance. 
 
 Thus far we have been speaking of the respectable 
 and conservative element in the new departure, of the 
 Extreme Right, so to speak, and generally of works 
 which were seriously designed, and so are entitled to 
 be seriously considered. It is not so pleasant to turn 
 to the Extreme Left, a frantic and vociferous mob, who 
 welcome the “ new departure ” as the disestablishment 
 of all standards, whether of authority or of reason, and 
 as an emancipation from all restraints, even those of 
 public decency, and who avail themselves of the re- 
 mission of them from academic restraints to those 
 imposed by their own sense of propriety by promptly 
 showing that they haven't any. The tame decorum of 
 one phase of the new departure is supplemented by the 
 violent indecorum of another. Sometimes the same 
 designers march now with one wing and now with the 
 other of the divergent host. Messrs. Me Kim, Mead, 
 & White, for example, have consoled themselves for 
 what now almost seems to have been the enforced se- 
 dateness of the houses we have noticed, by a mad orgy 
 of bad architecture in East Fifty- fifth Street. The 
 scene of this excess almost immediately adjoins the dig- 
 nified and respectable dwelling designed by Mr. Haight, 
 and almost frights that edifice from its propriety, and 
 the designers seem to have been led into it by the bale- 
 ful example of older persons who ought to have known 
 better, and who committed the maddest freaks in the 
 artistic quarter of the London suburb of Chelsea while 
 in a condition of total irresponsibility alike to any con- 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 victions and to any conventions of architectural art. 
 The present indecorum has been committed in the de- 
 sign of two dwellings which consist of a ferociously 
 rugged basement and parapeted cornice in granite, with 
 two or three irregularly disposed tin dormers emerging 
 above, and with a flat and shallow screen of brick wall 
 inserted between them, as between the upper and the 
 nether millstone, and having its thinness emphasized at 
 all the angles by shallow incisions forming a series of 
 brick weather-strips, as it were, a square reticulation 
 of which traverses the plane surfaces also. It is quite 
 conceivable that rugged simplicity may have suggested 
 itself to a designer as a desirable character for a city 
 house, but it seems scarcely possible that squareness 
 and flatness and thinness should have appeared desir- 
 able, and quite impossible that beauty should have 
 seemed to dwell in a building the top and bottom of 
 which were characterized by rugged simplicity, and the 
 middle by squareness and flatness and thinness. The 
 details, whether in brick or granite or tin, are as pre- 
 posterous as the conception of a building with its parts 
 thus swearing at each other. The round-headed door- 
 way is surmounted with the imitation in granite of a 
 metal flap secured to the rest of the block from which 
 it is cut by similitudes in granite of iron bolt-heads. 
 In the basement respectable blocks of granite are sub- 
 jected to the indignity of being decorated with stream- 
 ing ribbons in low-relief. In truth, the only detail of 
 the work which one can contemplate even with toler- 
 ance is a grill in the basement doorway which is the 
 simplest possible trellis of iron rods. 
 
 Indecorous and incoherent as this edifice unquestion- 
 ably is, it has yet the air of a gentleman taking his 
 pleasure, albeit in a perverse and vicious fashion, when 
 compared, for example, with the dwellings in red brick 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 33 
 
 and brown stone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 
 Sixty-seventh Street. In these there is no composition 
 whatever, and the effect is so scattering, and the whole 
 is so fortuitous an aggregation of unrelated parts, that 
 
 DOORWAY AT FIFTH AVENUE AND SIXTY-SEVENTH STREET. 
 
 it is impossible to describe the houses or to remember 
 them when one’s back is turned. Their fragments only 
 recur to memory, as the blurred images of a hideous 
 dream. So one recalls the Batavian grace of the bul- 
 bous gables ; the oriel-windows, so set as to seem in im- 
 
 5 
 
34 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 minent danger of toppling out; the egg-and-dart mould- 
 ing, niggled up and down jambs of brick-work connected 
 by flat openings with protruding key-stones; the whip- 
 lashes cut in sandstone blocks; the decorative detail 
 fished from the slums of the Rococo. These are not 
 subjects for architectural criticism ; they call for the 
 intervention of an architectural police. They are cases 
 of disorderly conduct done in brick and brown stone. 
 I fazardous as the superlative degree generally is, it is 
 not much of a hazard to say that they are the most 
 thoroughly discreditable buildings ever erected in New 
 York, and it is to be noted that they are thoroughly 
 characteristic of the period. Such a nightmare might, 
 perhaps, have entered the brain of some speculative 
 builder during the wildest vulgarity of the brown-stone 
 period, but he would not have had the effrontery to 
 build it, being deterred by the consideration that no- 
 body would face public ridicule by consenting to live 
 in it. Some speculator is, however, convinced that 
 there is now a market for a house which stands upon 
 the street corner, and screeches for people to come and 
 look at it, when there is nothing in it worth looking at; 
 and we must take shame to ourselves from the reflec- 
 tion that the speculator may be right in counting upon 
 this extreme vulgarization of the public taste, and that, 
 at any rate, there is no police to prevent the emission 
 of the screech upon the public highway. 
 
 This is the result of a demand for “something new” 
 upon a mind incapable of producing anything good. 
 The screech is the utterance of the Sweet Singer of 
 Michigan, exhorted not to mind about grammar, but 
 “ to fix her verses to the gauge of the round globe.” 
 It is an extreme instance, to be sure ; but there are 
 others only less discreditable, and only to be dealt with 
 in the way of what is called “slashing” criticism, which 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 35 
 
 probably never yet served any more important purpose 
 than to ease the critic’s mind. It is enough to indicate 
 these things, and to point out that they are all produced 
 
 by the strain in the minds of incompetent designers 
 after originality and aboriginal ity — a purpose essen- 
 tially vulgar, which would vitiate the work even of a 
 competent designer wherever it could be detected. For 
 although the pursuit of excellence is sure to result in 
 novelty, the pursuit of novelty is sure not to result in 
 excellence. The extreme instance we have cited is still 
 
36 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 an instance of a tendency to which all the younger 
 generation of architects, of whom so much was hoped, 
 and of whom, considering their opportunities, so little 
 of value has come, have more or less yielded — the ten- 
 dency to take themselves too seriously and their art not 
 seriously enough, and to imagine that anything that 
 occurs to them is for that reason good enough to build, 
 without asking it any questions. Such caricatures of 
 architecture as these houses would not occur to the 
 mind of an educated architect ; but when all restraints, 
 rational and academic, are removed, even educated archi- 
 tects, as we have seen, will not always take the trouble 
 to analyze their conceptions before embodying them in 
 durable brick and stone. It is from this that it comes 
 that, as we said awhile ago, the characteristic works of 
 the present period are distinctly inferior to the charac- 
 teristic works of the preceding period. It is not that 
 thoroughly good buildings have not been done within 
 the latter period, but that they are not characteristic of 
 the period. The buildings which appear to have been 
 done by architects, and yet fail to stand the tests either 
 of sense or of style, date themselves infallibly as having 
 been done since 1S76. One must resort to external 
 evidence to ascertain whether the buildings that are 
 honorable monuments to their architects were done 
 before or since Mr. Norman Shaw did all this mischief. 
 
 First among these, one has little hesitation in placing 
 the new buildings designed by Mr. Haight for Colum- 
 bia College. Mr. Haight has not here been in pursuit 
 of novelty, but has been content with conforming his 
 structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus 
 arrived at so as to heighten their inherent expression. 
 And although he has kept within the limits of histori- 
 cal English Gothic in doing this, the result of the proc- 
 ess is an individual building with a characteristic ex- 
 
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE 
 
 37 
 
 pression of its own, the most successful piece of Gothic 
 design that has been done in New York since Mr. 
 Withers designed the Jefferson Market Court-house. 
 In Queen Anne, as we saw, Mr. Haight’s work was 
 not very distinguish- 
 able from the work of 
 a very different archi- 
 tect. With a vocab- 
 ulary limited to fifty 
 words, not much can be 
 expressed. But when 
 he permits himself the 
 use of language, it is 
 seen that Mr. Haight 
 can express thoughts. 
 
 In composition and in 
 detail these buildings 
 are thoroughly studied 
 and thoroughly effec- 
 tive. In the earlier, a 
 street front of a whole 
 block on Madison Ave- 
 nue, the designer has 
 resisted the temptation 
 to diversify his build- 
 ing into unrest, but has 
 built a wall of three 
 stories in red brick 
 and light sandstone, the 
 broad and quiet aspect 
 of which is enhanced 
 by the grouping of the 
 openings, and not disturbed by the chimney-stacks and 
 the oriel and the turret which animate the composition. 
 The later building, of the same materials, has been built 
 
 FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN S HOUSE. 
 Calvert Vaux, Architect. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 38 
 
 for the library of the college, and the large hall which con- 
 tains this is in effect the building. This is treated with 
 equal skill, and to the same result of cloistral repose, of 
 harmony and dignity and grace. These vigorous and re- 
 fined works show, if the showing were needed, except by 
 the architects of the new departure, that vigor does not 
 necessarily involve bowlders, nor refinement microscopic 
 mouldings, and that these short-cuts to architectural ef- 
 fect are rather sorry and shabby substitutes for faithful 
 and skilful design. That these works of Mr. Haight’s 
 are grammatically “correct” Gothic is not, to our mind, 
 either a merit or a defect. But it shows how wide is 
 the range of expression possible in the architecture of 
 the Middle Ages, and of its pliability to modern uses, 
 that without a departure from precedent the needs of 
 an American college in the nineteenth century can be 
 completely answered in that architecture ; for there is 
 no innovation in Mr. Haight’s work, unless we include 
 the iron roof, which is partly visible from the floor of 
 the hall. There are one or two “survivals” of forms 
 which have lost their functions, as the unpierced pin- 
 nacled turrets at the angles of the library building and 
 the crenellated parapet of the porch in the quadrangle. 
 But, upon the whole, the result upon which the college 
 and its architect are to be congratulated has been at- 
 tained by following the advice of the sculptor who in- 
 formed his pupil that the art was not difficult: “You 
 simply take a piece of marble and leave out what you 
 don’t want.” Mr. Haight has taken what he wanted 
 in Gothic architecture for the uses of Columbia Col- 
 lege, and with the trivial exceptions we have noted has 
 left out the rest. And what is true of this work is 
 equally true of an unpretending and picturesque piece 
 of late Gothic, erected from Mr. Haight’s designs for 
 St. Thomas’s School, in East Fifty-ninth Street. 
 
ORIEL IN 
 
 w. k. Vanderbilt’s house, fifty-second street. 
 
 R. M. Hunt, Architect. 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 41 
 
 Another interesting piece of Gothic work, though 
 this time of distinctly Victorian Gothic, is the house 
 designed by Mr. Vaux for Governor Tilden. The in- 
 terest of this, however, is rather in the detail of form 
 and color than in general composition, since the build- 
 ing is architecturally only a street front, and since the 
 slightness of the projections and the lack of visible and 
 emphasized depth in the wall itself give it the appear- 
 ance rather of a screen than of one face of a building, 
 and the small gables which surmount it too evidently 
 exist for the sole purpose of animating the sky-line. 
 But the color treatment of this front is admirable, and 
 recalls the best work of the most successful colorist in 
 architecture whom we have ever had in New York — 
 Mr. Wrey Mould. It is characteristic that interesting 
 treatment of color, like every other properly architect- 
 ural development, has been stopped short by the new 
 “ movement.” An unusually large variety of colors, 
 and those of the most positive tints that natural stones 
 supply, has here been employed and harmonized ; and, 
 what is even rarer, they have all been used with archi- 
 tectural propriety to accentuate the construction and to 
 heighten its effect. An ingenious and novel use of 
 dark granite, which when polished is almost black, and 
 which is employed in narrow bands precisely where it 
 is wanted, deserves particular remark. The decorative 
 carving attracts attention chiefly by its profusion, and 
 by the exquisite crispness and delicacy of its execution. 
 In both these respects the only parallel to it is in the 
 house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, for, as we have seen, 
 the carving upon the houses of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt 
 does not count. That this carving counts so fully is 
 the result of the skill of the architect in fixing its place 
 and adjusting its scale so that it everywhere assists the 
 architecture, and is better in its place than it would be 
 in another place. 
 
 6 
 
42 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 These things are equally true of the equally profuse 
 carving in the house designed by Mr. Hunt for Mr. W. 
 K. Vanderbilt; but this, although in a monochrome of 
 gray limestone, would have a high architectural interest 
 without the least decoration by force of design alone. 
 The decorative detail is scarcely so well adjusted to 
 the building in scale as that in the house just men- 
 tioned, or in the house designed for Mr. Cornelius 
 Vanderbilt by Mr. Post, being partly lost by its minute- 
 
 REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH AVENUE. 
 George B. Post, Architect. 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 43 
 
 ness, but it has the same merit of being in the right 
 place, and designed for its place, and is cut with the 
 same perfection. In a more recent work of Mr. 
 Hunt’s, the Guernsey Building, in lower Broadway — 
 a street front in distinctly modern Gothic — there is 
 assuredly no error in scale on the side of minute- 
 ness ; but the treatment, in mass and in detail, is 
 marked by great vigor and animation, and the archi- 
 tecture of the building is an emphatic expression of its 
 structure. 
 
 Another commercial building, at the corner of Broad- 
 way and Wall Street, is by the architects of the Union 
 League Club, and seems to have been designed under 
 the pressure of a recent discovery that that building 
 would not do. There is no doubt about the discovery ; 
 it is only a pity that it should not have been made from 
 the drawings before they were translated into masonry. 
 Clear, however, as the architects were on this point, they 
 were not so clear when they began the United Bank 
 Building what would do, and the first two stories look 
 like a series of tentative experiments to find out. They 
 were proving all things, perhaps, with the intention of 
 holding fast that which was good. The practice of 
 projecting bowlders, especially in soft sandstone, has 
 already been mentioned as a somewhat slovenly sub- 
 stitute for the expression of vigor by modelling. Bowl- 
 ders are projected from the piers of this basement in 
 the most ferocious and blood-curdling manner — so fero- 
 cious, indeed, that the architects repented them of their 
 bullying behavior. It is like the fear that came upon 
 Snug the joiner, of the consequences that would ensue 
 if ladies took him for the king of beasts: “Another 
 prologue must tell he is not a lion.” And so the archi- 
 tects seem to have taken the counsel of Nick Bottom: 
 “ Half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck ; 
 
44 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to 
 the same defect — Ladies, or fair ladies, 1 would wish 
 you, or, I would request you, or, I would entreat you, 
 
 not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours. If you 
 think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. 
 No, I am no such thing: I am a man as other men are: 
 
 DOORWAY OF GUERNSEY BUILDING, BROADWAY. 
 R. M. Hunt, Architect. 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 45 
 
 and there, indeed, let him name his name ; and tell 
 them plainly he is Snug the joiner” — that is to say, 
 Messrs. Peabody and Stearns, architects. The “ other 
 prologue,” which is calculated to reassure the most 
 timid, is the treatment of the first floor, where a dis- 
 claimer of any offensive intention is made in the in- 
 sertion between the openings of pairs of banded pilas- 
 ters, between the capitals of which is inserted the novel 
 and pleasing ornament of a key-stone. In order to 
 make sure that they are not strong enough to do any 
 harm, they are not only designed with much feebleness, 
 but they are projected from the face of the wall they 
 might otherwise be imagined to strengthen, and set 
 upon brackets. Between these Renaissance pilasters 
 are Romanesque entrance arches, in which there is a 
 return to truculence of demeanor; but these are seen 
 to be not entrances at all, but only innocent windows 
 of bank parlors, and the real entrances under them, cov- 
 ered with trefoiled gablets in cast iron, are obviously 
 harmless. It is quite fair to say that up to the top of 
 the first story there is no design in the building, noth- 
 ing that betrays any evidence of a general intention. 
 But having built thus far in futile search of a motive 
 and of a style, they came upon both, and built over this 
 aimless and restless collection of inconsistent details a 
 purposeful, peaceable, and consistent brick building, a 
 series of powerful piers connected by and sustaining 
 powerful arches, defined by a light label moulding, and 
 enriched at the springing with a well-designed belt of 
 foliage. It seems incredible that the authors of this 
 respectable building should be also the authors of the 
 basement on which it stands. At the angle is the in- 
 genious device of a griffin “ displayed,” and with one 
 wing folded back against either wall, to carry the metal 
 socket of the flag-staff. This feature in all its details 
 
46 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 is designed with 
 great spirit and pic- 
 turesqueness. But 
 the architectural 
 impulse fails in the 
 attic story, which 
 should obviously be 
 here the richest 
 part of the build- 
 ing, and which is 
 the baldest, being 
 only a series of rec- 
 tangular holes, 
 without either 
 modelling or dec- 
 oration, and with- 
 out relation in their 
 grouping to the 
 openings immedi- 
 ately under them. 
 
 By far the most 
 successful, how- 
 ever, of all the re- 
 cent commercial 
 buildings is the 
 Post Building, de- 
 signed by Mr. Post, 
 and executed, above 
 the blue-stone base- 
 ment, in yellow 
 brick and yellow terra-cotta. The site is an irregular 
 tetragon at the intersection of three streets, and the 
 court, made necessary by the depth of the plot, in- 
 stead of being a well sunk in the middle of the build- 
 ing, is made a recess in one of the long sides. This 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 47 
 
 arrangement is not only practically convenient, but, like 
 every arrangement obviously dictated by practical con- 
 venience, is capable of becoming architecturally effec- 
 tive, and here becomes so. The openings are admirably 
 well grouped between the powerful piers, and, what is 
 a rare attainment in “ elevator architecture,” there is 
 abundant variety in their treatment, without the look 
 of restlessness and caprice which generally attends an 
 effort for variety in a many-storied building. The de- 
 tail enhances the effect of this disposition. It is well 
 adjusted to its function and position, nowhere excessive 
 in quantity or in scale, and nowhere meagre, and it is 
 in itself rich and re- 
 fined. It is designed 
 in “free Renais- 
 sance,” that is to say, 
 the designer has un- 
 dertaken to model 
 the building faith- 
 fully, according to its 
 plan and construc- 
 tion, in Renaissance 
 architecture, leav- 
 ing out all that he 
 does not want. Mr. 
 
 H aight, as we saw, 
 was able to achieve 
 that result without 
 transcending the 
 lines of academic 
 Gothic. Mr. Post has 
 put his academic 
 Renaissance into the 
 alembic of analysis, 
 and where the analy- 
 
 “ POST ” BUILDING. 
 George 13. Post, Architect. 
 
4 3 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 sis has been complete his Renaissance architecture 
 has volatilized and disappeared. We are very sure 
 that he had no real use for the imitations in terra- 
 cotta of protruding key-stones, for example, and these 
 are almost the only badges left his building of the 
 style with which he started, except the capitals of 
 the pilasters, and the Ionic capitals of the very pretty 
 shafted arcade which forms the attic. But for these 
 comparatively trivial incidents of his work, Mr. Post’s 
 free Renaissance would have to be classified as Gothic, 
 if it were really necessary to classify it at all, except as 
 good architecture. Mr. Post, in fact, has done on his 
 own account what the Romanesque builders did. They, 
 too, were doing “ free classic.” They began with classi- 
 cal Roman architecture, and, steadily leaving out what 
 they did not want, they arrived at Westminster and 
 Amiens and Cologne. 
 
 It is strange to see so thoroughly studied a perform- 
 ance as this succeeded by so thoroughly unstudied a 
 performance as the Mills Building, by the same archi- 
 tect. But possibly ten-story buildings, which must be 
 built in a year, will not wait for architects to mature 
 designs which would make the buildings of interest to 
 students of architecture as well as to investors. What- 
 ever the cause may be, the result is unfortunate ; for 
 after the grandiose and somewhat swaggering Roman 
 gateway, and the portcullis which it encloses, have been 
 taken out, the rest of the Mills Building may safely be 
 thrown away. The portcullis is really an interesting 
 piece of iron-work both in design and in workmanship, 
 although in both it is distinctly inferior to such a piece 
 of work as the nondescript beast in cast iron that per- 
 forms the humble office of holding a sign in Cedar 
 Street, and that might have been wrought in the 
 thirteenth century, so grotesque, so skilful, so charged 
 
CONCERNING QUEEN ANNE 4 9 
 
 with the spirit of artistic and enjoyed handicraft it is. 
 [See initial letter.] 
 
 So the new departure is still but a departure, and it 
 seems time that such of the victims of it as are artists 
 who take serious views of their art should ask them- 
 selves why they continue to work in a style which has 
 never produced a monument, and in which it is impos- 
 
 GATEWAY OF MILLS BUILDING. 
 George B. Post, Architect. 
 
50 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 sible to discern any element of progress. In doing 
 Queen Anne, have they done anything but follow a 
 fashion set, as fashions in millinery and tailoring are 
 set, by mere caprice? A professional journal has indeed 
 declared that “ architecture is very much a matter of 
 fashion,” and architects who take this view of their 
 calling will of course build in the fashion, as they dress 
 in the fashion, in spite of their own knowledge that the 
 fashion is absurd. But it is impossible to regard an 
 architect who takes this view as other than a trades- 
 man, or to discuss his works except by telling what are 
 the latest modes, in the manner of the fashion maea- 
 zines. It seems impossible for achitects who take this 
 view of their art to take their art seriously — anything 
 like so seriously, for example, as they take their incomes. 
 But for architects who love their art and believe in it, 
 the point of “departure” is much less important than 
 the point of arrival, and by such architects the histori- 
 cal styles of architecture will be rated according to the 
 help they give in solving the architectural problems of 
 our time. We have seen that an architect who starts 
 from Renaissance architecture and an architect who 
 starts from Gothic architecture, if they faithfully scru- 
 tinize their precedents, and faithfully discard such as 
 are inapplicable, in arriving at free architecture will 
 arrive, so far as style is concerned, at much the same 
 result. If this process of analysis w r ere to be carried 
 on for a generation, it would be as difficult, and as 
 purely a matter of speculative curiosity, to trace the 
 sources of Ensrlish and American architecture as the 
 
 o 
 
 sources of the composite and living English language, 
 which is adequate to every expression. We have been 
 blaming the architects for accepting the forms of past 
 architecture without analyzing them. But, indeed, if 
 architects had been analysts, they would generations 
 
CONCERNING OUEEN ANNE 
 
 51 
 
 aero have recognized in their work that we do live in 
 times unknown to the ancients, whether of Athens in 
 the fifth century before our era, or of Western Europe 
 in the thirteenth century of our era ; that within the 
 limits set by fact and reason there is ample room for 
 the exercise of all accomplished talents, and verge 
 enough for the expression of all sane temperaments, 
 while without these limits nothing can be done that 
 will stand the test of fact and reason, which is the test 
 of time; that “effects” cannot precede causes, and 
 that the rudest art which is sincere is living and in the 
 way to be refined, while the most refined art that has 
 lost its meaning can never be made alive. The recog- 
 nition of these things would have prevented a vagary 
 like the frivolities and affectations of the new depart- 
 ure from attaining any vogue, but it would also have 
 prevented the establishment of any technical styles in 
 modern building, and instead of reproducing “ exam- 
 ples” of one historical style and then of another, and 
 then of a mixture of two, architects would be producing 
 and writers would be discussing works of the great art 
 of architecture. 
 
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES 
 
 A S an architectural work, the house of Mr. W. K. 
 ^ ^ Vanderbilt is perhaps the most noteworthy of the 
 four large and costly mansions herewith illustrated. 
 In this a design intrinsically interesting has been car- 
 ried out with an amplitude of means of all kinds which 
 yet nowhere degenerates into profusion or mere osten- 
 tation. The dimensions are generous for a town house, 
 and they have been made the most of by a breadth of 
 treatment and an emphasis of structure, in the walls at 
 least, which enable the building to carry with grace a 
 wealth of ornament under which many buildings of equal 
 size would disappear. The material is a soft gray lime- 
 stone, which leaves much to be desired in color, though 
 in texture it is equally adapted to the simple and mas- 
 sive treatment of the walls and to the minute delicacy 
 of the decoration, both architectural and sculptural. 
 It is very much to the credit of the designer that 
 in spite of a richness without many examples in our 
 domestic architecture, except in the other dwellings of 
 this same series, the first impression of his work, and 
 the most abiding, is that of power and massiveness. 
 This is secured mainly by the unbroken breadth of 
 the flank of wall between the porch and the angle 
 on the Fifth Avenue front of the building — unbroken 
 except by the simple and square-headed openings with 
 which it is pierced, and the crisp and emphatic though 
 
HOUSE OF W. K. VANDERBILT. 
 
 R. M. Hunt, Architect. 
 
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES 
 
 55 
 
 not excessive string courses which traverse it and mark 
 the division of the stories. It is questionable whether 
 this massiveness is not carried too far, but everybody 
 will admit that an excessive weight of wall is a “good 
 fault” in the street architecture of New York, and 
 that of the two, a dwelling is more dignified which ap- 
 proaches the solidity proper to a prison than one that 
 emulates the precarious lightness proper to a green- 
 house. The depth of the porch and of the recessed bal- 
 cony over it in the central division of the avenue front 
 assists this expression of solidity, and helps the building 
 to wear its burden of decoration “ lightly, like a flower.” 
 The richness, as we have said, is almost unexampled in 
 New York. Of strictly architectural decoration — that is, 
 of members and details which are usually designed by 
 the architect of a building— there is a copiousness 
 which is only saved by the means just indicated from 
 becoming an embarrassment of riches. All this work 
 is exquisite in execution. In design it is generally in- 
 teresting and scholarly, though there is common to all 
 of it the defect of being too small to be thoroughly well 
 seen and thoroughly effective. The uniformity of this 
 defect of scale seems to prove that the architect erred 
 in estimating the effect of his design in the colorless 
 material employed. The decoration of the recess of the 
 balcony, too, loses effect by being entirely unrelated to 
 the Construction, and the stone trellis with which the 
 turret at the angle is overlaid is equally irrelevant to 
 the object to which it is applied. Architectural decora- 
 tion ceases to be such when it ceases to be a develop- 
 ment of the structure; and these exceptions, by their 
 comparative ineffectiveness, confirm the wisdom of the 
 rule by which elsewhere throughout the building the 
 ornament is used to emphasize the structure, and 
 thereby gains greatly in impressiveness and in charm. 
 
56 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I he sculptural decoration, in contradistinction to 
 that strictly architectural, equally abounds. By sculpt- 
 ural decoration is meant that designed as well as ex- 
 ecuted by the sculptor, and in regard to which the only 
 care of the architect is to provide places for it, and so 
 to frame it that, if it does not help, it may not injure, the 
 architecture to which it is attached. It is not too much 
 to say of this that it is much the most important and 
 interesting work in decorative sculpture which is to be 
 seen out-of-doors in New York. The most noteworthy 
 piece of it, perhaps, is the procession of cherubic musi- 
 cians girdling the frieze-like band of the corbel which 
 carries the oriel of the southern front.* The execution 
 elsewhere, in the panels under and between the win- 
 dows, and in the pilasters of the bay, is equally good, 
 but the design is nowhere else so effective. One need 
 not be a purist, indeed, to find fault with the introduc- 
 tion of these pilasters at the angles of the bay and on 
 the curve of the oriel, which are so clearly not struc- 
 tural members, actual or symbolic, and which are so 
 clearly introduced for the sake of the ornament they 
 bear, although he may condone the fault for the pretti- 
 ness of the ornament generally in design, and its un- 
 failing care and delicacy of execution. The only 
 criticism possible, indeed, upon the execution of this 
 work is, that it is too exquisite, and reduces the text- 
 ure of carved stone too nearly to the more facile sur- 
 face of moulded clay. 
 
 One’s admiration of Mr. Hunt’s spirited and scholarly 
 design does not indeed cease with the walls of the house; 
 but it must be owned that it undergoes some modifica- 
 tion above the cornice. It cannot be said that the sky- 
 line is so effective as might have been expected from 
 what is beneath it. There is an undeniable piquancy 
 
 * See illustration, page 39. 
 
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES 
 
 57 
 
 about the statued gable which terminates the roof of 
 the principal mass, and the relation between this roof 
 and the steep hood of the turret is picturesque, taken 
 alone. Unfortunately, it cannot be taken alone, and 
 the effect of the whole series of roofs is not a harmo- 
 nious grouping, but — there is no other word for it — a 
 “huddle.” It is in the roof, too, that the shortcomings 
 of the architect in the solution of what may be called 
 his academic problem are most apparent. The style 
 of his work is the transitional style of France, the modi- 
 fication of mediaeval architecture under the influence 
 of the Italian Renaissance, until what was all Gothic 
 at the beginning of the transition had become all classic 
 at its close. This is, in fact, an attempt to summarize 
 in one building the history of a most active and fruit- 
 ful century in the history of architecture, which in- 
 cluded the late Gothic of the fifteenth century and 
 the early Renaissance of the sixteenth, and spanned 
 the distance from the minute and complicated model- 
 ling of the Palais de Justice at Rouen and the Hotel 
 Cluny at Paris, to the romantic classicism of the great 
 chateaux of the Loire. Certainly the attempt does not 
 lack boldness. Here we have in one building the super- 
 imposed bases and interpenetrating mouldings of the 
 latest French Gothic and the fish-bladder tracery of the 
 Renaissance, and in the dormers the stride from the 
 ogee canopies of Rouen to the prim pilasters and pedi- 
 ment of Orleans. Mr. Hunt’s skill has not sufficed to 
 introduce together these features, the outcomes of 
 different modes of thought as well as of different sys- 
 tems of construction, without a visible incongruity; nor 
 are they in all cases successful, taken singly. The large 
 and elaborate dormer over the entrance, especially, in- 
 stead of being a visible reconciliation of the two styles, 
 is a visible demonstration that they cannot be recon- 
 8 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 58 
 
 died. A complete construction of post and lintel, of 
 pilaster and entablature, is supplemented by another 
 construction of flying buttresses which are clearly super- 
 fluous and irrelevant, and which, instead of resisting 
 the thrust of an arch, have the appearance of ineffectu- 
 ally “shoring up” a structure which, though complete, 
 is unstable. 
 
 One is inclined to ascribe the lack of unity and repose 
 which the disturbed sky-line of the building entails upon 
 it, and which somewhat impairs the dignity of an other- 
 wise dignified and always animated design, to the angle 
 turret of which the architect was evidently enamoured. 
 We may share his liking for it, and admit it to be an ex- 
 tremely pretty thing, without admitting tjiat it belongs to 
 this building. The leading motive of the composition is 
 evidently the “ pyramidization,” to borrow Mr. Thomas 
 Hope’s uncouth word, of the whole building towards the 
 apex of the main mass at the angle, from the point of 
 view from which the illustration is taken. It is clearly to 
 assist and emphasize the ascent and convergence of all 
 the lines of the building to this apex, and to enhance 
 the apparent dimensions, that this mass is raised a 
 story, and the extremities of the building allowed to fall 
 away, and it is in order to account for the emphasizing 
 of this. mass by a separate roof that the somewhat awk- 
 ward expedient has been adopted of dropping the cor- 
 nice on the street side below the eaves. New York 
 readers who are familiar with the aspect of the Dry 
 Dock Savings-Bank in the Bowery will know what is 
 meant by this “ pyramidization,” and will remember how 
 it is there attained. Now it happens that it is pre- 
 cisely this intention which in the present instance is 
 obscured and partly defeated by the tormenting of the 
 sky-line, which in turn may be traced to the insistence 
 of the architect upon his extremely pretty but irrele- 
 
HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT. 
 
 George B. Post, Architect. 
 
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES 
 
 6l 
 
 vant turret. It is a good lesson in architecture to find 
 that the effect of a whole may be so much impaired by 
 one of the most successful of the parts, and that even 
 when “ the thing ” is really rich and rare, we may still 
 be unsatisfied how it “got there.” Happily neither 
 this shortcoming, nor shortcomings much graver, could 
 prevent such a work as this from being an ornament 
 to the city, and an honorable monument to its archi- 
 tect. 
 
 Perhaps it is because Mr. Post, the architect of the 
 house of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, has not attempted 
 so much as Mr. Hunt that his work may be called at 
 once more successful and less interesting. In color it 
 has more and in design less of variety. P'or the mo- 
 notony of gray wall and black roof it substitutes red 
 brick, with wrought work of the same gray limestone 
 employed in the house we have been talking of, 
 and with a red slated roof broken by great stone 
 dormers. It is much more simple and compact in 
 composition than the other, for the main house is a 
 parallelogram brought together under one great four- 
 hipped roof, and the wing is here a very subordinate 
 appendage. It is thus much simpler, much more within 
 the conventional decorum of a town mansion in its 
 scheme, while it is equally far from having the appear- 
 ance of having been designed by contract, and is 
 studied with equal thoroughness, although with a very 
 different motive. In the matter of color, it is undeni- 
 able that the brick-work has in places a patchy look by 
 reason of the comparatively small quantities in which 
 it ‘is used, the whole front on the avenue being virtu- 
 ally of highly wrought stone, and it seems clear that 
 the building would have gained if the brick had been 
 omitted altogether from this front. On the street front 
 the mode of treatment adopted might very possibly 
 
62 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 have made the building dull and monotonous if it had 
 been built in monochrome, as assuredly the addition of 
 a strong contrast of color would have made the more 
 varied design of the other painfully restless. In style 
 the two buildings offer a curious resemblance and a 
 curious contrast. This also is a French chateau, but 
 a French chateau of the period after the transition, 
 when all detail had been thoroughly classicized, and 
 only a romantic wilfulness and freedom of composition 
 recalled the architecture of the Middle Aares. Here 
 are the shell frieze of Blois and the fish-bladder tracery 
 of Orleans, without the Gothic detail which in the 
 French Renaissance is so often found side by side with 
 them. The carving here, equally well executed for its 
 purpose, does not appeal so much to admiration for its 
 execution, for the reason that it is all strictly archi- 
 tectural, and not directly imitative. In design it is for 
 its purpose equally well studied ; in scale, indeed, is 
 much better studied, so that the detail, which is often 
 lost in the ineffectual minuteness of the carving in the 
 former case, here takes its place with emphasis. Per- 
 haps in some instances it takes its place with too much 
 emphasis, as in the modelling of the arches of the first 
 floor; while, on the other hand, there is a clear lack 
 of vigor in the brackets which carry the balcony of the 
 third story, and in the treatment of the spiral shaft 
 upon which rests the corbelled turret at the outer 
 angle. But these defects of design seem to be quite 
 deliberate, and it seems, upon the whole, that the build- 
 in o- looks as the architect intended it to look, in a 
 
 O 
 
 more accurate sense than can be said of its competitor. 
 The leading motive of composition in that was the 
 “ pyramidization ” at the angle. The leading motive of 
 this may be assigned to the development of the floor 
 lines. The perpendicular lines are entirely subordi- 
 
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES 
 
 65 
 
 nated to these — so far subordinated, indeed, that the 
 axial lines of the openings in the lower stories are dis- 
 regarded in the upper — and the horizontal lines are 
 wrought by modelling and decoration into emphatic 
 belts, graduated in richness from the simple basement 
 course to the very rich and elaborate cornice. We 
 may say here, too, that our admiration grows fainter 
 above this line ; for the exaggerated dormers, excessive 
 as dormers and inadequate as gables, are the least 
 successful features of the building, while in their deco- 
 ration, alone in the building, constructive propriety is 
 abandoned. But the great and simple roof certainly 
 prevents the building from straggling, as its neighbor 
 tends to do, while the angle turrets at its base not only 
 relieve its outline of monotonous heaviness, but are 
 clever expedients for stopping the lines of its angles. 
 Upon the whole, one may say of Mr. Post’s design that 
 it is a thoroughly workmanlike piece of work, and may 
 even find less fault with it than with the more ambi- 
 tious work of Mr. Hunt; though, indeed, he may as- 
 cribe this to his belief that there is less in it to talk 
 about or to think about. 
 
 Between either of these and the brown-stone houses 
 which have been built for Mr. William H. Vanderbilt, 
 after the designs of Messrs. Herter, the decorators, a 
 wide architectural gulf is fixed. We found a leading 
 motive in each of the others ; but what leading motive, 
 or, indeed, what subordinate motive, of an architectural 
 kind, can be found here ? There is indeed no develop- 
 ment of lines or of masses, and no organized relation 
 of parts is aimed at. The openings are not grouped 
 or spaced so as to tell the story of the interior, nor so 
 as to bear any reference to each other, nor are the 
 structural features which every building must possess 
 brought out by modelling; nor is the ornament applied 
 9 
 
66 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 to accentuate the structural features, nor is it de- 
 signed with reference either to its place or to its func- 
 tion as ornament. The fluted pilasters of the second 
 story seem to be meant, indeed, to re-enforce the angles 
 of the projecting portions of the wall. But this inten- 
 tion is abandoned in the first and in the third stories, 
 in which a belt of carved foliage is run to the angles of 
 the wall, without reference to the lines of the pilasters. 
 This foliage is in workmanship as careful as possible — 
 as careful, indeed, as the carving in either of the ar- 
 chitectural works which we have been discussing. Yet 
 its perfection gives no pleasure to the spectator, for the 
 simple reason that it has nothing to do with the build- 
 insr in the walls of which it is cut. Much of the detail is 
 
 o 
 
 carefully designed, but the absence of a general design 
 makes it ineffective. Except for the refinement of some 
 of this detail, the building would be as vacant of archi- 
 tectural interest as any work of our architectural period 
 of darkness. The Stewart mansion does not interest 
 students of architecture ; but the Stewart mansion itself 
 exhibits a nearer approach than these houses to an 
 architectural design, and certainly a coherent design 
 with coarse detail is less depressing, even if it be more 
 irritating, than an entire absence of architectural mean- 
 ing, with here and there a pretty architectural phrase 
 which in some other context may have meant some- 
 thing. These houses have another misfortune in their 
 very lugubrious color. A vivid piece of painted deco- 
 ration in the recessed balcony of the nearer is a grateful 
 oasis in the gloomy waste of rubbed sandstone, and 
 some relief to its monotony is also afforded by the gild- 
 ed railings of the windows at each side of this bal- 
 cony. But it is to be h-oped that courage may be found 
 to let loose a discreet decorator with unlimited gold- 
 leaf upon the whole sad fronts. A mode of decoration 
 
THE VANDERBILT HOUSES 67 
 
 which has been found so effective in the fogs of Lon- 
 don might profitably be employed to animate facades 
 which are in no danger of becoming too joyous. It 
 would not be fair to leave these architectural failures, 
 which are in so unpleasant contrast to the encouraging 
 architectural success achieved in the other Vanderbilt 
 houses, without noting one excellent piece of design in 
 the railings which surround them, in which an orig- 
 inal, characteristic, and successful treatment of metal 
 has been attained, and which, as works of art, are really 
 of more value than the houses they protect. 
 
 POST AND RAILING, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE. 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 r I S HE total length of the bridge is 5989 feet, of which 
 the central span between the towers is 1595 feet 6 
 inches, the “land spans "from the towers to the anchor- 
 ages each 930 feet, the approach on the New York side 
 1562 feet 6 inches, and on the steeper Brooklyn side 971 
 feet. These dimensions do not make this the longest 
 brido-e in the world. But when it was built there was no 
 
 O 
 
 single span which approached the central span over the 
 East River; and though it has since been exceeded by 
 two spans of the Forth Bridge, in Scotland (1 7 10-feeteach, 
 sustained by cantilevers), it remains by far the largest 
 example of a chain-bridge. It is half as long again as 
 Roebling’s Cincinnati Bridge (1057 feet between tow- 
 ers), and nearly twice as long as the same engineer’s 
 Niagara Bridge (821 feet). The span of the ill-fated 
 bridge over the Ohio at Wheeling, which was built in 
 1848, and blown down in 1854, was 1010 feet. Note- 
 worthy suspension-bridges in Europe are Telford’s, over 
 the Menai Straits (589 feet), finished in 1825; Chaley’s 
 bridge, at Fribourg (870 feet), finished in 1834; and 
 Tierney Clark’s bridge over the Danube at Pesth (670 
 feet), finished in 1849. The longest spans bridged oth- 
 erwise than by a roadway hung from cables are the cen- 
 tral spans of Stephenson’s Britannia (box girder) Bridge 
 (459 feet), of Eads’s St. Louis Bridge, of steel arches (520 
 feet), and of the beautiful Washington Bridge, of steel 
 
THE BRIDGE FROM THE BROOKLYN SIDE. 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 71 
 
 arches, at New York (510 feet). The largest span of an 
 arch of masonry known to have been built in a bridge 
 (251 feet) was in that built in the fourteenth century, 
 and destroyed by Carmagnola in the fifteenth, which 
 crossed the Adda at Trezzo. The largest now stand- 
 ing (220 feet) is an American work, the arch designed 
 and built by General Meigs to carry the Washington 
 Aqueduct over Cabin John Creek. The second is that 
 of the Grosvenor Bridge at Chester (200 feet), and the 
 third the central arch of London Bridge (152 feet). 
 
 The Brooklyn Bridge is thus one of the mechanical 
 wonders of the world, one of the greatest and most 
 characteristic of the monuments of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Its towers, at least, bid fair to outlast every struct- 
 ure of which they command a view. Everybody recalls 
 Macaulay’s prophecy of the time “ when some traveller 
 from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, 
 take his stand upon a broken arch of London Bridge, 
 to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” But when our New- 
 Zealander takes his stand above the saddles that are now 
 ridden by the cables of the bridge, to look over the site 
 of a forsaken city, there will be no ruins of churches — 
 at least, of churches now in being — for him to sketch 
 or see. The web of woven steel that now harms be- 
 
 O 
 
 tween the stark masses of the towers may have disap- 
 peared, its slender filaments rusted into nothingness 
 under the slow corrosion of the centuries. Its builders 
 and the generation for which they wrought may have 
 been as long forgotten as are now the builders of the 
 Pyramids, whereof the traveller, “ as he paceth amazedly 
 those deserts,” asks the Historic Muse “ who budded 
 them; and she mumbleth something, but what it is he 
 heareth not.” It is not unimaginable that our future 
 archzeologist, looking from one of these towers upon 
 the solitude of a mastless river and a dispeopled land, 
 
72 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 may have no other means of reconstructing our civiliza- 
 tion than that which is furnished him by the tower on 
 which he stands. What will his judgment of us be? 
 
 This, or something like this, ought to be a question 
 with every man who builds a structure which is meant 
 to outlast him, whether it be a temple of religion or a 
 work of bare utility like this. It so happens that the 
 work which is likely to be our most durable monument, 
 and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote 
 posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a 
 fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. This is in itself 
 characteristic of our time. It is true of no other peo- 
 ple since the Romans, and of none before. Like the 
 Roman remains, the duration of this work of ours will 
 show that we knew how to build. “A Roman work,” 
 we often hear it said of the bridge, and it is in many 
 ways true. It is far beyond any Roman monument in 
 refinement of mechanical skill. It is Roman in its mas- 
 siveness and durability. It is Roman, too, in its disre- 
 gard of art, in resting satisfied with the practical solu- 
 tion of the great problem of its builders, without a sign 
 of that skill which would have explained and emphasized 
 the process of construction at every step, and every- 
 where, in whole and in part, made the structure tell of 
 the work it was doing. There have been periods in his- 
 tory when this aesthetic purpose would have seemed to 
 the builder of such a monument as much a matter of 
 course, as necessary a part of his work, as the practical 
 purpose which animated the designer of the Brooklyn 
 Bridge. It would have seemed so to the engineer of a 
 bridge in Athens in the second century before our era, 
 or to the engineer of a bridge in Western Europe in the 
 thirteenth century of our era. The utilitarian treatment 
 of our monument is as striking and as characteristic a 
 mark of the period as its utilitarian purpose. It is a 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 73 
 
 noble work of engineering; it is not a work of archi- 
 tecture. 
 
 The most strictly scientific of constructors would 
 scarcely take the ground that he did not care how his 
 work looked, when his work was so conspicuous and so 
 durable as the Brooklyn Bridge, and he must be aware 
 that a training in scientific construction alone will not 
 secure an architectural result. It is more probable that 
 he looks upon the current architectural devices as frivo- 
 lous and irrelevant to the work upon which he is en- 
 cased, and consoles himself for his isrnorance of them 
 by contempt. Architecture is to him the unintelligent 
 use of building material. Assuredly this view is borne 
 out by a majority of the “ architecturesque ” buildings 
 that he sees, and he does not lack express authority for 
 it. Whereas the engineer’s definition of good masonry 
 is “ the least material to perform a certain duty,” Mr. 
 Fergusson declares that “an architect ought always to 
 allow himself such a margin of strength that he may 
 disregard or play with his construction and Mr. Rus- 
 kin defines architecture to be the addition to a building: 
 of unnecessary features. An engineer has, therefore, 
 some warrant for considering that he is sacrificing to 
 the graces and doing all that can reasonably be expect- 
 ed of him to produce an architectural monument, if in 
 designing the piers of a chain-bridge he employs an 
 unnecessary amount of material and adds unnecessary 
 features. But if we go back to the time when engineers 
 were artists, and study what a modern scientific writer 
 has described as “ that paragon of constructive skill, a 
 Pointed cathedral,” we shall find that the architecture 
 and the construction cannot be disjoined. The work 
 of the mediaeval builder in his capacity of artist was 
 to expound, emphasize, and refine upon the work he 
 did in his capacity of constructor, and to develop and 
 io 
 
74 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 heighten its inherent effect. And it is of this kind of 
 skill that the work of the modern engineer, in so far as 
 he is only an engineer, shows no trace. 
 
 Reduced to its simplest expression, and as it has actu- 
 ally been used for unknown periods in Asia and in South 
 America, a suspension-bridge consists of two parallel 
 ropes swung from side to side of a ravine, and carrying 
 the platform over which the passenger walks. As the 
 span increases, so that the dip makes the ropes imprac- 
 ticable, the land ends of the ropes are hoisted some dis- 
 tance above the roadway which they carry. If nothing 
 can be found there strong enough to hold them, they 
 are simply passed over, say, forked trees, and the ends 
 made fast to other trees or held down with stones. This 
 is the essential construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. 
 The ropes become four cables sixteen inches thick, of 
 5541 steel wires; the forked tree becomes a tower 276 
 feet high, and 8260 square feet in area at the base; the 
 bowlder to hold down the end of the rope becomes a 
 mass of masonry of 60,000 tons’ weight ; the shaky plat- 
 form becomes a great street, 85 feet wide, of five firm 
 roadways. But the man who first carried his rope over 
 the forked tree was the inventor of the arrangement 
 which, developed through all the refinements of modern 
 mechanics, forms the groundwork of the Brooklyn Bridge. 
 
 This statement of the germinal idea of a chain-bridge 
 will, perhaps, give a clearer notion of the functions of the 
 several parts of the Brooklyn Bridge than a considera- 
 tion of the complicated structure in its ultimate evolu- 
 tion, in which these functions are partly lost sight of. 
 But if the structure had been architecturally designed, 
 these things would have been emphasized at every point 
 and in every way. The function of the great “ towers,” 
 so called, being merely to hold up the cables, it is plain 
 that three isolated piers would have performed that func- 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 75 
 
 tion, and the stability of these piers, loaded as they are 
 by the cables, would very possibly have been assured, 
 even if they had been completely detached from each 
 other. But in order at once to stiffen and to load them, 
 so as to make the area of resistance to the force of the 
 wind equal to the whole area of the towers, the open- 
 ings through which the roadways run are closed above 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 76 
 
 by steep pointed arches, and the spandrels of these filled 
 with a wall which rises to the summit of the piers, where 
 a fiat coping covers the whole. There is a woful lack 
 of expression in this arrangement. The piers should 
 assert themselves starkly and unmistakably as the bones 
 of the structure, and the wall above the arches be sub- 
 ordinated to a mere filling. It should be distinctly with- 
 drawn from the face of the piers instead of being, as in 
 fact it is, only distinguished from them by their shal- 
 low and ineffectual projections. It should be distinctly 
 dropped below their summits instead of rising to the 
 same height, and being included under a common cor- 
 nice. To see what a difference in effect this very obvi- 
 ous differentiation of parts would have made, glance at 
 the sketch of a suspension-bridge at Minneapolis. This 
 is not, upon the whole, a laudable design, and it contains 
 several survivals of conventional architectural forms 
 meaningless in their present place. But the mere sub- 
 duing of the archway to a strut between the piers ex- 
 plains — not forcibly, perhaps, nor elegantly, but unmis- 
 takably — the main purpose of the structure, and the 
 functional relation of its parts. A drawing of one of 
 the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge without its cables 
 would tell the spectator nothing; the structure itself 
 will tell our New-Zealander nothing of its uses. With 
 its flat top and its level coping, indicating that the whole 
 was meant to be evenly loaded, it would seem to be the 
 base of a missing superstructure rather than what it is. 
 
 The flatness of the top alone conceals instead of ex- 
 pressing the structure. It is of the first practical neces- 
 sity that the great cables should move freely in their 
 saddles, so as always to keep the pressure upon the 
 piers directly vertical, and very ingenious appliances 
 have been employed to attain this end, and to avoid 
 chafing the cables. But the design of the piers them- 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 77 
 
 selves tells us absolutely nothing of all this. The cable 
 simply disappears on one side and reappears on the 
 other, as if it were two separate cables, one on each 
 side, instead of one continuous chain. Look at this 
 section of the top of the tower, and see how an exquisite 
 refinement of mechanical arrangement may coexist with 
 absolute insensibility to the desirableness even of an 
 architectural expression of this arrangement. The archi- 
 tecture of this crowning member of the tower has nothin? 
 
 o o 
 
 Liftinj 
 
 
 P] 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 Top of IVl 
 
 L 
 
 
 
 
 
 whatever to do with the purpose for which the structure 
 exists. Is it not perfectly evident that an architectural 
 expression of this mechanical arrangement would require 
 that the line of the summit, instead of this meaningless 
 flat coping, should, to begin with, be a crest of roof, its 
 double slope following the line of the cable which it shel- 
 ters ? Here the very channel through which the cable 
 runs is not designed, but is a mere hole occurring casu- 
 ally, and not by premeditation, in the midst of the mould- 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 78 
 
 ings which form the cornice of the tower. This is archi- 
 tectural barbarism. 
 
 Other opportunities offered for architectural expres- 
 sion in the towers themselves were in the treatment of 
 the buttresses, in the treatment of the balconies which 
 girdle the tower at the height of the roadway, and in 
 the modelling; of the arches. The Orth of each of the 
 towers at the water-line is 398 feet. At the roof-course 
 it is 378 feet. The reduction is effected by means of 
 five or six offsets, which withdraw each face of the tower 
 four feet between the bottom and the top, and each end 
 six feet. The counter-forts, eight in all, on the sides of 
 the outer piers and on the faces of all the piers, are mere 
 applied strips, very shallow in proportion to their width, 
 and terminating in the capital-like projections which are 
 casually pierced to receive the cables. It may make, 
 perhaps, no serious difference in the mechanical effi- 
 ciency of these counter-forts whether their area be nar- 
 row and deep or broad and shallow. But an increase 
 of depth in proportion to width would of itself, with its 
 higher lights and sharper shadows, have made forcible 
 masses of what are now ineffectual features. This inher- 
 ent effect would be very greatly enhanced if the offsets 
 themselves were accentuated by sharp and decisive mod- 
 elling. As it is, emphasis seems to have been studi- 
 ously avoided. The offsets are merely long batterings 
 of the wall, which do nothing to separate the piers into 
 related parts with definite transitions, and so to refine 
 the crudity of the masses. To see the difference be- 
 tween a mechanical and a monumental conception of a 
 great structure, compare these towers with the front of 
 Amiens, or of Strasburg, or of Notre Dame of Paris. 
 Of course the designer of a modern bridge must not at- 
 tempt to reproduce in his work “those misty masses of 
 multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower.” That 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 79 
 
 would be a more fatal fault than the rudeness and crude- 
 ness with which we have to charge the design of the 
 towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. The ornament of the 
 cathedrals, so far as it is separable from their structure, 
 has nothing for the designer of the bridge even of sug- 
 gestion. But to see how masses may be modelled so as 
 to be made to speak, look at the modelled masses of the 
 tower of Amiens, the stark lines of essential structure 
 framing the screen of wall between them, in contrast 
 with the uniform deadness here of buttress and curtain 
 wall ; the crisp emphasis of lines of light and hollows of 
 black shade which mark the transitions between parts 
 of structure in the west front of Rheims, in contrast 
 with the lack of emphasis in the offsets of the bridge 
 tower; the spirit of the gargoyled balconies that belt 
 the towers of Notre Dame, and the spiritlessness of the 
 parapeted balconies that encircle the tower of the bridge. 
 And note, too (we are not now speaking of the decora- 
 tion of the cathedrals), that all this transcendent supe- 
 riority arises merely from a development and emphasis 
 of the inherent expression of the masses themselves, 
 which in the bridge are left so crude, and in the cathe- 
 dral towers are refined so far. It need not, and indeed 
 should not, have been carried so far in this architecture 
 of reason and utility as in the architecture of a poetical 
 religion. The mere rudiments of those works would 
 have furnished all the expression that is necessary or de- 
 sirable here. But these rudiments are wanting. What 
 can we say but that the designer of the cathedral began 
 where the designer of the bridge left off? If our New- 
 Zealander should extend his travels, and come upon 
 these monuments also, what would be his surprise at 
 finding documentary proof that the bridge was built six 
 hundred years after the cathedrals, and that the genera- 
 tion which built the bridge looked backward and down- 
 
8o 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 ward upon the generation which built the cathedrals as 
 rude and barbarous and unreasoning in comparison with 
 themselves ! 
 
 What we have said of the towers is true also of the 
 anchorages. 1 he bowlder which the Peruvian rolls upon 
 the end of his rope to hold it down is here a mass of 
 60,000 tons. Scientifically it is adjusted to its purpose, 
 no doubt, with the most exact nicety. Artistically it is 
 still but a bowlder rolled upon a rope. It would prob- 
 ably be impracticable to exhibit the anchor plate which 
 takes the ultimate strain of this mile and more of cable, 
 though we may be sure that our Greek or our Gothic 
 bridge-builder would not have admitted its impractica- 
 bilitv without as exhaustive an investigation as the mod- 
 ern bridge-builder has given to the mechanical aspects 
 of his problem. But it was certainly practicable to indi- 
 cate the function of the anchorage itself, to build it up 
 in masses which should seem to hold the cable to the 
 earth, or a double arch like — or rather unlike — the 
 double arch of the main tower, turned between piers 
 which should visibly answer the same purpose. Instead 
 of either of these, or of any technical device for the same 
 purpose, the weight above is a crude mass, so far from 
 being adapted to its function in its form, that one has to 
 look with some care to find it from the street below, and 
 to distinguish it from the approaches. 
 
 What we have called the balconies at the level of the 
 roadway are not “practical” balconies, since they open 
 from the driveways, and not from the walk, and are not 
 accessible as points of view. The purpose of a projec- 
 tion at this point is to secure as great a breadth as pos- 
 sible for the system of wind-braces under the floor of the 
 bridge. This purpose is attained by the projection, but 
 is only masked by the imitations of balconies, instead of 
 being architecturally expressed, as it might have been 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT g r 
 
 unmistakably expressed, by the bold projection of a gran- 
 ite spur from the angle of the pier. 
 
 There are, probably, few arches in the world — cer- 
 tainly there can be none outside of works of modern 
 engineering — of anything like the span, height, thick- 
 ness, and conspicuousness of those in the bridge towers 
 which are so little effective. Like the brute mass of 
 wall above them, they are impressive only by magni- 
 tude. The great depth of the archway is only seen as 
 
 itself had been accentuated by modelling, instead of be- 
 ing weakened by the actual recession of its voussoirs 
 behind the plane of the wall. 
 
 The approaches themselves are greatly impressive, as 
 
 a matter of mensuration, 
 not felt as a poetical im- 
 pression, as it would have 
 been if the labors of the 
 constructor had been sup- 
 plemented by the labors of 
 an artist ; if the shallow 
 strips of pier had become 
 real buttresses, and the 
 jamb and arch had been 
 narrowed by emphatic suc- 
 cessions of withdrawal, in- 
 stead of being merely tun- 
 nelled through the mass ; 
 if the intrados of the arch 
 
 / 
 
 SECTION OF TOP AND BACK OF ANCHORAGE. 
 (SIDE VIEW.) 
 
82 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 indeed the towers are also, by magnitude and massive- 
 ness. The street bridges are uniformly imposing by 
 size and span, and especially attractive also by reason 
 of the fact that through them we get what is to be got 
 nowhere else in our rectangular city, glimpses and “bits” 
 of buildings. The most successful of them all, and the 
 most successful feature architecturally of all the masonry 
 of the bridge, is the simple, massive, and low bridge of 
 two arches which spans North William Street, in New 
 York. The arcades between the streets are imposing 
 by number and repetition as well as by massiveness, and 
 by the Roman durability which marks all the work. 
 They suffer, however, from two causes. The coping, 
 the arches, and the piers, which are the emphatic parts 
 of structure, are lighter in color than the unempha- 
 sized and rock-faced fields of the wall, and this is always 
 a misfortune when it is not an error. The arches are 
 of the form called “ Florentine” — that is to say, round 
 within and pointed without. The deepest voussoirs are 
 thus those at the crown of the arch. This is the reverse 
 of the disposition which would be dictated by mechan- 
 ical considerations alone. Architecturally it has the 
 drawback of interrupting at every arch the successive 
 and diminishing wheelings which make a long arcade 
 of great openings so impressive in a perspective view. 
 The form seems to have been chosen on account of the 
 facility it afforded, by lengthening the upper voussoirs, 
 to conform the ridge line of the arches to the slope of 
 the roadway, while keeping the springing line horizon- 
 tal. This gradual diminution of the arches shoreward 
 enhances the apparent length of the approach looking in 
 that direction, but correspondingly shortens it looking 
 towards the bridge ; and it seems, upon the whole, that 
 it would have been better to carry the arches through 
 level, without attempting to dissemble the difference 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 83 
 
 between their line and that of the roadway. There are 
 some shabby and flimsy details of iron work, which mar 
 the monumental effect of the great roadway itself, while 
 the design of the iron stations at either end is grossly 
 illiterate, and discreditable to the great work. Imita- 
 tions in cast iron of stone capitals surmount and emphat- 
 ically contradict posts profusely studded with bolt-heads; 
 and other solecisms, alike against constructional reason 
 and architectural tradition, are rife in these unfortunate 
 edifices, which do what they can to vulgarize the great 
 structure to which they give access. 
 
 Vulgarity certainly cannot be charged against any in- 
 tegral portion of the great work itself. There is noth- 
 ing frivolous and nothing ostentatious even in the details 
 which we have noted, and in which we have not been so 
 much criticising the crowning work of a great engineer’s 
 career as noting the spirit of our age. It is scarcely 
 fair to say, even, as was said by an architectural jour- 
 nal when the completion of the bridge was doubtful, 
 that if it were left incomplete its towers would stand 
 “ in unnecessary ugliness.” Its defects in design are 
 not misdeeds, but shortcomings. They are the defects 
 of being rudimentary, of not being completely developed. 
 The anatomy of the towers and of the anchorages is not 
 brought out in their modelling. Their fingers, so to 
 speak, are all thumbs. Their impressiveness is inherent 
 in their mass, and is what it could not help being. The 
 ugliest of great bridges is undoubtedly Stephenson’s 
 Britannia Bridge ; and this is ugly, not because it is 
 square and straight, but because it tells nothing of itself. 
 It is a mere flat surface, and almost absolutely inexpres- 
 sive, compared, for example, with such a piece of iron- 
 work as the truss which carries the roadway of the bridge 
 over Franklin Square, in which the function of every 
 joint and member is apparent. But a far nobler thing 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 84 
 
 than this is the central span of the great bridge itself, 
 its roadway slowly sweeping upward to meet the swift 
 swoop of its cables. We have complained of the lack 
 of expression in the towers of their anatomy, but this is 
 anatomy only, a skeletonized structure in which, as in a 
 scientific diagram, we see — even the layman sees — the in- 
 terplay of forces represented by an abstraction of lines. 
 What monument of any architecture can speak its story 
 more clearly and more forcibly than this gossamer archi- 
 tecture, through which its purpose, like “ the spider's 
 touch ” — 
 
 “ So exquisitely fine, 
 
 Feels at each thread, and lives along the line ” ? 
 
 This aerial bow, as it hangs between the busy cities, 
 “ curving on a sky imbrued with color,” is perfect as an 
 organism of nature. It is an organism of nature. There 
 was no question in the mind of its designer of “good 
 taste ” or of appearance. He learned the law that struck 
 its curves, the law that fixed the strength and the rela- 
 tion of its parts, and he applied the law. His work is 
 beautiful, as the work of a ship-builder is unfailingly 
 beautiful in the forms and outlines in which he is only 
 studying “ what the water likes,” without a thought of 
 beauty, and as it is almost unfailingly ugly when he does 
 what he likes for the sake of beauty. The designer of 
 the Brooklyn Bridge has made a beautiful structure out 
 of an exquisite refinement of utility, in a work in which 
 the lines of forces constitute the structure. Where a 
 more massive material forbade him to skeletonize the 
 structure, and the lines of effort and resistance needed 
 to be brought out by modelling, he has failed to bring 
 them out, and his structure is only as impressive as it 
 needs must be. It has not helped his work, as we have 
 seen, to trust his own sense of beauty, and to contradict or 
 to conceal what he was doing in accordance with its die- 
 
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS A MONUMENT 
 
 8.5 
 
 tates. As little would it have helped him to invoke the 
 aid of a commonplace architect to plaster his structure 
 with triglyphs or to indent it with trefoils. But an archi- 
 tect who pursued his calling in the spirit and with the 
 skill of the mediaeval builders of whom we have been 
 speaking, who knew in his province the lesson the engi- 
 neer has re-enforced in his, that “ Nature can only be 
 commanded by obeying her,” and that the function of 
 an organism, in art as in nature, must determine its 
 form — such an architect might have helped the designer 
 of the Brooklyn Bridge to make it one of the noblest 
 monuments of architecture in the world, as it is one of 
 the greatest and most honorable works of engineering. 
 
 o o o 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 I 
 
 HE saying that ours is not a cathedral-building 
 
 1 age is so obviously true, and so familiar, that the 
 proposal to erect in New York the most important re- 
 ligious monument on this side of the Atlantic strikes 
 many, and perhaps most, cultivated persons with a sense 
 of incongruity. It is so especially true that this is not 
 a cathedral-building country that an American cathe- 
 dral seems a violation of the unities in place not less 
 than in time — an anatopism as well as an anachronism. 
 It is a reflection calculated to give us pause that even 
 while we were considering what should be the charac- 
 ter of an American cathedral in the city of New York, 
 the Assembly of the State, being in possession of what 
 was acclaimed at the time of its opening as “ the most 
 monumental interior in this country,” should have de- 
 cided to demolish rather than to restore its most monu- 
 mental feature, and should have been hopelessly vul- 
 garizing it by substituting for its stone-work a system 
 of iron posts veneered with wood, and of beams en- 
 closing panels of papier-mache, without eliciting any 
 general or effective protest. 
 
 The very marked increase of interest in the art of 
 architecture in this country within the last few years 
 has been accompanied by a corresponding advance in 
 the practice of that art, but it has scarcely as yet pro- 
 
DESIGN FOR THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CATHEDRAL OF ALL-SAINTS AT ALBANY 
 

AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 89 
 
 ducecl any manifestations that can be called monumen- 
 tal. Our monuments, like those of the Romans, are 
 the works of engineers, and not of architects. In fact, 
 the disproportion in magnitude and in interest between 
 the Roman baths and aqueducts and the Roman tem- 
 ples is exaggerated in the relation between our works 
 of utility and our works of art. Our engineers stand 
 ready to span wider openings and to rear loftier struct- 
 ures than were ever bridged or raised before, provided 
 anybody can be convinced that these unprecedented 
 operations will “ pay.” The result of their labors, on 
 the aesthetic side, is fairly summed up in the remark 
 of a recent European visitor that public works in 
 America are executed without reference to art. 
 
 But, as Bishop Potter pointed out in the admirable 
 letter in which he promulgated the project of an Ameri- 
 can cathedra], this very prevalence and predominance 
 of the utilitarian spirit makes it most desirable that 
 there should be a conspicuous counteraction and an 
 impressive reminder, in a great commercial town, that 
 there are other than commercial interests and other 
 than physical needs. A “metropolitan” church, in the 
 modern sense of the adjective, dominating the more 
 prosaic erections of a city, as a cathedral must do if 
 reared upon the noble site secured for the Cathedral 
 of New York, is the conversion into a beacon of Mr. 
 Ruskin’s “ lamp of sacrifice.” It belongs to its func- 
 tion that it could not by any conceivable possibility 
 “ pay,” and that it should be, first of all, a religious 
 monument. There is some danger that this may be 
 forgotten, for in the design of ordinary churches, in 
 which the architects who have been working at the 
 problem presented by the cathedral are commonly ex- 
 ercised, they feel at every turn the pressure of the 
 utilitarian spirit. They are required to “ accommo- 
 
90 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 date” a congregation, in most cases at a minimum of 
 cost, so that the preacher may be well seen and heard 
 of all. The muses of acoustics, ventilation, and sani- 
 tary plumbing preside over their labors, necessarily to 
 the greater or less detriment of architecture. The 
 
 O 
 
 features that give dignity to the minsters of the Mid- 
 dle Ages are apt to be obstructive of the comfort of 
 the congregation. If a cathedral were to be merely or 
 mainly a huge auditorium, nearly all the traditions of 
 ecclesiastical architecture would have to be sacrificed. 
 Doubtless, in a true cathedral of such dimensions as 
 those contemplated for the Cathedral of New York, an 
 ample space for preaching must accrue. But a build- 
 ing in which this space is the object of the design can 
 scarcely become a cathedral. Mr. R. L. Stevenson, 
 considering the apse of Noyon, observes : “ I could 
 never fathom how any man dares to lift up his voice 
 in a cathedral. What has he to say that will not be 
 an anticlimax ? For though I have heard a considera- 
 ble variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was 
 so expressive as a cathedral. Tis the best preacher 
 itself, and preaches day and night, not only telling you 
 of man’s art and aspirations in the past, but convicting 
 your own soul of ardent sympathies.” At all events, 
 a cathedral is much more and other than a place to 
 preach in. If that alone were its purpose, it would be 
 best fulfilled by an enclosed and unobstructed space, 
 extending to the limits of the carrying power of the 
 human voice. But such an erection would resemble 
 a mediaeval cathedral much less than it would resemble 
 a modern rink. 
 
 In truth, the justification of a modern and Protestant 
 cathedral is not to be looked for in its “ usefulness.” 
 The altar, and not the pulpit, is the centre and culmi- 
 nation of its interior design, as it can scarcely be said 
 
WEST ELEVATION. 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 93 
 
 to be the centre of “ congregational worship.” The old 
 cathedrals are most admirably adapted to be the thea- 
 tres of ecclesiastical processions and pageants; and al- 
 though the Episcopal Church has a more highly devel- 
 oped ritual than any other Protestant body, it does not 
 provide for these on a cathedral scale. The Church of 
 England cannot be said really to employ the minsters 
 it has inherited. An eminent architect, who was not 
 only an Englishman, but an “Anglo-Catholic,” was 
 compelled to describe an ancient cathedral in its mod- 
 ern English use as merely “ a museum of antiquities, 
 with a free sacred concert on Sunday.” Even among 
 Catholic countries Spain is almost, if not quite, alone 
 in fully using her mediaeval cathedrals as modern 
 churches of the people, instead of secluding them as 
 “historical monuments” from the ordinary life of the 
 nation. In a country in which the arts of reading and 
 writing have been acquired by but a small fraction of 
 the people, the saying of Victor Hugo cannot have 
 come true. The book has not destroyed the church, 
 and the invention of printing has not affected either 
 the spirit or the form of devotion. The dramatic and 
 spectacular instinct, so strong among the Southern na- 
 tions, and among the English-speaking peoples perhaps 
 weaker than anywhere else, has found natural vent, in 
 a country in which the type of religion has remained 
 mediaeval, in those gorgeous ceremonials, addressed to 
 the imagination and not to the intellect, which really 
 require and employ the stage and the scenery of a 
 mediaeval cathedral. Not York or Salisbury, not 
 Cologne or Strasburg, not Rheims or Amiens, hardly 
 Milan or St. Peter’s itself, so fully shows to our gen- 
 eration the popular need which the mediaeval minsters 
 were meant to answer as it is shown to travellers on 
 one of the great feasts of the Church in Toledo or Sev- 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 97 
 
 ever incomplete, can scarcely be misleading. The de- 
 sign is, perhaps, the most suggestive contribution that 
 has thus far been made to the solution of the architect- 
 ural problem of a modern cathedral which the diocese 
 of New York has undertaken. At all events, the in- 
 fluence of it was more easy to be traced in the designs 
 for that work than the influence of any building actu- 
 ally erected on this side of the ocean. In part this was 
 due to the merits of the design itself ; in part to the 
 immense vigor and large picturesqueness of the exe- 
 cuted works of its author — qualities that have so im- 
 pressed themselves upon the younger generation of 
 American architects that there is scarcely a contem- 
 porary work of importance that does not betray his 
 influence, and that the Provent^al Romanesque, in which 
 his personal power of design was manifested, may al- 
 ready be said almost to have become the style of the 
 country. It must be manifest, however, that it would 
 be an injustice to Mr. Richardson’s memory to take 
 his design for the Albany Cathedral as his contribu- 
 tion to the civic — one may almost say the national — 
 problem of the present. For this design was prepared 
 under rigid limitations of space and of cost ; and though 
 its rejection is said to have been due to its excess of 
 these latter, it is by no means what its author would 
 have devised for a project in which there is no limita- 
 tion. The Cathedral of All-Saints was to be rather a 
 parish church of unusual dimensions than a cathedral ; 
 and the dimensions were still so restricted, and “seat- 
 ing capacity” still so important, that the accommoda- 
 tion of the congregation became a main object rather 
 than an incident of the plan from which the structure 
 proceeds. 
 
 Without reference to its scale, the design for the 
 Cathedral of Albany confesses the limitations that have 
 13 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 98 
 
 been relaxed for the Cathedral of New York, and that 
 render it unavailable as a direct model. These appear 
 mainly in the interior, but, as we shall presently see, 
 they affect the exterior design as well. As it was in 
 the beginnings of the art of building, so now stone 
 remains the material of monumental structures. In 
 durability it is rivalled, if it be rivalled, by metal alone, 
 and such experiments as the fleche of Rouen and the 
 tower of Paris have not yet convinced mankind of the 
 possibility of a monumental metallic architecture. Tim- 
 ber remains the most acceptable substitute, but timber 
 in a cathedral is plainly a substitute, and monumental 
 architecture admits no substitutes in the structure of 
 a great building. A stone ceiling must be regarded as 
 an indispensable requisite of a true cathedral ; and al- 
 though very impressive and noble cathedrals still ex- 
 hibit wooden ceilings, they so far come short of fulfil- 
 ling the idea of a cathedral, and the antiquarians are 
 pretty well agreed that the purpose of the builders was 
 to make their ceilings as durable as their walls, and 
 that they failed to carry out their purpose either through 
 lack of means or through doubt of their own ability to 
 construct stone ceilings. Considering the elaborate 
 expositions of construction in the true timber roofs of 
 the English Gothic, the boarded ceilings of Ely and 
 Peterborough were plainly makeshifts, and equally a 
 makeshift would be the wooden ceiling, of trefoil sec- 
 tion, hung to the timbers of the roof and concealing 
 its construction, which Mr. Richardson designed for the 
 Albany Cathedral. 
 
 We come here rather unexpectedly, upon the ques- 
 tion of “ style.’ If a vaulted ceiling be so eminently 
 desirable in a purely monumental building as to amount 
 to an architectural necessity, it is equally clear that the 
 groined vault — that is to say, the vault formed by the 
 
GROUND-PLAN. 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 IOI 
 
 intersection of two or more vaults — is necessary to the 
 complete development of the vaulting system ; and for 
 this the Romance architecture in which Mr. Richard- 
 son preferred to work, and which in a general way may 
 be called the style of his design for Albany, does not 
 provide.* The churches of the Provenqal Romanesque 
 were vaulted, but with a continuous tunnel vault, sup- 
 ported equally at all points, and demanding an enor- 
 mous thickness of wall, pierced by few and small open- 
 ings, to withstand the lateral thrust of the arch. The 
 introduction of groined vaults involved a concentration 
 of the supports and of the counterforts — that is to say, 
 a series of buttresses in place of a continuous wall. 
 The piers of the nave and the exterior buttresses, con- 
 nected by flying buttresses with the vaults the thrust 
 of which they withstood, thus constituted the frame- 
 work of the building, and the wall between the but- 
 tresses became a mere screen, as finally it did become 
 an avowed screen of painted glass. The history of this 
 development of the vault is the history of the transition 
 from Romanesque to Gothic architecture. The mediae- 
 val architects carried this development to its extreme, 
 leaving at last, as in the Sainte Chapelle, no wall at all, 
 and their work has been described as an attempt to 
 “ etherealize matter.” It may very well be doubted 
 whether the architect of a modern cathedral should not 
 stop short of the result they reached, and strive for a 
 simpler and more robust treatment than theirs — in 
 other words, for a treatment more Romanesque. But 
 if we assume that the cathedral shall be ceiled in mate- 
 
 * The alternative of a domical construction is not here considered, 
 though it was adopted in that one of the designs for the Cathedral of 
 New York that was chosen for further development. The competitive 
 design could not be accepted as a solution of the problem, since the 
 domed interior was masked, instead of being expressed, by the exterior. 
 
102 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 rial as durable and monumental as that of its walls, we 
 cannot reject the labors of the generations of artistic 
 builders who concerned themselves with that problem, 
 and attained so brilliant a solution of it. To take the 
 instance before us, the clere-story of the nave and of 
 the choir is in effect a continuous arcade of narrow- 
 pointed lancets. It needs a second glance to note that 
 they are grouped in pairs, and that the piers between 
 the pairs are slightly broader than the piers dividing 
 the openings of each pair. The slight increase in mass 
 quite suffices to account in the interior for the principal 
 roof timber which rests upon it, and, with the vaulting- 
 shaft, to continue upward the line of the nave-pier. But 
 if the flying buttress, necessary to transfer the thrust of 
 the vault, were built at this point, the arcade of the ex- 
 terior would be effectually interrupted, and the space 
 between the buttresses set off into a single bay, as in 
 the wall of the aisle below, which does, in fact, repre- 
 sent a vault. In that case a single large opening would 
 naturally take the place of the pair of lancets, still fur- 
 ther emphasizing the division into bays, and the side 
 of the nave would at once bear a much stronger resem- 
 blance than it now bears to the accepted type of a 
 cathedral. In the choir a like result would follow, and 
 it would be emphasized at the east end. The circle of 
 apsidal chapels is one of the most striking and most 
 successful features of Mr. Richardson’s design. As will 
 be seen from the ground-plan, however, these are fea- 
 tures that do not proceed from the interior arrange- 
 ment so much as features to which the interior arrange- 
 ment is conformed. Even when viewed from the outside 
 the undeniable power and picturesqueness of the group 
 is marred by the suggestion of something forced and 
 arbitrary in their arrangement. There are precedents 
 in Romanesque architecture for such a disposition, 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 103 
 
 among them “the great triapsal swing” of the twelfth- 
 century churches of Cologne, though evidently the ex- 
 ample that inspired Mr. Richardson was the chevet of 
 Clermont in Auvergne, which he has followed even to 
 the introduction of the mosaic above the springing of 
 the arches. All these, however, are much simpler than 
 the apse designed for Albany. What Mr. Richardson 
 doubtless had in mind was to reproduce the effect of 
 the ring of chapels that forms the chevet of a French 
 Gothic cathedral, without reproducing Gothic forms. 
 But the flying buttresses that radiate from the apse of 
 a French Gothic cathedral determine and bound the 
 chapels that fill the spaces between them, and, by mak- 
 ing these appear integral parts of the main structure, 
 save them from the look they would otherwise have of 
 extraneous appendages. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It seems, then, that the question of style in a modern 
 cathedral is not to be determined according to the in- 
 dividual preference of a designer for round arches or 
 pointed, for openings traceried or plain. If the prob- 
 lem he is working at has been successfully solved here- 
 tofore, he is not at liberty to ignore this solution be- 
 cause it falls without the limits of the historical period 
 he has proposed to himself, and to content himself with 
 an incomplete solution. Of course this remark does 
 not apply as a criticism to Mr. Richardson’s design for 
 Albany, prepared under limitations that he was com- 
 pelled to observe, but which the competitors for the 
 Cathedral of New York were at liberty to disregard. 
 Whether he was right in so far sacrificing the monu- 
 mental character of his interior to the monumental 
 features of his exterior, is not a practical question for 
 
104 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 designers of whom no sacrifice in either direction is 
 demanded. There are very noble examples of vaulted 
 architecture in the Romanesque period — examples which 
 it will be glory enough for the architect of the Cathe- 
 dral of New York if he succeeds in equalling without 
 slavishly imitating. But in all these there is a lack of 
 that complete correspondence between the interior and 
 the exterior structure that makes the organic unity of 
 a true cathedral, and that was attained for the first time 
 in the thirteenth century, after a series of tentative ex- 
 periments embodied in these very Romanesque build- 
 ings.* It is by no means necessary for an architect to 
 revert to these experiments because he does not sym- 
 pathize with the expression of strained intensity and 
 “otherworldliness” which the Gothic architects attained, 
 and prefers the more robust, more massive, more mun- 
 dane aspect of the Romanesque monuments that pre- 
 ceded the great cathedrals. The modelling of these 
 cathedrals is carried so far that nothing is left un- 
 modelled ; there are no longer any surfaces ; the whole 
 structure is anatomized; and the modern architect, 
 even while he stands astonished at the result of this 
 unsparing analysis, may yet say, “ It were to consider 
 too curiously to consider so.” But it is not by refusing 
 the aid these wonderful structures offer him that he 
 can advance upon or equal them. The development 
 of a cathedral requires, indeed, a system of piers and 
 vaults and flying arches and weighted buttresses. But 
 these need not be the same features in modelling, in 
 detail, or in expression that we know in historical ex- 
 amples. Instances are not wanting to show that they 
 
 * See Mr. Charles Herbert Moore’s excellent “ Development and 
 Character of Gothic Architecture,” published since this paper was 
 written ; a work which no student of Gothic or of cathedral-building 
 can afford not to read. 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 107 
 
 may be massed with the stalwart simplicity of the Ro- 
 manesque builders as well as drawn into the complex 
 and bewildering forms they assumed in the later Gothic. 
 In his design for Albany, Mr. Richardson has shown 
 very clearly that an artist, whose individuality is strong 
 enough, can put its stamp upon whatever he adopts. 
 The common distinction that Romanesque is a round- 
 arched and Gothic a pointed style, is shown to be base- 
 less in an unmistakably Romanesque church in which 
 all the openings of the clere-story are pointed lancets, 
 in which the pointed openings elsewhere far outnum- 
 ber the round arches, and in which the architect has 
 introduced tracery, sparingly but effectively, without at 
 all marring the unity of the structure. Nay, the church 
 owes the suggestion of some of its noblest features to 
 works that did not exist until the period classified as 
 Romanesque had closed. A modern architect forfeits 
 his birthright who does not use all that the past has to 
 offer him of help ; and his originality is impeached only 
 if he does not overrule to his own purposes what he 
 adopts, if he copies instead of using. The west front 
 of Albany, for example, is the west front of Notre Dame 
 of Paris, with differences, as marked as the resem- 
 blances, which convert it into a new creation. The 
 three entrances, burrowed through the thickness of the 
 wall and not projected from the face, are repeated, but 
 with a strong and decorated belt course at their spring- 
 ing. The buttresses, bringing down the line of the 
 towers at Paris and dividing the front into three, are 
 omitted, and a balustrade in relief takes the place of 
 the line of statues. The flanking towers thus rise from 
 a continuous base, and a tall mock-arcade marks their 
 lines in the next stage and emphasizes the flanking 
 wall, which in the mediaeval example is pierced with 
 a double arch on each side of the rose-window, and the 
 
io8 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 central wall is here recessed to serve the same purpose 
 of detaching the towers which in Notre Dame is an- 
 swered by the buttresses, while above the rose-window 
 another balustrade corresponds to the tall traceried 
 arcade, and the lancets of the belfry stage, double in 
 Notre Dame, are here grouped in threes. Except the 
 buttresses, every feature of the old front has its coun- 
 terpart, but by the emphasis given to the horizontal 
 lines, and the diminution of the vertical lines, in one 
 instance amounting to an effacement, the whole aspect 
 of the faqade is transformed. This is an admirable 
 example of the manner in which a modern architect 
 may employ his inheritance. Another, not less admi- 
 rable, is the adoption in the transept entrance of the 
 main and most characteristic feature of the famous 
 “ triple northern porch ” of Chartres, the interpolation 
 of narrow arches between the main portals and below 
 the springing of their arches. This is a still more 
 signal instance of what we have been saying of the 
 power of changing the expression of a feature while 
 retaining its substance, for the northern porch of Char- 
 tres is one of the loveliest fantasies of a late and highly 
 ornate Gothic, and it is here translated back into the 
 severer Romanesque, as all the structural features of a 
 fully developed cathedral might be. 
 
 IV 
 
 But it is not in its details nor in its features, fine as 
 many of these are, that Mr. Richardson’s design for 
 Albany offers the most inspiring suggestions and the 
 safest model. It is in the sense that pervades it of the 
 all-importance of the relation of its masses, and in the 
 mastery it shows of architectural composition. It was 
 lone aeo noted as a mark of an artistic work of archi- 
 
 o o 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 109 
 
 tecture that it “ pyramidizes,” and this implies a single 
 culminating feature to which the parts converge and 
 rise. In the work which first fixed Mr. Richardson’s 
 rank among American architects — -Trinity Church in 
 Boston — the most striking merit of the design is the 
 manner in which the parts are subordinated to the 
 noble and massive central tower. In his design for 
 Albany the same subordination is carried through more 
 gradations, and it is both more subtle and more suc- 
 cessful. The outer aisles of the nave are secluded alto- 
 gether from the interior, and set off in the “cloisters” 
 or loggie that are among the most effective features of 
 the building, and among the happiest suggestions its 
 designer derived from the study of Spanish architect- 
 ure. The roofs of these recede to the walls of the aisle 
 proper, the roofs of which are conspicuous, so that the 
 clere-story is seen above a succession of terraces. At 
 the east end the circle of chapels and the aisle roofs 
 and the sharp slope of the main roof rise in receding 
 masses that converge towards the great central tower, 
 which from the side broadens down upon the flanking 
 towers of the transept. The relation between the west- 
 ern and the central towers is far happier than in the 
 earlier example, and the central tower itself shows as 
 great an advance upon the tower of Trinity as does 
 that upon the tower of Salamanca, from which the sug- 
 gestion of it was derived. But the western front is 
 perhaps the most brilliantly successful illustration of 
 its author’s power. We have seen that Mr. Richard- 
 son refused the aid of the buttresses, which with their 
 successive offsets narrow the fronts of Gothic cathe- 
 drals as they rise, but he replaced them with a series 
 of devices that answer the same purpose almost as effec- 
 tively. The flanking towers are themselves flanked at 
 the base by low polygonal hooded structures that are 
 
I IO 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 succeeded by attached turrets reaching to the belfry 
 stage. The roofs of the western towers themselves 
 next converge towards the looming bulk of the central 
 feature, to which they serve as pinnacles. Surely in all 
 the achievements of architectural amity through variety 
 that the Middle Ages have bequeathed to us, there are 
 few that in nobleness and dignity surpass the effect that 
 is promised by Mr. Richardson’s design for the west 
 front of Albany, and in modern work where shall we 
 look for a parallel. 
 
 This very central tower may serve as a reminder of 
 the point in which a modern cathedral may mark an 
 architectural advance upon the mediaeval art which, in 
 most respects, its builders may be well content if they 
 can equal. For the culminating feature of the exterior 
 should be the culminating feature of the interior also, 
 and it was this need that the mediaeval architects left 
 unanswered. They recognized it, and in the cimborio 
 of the Spanish cathedral, and in such experiments as 
 the octagon of Ely, they made the beginnings of an 
 answer, but these are no more to be accepted as com- 
 plete than the Romanesque system of vaulting, which 
 the Gothic architects developed to its perfection. The 
 fleche of a French cathedral emphasizes rather than 
 supplies the need of such a culmination. The central 
 towers of such English cathedrals as possess them are 
 purely exterior ornaments, as unrelated to the body of 
 the church as its western towers. In Mr. Richardson’s 
 design the tall and narrow dome at the crossing would 
 not be apprehensible as a crowning feature, except from 
 a point of view almost directly beneath it, while its ex- 
 ternal form does not intimate its interior function. It 
 was a true feeling that led the architects of the Italian 
 Renaissance to embrace the aisles as well as the nave 
 under the central dome, though they clothed their con- 
 
AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL 
 
 I I I 
 
 struction in untrue forms. To develop true forms for 
 it is the one advance upon past ecclesiastical architect- 
 ure which seems to be possible, and to develop these 
 may be said to be the central problem of design in an 
 American cathedral. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 I.— CHICAGO 
 
 begin with a paradox, the feature 
 of Chicago is its featurelessness. 
 There is scarcely any capital, ancient 
 or modern, to which the site supplies 
 so little of a visible reason of being. 
 The prairie and the lake meet at 
 a level, a liquid plain and a plain of 
 mud that cannot properly be called 
 solid, with nothing but the change 
 of material to break the expanse. 
 Indeed, when there is a breeze, the 
 surface of Lake Michigan would be 
 distinctly more diversified than that 
 of the adjoining land, but for the 
 handiwork of man. In point of fact, 
 Chicago is of course explained by 
 the confluence here of the two branch- 
 es of the Chicago River. These have 
 determined the site, the plan, and the building of the 
 town, but one can scarcely describe as natural features 
 the two sinuous ditches that drain the prairie into the 
 lake, apparently in defiance of the law that water runs, 
 and even oozes, down hill. Streams, however narrow and 
 sluggish they may be, so they be themselves available 
 for traffic, operate an obstruction to traffic by land ; and it 
 is the fact that for some distance from the junction the 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 ”3 
 
 south fork of the river flows parallel with the shore of 
 the lake, and within a half-mile of it, which establishes in 
 this enclosure the commercial centre of Chicago. Even 
 the slight obstacle interposed to traffic by the confluent 
 streams, bridged and tunnelled as they are, has sufficed 
 greatly to raise the cost of land within this area, in com- 
 parison with that outside, and to compel here the erec- 
 tion of the towering structures that are the most charac- 
 teristic and the most impressive monuments of the town. 
 
 In character and impressiveness these by no means 
 disappoint the stranger’s expectations, but in number 
 and extent they do, rather. For what one expects of 
 Chicago, before anything else, is modernness. In most 
 things one’s expectations are fully realized. It is the 
 most contemporaneous of capitals, and in the appear- 
 ance of its people and their talk in the streets and in 
 the clubs and in the newspapers it fairly palpitates with 
 “ actuality.” Nevertheless, the general aspect of the 
 business quarter is distinctly old-fashioned, and this 
 even to the effete Oriental from New York or Boston. 
 The elevator is nearly a quarter of a century old, and 
 the first specimens of “elevator architecture,” the West- 
 ern Union and the “ Tribune ” buildings in New York, are 
 very nearly coeval with the great fire in Chicago. One 
 would have supposed that the rebuilders of Chicago 
 would have seized upon this hint with avidity, and that 
 its compressed commercial quarter would have made 
 up in altitude what it lacked in area. In fact, not only 
 are the great modern office buildings still exceptional 
 in the most costly and most crowded district, but it is 
 astonishing to hear that the oldest of them is scarcely 
 more than seven years of age. “ Men’s deeds are after 
 as they have been accustomed ” — and the first impulse 
 of the burnt-out merchants of Chicaqo was not to seize 
 the opportunity the clean sweep of the fire had given 
 
 15 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 14 
 
 them to improve their warehouses and office buildings, 
 but to provide themselves straightway with places in 
 which they could find shelter and do business. The 
 consequence was that the new buildings of the burnt 
 district were planned and designed, as well as built, with 
 the utmost possible speed, and the rebuilding was for 
 the most part done by the same architects who had 
 built the old Chicago, and who took even less thought 
 the second time than they had taken the first, by reason 
 of the greater pressure upon them. The American 
 commercial Renaissance, commonly expressed in cast- 
 iron, was in its full efflorescence just before the fire. 
 The material was discredited by that calamity, but un- 
 happily not the forms it had taken, and in Chicago we 
 may see, what is scarcely to be seen anywhere else in 
 the world, fronts in cast-iron, themselves imitated from 
 lithic architecture, again imitated in masonry, with the 
 modifications reproduced that had been made necessary 
 by the use of the less trustworthy material. This igno- 
 ble process is facilitated by the material at hand, a lime- 
 stone of which slabs can be had in sizes that simulate 
 exactly the castings from which the treatment of them 
 is derived. After the exposure of a few months to the 
 bituminous fumes it is really impossible to tell one of 
 these reproductions from the original, which very likely 
 adjoins it. Masonry and metal alike appear to have 
 come from a foundry, rather than from a quarry, and 
 to have been moulded according to the stock patterns 
 of some architectural iron-works. The lifelessness and 
 thoughtlessness of the iron-founders’ work predominate 
 in the streets devoted to the retail trade, and the pict- 
 uresque tourist in Chicago is thus compelled to traverse 
 many miles of street fronts quite as dismal and as mo- 
 notonous as the commercial architecture of any other 
 modern town. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 15 
 
 There is a compensation for this in what at first sight 
 seems to be one of its aggravations. The buildings 
 which wear these stereotyped street fronts are much 
 lower and less capacious than the increasing exigencies 
 of business require, and than the introduction of the 
 elevator makes possible, and they could not be other 
 than cheap and flimsy in construction. Naturally the 
 rebuilders of Chicago talked a great deal about “ abso- 
 lutely fire-proof” construction, but as naturally they did 
 very little of it. The necessity for immediate accom- 
 modation, at a minimum of cost, was overwhelming, 
 and cheap and hasty construction cannot be fire-proof 
 construction. Accordingly, the majority of the com- 
 mercial buildings now standing in Chicago are as really 
 provisional and temporary as the tents and shanties, 
 pitched almost on the embers of the fire, which they 
 succeeded. The time being now ripe for replacing them 
 by structures more capacious and durable, it is a mat- 
 ter for congratulation that there is nothing in the exist- 
 ing buildings of such practical or architectural value as 
 to make anybody regret or obstruct the substitution. 
 
 Even if the old-fashioned architects who rebuilt Chi- 
 cago had been anxious to reconstruct it according to 
 the best and newest lights, it would have been quite out 
 of their power to do so unaided. The erection of a 
 twelve-story building anywhere involves an amount of 
 mechanical consideration and a degree of engineering 
 skill that are quite beyond the practitioners of the Amer- 
 ican metallic Renaissance. In Chicago the problem is 
 more complicated than elsewhere, because these tower- 
 ing and massive structures ultimately rest upon a quag- 
 mire that is not less but more untrustworthy the deeper 
 one digs. The distribution of the weight by carrying 
 the foundations down to a trustworthy bottom, and 
 increasing the area of the supporting piers as they de- 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 16 
 
 scend, is not practicable here, nor, for the same reason, 
 can it be done by piling. It is managed, in the heavi- 
 est buildings, by floating them upon a raft of concrete 
 and railroad iron, spread a few feet below the surface, 
 so that there are no cellars in the business quarter, and 
 the subterranean activities that are so striking: in the 
 elevator buildings of New York are quite unknown. If 
 the architects of the old Chicago, to whom their former 
 clients naturally applied to rear the phoenix of the new, 
 had been seized with the ambition of building Babels, 
 they would doubtless have made as wild work practi- 
 cally as they certainly would have made artistically in 
 the confusion of architectural tongues that would have 
 fallen upon them. It is in every point of view fortu- 
 nate that the modernization of the town was reserved 
 for the better-trained designers of a younger genera- 
 tion. 
 
 It might be expected that the architecture of Chicago 
 would be severely utilitarian in purpose if not in design, 
 and this is the case. The city may be said to consist 
 of places of business and places of residence. There 
 are no churches, for example, that fairly represent the 
 skill of the architects. The best of them are scarcely 
 worthy of illustration or discussion here, while the worst 
 of them might suitably illustrate the work projected by 
 a ribald wit on “ The Comic Aspects of Christianity.” 
 Among other things, it follows from this deficiency that 
 Chicago lacks almost altogether, in any general view 
 that can be had of it, the variety and animation that 
 are imparted to the sky line of a town seen from the 
 water, or from an eminence, by a “ tiara of proud tow- 
 ers,” even when these are not specially attractive in 
 outline or in detail, nor especially fortunate in their 
 grouping. There is nothing, for example, in the aspect 
 of Chicago from the lake, or from any attainable point 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 II 7 
 
 of view, that is comparable to the sky-line of the Back 
 Bay of Boston, as seen from the Cambridge bridge, or 
 of lower New York from either river. The towering 
 buildings are almost wholly flat-roofed, and their stark, 
 rectangular outlines cannot take on picturesqueness, 
 even under the friendly drapery of the smoke that over- 
 hangs the commercial quarter during six days of the 
 week. The architect of the Dearborn Station was very 
 happily inspired when he relieved the prevailing mo- 
 notony with the quaint and striking clock-tower that 
 adjoins that structure. 
 
 The secular public buildings of Chicago are much 
 more noteworthy than the churches, but upon the whole 
 they bear scarcely so large a relation to the mass of 
 private building as one would expect from the wealth 
 and the public spirit of the town, and with one or two 
 very noteworthy exceptions, recent as many of them 
 are, they were built too early. The most discussed of 
 them is the city and county building, and this has been 
 discussed for reasons quite alien to its architecture, the 
 halves of what was originally a single design having 
 been assigned to different architects. The original 
 design has been followed in the main, and the result is 
 an edifice that certainly makes a distinctive impression. 
 A building, completely detached, 340 feet by 2S0 in 
 area, and considerably over 100 feet high, can scarcely 
 fail to make an impression by dint of mere magnitude, 
 but there is rather more than that in the city and county 
 building. The parts are few and large, but five stories 
 appearing, the masonry is massive, and the projecting 
 and pedimented porticoes are on an ample scale. These 
 things give the building a certain effect of sumptuosity 
 and swagger that ally it rather to the Parisian than to 
 the Peorian Renaissance. The effect is marred by cer- 
 tain drawbacks of detail, and by one that is scarcely of 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 16 
 
 scend, is not practicable here, nor, for the same reason, 
 can it be done by piling. It is managed, in the heavi- 
 est buildings, by boating them upon a raft of concrete 
 and railroad iron, spread a few feet below the surface, 
 so that there are no cellars in the business quarter, and 
 the subterranean activities that are so striking in the 
 elevator buildings of New York are quite unknown. If 
 the architects of the old Chicago, to whom their former 
 clients naturally applied to rear the phoenix of the new, 
 had been seized with the ambition of building Babels, 
 they would doubtless have made as wild work practi- 
 cally as they certainly would have made artistically in 
 the confusion of architectural tongues that would have 
 fallen upon them. It is in every point of view fortu- 
 nate that the modernization of the town was reserved 
 for the better-trained designers of a younger genera- 
 tion. 
 
 It might be expected that the architecture of Chicago 
 would be severely utilitarian in purpose if not in design, 
 and this is the case. The city may be said to consist 
 of places of business and places of residence. There 
 are no churches, for example, that fairly represent the 
 skill of the architects. The best of them are scarcely 
 worthy of illustration or discussion here, while the worst 
 of them might suitably illustrate the work projected by 
 a ribald wit on “ The Comic Aspects of Christianity.” 
 Among other things, it follows from this deficiency that 
 Chicago lacks almost altogether, in any general view 
 that can be had of it, the variety and animation that 
 are imparted to the sky line of a town seen from the 
 water, or from an eminence, by a “ tiara of proud tow- 
 ers,” even when these are not specially attractive in 
 outline or in detail, nor especially fortunate in their 
 grouping. There is nothing, for example, in the aspect 
 of Chicago from the lake, or from any attainable point 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 II 7 
 
 of view, that is comparable to the sky-line of the Back 
 Bay of Boston, as seen from the Cambridge bridge, or 
 of lower New York from either river. The towering 
 buildings are almost wholly flat-roofed, and their stark, 
 rectangular outlines cannot take on picturesqueness, 
 even under the friendly drapery of the smoke that over- 
 hangs the commercial quarter during six days of the 
 week. The architect of the Dearborn Station was very 
 happily inspired when he relieved the prevailing mo- 
 notony with the quaint and striking clock-tower that 
 adjoins that structure. 
 
 The secular public buildings of Chicago are much 
 more noteworthy than the churches, but upon the whole 
 they bear scarcely so large a relation to the mass of 
 private building as one would expect from the wealth 
 and the public spirit of the town, and with one or two 
 very noteworthy exceptions, recent as many of them 
 are, they were built too early. The most discussed of 
 them is the city and county building, and this has been 
 discussed for reasons quite alien to its architecture, the 
 halves of what was originally a single design having 
 been assigned to different architects. The original 
 design has been followed in the main, and the result is 
 an edifice that certainly makes a distinctive impression. 
 A building, completely detached, 340 feet by 2S0 in 
 area, and considerably over 100 feet high, can scarcely 
 fail to make an impression by dint of mere magnitude, 
 but there is rather more than that in the city and county 
 building. The parts are few and large, but five stories 
 appearing, the masonry is massive, and the projecting 
 and pedimented porticoes are on an ample scale. These 
 things give the building a certain effect of sumptuosity 
 and swagger that ally it rather to the Parisian than to 
 the Peorian Renaissance. The effect is marred by cer- 
 tain drawbacks of detail, and by one that is scarcely of 
 
1 18 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 FROM THE CITY AND COUNTY BUILDING. 
 J. W. Egan and J. R. Mullett, Architects. 
 
 detail, the extreme meanness and baldness of the attic, 
 in which, for the only time in the building, the openings 
 seem to be arranged with some reference to their uses, 
 and in which accordingly they have a painfully pinched 
 and huddled appearance. In the decorative detail there 
 is apparent a divergency of views between the two archi- 
 tects appointed to carry out the divided halves of the 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE lY g 
 
 united design. The municipal designer — or possibly it 
 is the county gentleman — has been content to stand 
 upon the ancient ways, and to introduce no detail for 
 which he has not found Ludovican precedent, while his 
 rival is of a more aspiring mind, and has endeavored to 
 carry out the precepts of the late Thomas Jefferson, by 
 classicizing things modern. His excursions are not 
 very daring, and consist mainly in such substitutions as 
 that of an Indian's head for the antique mask, in a 
 frieze of conventionalized American foliage. He has 
 attained what must be in such an attempt the gratifying 
 success of converting his modern material to a result as 
 dull and lifeless and uninteresting as his prototype. It 
 does not, however, impair the grandiosity of the general 
 effect. This is impaired, not merely by the poverty of 
 design already noted in the attic, but also by the nig- 
 gardliness shown in dividing the polished granite col- 
 umn of the porticoes into several drums, though mono- 
 liths are plainly indicated by their dimensions, and by 
 the general scale of the masonry. The small economy 
 is the more injurious, because a noble regardlessness of 
 expense is of the essence of the architecture, and an 
 integral part of its effectiveness. The most monumental 
 feature of the projected building has never been sup- 
 plied — a huge arch in the centre of each of the shorter 
 fronts, giving access to the central court, and marking 
 the division between the property of the city and of the 
 county. It is possible that the failure to finish this 
 arch has proceeded from the political conflict that has 
 left its scars upon the building elsewhere. There is an 
 obvious practical difficulty in intrusting the two halves 
 of an arch to rival architects and rival contractors. 
 However that may be, the arch is unbuilt, and the en- 
 trance to the central court is a mere rift in the wall. 
 The practical townspeople have seized the opportunity 
 
I 20 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 thus presented by the unoccupied space of free quarters 
 for the all-pervading buggy. With a contempt for the 
 constituted authorities that it must be owned the con- 
 stituted authorities have gone far to justify, they tether 
 their horses in the shadow of their chief civic monu- 
 ment, like so many Arabs under the pillars of Palmyra 
 or Persepolis, and heighten the impression of being the 
 relic of an extinct race that is given to the pile not only 
 by its unfinished state and by the stains of smoke, un- 
 distinguishable from those of time, but by its entirely 
 exotic architecture. As the newly- landed Irishman,, 
 making his way up Broadway from Castle Garden, is 
 said to have exclaimed, when he came in sight of the 
 City Hall, that “ that never was built in this country," 
 so the stranger in Chicago is tempted to declare of its 
 municipal building that it could not have been reared 
 by the same race of whose building activities the other 
 evidences surround him. This single example of Ludo- 
 vican architecture recalls, as most examples of it do, 
 Thackeray’s caricature of its Mecaenas. Despoiled of 
 its periwigs and its high heels, that is to say, of its archi- 
 tecture, which is easily separable from it, the building 
 would merely lose all its character, without losing any- 
 thing that belongs to it as a building. 
 
 Nevertheless this municipal building has its char- 
 acter, and in comparison with the next most famous 
 public building of Chicago, it vindicates the wisdom of 
 its architect in subjecting himself to the safeguard of a 
 style of which, moreover, his work shows a real study. 
 The style may be absolutely irrelevant both to our 
 needs and to our ideas, as irrelevant as the political 
 system of Louis XIV. which it recalls. Its formulas 
 may seem quite empty, but they gather dignity, if not 
 meaning, when contrasted with the work of an avid 
 “swallower of formulas,” like the architect of the Board 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 2 I 
 
 of Trade. His work is of no style, a proposition that 
 is not invalidated by the probability that he himself 
 would call it “ American eclectic Gothic.” We all know 
 what the untutored and aboriginal architect stretches 
 that term to cover. There is no doubt about its being 
 
 THE ART INSTITUTE. 
 Burnham & Root, Architects. 
 
 characteristically modern and American ; one might 
 say characteristically Western, if he did not recall 
 equally free and untrammelled exuberances in the At- 
 lantic States. But it is impossible to ascribe to it any 
 architectural merit, unless a complete disregard for 
 precedent is to be imputed for righteousness, whether 
 it proceed from ignorance or from contempt. And, 
 indeed, there are not many other structures in the 
 16 
 
122 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 United States, of equal cost and pretension, which 
 equally with this combine the dignity of a commercial 
 traveller with the bland repose of St. Vitus. It is 
 difficult to contemplate its bustling and uneasy faqade 
 without feeling a certain sympathy with the mob of 
 anarchists that “ demonstrated ” under its windows on 
 the night of its opening. If they were really anarchists, 
 it was very ungrateful of them, for one would go far to 
 find a more perfect expression of anarchy in architec- 
 ture, and it is conceivable that they were instigated by 
 an outraged architectural critic in disguise. If that 
 ringleader had been caught and arraigned, he could 
 have maintained, with much better reason, the plea 
 that Gustave Courbet made for his share in the de- 
 struction of the column of the Place Vendome, that 
 his opposition to the monument was not political, but 
 aesthetic. 
 
 Fortunately there is no other among the public or 
 quasi -public buildings of Chicago of which the archi- 
 tecture is so hopeless and so irresponsible — no other 
 that would so baffle the palaeontological Paley who 
 should seek in it evidences of design, and that does 
 not exhibit, at least, an architectural purpose, carried 
 out with more or less of consistency and success. At 
 the very centre of the commercial water front there 
 was wisely reserved from traffic in the rebuilding of the 
 town the “ Lake Park,” a mile in extent, and some hun- 
 dreds of feet in depth, which not only serves the pur- 
 pose of affording a view of the lake from the business 
 quarter, but also secures an effective foreground for 
 the buildings that line its landward edge. One of 
 the oldest of these, young as all of them are, is the 
 “ Art Institute,” designed by Messrs. Burnham & Root. 
 This is of a moderate altitude, and suffers somewhat 
 from being dwarfed by the elevator buildings erected 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 12 3 
 
 since, being but of three stories and a roof ; but no 
 neighbor could make it other than a vigorous and 
 effective work, as dignified as the Board of Trade is 
 uneasy, and as quiet as that is noisy. It is extremely 
 simple in composition, as will be seen, and it bears very 
 little ornament, this being for the most part concen- 
 trated upon the ample and deeply moulded archway of 
 the entrance. It owes its effectiveness to the clearness 
 of its division into the three main parts of base and 
 superstructure and roof, to the harmonious relation be- 
 tween them, and to the differences in the treatment of 
 them that enhance this harmony. The Aristotelian 
 precept that a work of art must have a beginning, a 
 middle, and an end, is nowhere more conspicuously valid 
 
124 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 than in architecture, and nowhere does the neglect of 
 it entail more unfortunate consequences. The severity 
 of the basement, with its plain rectangular openings, is 
 an effective introduction to the somewhat lighter and 
 more open fenestration of the second and third stories, 
 which are grouped to form the second term in the pro- 
 portion, and this in turn to the range of openings in 
 the gable of the shorter front, and to the row of peaked 
 dormers in the longer that animate the sky-line and 
 complete the composition. The impressiveness of the 
 fronts is very greatly deepened by the vigorous framing 
 of massive angle piers in which they are enclosed, the 
 vigor of which is enhanced by the solid pinnacled tur- 
 rets, corbelled out above the second story, that help to 
 weight them, and that visibly abut the outward thrust 
 of the arcades. It may be significant, with reference 
 to the tendency of Western architecture, that this ad- 
 mirable building, admirable in the sobriety and mod- 
 eration that are facilitated by its moderate size, is 
 precisely what one would not expect to find in Chicago, 
 so little is there evident in it of an intention to “collar 
 the eye,” or to challenge the attention it so very well 
 repays. 
 
 In part, as we have just intimated, this modesty may 
 be ascribed to the modest dimensions of the building. 
 At any rate, it was out of the question in another im- 
 portant quasi-public building, which is the latest, and, at 
 this writing, the loudest of the lions of Chicago — the 
 Auditorium. Whatever else a ten-story building, nearly 
 300 feet by more than 350 in area and 140 in height, 
 with a tower rising 80 feet farther, may happen to be, 
 it must be conspicuous, and it is no wise possible that 
 its designer should make it appear bashful or unobtru- 
 sive. Of however retiring a disposition he may be, in 
 such a situation he must brazen it out. It is in his 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 125 
 
 Adler & Sullivan, Architects. 
 
 power to adopt a very simple or a very elaborate treat- 
 ment, and to imperil the success of his work by mak- 
 ing it dull on the one hand or unquiet on the other. 
 Messrs. Adler & Sullivan, the architects of the Audi- 
 torium, have chosen the better part in treating their 
 huge fronts with great severity, insomuch that the 
 building can scarcely be said to exhibit any “features,” 
 except the triple entrance on the lake front, with its 
 overhanging balcony, and the square tower that rises 
 over the southern front to a height of 225 feet. While 
 they did wisely in showing that monotony had fewer 
 terrors for them than restlessness, the monotony that 
 undoubtedly amounts to a defect in the aspect of the 
 completed work is by no means wholly or mainly at- 
 
I2 6 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 tributable to them. A place of popular entertainment, 
 constructed upon a scale and with a massiveness to 
 which we can scarcely find a parallel since Roman days, 
 would present one of the worthiest and most interesting 
 problems a modern architect could have if he were left 
 to solve it unhampered. It is quite difficult enough to 
 tax the power of any designer without any complica- 
 tions. The problem of design in the Chicago Audi- 
 torium is much complicated with requirements entirely 
 irrelevant to its main purpose. The lobbies, the audi- 
 torium, and the stage of a great theatre, which are its 
 essential parts, are all susceptible of an exterior ex- 
 pression more truthful and more striking than has yet 
 been attained, in spite of many earnest and interesting 
 essays. In the interior of the Auditorium, where the 
 architects were left free, they have devoted themselves 
 to solving their real problem with a high degree of 
 success, and have attained an impressive simplicity and 
 largeness. We are not dealing with interiors, however, 
 and they were required to envelop the outside of their 
 theatre in a shell of many-storied commercial architec- 
 ture, which forbade them even to try for a monumental 
 expression of their great hall. In the main, their ex- 
 terior appears and must be judged only as a “business 
 block.” They have their exits and their entrances, and 
 it is really only in these features that the exterior be- 
 trays the primary purpose of the building. The tower, 
 even, is evidently not so much monumental as utilitarian. 
 It is prepared for in the substructure only by a slight 
 and inadequate projection of the piers, while it is itself 
 obviously destined for profitable occupancy, being a 
 small three-story business block, superimposed upon a 
 huge ten-story business block. Such a structure can- 
 not be converted into a monumental feature by making 
 it more massive at the top than it is at the bottom, 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I27 
 
 TOWER OF AUDITORIUM. 
 Adler & Sullivan. Architects. 
 
 even though the massiveness be as artistically accen- 
 tuated as it is in the tower of the Auditorium by the 
 powerful open colonnade and the strong machicolated 
 cornice in which it culminates. Waiving, as the de- 
 signers have been compelled to do, the main purpose 
 of the structure, and considering it as a commercial 
 building, the Auditorium does not leave very much 
 to be desired. The basement, especially, which consists 
 of three stories of granite darker than the limestone 
 of the superstructure, and appropriately rough-faced, is 
 a vigorous and dignified performance, in which the ex- 
 pression of rugged strength is enhanced by the small 
 and deep openings, and in which the necessarily large 
 openings of the ground-floor are prevented from en- 
 
128 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 feebling the design by the massiveness of the lintels 
 and flat arches that enclose them, and of the piers and 
 pillars by which these are supported. The superstruc- 
 ture is scarcely worthy of this basement. The triple 
 vertical division of the wall is effectively proportioned, 
 but a much stronger demarcation is needed between 
 the second and third members than is furnished 
 by the discontinuous sill-course of the eighth story, 
 while a greater projection, a greater depth, and a 
 more vigorous modelling of the main cornice, and 
 an enrichment of the attic beneath, would go far to 
 relieve the baldness and monotony that are the de- 
 fects of the design, and that are scarcely to be con- 
 doned because there are architectural faults much 
 worse and much more frequent, which the designers 
 have avoided. It is only, as has been said, in the en- 
 trances that they have been permitted to exhibit the 
 object of the building. Really, it is only in the en- 
 trance on the Lake front, for the triplet of stilted arches 
 at the base of the tower is not a very felicitous or a 
 very congruous feature. The three low arches of the 
 Lake front are of a Roman largeness — true vomitoria 
 — and their effectiveness is increased by the simplicity 
 of their treatment, by the ample lateral abutment pro- 
 vided for them, and by the long and shallow balcony 
 that overhangs them. With the arches themselves this 
 makes a very impressive feature, albeit the balcony is 
 a very questionable feature. Even to the layman there 
 must be a latent contradiction in the intercalation of 
 the pillar to relieve the bearing of a lintel,' when the 
 pillar is referred to an unsupported shelf, obviously 
 lighter and weaker than the lintel itself. This contra- 
 diction is not explained away by the vigor and massive- 
 ness of the shallow corbels that really account for the 
 alternate columns, and it suggests that the construe- 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 29 
 
 tion so exhibited is not the true construction at all, 
 and leaves this latter to be inferred without any help 
 from the architecture. Even if one waives his objec- 
 tion to architectural forms that do not agree with the 
 structural facts, it is surely not pedantic to require 
 that the construction asserted by the forms shall be 
 plausible to the extent of agreeing with itself. It is 
 a pity that there should be such a drawback from a 
 feature so effective ; but the drawback does not prevent 
 the feature from being effective, nor do the shortcom- 
 ings we have been considering in the design of the 
 Auditorium, nor even the much more serious obstacle 
 that was inherent in the problem and imposed upon 
 the architects, prevent it from being a very impressive 
 structure, and justifying the pride with which it is re- 
 garded by all patriotic Chicagoans. 
 
 But, as has been intimated, it is not in monumental 
 edifices that the characteristic building of Chicago is to 
 be looked for. The “ business block,” entirely utilitarian 
 in purpose, and monumental only in magnitude and 
 in solidity of construction, is the true and typical em- 
 bodiment in building of the Chicago idea. This might 
 be said, of course, of any American city. Undoubtedly 
 the most remarkable achievements of our architects 
 and the most creditable have been in commercial archi- 
 tecture. But in this respect Chicago is more American 
 than any of the Eastern cities, where there are signs, 
 even in the commercial quarters, of division of interest 
 and infirmity of purpose. In none of them does the 
 building bespeak such a singleness of devotion, or in- 
 dicate that life means so exclusively a living. Even 
 the exceptions prove the rule by such tokens as the 
 modest dimensions of the Art Institute and the con- 
 cealment of the Auditorium in the heart of a business 
 block. It does not by any means follow that the 
 l 7 
 
130 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 business blocks are uninteresting. There are sineu- 
 larly few exceptions to the rule of dismalness in the 
 buildings that were hurriedly run up after the fire. 
 One of these exceptions, the American Express Com- 
 pany, has an extrinsic interest as being the work of Mr. 
 Richardson, and as being, so far as it need be classified, 
 an example of Victorian Gothic, although its openings 
 are all lintelled, instead of the Provenqal Romanesque 
 to which its author afterwards addicted himself with 
 such success. So successful an example is it that an 
 eminent but possibly bilious English architect, who 
 visited Chicago at an early stage of the rebuilding, 
 declared it to be the only thing in the town worth 
 looking at — a judgment that does not seem so harsh 
 to the tourist of to-day who compares it with its thus 
 disesteemed contemporaries. It is a sober and straight- 
 forward performance in a safe monochrome of olive 
 sandstone, and it thus lacks the note of that variety 
 of Victorian Gothic that Mr. Ruskin’s eloquence stim- 
 ulated untrained American designers to produce, in 
 which the restlessness of unstudied forms is still fur- 
 ther tormented by the spotty application of color. 
 From this variety of Victorian Gothic Chicago is hap- 
 pily free. A gabled building in brick and sandstone 
 opposite the Palmer House is almost a unique, and 
 not at all an unfavorable, example. The business 
 streets that are now merely dismal would have been 
 much more aggressively painful if the incapable archi- 
 tects who built them had deviated from the compara- 
 tive safety of their cast-iron Renaissance into a style 
 that put them upon their individual want of resources. 
 Moreover, throughout the commercial quarter any at- 
 tempt at a structural use of color is sure shortly to be 
 frustrated by coal-smoke. Upon the whole, it is a 
 matter for congratulation that the earlier rebuilders of 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 THE FIELD BUILDING. 
 
 H. H. Richardson, Architect. 
 
 Chicago, 
 
 what they were, 
 should have been 
 so isrnorant or 
 
 O 
 
 careless of what 
 was sioino- on else- 
 where, which, had 
 they been aware 
 of it, they would 
 have been quite 
 certain to mis- 
 apply. Not only 
 did they thus escape the frantic result that came of 
 Victorian Gothic in untutored hands, but they escaped 
 the pettiness and puerility that resulted of “ Queen 
 Anne,” even when it was done by designers who ought 
 to have known better. These pages contain a dis- 
 paragement of that curious mode of building in a pa- 
 per written when it was dressed in its little brief au- 
 thority and playing its most fantastic tricks. Now it is 
 so well recognized that Queen Anne is dead, that it 
 seems strange educated architects ever could have fan- 
 cied they detected the promise and potency of architec- 
 
132 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 tural life in her cold remains. This most evanescent of 
 fashions seems never to have prevailed in Chicago at all. 
 
 One of the earliest of the more modern and charac- 
 teristic of the commercial structures of Chicago, the 
 Field Building, is by Mr. Richardson also, a huge ware- 
 house covering a whole square, and seven stories high. 
 With such an opportunity, Mr. Richardson could be 
 trusted implicitly at least to make the most of his di- 
 mensions, and large as the building is in fact, it looks 
 interminably big. Its bigness is made apparent by 
 the simplicity of its treatment and the absence of any 
 lateral division whatever. Simplicity, indeed, could 
 scarcely go further. The vast expanses of the fronts 
 are unrelieved by any ornament except a leaf in the 
 cornice, and a rudimentary capital in the piers and 
 mullions of the colonnaded attic. The effect of the 
 mass is due wholly to its magnitude, to the disposition 
 of its openings, and to the emphatic exhibition of the 
 masonic structure. The openings, except in the attic, 
 and except for an ample pier reserved at each corner, 
 are equally spaced throughout. The vertical division 
 is limited to a sharp separation from the intermediate 
 wall veil of the basement on one hand, and of the attic 
 on the other. It must be owned that there is even a 
 distinct infelicity in the arrangement of the five stories 
 of this intermediate wall, the two superposed arcades, 
 the upper of which, by reason of its multiplied supports, 
 is the more solid of aspect, and between which there is 
 no harmonious relation, but contrariwise a competition. 
 Nevertheless, the main division is so clear, and the han- 
 dling throughout so vigorous, as to carry off even a more 
 serious defect. Nothing of its kind could be more im- 
 pressive than the rugged expanse of masonry, of which 
 the bonding is expressed throughout, and which in the 
 granite basement becomes Cyclopean in scale, and in 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 133 
 
 the doorway especially Cyclopean in rude strength. The 
 great pile is one of the most interesting as it is one of 
 the most individual examples of American commercial 
 building. In it the vulgarity of the “commercial pal- 
 ace” is gratefully conspicuous by its absence, and it is 
 as monumental in its massiveness and durability as it is 
 grimly utilitarian in expression. 
 
 It is in this observance of the proprieties of commer- 
 cial architecture, and in this self-denying rejection of an 
 ornateness improper to it, that the best of the commer- 
 cial architecture of Chicago is a welcome surprise to the 
 tourist from the East. When the rebuilding of the 
 business quarter of Boston was in progress, and while that 
 city was for the most part congratulating itself upon the 
 display of the skill of its architects for which the fire had 
 opened a field, Mr. Richardson observed to the author of 
 these remarks that there was more character in the plain 
 and solid warehouses that had been destroyed than in 
 the florid edifices by which they had been replaced. 
 The saying was just, for the burned Boston was as un- 
 mistakably commercial as much of the rebuilt Boston is 
 irrelevantly palatial. In the warehouse just noticed, Mr. 
 Richardson himself resisted this besetting temptation of 
 the architect, and his work certainly loses nothing of the 
 simplicity which, with the uninstructed builders of old 
 Boston, was in large part mere ignorance and unskilful- 
 ness, but emphasizes it by the superior power of distrib- 
 uting his masses that belonged to him as a trained and 
 sensitive designer ; for the resources of an artist are re- 
 quired to give an artistic and poignant expression even 
 of rudeness. The rebuilt commercial quarter of Bos- 
 ton is by no means an extreme example of misplaced 
 ornateness. Within the past three or four years Wall 
 Street has been converted from the hum-drum respect- 
 ability of an old-fashioned business thoroughfare to a 
 
*34 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 street of commercial palaces, the aspect of which must 
 contain an element of grievousness to the judicious, 
 who see that the builders have lavished their repertory 
 of ornament and variety on buildings to which nobody 
 resorts for pleasure, but everybody for business alone, 
 and that they have left themselves nothing further to 
 do in the way of enrichment when they come to do 
 temples and palaces, properly so called. Mr. Ruskin 
 has fallen into deep, and largely into deserved discredit 
 as an architectural critic, by promulgating rhapsodies as 
 dogmas. His intellectual frivolity is even more evident 
 and irritating by reason of the moral earnestness that 
 attends it, recalling that perfervid pulpiteer of whom a 
 like-minded eulogist affirmed that “he wielded his pru- 
 rient imagination like a battle-axe in the service of the 
 Lord of Hosts.” All the same, lovers of architecture 
 owe him gratitude for his eloquent inculcation of some 
 of the truths that he arrived at by feeling, however in- 
 conclusive is the reasoning by which he endeavors to 
 support them, and one of these is the text, so much 
 preached from in the “Seven Lamps,” that “where rest 
 is forbidden, so is ornament.” Wall Street and the 
 business quarter of Boston, and every commercial palace 
 in every city, violate, in differing degrees, this plain dictate 
 of good sense and good taste, even in the very rare in- 
 stances in which the misplacement of the ornateness is 
 the worst thing that can be alleged against it. In the 
 best of the commercial buildings of Chicago there is 
 nothing visible of the conflict of which we hear so much 
 from architects, mostly in the way of complaint, between 
 the claims of “art” and the claims of utility, nor any ev- 
 idence of a desire to get the better of a practical client 
 by smuggling architecture upon him, and deceiving him 
 for his own good and the glory of his architect. It is a 
 very good lesson to see how the strictly architectural sue- 
 
. Beman, Architect. 
 
 > 
 
 n 
 
 > 
 
 D 
 
 M 
 
 X 
 
 PI 
 

 '1 
 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 137 
 
 cess of the commercial buildings is apt to be directly in 
 proportion to the renunciation by the designers of con- 
 ventional “ architecturesqueness,” and to their loyal ac- 
 ceptance at all points of the utilitarian conditions under 
 which they are working. 
 
 The Studebaker Building is one of the show build- 
 in sis of Chicaq-o, but it cannot be said to deserve this 
 particular praise in so high a degree as several less cel- 
 ebrated structures. It partakes — shall we say? — too 
 much of the palatial character of Devonshire Street and 
 Wall Street to be fairly representative of the severity of 
 commercial architecture in Chicago. It is very ad- 
 vantageously placed, fronting the Lake Park, and it is 
 in several respects not unworthy of its situation. The 
 arrangement of the first five stories is striking, and the 
 arcade that embraces the three upper of these is a strik- 
 ing and well-studied feature, with detail very good in 
 itself and very well adjusted in place and in scale. It 
 is the profusion of this detail and the lavish introduc- 
 tion of carved marble and of polished granite shafts 
 that first impress every beholder with its palatial rather 
 than commercial character, but this character is not 
 less given to the front, or to that part of it which has 
 character, by the very general composition that makes 
 the front so striking. An arcade superposed upon two 
 colonnades, which are together of less than its own 
 height, can scarcely fail of impressiveness ; but here it 
 loses some of its impressiveness in losing all its signifi- 
 cance by reason of its subdivision into three equal 
 stories, none of them differing in purpose from any 
 other or from the colonnade below, and the larger 
 grouping that simulates a lofty hall above two minor 
 stories is thus seen to be merely capricious. Of course 
 pretty much the same criticism may be passed upon 
 most American works of commercial architecture, and 
 18 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 133 
 
 upon the best not less than upon the worst, but that it 
 cannot be passed upon the best commercial buildings 
 of Chicago is their peculiar praise. Moreover, the 
 Studebaker building has some marked defects peculiar 
 to its design. The flanking piers of the building, in 
 spite of the effort made to increase their apparent mas- 
 siveness by a solid treatment of the terminal arches at 
 the base, are painfully thin and inadequate, and their 
 tenuity is emphasized by the modelling into nook shafts 
 of their inner angles in the second story. These are 
 serious blemishes upon the design of the first five sto- 
 ries, and these stories exhaust the architectural interest 
 of the building. There is something even ludicrous in 
 the sudden and complete collapse of the architecture 
 above the large arcade, as if the ideas of the designer 
 had all at once given out, or rather as if an untrained 
 builder had been called upon to add three stories to the 
 unfinished work of a scholarly architect. In truth, this 
 superstructure does not show a single felicity either of 
 disposition or detail, but is wholly mean and common- 
 place. It suffices to vulgarize the building below it, and 
 it is itself quite superfluously vulgarized by the unmean- 
 ing and irrelevant conical roofs with which the sky-line 
 is tormented. If the substructure be amenable to the 
 criticism that it is not commercial architecture, the su- 
 perstructure is amenable to the more radical criticism 
 that it is not architecture at all. 
 
 The Owings Building is another conspicuous com- 
 mercial structure that invites the same criticism of not 
 being strictly commercial, but in a very different way. 
 There is here no prodigality of ornament, and no irrel- 
 evant preciousness of material. A superstructure of 
 grayish brick surmounts a basement of gray-stone, and 
 the only decoration is reserved for the main entrance, 
 which it is appropriate to signalize and render conspicu- 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 139 
 
 ouseven in works 
 of the barest 
 utility. This is 
 attained here by 
 the lofty gable, 
 crocheted and 
 covered with 
 carving, that rises 
 above the plain 
 archway which 
 forms the en- 
 trance itself. The 
 lintelled open- 
 ings of the base- 
 ment elsewhere 
 are of a Puritan- 
 ical severity, and 
 so are the arched openings of 
 the brick superstructure. Neither 
 is there the least attempt to suggest 
 the thing that is not in the interior ar- 
 rangement by way of giving variety and 
 interest to the exterior. In the treat- 
 ment of the wall space, the only one of 
 the “unnecessary features,” in which Mr. 
 
 Ruskin declares architecture to consist, is the corniced 
 frieze above the fourth story of the superstructure, with 
 its suggested support of tall and slim pilasters; and 
 this is quite justifiable as giving the building a triple 
 division, and distinguishing the main wall from the 
 gable. For this purpose, however, obviously enough, 
 the dividing feature should be placed between the 
 two parts it is meant to differentiate ; and in the pres- 
 ent instance this line is two stories higher than the 
 point actually selected, and is now marked only by 
 
 THE OWINGS BUILDING. 
 Cobb &. Frost, Architects. 
 
140 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 a light string course. If the emphatic horizontal 
 belt had been raised these two stories, the division it 
 creates would not only have corresponded to the or- 
 ganic division of the building, but another requisite of 
 architectural composition would have been fulfilled, in- 
 asmuch as one of the three members would visibly have 
 predominated over the others ; whereas now the three 
 are too nearly equal. It is quite true that the prolonga- 
 tion of the pilasters through two more stories would 
 have made them spindle quite intolerably, but in any 
 case they are rather superfluous and impertinent, and 
 it would have decorated the fronts to omit them. The 
 accentuation of vertical lines by extraneous features is 
 not precisely what is needed in a twelve-story building 
 of these dimensions. In these points, however, there is 
 no departure from the spirit of commercial architect- 
 ure. That occurs here, not in detail, but in the general 
 scheme that gives the building its picturesqueness of 
 outline. The corbelled turret at the angle makes more 
 eligible the rooms its openings light, but the steep 
 gabled roofs which this turret unites and dominates 
 plainly enough fail to utilize to the utmost the spaces 
 they enclose, and so far violate the conditions of com- 
 mercial architecture. It seems ungracious to find fault 
 with them on that account, they are so successfully 
 studied in mass and in detail, and the group they make 
 with the turret is so spirited and effective; but never- 
 theless they evidently do not belong to an office build- 
 ing, and, to borrow the expression of a Federal judge 
 upon a famous occasion, their very picturesqueness is 
 aliunde. 
 
 We have been speaking, of course, of the better com- 
 mercial edifices, and it is by no means to be inferred 
 that Chicago does not contain “elevator buildings” as 
 disunited and absurd and restless as those of any other 
 
CORNER OF INSURANCE EXCHANGE. 
 
 Burnham & Root, Architects. 
 

 '5 
 
 
 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 143 
 
 American town. About these select few, also, there is 
 nothing especially characteristic. They might be in 
 New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, for any local 
 color that they exhibit. It is otherwise with the com- 
 mercial buildings designed by Messrs. Burnham & 
 Root. With the striking exception of Mr. Richardson’s 
 P'ield Building, the names of these designers connote 
 what there is of characteristically Chicagoan in the ar- 
 chitecture of the business streets, so that, after all, the 
 individuality is not local, but personal. The untimely 
 and deplorable death of John Wellborn Root makes it 
 proper to say that the individuality was mainly his. It 
 consists largely in a clearer perception than one finds 
 elsewhere of the limitations and conditions of com- 
 mercial architecture, or in a more austere and self- 
 denying acting upon that perception. This is the quality 
 that such towering structures as the Insurance Ex- 
 change, the Phoenix Building, and “ The Rookery ” have 
 in common, and that clearly distinguishes them from 
 the mass of commercial palaces in Chicago or else- 
 where. There is no sacrifice to picturesqueness of the 
 utilitarian purpose in their general form, as in the com- 
 position of the Owings Building, and no denial of it in 
 detail, as in the irrelevant arcade of the Studebaker 
 Building. Their flat roofs are not tormented into pro- 
 tuberances in order to animate their sky-lines, and those 
 of them that are built around an interior court are 
 frankly hypaethral. Nor is there in any of them any 
 incongruous preciousness of material. They are of brick, 
 brown or red, upon stone basements, and the ornament 
 is such, and only such, as is needed to express and to 
 emphasize the structural divisions and dispositions. 
 These are negative merits, it is true, but as our com- 
 mercial architecture goes, they are not less meritorious 
 on that account, and one is inclined to wish that the 
 
144 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 architects of all the commercial palaces might attend to 
 the preachments upon the fitness of things that these 
 edifices deliver, for they have very positive merits also. 
 They are all architectural compositions, and not mere 
 walls promiscuously pierced with openings, or, what is 
 much commoner, mere ranges of openings scantily 
 framed in strips of wall. They are sharply and un- 
 mistakably divided into the parts that every building 
 needs to be a work of architecture, the members that 
 mark the division are carefully and successfully ad- 
 justed with reference to their place and their scale, and 
 the treatment of the different parts is so varied as to 
 avoid both monotony and miscellany. The angle piers, 
 upon the visible sufficiency of which the effectiveness, 
 especially of a lofty building, so largely depends, never 
 fail in this sufficiency, and the superior solidity that 
 the basement of any building needs as a building, when 
 it cannot be attained in fact by reason of commercial 
 exigencies, is suggested in a more rugged and more 
 massive treatment not less than in the employment of 
 a visibly stronger material. These dispositions are 
 aided by the devices at the command of the architect. 
 The angle piers are weighted to the eye by the solid 
 corbelled pinnacles at the top, as in the Insurance Ex- 
 change and the Rookery, or stiffened by a slight with- 
 drawal that gives an additional vertical line on each 
 side of the arris, as in the Phoenix, while the same 
 purpose is partly subserved in the Rookery by the 
 projection from the angle of the tall metallic lantern 
 standards that repeat and enforce this line. The lat- 
 eral division of the principal fronts is similar in all 
 three structures. A narrow central compartment is 
 distinguished in treatment, by an actual projection or 
 by the thickening of the pier, from the longer wings, 
 while the coincidence of this central division with the 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 H5 
 
 main entrance relieves the arrangement from the un- 
 pleasant look of an arrangement obviously forced or 
 arbitrary. In the Insurance Exchange the centre is 
 signalized by a balconied projection over the entrance, 
 extending through the architectural basement — the 
 dado, so to speak, which is here the principal division ; 
 by a widening of the pier and a concentration of the 
 central openings in the second division, and above by 
 an interruption of the otherwise unbroken arcade that 
 
 ENTRANCE TO THE PHCENIX BUILDING. 
 Burnham & Root. Architects. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 146 
 
 traverses the attic. In the Rookery it is marked by a 
 slight projection, which above is still further projected 
 into tall corbelled pinnacles, and the wall thus bounded 
 is slightly bowed, and its openings diminished and mul- 
 tiplied. In the Phoenix Building this bowing is carried 
 so much further as to result in a corbelled oriel, extend- 
 ing through four stories, and repeated on a smaller scale 
 at each end of the principal front and in the centre of 
 each shorter front. This feature may perhaps be ex- 
 cepted from the general praise the buildings deserve of 
 a strict adherence to their utilitarian purpose. Not that 
 even in Chicago a business man may not have occasion 
 to look out of the window, nor that, if he does, he may 
 not be pardoned for desiring to extend his view beyond 
 the walls and windows of over the way. An oriel-win- 
 dow is not necessarily an incongruity in a “ business 
 block,” but the treatment of these oriels is a little fan- 
 tastic and a little ornate for their destination, and belongs 
 rather to domestic than to commercial architecture, and 
 it is not in any case fortunate. This is the sole excep- 
 tion, however, to be made on this score. The entrances, 
 to be sure, are enriched with a decoration beyond the 
 mere expression of the structure which has elsewhere 
 been the rule, but they do not appear incongruous. The 
 entrance to a building that houses the population of a 
 considerable village must be wide, and if its height were 
 regulated by that of the human figure it would resem- 
 ble the burrow by which the Esquimau gains access to 
 his snow-hut, and become a manifest absurdity as the 
 portal of a ten-story building. It must be large and 
 conspicuous, and it should be stately, and it were a 
 “very cynical asperity” to deny to the designer the 
 privilege of enhancing by ornament the necessary state- 
 liness of the one feature of his building which must 
 arrest, for a moment at least, the attention of the most 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 H7 
 
 preoccupied visitor. It 
 cannot be said that such 
 a feature as the entrance 
 of the Phoenix Building 
 is intensely characteris- 
 tic of a modern business 
 block, but it can be said 
 that in its place it does 
 not in the least disturb 
 the impression the struct- 
 ure makes of a modern 
 business block. If beau- 
 ty be its own excuse for 
 being, this entrance 
 needs no other, for assur- 
 edly it is one of the most 
 beautiful and artistic 
 works that American ar- 
 chitecture has to show, 
 so admirably propor- 
 tioned it is, and so ad- 
 mirably detailed, so clear 
 and emphatic without 
 exaggeration is the ex- 
 pression of the structure, 
 and so rich and refined 
 the ornament. Upon the 
 whole these buildings, 
 
 by far the most successful and impressive of the busi- 
 ness buildings of Chicago, not merely attest the skill 
 of their architects, but reward their self-denial in mak- 
 ing the design for a commercial building out of its 
 own elements, however unpromising these may seem ; 
 in permitting the building, in a word, to impose its de- 
 sign upon them and in following its indications, rather 
 
 ORIEL, PHCENIX BUILDING. 
 Burnham & Root, Architects, 
 
143 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 than in imposing upon the building a design derived 
 from anything but a consideration of its own require- 
 ments. Hence it is that, without showing anywhere 
 any strain after originality, these structures are more 
 original than structures in which such a strain is evi- 
 dent. “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is 
 sincerity.” The designer did not permit himself to be 
 diverted from the problem in hand by a consideration 
 of the irrelevant beauties of Roman theatres, or Floren- 
 tine palaces, or Flemish town -halls, and accordingly 
 the work is not reminiscent of these nor of any previous 
 architectural types, of which so many contemporary 
 buildings have the air of being adaptations under ex- 
 treme difficulties. It is to the same directness and 
 sincerity in the attempt to solve a novel problem that 
 these buildings owe what is not their least attraction, 
 in the sense they convey of a reserved power. The 
 architect of a commercial palace seems often to be dis- 
 charging his architectural vocabulary and wreaking his 
 entire faculty of expression upon that contradiction in 
 terms. Some of the buildings of which we have been 
 speaking exhibit this prodigality. There is something 
 especially grateful and welcome in turning from one of 
 them to a building like one of those now in question, 
 which suggests by comparison that, after he had com- 
 pleted the design of it, the architect might still have 
 had something left — in his portfolios and in his intel- 
 lect. 
 
 In considering the domestic architecture of Chicago 
 it is necessary to recur to the topographical conditions, 
 for these have had as marked an influence upon it as 
 they have had upon the commercial quarter, although 
 this influence operates in almost the opposite direction. 
 The commercial centre — the quarter of wholesale traf- 
 fic and of “high finance” — is huddled into the space 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 149 
 
 between the lake and the river. But when this limit is 
 once passed there is no natural limit. No longer pent 
 up, the whole boundless continent is Chicago’s, and the 
 instinct of expansion is at liberty to assert itself in every 
 direction but the east, where it is confronted by Lake 
 Michigan. There is thus no east side in Chicago to 
 supplement the north and the west and the south sides, 
 among which the dwellings of the people are divided, 
 but there is no natural obstacle whatsoever to the de- 
 velopment of the city in these three directions, and no 
 natural reason why it should expand in one rather than 
 in another except what is again furnished by the lake. 
 To the minority of people, who live where they will and 
 not where they must, this is a considerable exception, 
 and one would suppose that the fashionable quarter 
 would be that quarter from which the lake is most ac- 
 cessible. This is distinctly enough the north side, which 
 a stranger, without the slightest interest, present or pros- 
 pective, in Chicago real estate, may be pardoned for in- 
 ferring to be the most desirable for residence. For it 
 happens that the dwellers upon the south side are cut 
 off from any practical or picturesque use of the lake by 
 the fact that the shore to the south of the city is occu- 
 pied by railroad tracks, and the nearest houses of any 
 pretensions are turned away from the water, of which 
 only the horses stabled in the rear are in a position to 
 enjoy the view. The inference that the north is the 
 most eligible of the sides one finds to be violently com- 
 bated by the residents of the south and the west, and 
 he finds also that, instead of one admittedly fashiona- 
 ble quarter, as in every other city, Chicago has three 
 claimants for that distinction. Each of these quarters 
 has its centre and its dependencies, and between each 
 two there is a large area either unoccupied, or occupied 
 with dwellings very much humbler than those that line 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 150 
 
 the avenues that are severally the boasts of the compet- 
 ing sides. The three appear to have received nearly 
 equal shares of municipal attention, for there is a park 
 for each — nay, there are three parks for the west side, 
 though these are thus far well beyond the limit of fash- 
 ion if not of population, and nominally two for the south 
 side, though even these bear more the relation to the 
 quarter for which they were provided that the Central 
 Park bore to New York in 1870 than that which it bears 
 in 1891. They are still, that is to say, rather outlying 
 pleasure-grounds accessible to excursionists than parks 
 in actual public use. Lincoln Park, the park of the 
 north side, is the only one of the parks of Chicago that 
 as yet deserves this description, and the north side is 
 much to be congratulated upon possessing such a resort. 
 It has the great advantage of an unobstructed frontage 
 upon the lake, and it is kept with the same skill and 
 propriety with which it was planned. 
 
 It will be evident from all this that in the three resi- 
 dential quarters of Chicago there is plenty of room, and 
 it is this spaciousness that gives a pervading character- 
 istic to its domestic architecture. The most fashionable 
 avenues are not filled with the serried ranks of houses 
 one expects to see in a city of a million people. On 
 the contrary, in Michigan Avenue and Prairie Avenue, 
 on the south side, and in the corresponding streets in 
 the other quarters, there is commonly a considerable 
 strip of sward in front of the house, and often at the 
 sides as well. The houses are often completely or partly 
 detached, and they are frequently of a generous breadth, 
 and always of a moderate height. Three stories is the 
 limit, which is rarely exceeded even in the costliest dwell- 
 ings. Conditions so different prevail in all the Eastern 
 cities, even in Philadelphia, the roominess of which 
 is one of its sources of local pride, that to the inhabit- 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 15 1 
 
 ant of any one of them the domestic building of Chicago 
 indicates a much less populous city than Chicago is, 
 and its character seems rather suburban than urban. 
 In the main, this character of suburbanity is heightened 
 by the architectural treatment of the dwellings. There 
 are exceptions, and some of them are conspicuous and 
 painful exceptions ; but the rule is that the architect at- 
 tempts to make the house even of a rich man look like 
 a home rather than like a palace, and that there is very 
 little of the mere ostentation of riches. Even upon the 
 speculative builder this feeling seems to have imposed 
 itself ; and however crude and violent his work may be 
 in other ways, it does not very often offend in this par- 
 ticular direction. The commercial palace against which 
 we have been inveighing is by no means so offensive as 
 the domestic sham palace, and from this latter offence 
 Chicago is much freer than most older American cities. 
 The grateful result is that the houses in the best quar- 
 ters are apt to look eminently “ livable and though 
 inequalities of fortune are visible enough, there is not so 
 visible as to be conspicuous any attempt of the more 
 fortunate to force them on the notice of the less fortu- 
 nate. In other words, Chicago is, in its outward aspect 
 at least, the most democratic of great American cities, 
 and its aspect increases one’s wonder that anarchism 
 should have sprung up in this rich and level soil — to 
 which, of course, the answer is that it didn’t, being dis- 
 tinctly an exotic. 
 
 Another characteristic of the domestic architecture 
 of Chicago there is — less prevalent than this absence 
 of pretentiousness and mere display, but still prevalent 
 enough to be very noteworthy — and that is the evidence 
 it affords of an admiration for the work of Mr. Richard- 
 son, which, if not inordinate, is at least undiscriminat- 
 ing and misapplied. What region of our land, indeed, 
 
152 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 is not full of his labors, done vicariously, and with a 
 zeal not according; to knowledge? In Chicago his mis- 
 understood example has fructified much more in the 
 quarters of residence than in the business quarters, in- 
 somuch that one can scarcely walk around a square, 
 either in the north or in the south side, without seeing 
 some familiar feature or detail, which has often been 
 
 JANUA RICH ARDSONIENSIS. 
 N'Importe Qui, Architect. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 T 53 
 
 borrowed outright from one of his works, and is repro- 
 duced without reference to its context. Now the great 
 and merited success of Richardson was as personal and 
 incommunicable as any artistic success can be. It was 
 due to his faculty of reducing a complicated problem to 
 its simplest and most forcible expression. More specif- 
 ically, it was due to his faculty for seizing some feature 
 of his building, developing it into predominance, and 
 skilfully subordinating the rest of his composition to it, 
 until this feature became the building. It was his power 
 of disposing masses, his insistence upon largeness and 
 simplicity, his impatience of niggling, his straightfor- 
 ward and virile handling of his tasks, that made his 
 successes brilliant, and even his failures interesting. 
 Very much of all this is a matter of temperament, and 
 Richardson’s best buildings were the express images of 
 that impetuous and exuberant personality that all who 
 knew him remember. He used to tell of a tourist from 
 Holland in whom admiration for his art had induced a 
 desire to make his acquaintance, and who upon being in- 
 troduced to him exclaimed: “ Oh, Mr. Richardson, how 
 you are like your work !” “ Now wasn’t that a Dutch 
 
 remark ?” Richardson concluded the story. Indeed, the 
 tact of the salutation must be admitted to have been 
 somewhat Batavian, but it was not without critical value. 
 One cannot conceive of Richardson’s work as having 
 been done by an anaemic architect, or by a self-distrust- 
 ful architect, or by a professor of architecture, faithful 
 as his own professional preparation had been. There 
 is a distinction well recognized in the art to which archi- 
 
 O 
 
 tecture has more or less plausibly been likened that is 
 no less valid as applied to architecture itself — the dis- 
 tinction between “school music” and “bravura music.” 
 If we adopt this distinction, Richardson must be classed 
 among the bravura performers in architecture, who are 
 20 
 
x 54 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 eligible rather 
 for admiration 
 than for study. 
 Assuredly de- 
 signers will get 
 nothing but good 
 from his work if 
 they learn from 
 it to try for large- 
 ness and simplic- 
 ity, to avoid nig- 
 gling, and to con- 
 sider first of all 
 the disposition 
 of their masses. 
 But these are 
 merits that can- 
 not be trans- 
 ferred from a pho- 
 tograph. They 
 are quite inde- 
 pendent of a 
 fondness for the 
 Provenqal Ro- 
 manesque, and 
 
 ORIEL OF DWELLING. still more of an 
 
 Hu„t, Architect. exaggeration of 
 
 o o 
 
 the depth of voussoirs and of the dwarfishness of pillars. 
 These things are readily enough imitable, as nearly every 
 block of dwellings in Chicago testifies, but they are scarce- 
 ly worth imitating. In Richardson’s best work there is 
 apt to be some questionable detail, since the success or fail- 
 ure of his building is commonly decided before the consid- 
 eration of detail arises, and it is this questionable detail 
 that the imitators are apt to reproduce without asking 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 55 
 
 it any questions. Moreover, it will probably be agreed 
 by most students that Richardson’s city houses are, upon 
 the whole, and in spite of some noteworthy exceptions, 
 the least successful of his works. As it happens, there 
 are two of them in Chicago itself, one on the north side 
 and one on the south, and if their author had done noth- 
 ing else, it is likely that they would be accepted rather 
 as warnings than as examples. The principal front of 
 the former has the simple leading motive that one sel- 
 dom fails to find in the work of its architect, in the cen- 
 tral open loggia of each of its three stories, flanked on 
 each side by an abutment of solid wall, and the appor- 
 tionment of the front between voids and solids is just 
 and felicitous. Three loggie seem an excessive allow- 
 
 i 1 ' - MjjSfejajw 
 
 
 DWELLING IN LAKE SHORE DRIVE. 
 H. II. Richardson, Architect. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 156 
 
 ance for the town-house of a single family ; but if we 
 waive this point as an affair between the architect and 
 his client exclusively, it must be owned that the arrange- 
 ment supplies a motive susceptible of very effective de- 
 velopment. In this case it cannot be said to have been 
 developed effectively; nay, it can hardly be said to have 
 been developed in an architectural sense at all, and the 
 result proves that though a skilful disposition of masses 
 is much, it is not everything. We have just been say- 
 ing that the success or failure of Richardson’s work was 
 in a great degree independent of the merit of the detail,, 
 but this dwelling scarcely exhibits any detail. This is 
 the more a drawback because the loggia is a feature of 
 which lightness and openness is the essential charac- 
 teristic, and which seems, therefore, to demand a cer- 
 tain elegance of treatment, as was recognized alike by 
 the architects of the Gothic and the Renaissance palaces 
 in Italy, from which we derive the feature and the name. 
 It is, indeed, in the contrast between the lightened and 
 enriched fenestration of the centre and the massiveness 
 of the flanking walls that the potential effectiveness of 
 the arrangement resides. Here, however, there is no 
 lightening and no enrichment. Rude vigor character- 
 izes as much the enclosed arcades as the enclosing walls, 
 and becomes as much the predominant expression of the 
 front of a dwelling of moderate dimensions as of the huge 
 facades of the Field warehouse. Such modelling as is 
 introduced tends rather to enforce than to mitigate this 
 expression, for the piers of the lower arcade are squared, 
 and the intercalated shafts of the upper are doubled per- 
 pendicularly to the front, as are the shafts of the colon- 
 nade above, so as to lay an additional stress upon the 
 thickness of a wall that is here manifestly a mere screen. 
 The continuation of the abacus of the arcade through 
 the wall and its reappearance as the transom of the flank- 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 57 
 
 ing windows is an effective device that loses some of its 
 effectiveness from its introduction into both arcades. 
 It scarcely modifies the impression the front makes of 
 lacking detail altogether. The double-dentilled string- 
 course that marks off and corbels out the attic is virtu- 
 ally the only moulding the front shows. Yet the need 
 of mouldings is not less now than it was in the remote 
 antiquity when a forgotten Egyptian artist perceived 
 the necessity of some expedient to subdivide a wall, to 
 mark a level, to sharpen or to soften a transition. For 
 th ree thousand years his successors have agreed with 
 him, and for a modern architect to abjure the use of 
 these devices is to deny himself the rhetoric of his art. 
 The incompleteness that comes of this abjuration in the 
 present instance must be apparent to the least-trained 
 layman, who vaguely feels that “something is the mat- 
 ter ” with the building thus deprived of a source of ex- 
 pression, for which the texture given to the whole front 
 by the exhibition of the bonding of the masonry, skilful 
 and successful as this is in itself, by no means compen- 
 sates. The sensitive architect must yearn to set the 
 stone-cutters at work anew to bring out the expression 
 of those parts that are especially in need of rhetorical ex- 
 position, to accentuate the sills of the arcades, to define 
 and refine their arches, to emphasize the continuous line 
 of the abacus, and especially to mark the summit of the 
 sloping basement, which now is merged into the plane 
 of the main wall, without the suggestion of a plinth. It 
 is conceivable that an architect might, by the skilful em- 
 ployment of color, so treat a front, without the least pro- 
 jection or recess from top to bottom or from end to end, 
 as to make us forget to deplore the absence of mould- 
 ings. Some interesting attempts in that direction have, 
 in fact, been made, and complete success in such an at- 
 tempt would be entitled to the praise of a tour de force. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I5S 
 
 But when in a monochromatic wall the designer omits 
 the members that should express and emphasize and 
 adorn his structural dispositions without offering any 
 substitute for them, his building will appear, as this 
 dwelling appears, a work merely “blocked out” and left 
 unfinished; and if it be tire work of a highly endowed 
 and highly accomplished designer like Richardson, the 
 deficiency must be set down merely as an unlucky ca- 
 price. We have been speaking exclusively of the longer 
 front, since it is manifest that the shorter shares its incom- 
 pleteness, without the partial compensation of a strong 
 and striking composition, which would carry off much 
 unsuccessful detail, though it is not strong enough to 
 carry off the lack of detail, even with the powerful and 
 simple roof that covers the whole — in itself an admira- 
 ble and entirely satisfactory piece of work. 
 
 Capriciousness may with as much justice be charged 
 upon the only other example of Richardson’s domestic 
 architecture in Chicago, which, even more than the 
 house we have been considering, arrests attention and 
 prevents apathy, but which also seems even more from 
 
 DWELLING IN PRAIRIE AVENUE. 
 H. H. Richardson, Architect. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 r 59 
 
 the purpose of domestic architecture. Upon the longer 
 though less conspicuous front it lacks any central and 
 controlling motive; and on the shorter and more con- 
 spicuous, this motive, about which the architect so sel- 
 dom leaves the beholder in any doubt, is obscured by 
 the addition at one end of a series of openings irrele- 
 vant to it, having no counterpart upon the other, and 
 serving to weaken at a critical point the wall, the em- 
 phasis of whose massiveness and lateral expanse may be 
 said to be the whole purport of the design, to which ev- 
 erything else is quite ruthlessly sacrificed. For this the 
 building is kept as low as possible, insomuch that the 
 ridge of its rather steep roof only reaches the level of 
 the third story of the adjoining house. For this the 
 openings are diminished in size upon both sides, inso- 
 much that they become mere orifices for the admission 
 of light, and in number upon the long side, insomuch 
 that the designer seems to regard them as annoying in- 
 terruptions to his essay in the treatment of blank wall. 
 A granite wall over a hundred and fifty feet long, as in 
 the side of this dwelling, almost unbroken, and with its 
 structure clearly exhibited, is sure enough to arrest and 
 strike the beholder; and so is the shorter front, in which 
 the same treatment prevails, with a little more of ungra- 
 cious concession to practical needs in the more numer- 
 ous openings; but the beholder can scarcely accept 
 the result as an eligible residence. The treatment is, 
 even more strictly than in the house on the north side, 
 an exposition of masonry. There is here, to be sure, 
 some decorative detail in the filling of the head of the 
 doorway and in the sill above it, but this detail is so mi- 
 nute, in the case of the egg-and-dart that adorns the sill, 
 so microscopic, that it does not count at all in the gen- 
 eral effect. A moulding that does count in the general 
 effect, and that vindicates itself at the expense of the 
 
i6o 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 structural features not thus developed, is the main 
 cornice, an emphatic and appropriate profile. In this 
 building there seems to be a real attempt to supply the 
 place of mouldings by modifications of the masonry, 
 which in the other forms an unvaried reticulation over 
 the whole surface. In this not only are the horizontal 
 joints accentuated, and the vertical joints slurred so as 
 to assist very greatly in the emphasis of length, but the 
 courses that are structurally of unusual importance, the 
 sills and lintels of the openings, are doubled in width, 
 thus strongly belting the building at their several levels. 
 Here again a device that needs only to be expressed in 
 modelling to answer an artistic purpose fails to make up 
 for the absence of modelling. The merits of the build- 
 ing as a building, however, are much effaced when it 
 is considered as a dwelling, and the structure ceases to 
 be defensible, except, indeed, in a military sense. The 
 whole aspect of the exterior is so gloomy and forbid- 
 ding and unhomelike that but for its neighborhood one 
 would infer its purpose to be not domestic, but penal. 
 Lovelace has assured us that “ stone walls do not a prison 
 make,” but when a building consists as exclusively as 
 possible of bare stone walls, it irresistibly suggests a 
 place of involuntary seclusion, even though minds espe- 
 cially “ innocent and quiet ” might take it for a hermit- 
 age. Indeed, if one were to take it for a dwelling ex- 
 pressive of the character of its inmates, he must suppose 
 it to be the abode of a recluse or of a misanthrope, though 
 when Timon secures a large plot upon a fashionable av- 
 enue, and erects a costly building to show his aversion 
 to the society of his kind, he exposes the sincerity of his 
 misanthropical sentiments to suspicion. Assuming that 
 the owner does not profess such sentiments, but is much 
 like his fellow-citizens, the character of his abode must 
 be referred to a whim on the part of his architect — a 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE jgi 
 
 Titanic, or rather a Gargantuan freak. For there is at 
 least nothing petty or puerile about the design of these 
 houses. They bear an unmistakably strong and indi- 
 vidual stamp, and failures as, upon the whole, they must 
 be called, they really increase the admiration aroused 
 by their author’s successes for the power of design that 
 can make even wilful error so interesting. 
 
 That romantic architecture is not inconsistent with 
 the suggestion of a home, or with the conditions of a 
 modern town-house, is shown, if it needed any showing, by 
 a dwelling that adjoins the first of the Richardson houses, 
 and that nobody who is familiar with Mr. W. K. Van- 
 derbilt’s house or with the Marquand houses in New 
 York would need to be told was the work of Mr. Hunt. 
 It recalls particularly the Vanderbilt house, being in the 
 same monochrome of light gray, and repeating, though 
 with a wide variation, some of the same features, espe- 
 cially the corbelled tourelle. This is here placed to 
 much better advantage at a salient instead of a re- 
 entrant angle; it is more happily proportioned; the cor- 
 belling, not continuous, but broken by the wall of the 
 angle, is very cleverly managed, and the whole feature 
 is as picturesque and spirited as it is unmistakably do- 
 mestic in expression. The house does not exhibit the 
 same profusion of sculptural ornament as the earlier 
 work it recalls, nor is there so much of strictly archi- 
 tectural detail. By this comparison, indeed, one would 
 be inclined to call this treatment severe ; but it is prod- 
 igality itself in comparison with its neighbor. This lat- 
 ter comparison is especially instructive because in the 
 block, as a matter of mere mass and outline, Mr. Rich- 
 ardson’s composition, considerably simpler, is also pretty 
 distinctly more forcible than that of Mr. Hunt, by rea- 
 son of its central and dominating feature, and especially 
 by reason of the completeness with which it is united 
 
 21 
 
162 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 by the simple and unbroken roof ; whereas the criti- 
 cism already passed upon the Vanderbilt house, that it 
 grows weak above tire cornice line, is applicable, though 
 in a less degree, to its author’s later work. The vari- 
 ous roofs required by the substructure, and carried to 
 the same height, have been imperfectly brought into 
 subjection, and their grouping does not make a single 
 or a total impression. Taking the fronts by themselves, 
 considering them with reference to the distribution of 
 voids and solids, we must omit the minor front of Mr. 
 Richardson’s work as scarcely showing any composi- 
 tion ; but the principal front is much more striking and 
 memorable, doubtless, than either elevation of Mr. Hunt’s 
 design, carefully and successfully as both of them have 
 been studied. Yet there is no question at all that the 
 latter is by far the more admirable and effective exam- 
 ple of domestic architecture, because the possibilities of 
 expression that inhere in the masses are in the one case 
 brought out, and left latent in the other. 
 
 Of course, Mr. Hunt’s work is no more characteris- 
 tically Chicagoan than Mr. Richardson’s, and, of course, 
 the dwellings we have been considering are too large 
 and costly to be fairly representative of the domestic 
 architecture of any city. The rule, to which there are 
 as few exceptions in Chicago as elsewhere, is that archi- 
 tecture is regarded as a superfluity that only the rich 
 can afford ; whereas a genuine and general interest in it 
 would require the man who was able to own a house at all 
 to insist upon what the tailors call a “custom-made” 
 dwelling, and would lead him equally to reject a ready- 
 made residence and a misfit. In that case we should 
 see in single houses of moderate size and moderate cost 
 the same evidence of affectionate study as in houses of 
 greater pretensions, even though the design might be 
 evinced only in the careful and thoughtful proportion- 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 ing and adjustment of the parts. This is still a sight as 
 rare as it is welcome in any American city, though it is 
 less rare in cities of the second and third class than in 
 cities of the first. Chicago has its share, but no more 
 than its share, of instances in which the single street 
 front of a modest dwelling has been thought worthy of 
 all the pains that could be given to it. Of one such 
 instance in Chicago an illustration is given, and it is 
 somewhat saddening to one who would like to find in it 
 
 FRONT IN DEARBORN AVENUE. 
 John Addison, Architect. 
 
164 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 an evidence of intelligent lay interest in architecture to 
 be informed that it is the residence of its architect. 
 
 Upon the whole, the domestic architecture of the 
 town has few local characteristics, besides those already 
 mentioned, which are due to local conditions rather than 
 to local preferences. The range of building material is 
 wide, and includes a red sandstone from Lake Superior 
 that has not yet made its way into the Eastern cities, of 
 a more positive tint than any in general use there. On 
 the other hand, the whole continent has been laid under 
 tribute for Chicago. The green “ Chester serpentine ” 
 which one encounters so often in Philadelphia — and 
 generally with regret, though in combination it may be- 
 come very attractive — cpiite unknown in New York as 
 it is, is not uncommon in the residential quarters of Chi- 
 cago. Another material much commoner here than 
 elsewhere is the unhewn bowlder that Mr. Richardson 
 employed in the fantastic lodge at North Easton, which 
 was one of his happiest performances. In a long and 
 low structure like that the defects of the material are 
 much less manifest than when it is attempted to employ 
 it in a design of several stories. One of the most inter- 
 esting of these attempts is illustrated herewith. The 
 architect has wisely simplified his design to the utmost 
 to conform to the intractability of his material, and with 
 equal wisdom has marked with strong belts the division 
 of his stories. But in spite of its ruggedness the wall 
 looks weak, since it is plain that there is no bonding, 
 and that it is not properly a piece of masonry, but a layer 
 of highly magnified concrete, which owes its stability 
 only to the cohesion of the cement, and to give the as- 
 surance of being a trustworthy wall needs to be framed 
 in a conspicuous quoin ing of unquestionable masonry. 
 
 One other trait is common enough among such of the 
 dwellings of Chicago as have architectural pretensions to 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 165 
 
 A HOUSE OF BOWLDERS. 
 Burnham & Root, Architects. 
 
 be remarked, and that is the prevalence of Byzantine 
 carving. This is not really a Chicagoan characteristic. 
 If it is especially noticeable here, it is because Chicago 
 is so new, and it is in the newer quarters of older towns 
 that it is to be seen. It is quite as general on the “ West 
 side” of New York. Its prevalence is again in great part 
 due to the influence of Richardson, and one is inclined 
 to welcome it as at least tending to provide a common 
 and understood way of working for architectural carvers, 
 and the badge of something like a common style for build- 
 ings that have little else in common. The facility with 
 which its spiky leafage can be used for surface decora- 
 tion tempts designers to provide surfaces for its decora- 
 tion, in such structural features as capitals and corbels, 
 at the cost of the modelling which is so much more ex- 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 66 
 
 pressive and so much more troublesome, when a mere 
 cushion will do better as a basis for Byzantine orna- 
 ment. 
 
 For the rest, the clever and ingenious features which 
 one often comes upon in the residential streets of Chi- 
 cago, and the thoroughly studied fronts that one comes 
 
 A BYZANTINE CORBEL. 
 Henry Ives Cobb, Architect. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 167 
 
 upon so much more seldom, would excite neither more 
 nor less surprise if they were encountered in the streets 
 of any older American town. But from what has been 
 said it will be seen that in every department of building, 
 except only the ecclesiastical, Chicago has already ex- 
 amples to show that should be of great value to its future 
 growth in stimulating its architects to produce and in 
 teaching its public to appreciate. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 II.— ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS 
 
 TT is just thirty years since Anthony Trollope ascend- 
 ed the Mississippi to the head of navigation and the 
 Falls of St. Anthony, and recorded his impressions of 
 the works of nature and of man along the shores of that 
 river. As might perhaps have been expected, he ad- 
 mired with enthusiasm the works of nature, and as might 
 certainly have been expected, he found little to admire 
 in the handiwork of man. “ I protest that of all the 
 river scenery that I know, that of the upper Mississippi 
 is by far the finest and the most continued. One thinks, 
 of course, of the Rhine ; but, according to my idea of 
 beauty, the Rhine is nothing to the upper Mississippi. 
 . . . The idea constantly occurs that some point on every 
 hill-side would form the- most charming site ever yet 
 chosen for a noble residence.” Thus Trollope of the 
 upper Mississippi, and thus again of the “ twin cities ” 
 that are the subject of our present inquisition : “ St. 
 Paul contains about 14,000 inhabitants, and, like all 
 other American towns, is spread over a surface of ground 
 adapted to the accommodation of a very extended pop- 
 ulation. As it is belted on one side by the river, and 
 on the other by the bluffs which accompany the course 
 of the river, the site is pretty, and almost romantic.” The 
 other “ twin ” is so much the later born that to few Min- 
 neapolitans does it ever occur that it had even seen the 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 169 
 
 light i n 1861. “Going on from Minnehaha, we came to 
 Minneapolis, at which place there is a fine suspension- 
 bridge across the river, just above the Falls of St. An- 
 thony, and leading to the town of that name. Till I got 
 there I could hardly believe that in these days there 
 should be a living village called Minneapolis by living 
 men. I presume I should describe it as a town, for it 
 has a municipality and a post-office, and of course a large 
 hotel. The interest of the place, however, is in the saw- 
 mills.” 
 
 I do not mean to celebrate again the growth of St. 
 Paul and Minneapolis from these small beginnings, which 
 is the marvel of even the marvellous West. But for our 
 immediate purpose it is necessary to bear in mind not 
 only the rapidity of the growth of the two cities, but the 
 intensity of the rivalry between them — a rivalry which 
 the stranger hardly comprehends, however much he may 
 have heard of it, until he has seen the workings of it on 
 the spot. Indeed, it is scarcely accurate to describe the 
 genesis of Minneapolis, in particular, as a growth at all. 
 St. Paul has been developed from the frontier trading- 
 post of the earlier days by an evolution, the successive 
 stages of which have left their several records ; but Min- 
 neapolis has risen like an exhalation, or, to adopt even 
 a mustier comparison, has sprung from the heads of its 
 projectors full-panoplied in brick and mortar. “ The 
 twin cities on either bank,” remarks the historiogra- 
 pher of the Minneapolis Exposition of 1886, “ amid many 
 ups and downs — the ups always predominating — pegged 
 along steadily towards greatness.” The phrase is rather 
 picturesque than graphic, for nothing could be less de- 
 scriptive of the mode of locomotion of Minneapolis than 
 a steady pegging along. It has been an affair of leaps 
 and bounds. There are traces of the village that Trol- 
 lope saw, and there are the towering structures of a mod- 
 22 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 70 
 
 ern city, and there is nothing between. In this electric 
 air, where there is so little “precipitation ” in the atmos- 
 phere and so much in everything else; where “the flux 
 of mortal things ” is not a generalization of the mind, 
 but a palpable fact of daily experience ; where antiquity 
 means the day before yesterday, and posterity the day 
 after to-morrow, the present is the most contemptible of 
 tenses, and men inevitably come to think and live and 
 build in the future-perfect. A ten-story building in a 
 ten-acre lot requires explanation, and this seems to be 
 the explanation— this and the adjacency of the hated 
 rival. In St. Paul the elevator came as a needed factor 
 in commercial architecture, since the strip of shore to 
 which the town was confined in Trollope’s time still lim- 
 its and cramps the business-quarter, and leaves only the 
 vertical dimension available for expansion. Towering 
 buildings are the normal outcome of such a situation. 
 Minneapolis, on the other hand, occupies a table-land 
 above the river, which at present is practically unlimited. 
 Although, of course, every growing or grown town must 
 have a most frequented part — a centre where land is 
 costlier than elsewhere, and buildings rise higher — the 
 altitude of the newest and tallest structures of Minne- 
 apolis could scarcely be explained without reference to 
 the nearness of St. Paul, and the intensity of the local 
 pride born of that nearness. If the physical necessities 
 of the case prescribed ten-story buildings in .St. Paul, 
 the moral necessity of not being outdone would pre- 
 scribe twelve-story buildings for Minneapolis. In point 
 of fact, it is to a Minneapolitan architect that we owe 
 the first project of an office building which bears the 
 same relation to the ordinary elevator building of our 
 cities that this bears to the five or six story edifice that 
 the topographical and commercial conditions would indi- 
 cate as suited to the actual needs of Minneapolis. The 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 71 
 
 project remains on paper, though it is some years since 
 it startled the architects of the country, and an interest- 
 ing project it is in an architectural sense ; but it is none 
 the less representative of the local genius than if it had 
 been executed. 
 
 Evidently there could be no better places than the 
 twin cities to study the development of Western archi- 
 tecture, or rather to ascertain whether there is any such 
 thing. There seems to be among the Western lay pop- 
 ulations a faith that there is, which is none the less firm 
 for being a trifle vague, and this faith is shared by some 
 of the practitioners of architecture in the West. In the 
 inscrutable workings of our official architecture, one of 
 these gentlemen came to be appointed a few years ago 
 the supervising architect of the Treasury. It is a meas- 
 ure of the extent and intelligence of the national inter- 
 est in the art that this functionary, with little more than 
 the official status of a clerk, and with no guarantee that 
 he has any professional status whatever, has little less 
 than the aediliary powers of an Augustus. To have 
 found a city of brick and to have left a city of marble is 
 a boast that more than one supervising architect could 
 have paraphrased in declaring that he found the gov- 
 ernment architecture Renaissance and he left it Gothic, 
 or that he found it Gothic and he left it nondescript, 
 while each successive incumbent could have declared 
 that he found it and left it without architectural tradi- 
 tions and without architectural restraints. The ambi- 
 tion of the architect immediately in question was not 
 sectarian so much as sectional. To him it seemed that 
 a bureau had too many traditions which to other students 
 seemed to have none at all. Not personally addicted to 
 swearing to the words of any master, he considered that 
 the influence of authority in his office was much too 
 strong. He was himself from the remote West, and in 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 72 
 
 an interview setting forth his hopes and purposes, shortly 
 after lie came into the office from which he was shortly 
 to go out, he explained that “ Eastern ” conventionali- 
 ties had had altogether too much sway in the previous 
 conduct of the office, and that he meant to embody 
 “Western ideas” in the public buildings. In the brief 
 interval before his retirement he designed many monu- 
 ments from which one should be able to derive some 
 notion of Western architectural ideas, and one of these 
 is the government building in Minneapolis. This edi- 
 fice is mainly remarkable for the multitude of ill-assort- 
 ed and unadjusted features which it exhibits, especially 
 for the “ grand choice ” of pediments which its fronts 
 present — pediments triangular and curved, pediments 
 closed and broken — and for the variety and multiplic- 
 ity of the cupolas and lanterns and crestings by which 
 the sky-line is animated into violent agitation. The 
 features themselves cannot be “Western,” since they 
 are by no means novel, the most recent of them dating 
 back to Sir Christopher Wren, and it must be the com- 
 bination or the remarkable profusion of “ things ” that 
 constitutes the novelty and the Westernness which it 
 was the mission of the author to introduce into our 
 public architecture. Unfortunately there is nothing 
 that can fairly be called combination, for the composi- 
 tion is but an asrsrlomeration, “a fortuitous concourse 
 of atoms.” We have all seen in the Eastern cities too 
 many buildings of which crudity and recklessness were 
 the characteristics, and which were unstudied accumu- 
 lations of familiar forms, to assume that crudity and 
 recklessness in architecture are especially “ Western 
 ideas.” If they be so, then assuredly “Western ” is an 
 opprobrious epithet, not lightly and unadvisedly to be 
 applied to any structure. 
 
 There is perhaps no other building in either city 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 73 
 
 equally costly and conspicuous which merits it in the 
 same degree with the government building at Minneap- 
 olis, at least in an architectural sense. An enterprising- 
 owner in the same city has procured the materials for a 
 new building by permitting each contributor to inscribe 
 his contribution with the name of the material furnished 
 by him, and a statement of its good qualities, and these 
 incised advertisements undoubtedly give a local color 
 to the structure ; but this Westernness is scarcely archi- 
 tectural. The City Hall and Court-house in St. Paul 
 is a large and conspicuous building, the more conspicu- 
 ous for being isolated in the midst of an open square; 
 and it is unfortunate in design, or the absence of it, the 
 arrangement of its voids and solids being quite unstud- 
 ied and casual, and the aggregation quite failing to con- 
 stitute a whole. There are by no means so many feat- 
 ures in it as in the government building at Minneapo- 
 lis, nor are they classic ; but the architect has introduced 
 more “ things ” than he was able to handle, and they 
 are equally irrelevant to the pile and to each other, es- 
 pecially the tower that was intended to be the culmi- 
 nating feature of the composition, but which fails to fulfil 
 its purpose from any point of view, crowning as it does 
 a recessed anqle of the front. This also is a cono-eries 
 of unrelated and unadjusted parts, and, in the light of 
 the illustrations of his meaning furnished by our official 
 spokesman, this also may be admitted to be character- 
 istically W n. The same admission may reluctantly 
 
 be made concerning the Chamber of Commerce in St. 
 Paul, which consists architecturally of two very busy 
 and bustling fronts, compiled of “features” that do not 
 make up a physiognomy, and which stand upon a mas- 
 sive sash frame of plate-glass. As a matter of fact, these 
 things have their counterparts in the East, only there 
 they are not referred to the geography, but to the illit- 
 
174 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 eracy or insensibility of the designer, and this classifi- 
 cation seems simpler, and, upon the whole, more satis- 
 factory. 
 
 Minneapolis has a compensation for its newness in the 
 fact that when its public buildings came to be projected, 
 the fashion of such edifices as these had passed away. 
 If the work of Mr. Richardson has been much misun- 
 derstood, as I tried to point out in speaking of the do- 
 mestic architecture of Chicago, if its accidents have been 
 mistaken by admiring disciples for its essence, even if 
 its essential and admirable qualities do not always suf- 
 fice to make it available as a model, it is necessary only 
 to consider such buildings as have just been mentioned 
 to perceive how beneficial, upon the whole, his influence 
 has been, for it has at least sufficed to make such build- 
 ings impossible — impossible, at least, to be done by ar- 
 chitects who have any pretensions to be “ in the move- 
 ment ” — and it is hard to conceive that they can be suc- 
 ceeded by anything so bad. The City Hall of Minne- 
 apolis, for instance, was projected but a few years later 
 than its government building, but in the interval Rich- 
 ardson’s influence had been at work. That influence is 
 betrayed both in the accepted design now in course of 
 execution and in the other competitive designs, and it 
 has resulted in a specific resemblance to the public 
 building at Pittsburgh, which its author professed his 
 hope to make “ a dignified pile of rocks.” The varia- 
 tions which the authors of the Minneapolis City Hall 
 have introduced in the scheme they have reproduced in 
 its general massing, and in its most conspicuous feat- 
 ures are not all improvements. By the introduction of 
 grouped openings into its solid shaft the tower of Pitts- 
 burgh is shorn of much of its power; nor can the substi- 
 tution be commended in its upper stage of a modifica- 
 tion of the motive employed by Richardson in Trinity, 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 75 
 
 Boston, and derived by him from Salamanca, for the sim- 
 pler treatment used in the prototype of this building as 
 the culminating feature of a stark and lofty tower. The 
 far greater elaboration of the corner pavilions of the 
 principal fronts, also, though in part justified by the 
 greater tractability of the material here employed, tends 
 rather to confusion than to enrichment. On the other 
 hand, the more subdued treatment of the curtain wall 
 between the tower and the pavilions gives greater value 
 and detachment to both, and is thus an advance upon 
 the prototype ; and the central gable of the subordinate 
 front is distinctly more successful than the correspond- 
 ing feature of Pittsburgh, the archway, withdrawn be- 
 tween two protecting towers, of which the suggestion 
 comes from mediaeval military architecture. Observe, 
 however, that the derivation of the general scheme of 
 the building and of its chief features from an earlier 
 work is by no means an impeachment of the architect’s 
 originality, provided the precedent he chooses be really 
 applicable to his problem, and provided he analyze it 
 instead of reproducing it without analysis. In what 
 else does progress consist than in availing one’s self of 
 the labor of one’s predecessors ? If the Grecian build- 
 ers had felt the pressure of the modern demand for nov- 
 elty, and had endeavored to comply with it by making 
 dispositions radically^ new, instead of refining upon the 
 details of an accepted type, or if the mediaeval builders 
 had done the same thing, it is manifest that the typical 
 temple or the typical cathedral would never have come 
 to be built, that we should have had no Parthenon and 
 no Cologne. The requirements of the Minneapolis build- 
 ing, a court-house and town-hall, are nearly enough alike 
 to those of the county building at Pittsburgh to make it 
 credible that the general scheme of the earlier work may, 
 by force of merit, have imposed itself upon the architect 
 
PUBLIC LIBRARY, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 
 Long & Kees, Architects. 
 
 of the later. The general difference of treatment is the 
 greater richness and elaboration of the newer structure, 
 and this is a legitimate consequence of the substitution 
 of freestone for granite ; while the differences of detail 
 and the introduction at Minneapolis of features that have 
 no counterpart at Pittsburgh suffice to vindicate the de- 
 signer from the reproach of having followed his model 
 thoughtlessly or with servility. So far as can be judged 
 from the drawings, the municipal building of Minne- 
 apolis, when it comes to be finished, will be a monu- 
 ment of which the Minneapolitans will have a right to 
 be proud, for better reasons than mere magnitude and 
 costliness. 
 
 Another work, this time completely executed, by the 
 designers of the City Hall, the Public Library of Minne- 
 apolis, betrays also the influence of Richardson. The 
 motive of the principal front, an arcade bounded by 
 round towers and surmounted by a story of blank wall, 
 was pretty evidently suggested by his unexecuted de- 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 77 
 
 sign for a similar building at Buffalo. The precedent 
 here is perhaps not so directly in point, seeing that the 
 effectiveness of an arcade increases with its length, and 
 in a much greater ratio, and that the arcade here is not 
 only much shorter than in the projected building, but is 
 still further shortened to the eye by being heightened 
 and carried through two stories. The towers, too, would 
 have been more effective had it been practicable to give 
 greater solidity to their lower stages. Nevertheless, the 
 building is distinctly successful, and its most successful 
 
 ENTRANCE TO PUBLIC LIBRARY, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 feature, the gabled centre that includes the entrance, is 
 one which illustrates the inventiveness of the designers, 
 as well as their power of judicious selection and modifi- 
 cation. 
 
 As was remarked in the paper on Chicago, the archi- 
 tectural activity of the West is not largely ecclesiastical, 
 and the churches are for the most part as near to tradi- 
 tional models as their designers have the knowledge to 
 bring them. In the Eastern States a great many inter- 
 esting essays have been made towards solving the mod- 
 ern problem of a church in which the pulpit and not the 
 altar is the central point of design, while yet retaining 
 an ecclesiastical expression. There is an edifice in St. 
 Paul called “ the People’s Church,” in which the designer 
 seems purposely to have avoided an ecclesiastical expres- 
 sion, and to have un- 
 dertaken to typify in 
 brick and stone the 
 wild, free theology of 
 the West. He has 
 so far succeeded that 
 nobody could possi- 
 bly take the result of 
 his labors for a ch urch 
 in the usual accepta- 
 tion of the term, but 
 this negative attain- 
 ment does not yet 
 constitute a positive 
 architectural suc- 
 cess. It may be that 
 Western ideas in 
 theology are thus 
 far somewhat too 
 , w c » C sketchy to form a 
 
 J. W. Stevens, Architect. J 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 1 79 
 
 basis for the establishment of an architectural type, 
 since mere negation is insusceptible of architectu- 
 ral expression. The People’s Church does not lack, 
 however, many of the qualities that should belong to 
 every building as a building, apart from its destination. 
 In spite of such unhappy freaks as that by which the 
 stone basement merges into the brick superstructure 
 with no architectural mark of the transition, and cuts 
 the openings quite at random, or as that by which the 
 brick wall, for a considerable but indefinite extent, is 
 quite promiscuously aspersed with irregular bits of stone, 
 it shows a considerable skill in the placing and detailing 
 of features, and the disposition of the openings gives the 
 principal front a grateful sense of stability and repose. 
 The ample entrances designate it as a place of popular 
 assembly, and possibly its religious purpose may be ta- 
 ken to be confessed, though somewhat shamefacedly, in 
 the wheel-window at the centre of one front, and the tall 
 traceried opening at the centre of the other, which are 
 the only relics of ecclesiastical architecture that are suf- 
 fered to appear. It is evident that it is a “ People’s ” 
 something, and possibly this is as near to a specification 
 of its purpose as the neo-theologians have attained. In 
 this case, as it is notoriously difficult for a man to give 
 expression to an idea of which he is not possessed, the 
 architectural ambiguity is assuredly not to be imputed 
 to the architect. 
 
 A Unitarian church in Minneapolis is also an un- 
 conventional specimen of church architecture, though 
 it could not be taken for anything but a church, and 
 it is undeniably a vigorous performance, consisting of 
 massive, well-divided, and “ well-punched” walls in a 
 monochrome of dark-red sandstone. The novelty and 
 the unconventionality, however, seem, both in compo- 
 sition and in detail, to have been sought rather than 
 
 O 
 
i8o 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 UNITARIAN CHURCH, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 
 L. S. Buffington, Architect. 
 
 to have proceeded from the conditions of the problem, 
 and the effect is so far marred by the loss of the natu- 
 ralness and straightforwardness that justify a departure 
 from convention. For example, even in a galleried 
 church the division into two stories can scarcely be 
 considered the primary fact of the building, though 
 this division is the primary fact of this design, and is 
 emphasized by the torus that is the most conspicuous 
 moulding. Nevertheless, there is much felicity in the 
 general disposition and in the design of the features, 
 especially in the open fenestration of the transept gable, 
 and its strong contrast with the solider flanks of wall 
 pierced only by the smaller openings that indicate the 
 gallery staircases, the slope of which is also expressed 
 in the masonry of the wall itself ; and the low polygonal 
 tower effectually unites and dominates the two fronts. 
 The innovation in the treatment of detail, by which 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE x g r 
 
 what is commonly the “wrought work” of a building 
 in facile sandstone is left rough-faced, is a caprice that 
 seems also to proceed from the pursuit of novelty, and 
 that gains nothing in vigor for what it loses in refine- 
 ment. A rough-faced moulding seems to be a contra- 
 diction in terms; yet here not only are the mouldings 
 rough-faced, but also the columns and colonnettes, and 
 the corbelled pinnacles that detach the tower and the 
 gables, and it is only in the copings of these that the 
 asperities of the sandstone are mitigated. Slovenliness 
 is not vigor, and in the coarsening of this detail the de- 
 signer, in spite of having produced a vigorous and in- 
 teresting work, exposes himself to the critical amenity 
 bestowed by Dryden upon Elkanah Settle, that “ his 
 style is boisterous and rough-hewn.” 
 
 A more conventional and a quite unmistakable ex- 
 ample of church building is a Presbyterian church in 
 St. Paul, which follows the established ecclesiastical 
 type, albeit with a recognition of the modern demand 
 that a church shall be a good place in which to preach 
 and to be preached to — a demand which here, as often 
 elsewhere, is met by shortening the arms of the cruci- 
 form plan until the church is virtually limited to the 
 crossing. It is no disparagement to the present design 
 to say that in its general composition it seems to have 
 been suggested by — and at any rate it suggests — an 
 early and interesting work of Mr. Richardson’s, a church 
 in Springfield, Massachusetts, upon which it improves at 
 some points, notably in the emphatic exposition of the 
 masonic structure. At other points the variation is 
 not so successful. The tower at Springfield, with its 
 attached turret, the entrance arch at its base, and the 
 broach spire with pinnacles detached over the squinches, 
 is a very vigorous piece of design. In the correspond- 
 ing feature at St. Paul, the relation between the two 
 
182 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ST. PAUL. 
 
 Gilbert & Taylor, Architects. 
 
 superposed open stages is not rhythmic or felicitous, 
 though each in itself is well modelled, and the transi- 
 tion from the tower to the shingled spire, marked by 
 shingled pinnacles without a parapet, is distinctly un- 
 fortunate. For all that, tire church is a studied and 
 scholarly performance. 
 
 In the material and materializing development of the 
 West, it is not surprising that the chief object of local 
 pride should not be the local church, but the local hotel. 
 “ Of course a large hotel” is now, as in Trollope’s time, 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 a necessary ingredient of a local “ boom.” In respect 
 of architecture the large hotel of Minneapolis has a 
 decided advantage over the large hotel of St. Paul. 
 For the caravansary of the older town is an example 
 of the kind of secular Victorian Gothic that was stimu- 
 lated by the erection of Sir Gilbert Scott’s Midland 
 Hotel in London, than which a less eligible model could 
 scarcely be put before an untrained designer, since 
 there is little in it to redeem an uneasy and uninterest- 
 ing design except carefully studied and carefully ad- 
 justed detail. This careful study and adjustment being 
 omitted, as they are in the Hotel Ryan, and a multi- 
 plicity of features retained and still further confused 
 
 WEST HOTEL, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 L. S. Buffington, Architect. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 184 
 
 by a random introduction of color, the result is a be- 
 wildering and saltatory edifice which has nothing of 
 interest except the banded piers of the basement. The 
 West Hotel in Minneapolis is a much more considera- 
 ble structure. It has a general composition, both ver- 
 tically and laterally, consisting in the former case of 
 three divisions, of which the central is rather the most 
 important, and in the latter of an emphasis of the centre 
 and the ends in each front and of a subordination of 
 the intervening wall. Here, also, there is a multiplicity 
 of features, but they are not so numerous or distributed 
 so much at random as to prevent us from seeing the 
 countenance, for undeniably the building has a physi- 
 ognomy, and that is in itself an attainment. In artistic 
 quality the features are very various, and the one trait 
 they seem to have in common is a disregard for aca- 
 demic correctness or for purity of style. This is con- 
 spicuous in the main entrance, which is perhaps the 
 most effective and successful of them, being a massive 
 and powerful porte-cochere, in which, however, an un- 
 mistakably Gothic dwarf column adjoins a panelled 
 pilaster, which as unmistakably owes its origin to the 
 Renaissance, and a like freedom of eclecticism may be 
 observed throughout the building. In its degree this 
 freedom may be Western, though a European archi- 
 tect would be apt to dismiss it indiscriminately as 
 American ; whereas an American architect would be 
 more apt to ask himself, with respect to any particular 
 manifestation of it, whether it was really, and not only 
 conventionally, a solecism. In this place the conjunc- 
 tion does not strike one as incongruous, but there are 
 other features in which the incongruity is real, such as 
 the repeated projections of long and ugly corbels to 
 support things that are pretty evidently there mainly 
 for the purpose of being supported. The impregnable 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 IS 5 
 
 criticism of the Vicar of Wakefield, that the picture 
 would have been better if the artist had taken more 
 pains, is especially applicable to this edifice. It might 
 have been both chastened and clarified by severer study; 
 but it is a compliment to it, as American hotel archi- 
 tecture goes, to wish that it had been more carefully 
 matured by its designer before being irretrievably exe- 
 cuted. The interior presents several interesting points 
 of design as well as of arrangement, but perhaps it 
 owes its chief attractiveness to the rich and quiet deco- 
 ration of those of its rooms that have been intrusted 
 to Mr. Bradstreet, who for many years has been acting 
 as an evangelist of good taste to the two cities, and 
 who for at least the earlier of those years must have 
 felt that he was an evangelist in partibus . The inte- 
 rior design and decoration of the opera-house at Min- 
 neapolis is a yet more important illustration of his skill ; 
 but interiors are beyond our present scope. 
 
 For public works other than public buildings, the 
 two cities are not as yet very notable. The site of 
 St. Paul makes a bridge across the river at this point 
 a very conspicuous object, and perhaps nowhere in the 
 world would a noble and monumental bridge be more 
 effective. The existing bridges, however, are works of 
 the barest utility, apparently designed by railroad en- 
 gineers with no thought of anything beyond efficiency 
 and economy, and they are annoying interruptions to 
 the panorama unrolled to the spectator from the hill- 
 side in the shining reach of the great river. Minneapo- 
 lis has been more fortunate in this respect, although 
 the river by no means plays so important a part in its 
 landscape. The suspension-bridge of Trollope’s time 
 has, of course, long since disappeared, having been 
 replaced by another, built in 1876 from the designs of 
 Mr. Griffith, which was a highly picturesque object, 
 24 
 
1 86 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 and was perhaps the most satisfactory solution yet at- 
 tained, though by no means a completely satisfactory 
 solution, of the artistic problem involved in the design 
 of a suspension - bridge ; a problem which to most de- 
 signers of such bridges does not appear to be involved 
 in it at all.* It is very unfortunate that although the 
 Minneapolitans appreciated this structure as one of 
 their chief municipal ornaments, they should, never- 
 theless, have sacrificed it quite ruthlessly to the need 
 of greater accommodation ; whereas there could scarcely 
 have been any insuperable difficulty in moving the site 
 of the new bridge that the new exigencies demanded 
 so that the old might be preserved. In another re- 
 spect, Minneapolis has derived a great advantage from 
 the capacity and the necessity of taking long views 
 that are imposed upon her people by the conditions 
 of their lives. This is the reservation, at the instiga- 
 tion of a few provident and public-spirited citizens, of 
 the three lakes that lie in the segment of a circle a few 
 miles inland from the existing city, and of the strip of 
 land connecting them. Even now, with little improve- 
 ment beyond road-making, the circuit of the future 
 parks is a delightful drive; and when Minneapolis shall 
 have expanded until they constitute a bounding boule- 
 vard, the value of them as a municipal possession will 
 be quite incalculable. 
 
 The aspect of the commercial quarters of the two 
 cities has more points of difference than of resem- 
 blance. The differences proceed mainly from the fact 
 already noted, that the commercial quarter of St. Paul 
 is cramped as well as limited by the topography, and 
 that it is all coming to be occupied by a serried mass 
 of lofty buildings, whereas the lofty buildings of Min- 
 neapolis are still detached objects erected in anticipa- 
 
 * See illustration, p. 75. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 LUMBER EXCHANGE, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 Long & Kees, Architects. 
 
 tion of the pressure for room that has not yet begun 
 to be felt. It is an odd illustration of the local rivalry 
 that although the cities are so near together, the archi- 
 tects are confined to their respective fields, and it is 
 very unusual, if not unexampled, that an architect of 
 either is employed in the other. Such an employment 
 would very likely be resented as incivism. Eastern 
 architects are admitted on occasion as out of the com- 
 petition, but in the main each city is built according 
 to the plans of the local designers. The individual 
 characteristics of the busiest and most successful archi- 
 tects are thus impressed upon the general appearance 
 of the town, and go to widen the difference due to 
 
jSS AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 natural causes. The best examples of commercial archi- 
 tecture in Minneapolis, such as the Bank of Commerce 
 and the Lumber Exchange, before its partial destruc- 
 tion by fire, have the same straightforward and severely 
 business-like character as the buildings designed by 
 Mr. Root in Chicago, and, indeed, they seem to owe 
 not a little to suggestions derived from him. The 
 treatment of the Lumber Exchange, in particular, indi- 
 cates an admiring study of his work. Here the centre 
 of the front is signalized by projecting shallow oriels 
 carried through the five central stories of the building 
 
 ENTRANCE TO BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 Harry W. Jones, Architect. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 89 
 
 on each side of the ample opening in each story di- 
 rectly over the entrance, and by flanking this central 
 bay in the upper division with narrow and solid tur- 
 rets, corbelled and pinnacled. The scheme is not so 
 effectively wrought out as it deserves to be, and as it 
 might be. The central feature is not developed into 
 predominance, and the main divisions of the building- 
 are no more emphasized in treatment than the divis- 
 ions between the intermediate stories. The observer 
 may recur to the Vicar of Wakefield to express his re- 
 gret that the promise of so promising a scheme should 
 not have been fulfilled, although, in spite of its short- 
 comings, the result is a respectable “ business block.” 
 These remarks apply to the original building, and not 
 to the building as it has since been reconstructed by 
 the addition of two stories which throw out the rela- 
 tions of its parts, and make it difficult to decipher the 
 original scheme. The Bank of Commerce is as frankly 
 utilitarian as the Lumber Exchange, the designer hav- 
 ing relaxed the restraint imposed upon him by the 
 prosaic and pedestrian character of his problem only 
 in the design of the scholarly and rather ornate en- 
 trances. For the rest, the architecture is but the ex- 
 pression of the structure, which is expressed clearly 
 and with vigor. The longer front shows the odd no- 
 tion of emphasizing the centre by withdrawing it, a 
 procedure apparently irrational, which has, however, 
 the compensation of giving value and detachment to 
 the entrance at its base. The problem was much more 
 promising than that of the Lumber Exchange, seeing 
 that here, with an ample area, there are but six stories 
 against ten, and it is out of all comparison better solved. 
 The four central stories are grouped by piers contin- 
 ued through them and connected by round arches above 
 the fifth, while the first and sixth are sharply separated 
 
190 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 CORNER OF BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 
 in treatment, the former as an unmistakable basement, 
 with a plain segment headed opening in each bay, and 
 the latter as an unmistakable attic, with a triplet of 
 lintelled and shafted openings aligned over each of 
 the round arches. The fronts are, moreover, distin- 
 guished, without in the least compromising the utili- 
 tarian purpose of the structure, by the use of the archi- 
 tectural devices the lack of which one deplores in the 
 other building, insomuch that the difference between 
 the two is the difference between a building merely 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 9 I 
 
 blocked out and a finished building, and suggests again 
 that the Lumber Exchange must have been designed 
 under pressure. The building of the “ Globe ” news- 
 paper, in Minneapolis, is a vigorous composition in Rich- 
 ardsonian Romanesque, excessively broken and diver- 
 sified, doubtless, for its extent, but with interesting 
 pieces of detail, and with a picturesque angle tower 
 that comes in very happily from several points of view 
 of the business quarter. The emphatic framing of this 
 tower between two plain piers is a noteworthy point of 
 design, and so is the use of the device that emphasizes 
 the angles throughout their whole extent, while still keep- 
 ing the vertical lines in subordination to the horizontal. 
 
 O 
 
 THE “GLOBE” BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 E. Townsend Mix, Architect. 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I 92 
 
 Among the business blocks of St. Paul, the building of 
 the “ Pioneer Press ” newspaper is eminent for the strict- 
 ness with which the design conforms itself to the utili- 
 tarian conditions of the structure, and the impressiveness 
 of the result attained, not in spite of those apparently 
 forbidding conditions, but by means of them. Here 
 also Mr. Root’s buildings, to which this praise belongs 
 in so high a degree, have evidently enough inculcated 
 their lesson upon the designer of the present structure. 
 An uncompromising parallelopiped of brown brick rears 
 
 ENTRANCE TO “ PIONEER PRESS ” BUILDING, ST. PAUL. 
 S. S. Benian, Architect. 
 
 itself to the height of twelve stories, with no break at 
 all in its outline, and with no architecture that is not 
 evolved directly from the requirements of the building. 
 One does not seem to be praising a man very highly to 
 praise him for talking prose when he has a prosaic sub- 
 ject. A mere incompetency to poetry would apparently 
 suffice to earn this moderate eulogy. Yet, in fact, noth- 
 ing is much rarer in our architecture than the power to 
 deny one’s self irrelevant beauties. The “ Pioneer Press" 
 building is a basement of three stories, the first story of 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 !9 3 
 
 the brick-work counting in with 
 the two-story substructure of ma- 
 sonry, carrying a superstructure 
 of seven, crowned with an attic 
 of two. This latter feature 
 proceeds, doubtless, from 
 the special requirement 
 of a newspaper office 
 superposed upon a 
 business block, and it 
 may be inferred that to 
 this requirement is due 
 the greater enrichment of 
 the lower of the two attic 
 stories, contrary to the usual 
 arrangement, and testifying the 
 architect’s belief, mistaken or 
 not, that the editorial function is 
 of more dignity and worthier of 
 celebration than the typographical. 
 
 At any rate, the unusual disposi- 
 tion is architecturally fortunate, 
 since it provides, in the absolute- 
 ly plain openings of what is pre- 
 sumably the composing-room, a 
 grateful interval between the com- 
 parative richness of the arcades 
 beneath and of the cornice above. 
 
 In the main front, the ample en- 
 trance at the centre supplies a 
 visible motive for the vertical as 
 well as for the subordinate lateral 
 
 division. It is developed through the three stories of the 
 basement, and it is recognized in a prolongation upward 
 of its flanking piers through the central division — which 
 
 CORNER OF “PIONEER PRESS ” 
 BUILDING. 
 
 2 5 
 
194 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 is completed by round arches, the spandrels of which are 
 decorated — and through the attic, so as to effect a triple 
 division for the front. The unostentatious devices are 
 highly effective by which the monotony that would re- 
 sult from an identical treatment of the seven central 
 stories is relieved, while the impression made by the 
 magnitude of such a mass is retained. The terminal 
 piers are left entirely unbroken throughout all their 
 extent, except for a continuous string course above the 
 eighth story, which might better have been omitted, 
 since it cuts the intermediate piers very awkwardly, and 
 detracts from the value of the heavier string course only 
 one story higher that has an evident reason of being, 
 as the springing course of the arcade; while the inter- 
 mediate piers are crossed by string courses above the 
 fifth and the ninth stories, so as to give to the central 
 and dominant feature of the main composition a triple 
 division of its own into a beginning, a middle, and an 
 end. 
 
 The building is very successful, and the more suc- 
 cessful because the designer lias shirked nothing and 
 blinked nothing, but out of this nettle, commercial de- 
 mands, has plucked this flower, commercial architecture. 
 The same praise of an entire relevancy to its purpose 
 belongs to the Bank of Minnesota, a well-proportioned 
 and well-divided piece of masonry, in spite of more 
 effort at variety in outline, and of somewhat more of fan- 
 tasy in detail. The former is manifested in the treat- 
 ment of the roof, in which the gables of the upper story 
 are relieved against a low mansard ; and the latter in 
 the design of these gables and of the rich and effective 
 entrance. The problem, as one of composition, is very 
 much simplified here, since the building is but of six 
 stories, and the dilemma of monotony or miscellany, 
 which so awfully confronts the designers of ten and 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 *95 
 
 BANK OF MINNESOTA, ST. PAUL. 
 
 Wilcox & Johnson, Architects. 
 
 twelve story buildings, does not present itself. The two 
 lower stories, though quite differently detailed, are here 
 grouped into an architectural basement, the grouping 
 being emphasized in the main front by the extension of 
 the entrance through both. The superstructure is of 
 three stories, quite identical and very plain in treatment, 
 and above is the lighter and more open fenestration of 
 the gabled attic. 
 
 Of far more extent and pretension than this, being 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 app ro priat e ne ss , as a housing and an expression of the 
 local genius, for assuredly there is nothing quaint about 
 the Western business man or his procedures during 
 business hours, however quaint and even picturesque 
 one may find him when relaxing into anecdote in his 
 hours of ease. The building owes its quaintness in 
 great part to the division of its superstructure into two 
 unequal masses flanking a narrow court, at the base of 
 which is the main entrance. The general arrangement 
 is not uncommon in the business blocks of New York. 
 The unequal division into masses, of which one is just 
 twice as wide as the other, looks capricious in the pres- 
 ent detached condition of the building; though when 
 
 196 
 
 indeed perhaps the costliest and most “ important ” of 
 all the business block of St. Paul, is the building of the 
 New York Life Insurance Company. In saying that 
 the total impression of this edifice is one of picturesque 
 quaintness, one seems to deny its typicalness, if not its 
 
 TOP OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL. 
 Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 197 
 
 another lofty building abuts upon it, the inequality will 
 be seen to be a sensible precaution to secure the effec- 
 tive lighting of the narrower mass, the light for the 
 wider being secured by a street upon one side as well 
 as by the court upon the other. Even so, this will not 
 be so intuitively beheld as the fact of the inequality 
 itself, and as the differences of treatment to which it 
 gives rise and by which it is emphasized ; for the quaint- 
 ness resulting from the asymmetry is so far from being 
 ungrateful to the designer that he has seized upon it 
 with avidity, and developed it by all the means in his 
 power. Ouaintness is the word that everybody uses 
 spontaneously to express the character of the Dutch 
 and Flemish Renaissance, and the treatment of these 
 unequal gables is obviously derived from Flemish ex- 
 amples. The origin of their crow steps and ailerons is 
 unmistakable, and the treatment of the grouped and 
 somewhat huddled openings, and their wreathed pedi- 
 ments and bull’s-eyes, richly and heavily framed in 
 terra-cotta, is equally characteristic, to the point of be- 
 ing baroque. This character is quite evidently meant, 
 and the picturesqueness that results from it is undeni- 
 able, and gives the building its prevailing expression ; 
 howbeit it is confined to the gables, the trearment of 
 the substructure being as “ architecturesque ” as that 
 of the superstructure is picturesque. A simple and 
 massive basement of two stories in masonry carries 
 the five stories of brick-work heavily quoined in stone 
 that constitute the body of the building, and this is 
 itself subdivided by slight but sufficient differences, 
 the lower story being altogether of masonry, and 
 the upper arcaded. An intermediate story, emphati- 
 cally marked off above and below, separates this body 
 from the two-story roof, the gables of which we have 
 been considering. The main entrance, which gives ac- 
 
AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 is evident, and also the elegance of the detail in its kind 
 and in its place; but it does not seem to be in its place 
 anywhere out-of-doors, and still less as applied to the 
 entrance of a business block to which it is merely ap- 
 plied, and from which it is not developed. Its extreme 
 delicacy, indeed, almost gives the impression that it is 
 
 ENTRANCE TO NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL. 
 
 cess to a stately and sumptuous corridor, seems itself 
 extraneous to the building, having little congruity either 
 with the straightforward and structural treatment of 
 the main building, or with the bulbous picturesqueness 
 of the gables. The care with which its detail is studied 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 I99 
 
 meant to be a still small voice of scholarly protest on 
 the part of an “Eastern” architect against a “boisterous 
 and rough-hewn ” Westernness. A still smaller voice 
 of protest seems to be emitted by the design of the 
 Endicott Arcade, the voice of one crying, very softly, 
 in the wilderness. So ostentatiously discreet is the 
 detail of this building, indeed, so minute the scale of 
 it, and so studious the avoidance of anything like stress 
 and the effort for understatement, that the very quietness 
 of its remonstrance gives it the effect of vociferation. 
 
 “ He who in quest of quiet ‘ Silence ’ hoots, 
 
 Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.” 
 
 It seems to be an explicit expostulation, for example, 
 with the architect of the Guaranty Loan Building in 
 Minneapolis, which has many striking details not with- 
 out ingenuity, and certainly not without “ enterprise,” 
 but as certainly without the refinement that comes of a 
 studied and affectionate elaboration, insomuch that this 
 
 also may be admitted to be W n, and to invite the 
 
 full force of Dryden’s criticism. The building in the 
 exterior of which this mild remonstrance is made has an 
 interior feature that is noteworthy for other qualities 
 than the avoidance of indiscretion ancl overstatement — 
 the “arcade,” so called, from which it takes its name — a 
 broad corridor, sumptuous in material and treatment to 
 the “palatial” point, one’s admiration for which is not 
 destroyed, though it is abated, by a consideration of its 
 irrelevancy to a business block. The building of the 
 New York Life in Minneapolis, by the same architects 
 as the building of the same corporation in St. Paul, is 
 more readily recognizable by a New-Yorker as their 
 work. It is a much more commonplace and a much 
 more utilitarian composition — a basement of four sto- 
 ries, of which two are in masonry, carrying a central 
 division also of four and an attic of two, the superstruct- 
 
200 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 ure being of brick-work. The two principal divisions 
 are too nearly equal ; nor does the change of material 
 effected by building the two upper stories of the 
 basement in brick-work achieve the rhythmic relation 
 for the attainment of which it was doubtless intro- 
 duced. But the structure is nevertheless a more satis- 
 factory example of commercial architecture than the 
 St. Paul building. Its entrance, of four fluted and 
 banded columns of a very free Roman Doric, with the 
 platform on consoles above, has strength and dignity, 
 and is a feature that can evidently be freely exposed to 
 the weather, and that is not incongruous as the portal 
 of a great commercial building. A very noteworthy 
 feature of the interior is the double spiral staircase in 
 
 NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS. 
 Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects. 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 201 
 
 metal that has apparently been inspired by the famous 
 rood screen of St. Etienne du Mont in Paris, and 
 that is a very taking and successful design, in which 
 the treatment of the material is ingenious and charac- 
 teristic. 
 
 We have seen that the huddled condition of the 
 business quarter of St. Paul, practically a disadvantage 
 in comparison with the spaciousness of Minneapolis, 
 has become architecturally a positive advantage. The 
 natural advantages with respect to the quarters of resi- 
 dence seem to be strongly on the side of St. Paul. The 
 26 
 
202 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 river-front at Minneapolis is not available for house- 
 building, nor is there any other topographical indica- 
 tion of a fashionable quarter, except what is furnished 
 by the slight undulations of the plateau. The more 
 pretentious houses are for the most part scattered, and, 
 of course, much more isolated than the towering com- 
 mercial buildings. On the other hand, the fashionable 
 quarter of St. Paul is distinctly marked out by nature. 
 It could not have been established anywhere but at the 
 edge of the bluff overhanging the town and command- 
 ing the Mississippi. Surely this height must have been 
 one of those eminences that struck the imagination of 
 Trollope when they were yet unoccupied. And now 
 the “noble residences” have come to crown the hill- 
 side, and really noble residences many of them are. 
 
 DWELLING IN MINNEAPOLIS. 
 Harry W. Jones, Architect. 
 
 There are perhaps as skilfully designed houses in the 
 younger city, and certainly there are houses as costly ; 
 but there is nothing to be compared with the massing 
 of the handsome houses of St. Paul upon the ridge 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 203 
 
 above the river. Indeed, there are very few streets in 
 the United States that give in as high a degree as 
 Summit Avenue the sense of an expenditure liberal 
 without ostentation, directed by skill, and restrained by 
 taste. What mainly strikes a pilgrim from the East 
 is not so much the merit of the best of these houses, as 
 the fact that there are no bad ones ; none, at least, so 
 bad as to disturb the general impression of richness and 
 refinement, and none that make the crude display of 
 “new money” that is to be seen in the fashionable 
 quarters of cities even richer and far older. The houses 
 rise, to borrow one of Ruskin’s eloquent phrases, “ in 
 fair fulfilment of domestic service and modesty of home 
 seclusion.” The air of completeness, of finish, of “keep- 
 ing,” so rare in American towns, is here as marked as 
 at Newport. In the architecture there is a wide variety, 
 which does not, however, suffice to destroy the homo- 
 geneousness of the total effect. Suggestions from the 
 Romanesque perhaps prevail, and testify anew to the 
 
204 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 influence of Richardson, though there are suggestions 
 from the Renaissance and from pointed architecture 
 that show scholarship as well as invention. The clever- 
 ness and ingenuity of a porte-cochere of two pointed 
 arches are not diminished by the likelihood that it was 
 suggested by a canopied tomb in a cathedral. But, in- 
 deed, from whatever source the inspiration of the archi- 
 tects may have come, it is everywhere plain that they 
 have had no intention of presenting “examples” of his- 
 torical architecture, and highly unlikely that they would 
 be disturbed by the detection in their work of solecisms 
 that were such merely from the academic point of view. 
 It is scarcely worth while to go into specific criticism of 
 their domestic work. To illustrate it is to show that the 
 designers of the best of it are quite abreast of the archi- 
 tects of the older parts of the country, and that they 
 
 PORTE-COCHERE, ST. PAUL. 
 Wilcox & Johnson, Architects. 
 

 GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 205 
 
 MsaLvit.il if, 
 
 -c™' . j 
 
 
 PORCH IN ST. PAUL. 
 
 Mould & McNichol, Architects. 
 
 are able to command an equal skill of craftsmanship in 
 the execution of their designs. 
 
 This does not answer our question whether there is 
 any such thing as Western architecture, or whether these 
 papers should not rather have been entitled “ Glimpses 
 of Architecture in the West.” The interest in this art 
 throughout the West is at least as general as the interest 
 in it throughout the East, and it is attested in the twin 
 cities by the existence of a flourishing and enterprising 
 periodical, the “Northwestern Architect,” to which I am 
 glad to confess my obligations. It is natural that this 
 interest, when joined to an intense local patriotism, 
 should lead to a magnifying of the Westernness of such 
 structures as are the subjects of local pride. It is com- 
 mon enough to hear the same local patriot who declaims 
 to you in praise of Western architecture explain also 
 
206 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 FROM A DWELT, ING IN ST. PAUL. 
 
 Gilbert & Taylor, Architects. 
 
 that the specimens of it which he commends to your 
 admiration are the work of architects of “ Eastern” birth 
 or training. Now, if not in Dickens’s time, tire “ man 
 of Boston raisin’ ” is recognized in the West to have 
 his uses. The question whether there is any American 
 architecture is not yet so triumphantly answered that it 
 is other than provincial to lay much stress on local 
 differences. The general impression that the Eastern 
 observer derives from Western architecture is the same 
 that American architecture in general makes upon the 
 European observer; and that is, that it is a very much 
 emancipated architecture. Our architects are assuredly 
 less trammelled by tradition than those of any older 
 countries, and the architects of the West are even less 
 trammelled than those of the East. Their characteristic 
 buildings show this characteristic equally, whether they 
 be qood or bad. The towerinq- commercial structures 
 that are forced upon them by new conditions and 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 207 
 
 facilities are very seldom specimens of any historical 
 style ; and the best and the worst of these, the most and 
 the least studied, are apt to be equally hard to classify. 
 To be emancipated is not a merit ; and to judge whether 
 or not it is an advantage, one needs to examine the 
 performances in which the emancipation is exhibited. 
 “ That a good man be ‘ free,’ as we call it,” says Carlyle, 
 in one of his most emphatic Jeremiads — “be permitted 
 to unfold himself in works of goodness and nobleness — 
 is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable; 
 
 DWELLINGS IN ST. PAUL. 
 Wilcox & Johnson, Architects. 
 
208 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 to him and to those about him. But that a bad man be 
 ‘free’ — permitted to unfold himself in his particular way 
 —is, contrariwise, the fatallest curse you could inflict 
 upon him ; curse, and nothing else, to him and all his 
 neighbors.” 
 
 There is here not a question of morals, but of knowl- 
 edge and competency. The restraints in architecture 
 of a recognized school, of a prevailing style, are useful 
 and salutary in proportion to the absence of restraint 
 that the architect is capable of imposing upon himself. 
 The secular tradition of French architecture, imposed 
 by public authority and inculcated by official academics, 
 is felt as a trammel by many architects, who, neverthe- 
 less, have every reason to feel grateful for the power of 
 design which this same official curriculum has trained and 
 developed. In England the fear of the archaeologists 
 and of the ecclesiologists operated, during the period of 
 modern Gothic at least, with equal force, though with- 
 out any official sanction. To be “ ungrammatical,” not 
 to adopt a particular phase of historical architecture, 
 and not to coniine one’s self to it in a design, was there 
 the unforgivable offence, even though the incongruities 
 that resulted from transcending it were imperceptible to 
 an artist and obvious only to an archaeologist. A de- 
 signer thoroughly trained under either of these systems, 
 and then transferred to this country as a practitioner, 
 must feel, as many such a practitioner has in fact felt, 
 that he was suddenly unshackled, and that his emanci- 
 pation was an unmixed advantage to him ; but it is none 
 the less true that his power to use his liberty wisely came 
 from the discipline that was now relaxed. The academ- 
 ic prolusions of the Beaux Arts, or the exercises of a 
 draughtsman, have served their purpose in qualifying 
 him for independent design. The advocates of the cur- 
 riculum of the English public schools maintain that, ob- 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 209 
 
 JPORCH IN ST. PAUL. 
 
 A. H. Stein, Architect. 
 
 solete as it seems, even the practice of making Latin 
 verses has its great benefits in imparting to the pupil 
 the command of literary form and of beauty of diction. 
 There are many examples to sustain this contention, as 
 well as the analogous contention that a faithful study 
 and reproduction of antique or of mediaeval architecture 
 are highly useful, if not altogether indispensable, to cul- 
 tivate an architect’s power of design. Only it may be 
 27 
 
2 lO 
 
 AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 pointed out that the use of these studies is to enable 
 the student to express himself with more power and grace 
 in the vernacular, and that one no longer reverts to Latin 
 verse when he has really something to say. The mon- 
 uments that are accepted as models by the modern world 
 are themselves the results of the labors of successive sren- 
 
 O 
 
 erations. It was by a secular process that the same 
 structural elements employed at Thebes and Karnac 
 were developed to the perfection of the Parthenon. In 
 proportion to the newness of their problems it is to be 
 expected that the efforts of our architects will be crude; 
 but there is a vast difference between the crudity of a 
 serious and matured attempt to do a new thing and the 
 crudity of mere ignorance and self-sufficiency. Evi- 
 dently the progress of American architecture will not 
 be promoted by the labors of designers, whether they 
 be “Western” or “Eastern,” who have merely “lived 
 in the alms basket ” of architectural forms, and whose 
 notion of architecture consists in multiplying “features,” 
 as who should think to enhance the expressiveness of 
 the human countenance by adorning it with two noses. 
 
 One cannot neologize with any promise of success 
 unless he knows what is already in the dictionary; and 
 a professional equipment that puts its owner really in 
 possession of the best that has been done in the world 
 is indispensable to successful eclecticism in architecture. 
 On the other hand, it is equally true that no progress 
 can result from the labors of architects whose training 
 has made them so fastidious that they are more revolted 
 by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt 
 to express a new meaning than by the failure to make 
 the attempt, and so conceal what they are really doing 
 behind a mask of historical architecture, of which the 
 elegance is quite irrelevant. This latter fault is that of 
 modern architecture in general. I he history of that 
 
GLIMPSES OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 2 I I 
 
 architecture indicates that it is a fault even more un- 
 promising of progress than the crudities of an emanci- 
 pated architecture, in which the discipline of the designer 
 fails to supply the place of the artificial check of an his- 
 torical style. It is more feasible to tame exuberances 
 than to create a soul under the ribs of death. The 
 emancipation of American architecture is thus ulti- 
 mately more hopeful than if it were put under aca- 
 demic bonds to keep the peace. It may freely be ad- 
 mitted that many of its manifestations are not for the 
 present joyous, but grievous, and that to throw upon 
 the individual designer the responsibility withheld from 
 a designer with whom fidelity to style is the first duty 
 is a process that fails when his work, as has been wit- 
 tily said, ‘ shows no more self-restraint than a bunch of 
 fire-crackers.” But these papers have also borne wit- 
 ness that there are among the emancipated practition- 
 ers of architecture in the West men who have shown 
 that they can use their liberty wisely, and whose work 
 can be hailed as among the hopeful beginnings of a na- 
 tional architecture. 
 
 THE END 
 
Valuable and Interesting Works 
 
 FOR 
 
 Students of Ancient and Modern Art. 
 
 5£|p Harper & Brothers will send any of the following works by mail, postage 
 prepaid , to any part of the United States , Canada , or Mexico , on receipt oj 
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 fff For a full list of works published by Harper & Brothers, see Harper s 
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 MEDIAEVAL ART. 
 
 History of Mediaeval Art. By Dr. Franz von Reber. Translated 
 and Augmented by JOSEPH ThaCHER Clarke. Profusely Illus- 
 trated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 oo. 
 
 ANCIENT ART. 
 
 History of Ancient Art. By Dr. Franz von Reber. Revised by 
 the Author, and Translated and Augmented by Joseph Thacher 
 Clarke. Profusely Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50. 
 
 SCHLIEMANN'S ILIOS. 
 
 Ilios, the City and Country of the Trojans. By Dr. Henry Schlie- 
 mann, F.S.A. Maps, Plans, and about 1800 Illustrations. Imperial 
 8vo, Cloth, $7 50 ; Half Morocco, $10 00. 
 
 SCHLIEMANN'S TROJA. 
 
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 By Dr. Henry Schliemann, F.S.A. With 150 Wood-cuts and 4 
 Maps and Plans. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00; Half Morocco, $7 50. 
 
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 CHILD'S ART AND CRITICISM. 
 
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 Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers. By Amelia B. Edwards. Il- 
 lustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $4 00. 
 
Valuable and Interesting Works for Art Students. 
 
 CESNOLA’S CYPRUS. 
 
 Cyprus: its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples. A Narrative of 
 Researches and Excavations during Ten Years' Residence in that 
 Island. By General Louis Palma di Cesnola. With Appendix, 
 containing a Treatise on “ The Rings and Gems in the Treasure of 
 Kurium,” by C. W. King, M.A.; a “ List of Engraved Gems found at 
 Different Places in Cyprus;” a Treatise “On the Pottery of Cy- 
 prus,” by A. S. Murray; Lists of “Greek Inscriptions,” “ Inscrip- 
 tions in the Cypriote Character,” and “Inscriptions in the Phoeni- 
 cian Character.” With Portrait, Maps, and 400 Illustrations. Third 
 Edition. 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Top and Uncut Edges, $7 50. 
 
 CHURCH-BUILDING. 
 
 Historical Studies of Church-building in the Middle Ages : Venice, 
 Siena, Florence. By Charles Eliot Norton. 8vo, Cloth, $3 00. 
 
 ART DECORATION APPLIED TO FURNITURE. 
 
 Art Decoration Applied to Furniture. By Harriet Prescott 
 Spofford. With Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00; Half Calf, $6 25. 
 
 ART EDUCATION APPLIED TO INDUSTRY. 
 
 Art Education Applied to Industry. By Geo. Ward Nichols. 
 Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Illuminated and Gilt, $4 00 ; Half Calf, $6 25. 
 
 WOOD-ENGRAVING. 
 
 A History of Wood - engraving. By G. E. Woodberry. With 
 Numerous Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50. 
 
 HINTS TO AMATEURS. 
 
 A Hand-book on Art. By Louise Jopling. i6mo, Paper, Orna- 
 mental, 50 cents. 
 
 JARVES’S ART HINTS. 
 
 Art Hints. Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting. By James 
 Jackson Jarves. nmo, Cloth, $1 50. 
 
 PARTON S CARICATURE. 
 
 Caricature and other Comic Art, in all Times and Many Lands. By 
 James Parton. With 203 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Top and 
 Uncut Edges, $5 00; Half Calf, $7 25. 
 
 THE CERAMIC ART. 
 
 The Ceramic Art : A Compendium of the History and Manufacture 
 of Pottery and Porcelain. By Jennie Y. Young. Illustrated. 8vo, 
 Cloth, $5 00. 
 
Valuable and Interesting Works for Art Students. 
 
 CHARNAY'S ANCIENT CITIES. 
 
 The Ancient Cities of the New World. Being Voyages and Ex- 
 plorations in Mexico and Central America, from 1857 to 1882. By 
 Desire Charnay. Translated by J. Gonino and Helen S. Co- 
 NANT. 209 Illustrations and a Map. Royal 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, 
 Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $6 00. 
 
 “THE QUIET LIFE.” Illustrated by Abbey and Parsons. 
 
 “The Quiet Life.” Certain Verses by Various Hands: the Motive 
 set forth in a Prologue and Epilogue by Austin Dobson ; the whole 
 Adorned with Numerous Drawings by Edwin A. Abbey and Al- 
 fred Parsons. 4to, Ornamental Leather, $7 50. ( In a Boxl) 
 
 OLD SONGS. Illustrated by Abbey and Parsons. 
 
 Old Songs. With Drawings by Edwin A. Abbey and Alfred 
 Parsons. 4to, Ornamental Leather, Gilt Edges, $7 50. {In a Box.) 
 
 SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER. Illustrated by Abbey. 
 
 She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. 
 By Dr. Goldsmith. With Photogravure and Process Reproduc- 
 tions from Drawings by Edwin A. Abbey. Decorations by Alfred 
 Parsons. Introduction by Austin Dobson. Folio, Leather, Il- 
 luminated, Gilt Edges, $20 00. (In a Box.) 
 
 HERRICK'S POEMS. Illustrated by Abbey. 
 
 Selections from the Poems of Robert Herrick. With Drawings bv 
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 a Box.) 
 
 BOUGHTON AND ABBEY’S HOLLAND. 
 
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 Beautifully and Profusely Illustrated with Drawings by Edwin A. 
 Abbey and the author. 8vo, Cloth, Illuminated, $5 00; Gilt Edges, 
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 SOUTH KENSINGTON. 
 
 Travels in South Kensington. With Notes on Decorative Art and 
 Architecture in England. By Moncure Daniel Conway. Illus- 
 trated. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. 
 
 BEN-HUR. Illustrated. 
 
 Ben-IIur : A Tale of the Christ. By Lew. Wallace. Two Vol- 
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 Contained in Specially Designed Gladstone Box, $7 00. 
 
 3 
 
Valuable and Interesting Works for Art Students. 
 
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 The Warwickshire Avon. Notes by A. T. Ouiller- Couch. Il- 
 lustrations by Alfred Parsons. Crown 8vo, Half Leather, Orna- 
 mental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $2 00. {In a Box.) 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S SONNETS. Illustrated by Parsons. 
 
 A Selection from the Sonnets of William Wordsworth. With Nu- 
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 Edges, $5 00. {In a Box.) 
 
 GIBSON'S SHARP EYES: 
 
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 Top, $5 00. {In a Box.) 
 
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 GIBSONS HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS. 
 
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 The Heart of the White Mountains. By Samuel Adams Drake. 
 Illustrated by W. Hamilton Gibson. 4to, Cloth, Ornamental, Gilt 
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 Post 8vo, Cloth, $1 75. 
 
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 Winters in Algeria. Written and Illustrated by Frederick Ar- 
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 Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 
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