Part 1

Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)

AMERICAN

ARCHITECTURE

Studies

BY

MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 1892

Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

TO

K. L. S.

_CONTENTS_

PAGE

THE POINT OF VIEW 1

CONCERNING QUEEN 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

_ILLUSTRATIONS_

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 59

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

BRIDGE AT MINNEAPOLIS 75

SECTION OF BROOKLYN BRIDGE TOWER 77

SECTION OF ANCHORAGE. (SIDE VIEW.) 81

AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL:

PROPOSED CATHEDRAL 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 PHŒNIX BUILDING 145

ORIEL, PHŒNIX 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

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-COCHÈRE, 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 new departure is an apt name for what some of its conductors describe as the new “school” in architecture and decoration. It has still, after nearly ten years of almost complete sway among the young architects of England and of the United States, all the signs of a departure--we might say of a hurried departure--and gives no hint of an arrival, or even of a direction. It is, in fact, a general “breaking-up” in building, as the dispersion of Babel was in speech, and we can only and somewhat desperately hope that the utterances of every man upon whom a dialect has suddenly fallen may at least be intelligible to himself. From a “movement” so exclusively centrifugal that it assumes rather the character of an explosion than of an evolution, not much achievement can be looked for. In fact, the “movement” has not, thus far, either in England or in the United States, produced a monument which anybody but its author would venture to pronounce very good. Not to go back to the times when Gothic architecture was vernacular in England, it has produced nothing which can be put in competition with 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 mediævalists acknowledged a subjection to certain principles of design. The classicists accepted certain forms and formulæ as efficacious and final. They were both, therefore, under some restraint. But the new movement seems to mean that aspiring genius shall not be fettered by mechanical laws or academic rules, by reason or by revelation, but that every architect shall build what is right in his own eyes, even if analysis finds it absurd and Vitruvius condemns it as incorrect.

“Queen Anne” is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use. But it is rather noteworthy that the effect of what is most specifically known as Queen Anne is to restrain the exuberances of design. Whoever recalls Viollet-le-Duc’s pregnant saying, that “only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career,” would scarcely select the reign of Queen Anne out of all English history for a point of departure in the history of any one of the plastic arts. The bloated Renaissance of Wren’s successors, such as is shown in Queen’s College and in Aldrich’s church architecture in Oxford, was its distinctive attainment in architecture. The minute and ingenious woodcarving of Grinling Gibbons was its distinctive attainment in decoration. Nothing could show more forcibly the degeneracy of art at the period which of late years has been represented as an æsthetic renascence than the acceptance of these wood-carvings, which in execution and all technical qualities are as complete, and in design and all imaginative qualities are as trivial and commonplace, as contemporary Italian sculpture, as works of art comparable to the graceful inventions of Jean Goujon, and clearly preferable to the sometimes rude but always purposeful decoration of mediæval churches.

The revivalists of Queen Anne have not confined their attentions to the reign of that sovereign. They have searched the Jacobean and the Georgian periods as well, and have sucked the dregs of the whole English Renaissance. Unhappily, nowhere in Europe was the Renaissance so unproductive as in the British Islands. It was so unproductive, indeed, that Continental historians of architecture have scarcely taken the trouble to look it up or to refer to it at all. Not merely since the beginning of the Gothic revival, but since the beginning of the Greek revival that was stimulated by the publication of Stuart’s work on Athens, in which for the first time uncorrupted Greek types could be studied, what contemporary architects have ransacked as a treasury was considered a mere lumber-room, and fell not so much into disesteem as into oblivion. During two generations nobody any more thought of studying the works of English architecture from Hawksmoor to “Capability” Brown, than anybody thought of studying the poetry of Blackmore and Hayley. The attempt within the past ten years to raise to the rank of inspirations the relics of this decadence, which for years had been regarded by everybody as rather ugly and ridiculous, is one of the strangest episodes in the strange history of modern architecture.