Part 10

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 traffic and of “high finance”--is huddled into the space 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 development 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 accessible. This is distinctly enough the north side, which a stranger, without the slightest interest, present or prospective, in Chicago real estate, may be pardoned for inferring 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 occupied 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 combated by the residents of the south and the west, and he finds also that, instead of one admittedly fashionable 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 the avenues that are severally the boasts of the competing 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 fashion 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 residential quarters of Chicago there is plenty of room, and it is this spaciousness that gives a pervading characteristic 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 dwellings. 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 inhabitant 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 attempts 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 particular 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 quarters 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 fortunate. 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 distinctly 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. Richardson, which, if not inordinate, is at least undiscriminating and misapplied. What region of our land, indeed,

is not full of his labors, done vicariously, and with a zeal not according to knowledge? In Chicago his misunderstood example has fructified much more in the quarters of residence than in the business quarters, insomuch 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 borrowed outright from one of his works, and is reproduced 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 specifically, 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 straightforward 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 introduced 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 anæmic architect, or by a self-distrustful 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 architecture has more or less plausibly been likened that is no less valid as applied to architecture itself--the distinction between “school music” and “bravura music.” If we adopt this distinction, Richardson must be classed among the bravura performers in architecture, who are

eligible rather for admiration than for study. Assuredly designers will get nothing but good from his work if they learn from it to try for largeness and simplicity, to avoid niggling, and to consider first of all the disposition of their masses. But these are merits that cannot be transferred from a photograph. They are quite independent of a fondness for the Provençal Romanesque, and still more of an exaggeration of 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 scarcely worth imitating. In Richardson’s best work there is apt to be some questionable detail, since the success or failure of his building is commonly decided before the consideration of detail arises, and it is this questionable detail that the imitators are apt to reproduce without asking

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 nothing 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 seldom fails to find in the work of its architect, in the central open loggia of each of its three stories, flanked on each side by an abutment of solid wall, and the apportionment of the front between voids and solids is just and felicitous. Three loggie seem an excessive allowance 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 arrangement supplies a motive susceptible of very effective development. 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 saying 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 characteristic, and which seems, therefore, to demand a certain 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 characterizes 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 façades 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 perpendicularly to the front, as are the shafts of the colonnade 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 flanking 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 virtually 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 three 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 matter” with the building thus deprived of a source of expression, 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 compensates. 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 exposition, 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 employment of color, so treat a front, without the least projection or recess from top to bottom or from end to end, as to make us forget to deplore the absence of mouldings. Some interesting attempts in that direction have, in fact, been made, and complete success in such an attempt would be entitled to the praise of a tour de force. 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 the work of a highly endowed and highly accomplished designer like Richardson, the deficiency must be set down merely as an unlucky caprice. We have been speaking exclusively of the longer front, since it is manifest that the shorter shares its incompleteness, 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 admirable 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 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 conspicuous, this motive, about which the architect so seldom leaves the beholder in any doubt, is obscured by the addition at one end of a series of openings irrelevant to it, having no counterpart upon the other, and serving to weaken at a critical point the wall, the emphasis of whose massiveness and lateral expanse may be said to be the whole purport of the design, to which everything 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, insomuch 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 interruptions 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 ungracious concession to practical needs in the more numerous 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 minute, in the case of the egg-and-dart that adorns the sill, so microscopic, that it does not count at all in the general effect. A moulding that does count in the general effect, and that vindicates itself at the expense of the 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 building 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 forbidding 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 especially “innocent and quiet” might take it for a hermitage. Indeed, if one were to take it for a dwelling expressive 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 avenue, 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 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 individual 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. Vanderbilt’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, especially 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 corbelling, 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 domestic 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 architectural detail. By this comparison, indeed, one would be inclined to call this treatment severe; but it is prodigality itself in comparison with its neighbor. This latter comparison is especially instructive because in the block, as a matter of mere mass and outline, Mr. Richardson’s composition, considerably simpler, is also pretty distinctly more forcible than that of Mr. Hunt, by reason of its central and dominating feature, and especially by reason of the completeness with which it is united by the simple and unbroken roof; whereas the criticism already passed upon the Vanderbilt house, that it grows weak above the cornice line, is applicable, though in a less degree, to its author’s later work. The various 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 composition; 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 example 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 characteristically 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 architecture 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 proportioning

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 an evidence of intelligent lay interest in architecture to be informed that it is the residence of its architect.