Part 4

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 mentioned, or in the house designed for Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt by Mr. Post, being partly lost by its minuteness, 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 minuteness; but the treatment, in mass and in detail, is marked by great vigor and animation, and the architecture of the building is an emphatic expression of its structure.

Another commercial building, at the corner of Broadway 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 substitute for the expression of vigor by modelling. Bowlders are projected from the piers of this basement in the most ferocious and blood-curdling manner--so ferocious, 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 architects seem to have taken the counsel of Nick Bottom: “Half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck;

and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect--Ladies, or fair ladies, I 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: 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 disclaimer of any offensive intention is made in the insertion between the openings of pairs of banded pilasters, 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, covered 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, nothing 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 ingenious 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 is designed with great spirit and picturesqueness. But the architectural impulse fails in the attic story, which should obviously be here the richest part of the building, and which is the baldest, being only a series of rectangular holes, without either modelling or decoration, and without relation in their grouping to the openings immediately under them.

By far the most successful, however, of all the recent commercial buildings is the Post Building, designed by Mr. Post, and executed, above the blue-stone basement, 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, instead of being a well sunk in the middle of the building, is made a recess in one of the long sides. This

arrangement is not only practically convenient, but, like every arrangement obviously dictated by practical convenience, is capable of becoming architecturally effective, 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 detail 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 refined. It is designed in “free Renaissance,” that is to say, the designer has undertaken to model the building faithfully, according to its plan and construction, in Renaissance architecture, leaving out all that he does not want. Mr. Haight, 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 analysis 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 classical 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 performance as this succeeded by so thoroughly unstudied a performance as the Mills Building, by the same architect. 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. Whatever 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 performs 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 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 themselves why they continue to work in a style which has never produced a monument, and in which it is impossible 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 tradesman, or to discuss his works except by telling what are the latest modes, in the manner of the fashion magazines. It seems impossible for architects 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 historical 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 scrutinize 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 were 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 English and American architecture as the 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 ago 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 recognition of these things would have prevented a vagary like the frivolities and affectations of the new departure from attaining any vogue, but it would also have prevented the establishment of any technical styles in modern building, and instead of reproducing “examples” 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.

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 approaches the solidity proper to a prison than one that emulates the precarious lightness proper to a greenhouse. The depth of the porch and of the recessed balcony 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 interesting 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 decoration ceases to be such when it ceases to be a development 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.

The sculptural decoration, in contradistinction to that strictly architectural, equally abounds. By sculptural decoration is meant that designed as well as executed 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 musicians girdling the frieze-like band of the corbel which carries the oriel of the southern front.[D] The execution elsewhere, in the panels under and between the windows, 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 introduction of these pilasters at the angles of the bay and on the curve of the oriel, which are so clearly not structural 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 prettiness of the ornament generally in design, and its unfailing 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 texture of carved stone too nearly to the more facile surface 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 modification 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 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 harmonious 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 modification of mediæval 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 fruitful century in the history of architecture, which included the late Gothic of the fifteenth century and the early Renaissance of the sixteenth, and spanned the distance from the minute and complicated modelling of the Palais de Justice at Rouen and the Hôtel Cluny at Paris, to the romantic classicism of the great châteaux of the Loire. Certainly the attempt does not lack boldness. Here we have in one building the superimposed 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 pediment 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 systems of construction, without a visible incongruity; nor are they in all cases successful, taken singly. The large and elaborate dormer over the entrance, especially, instead of being a visible reconciliation of the two styles, is a visible demonstration that they cannot be reconciled. A complete construction of post and lintel, of pilaster and entablature, is supplemented by another construction of flying buttresses which are clearly superfluous and irrelevant, and which, instead of resisting the thrust of an arch, have the appearance of ineffectually “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 otherwise 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 extremely pretty thing, without admitting that 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 awkward expedient has been adopted of dropping the cornice 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 precisely 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 irrelevant

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 architect.