Part 5

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. For the monotony 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 appearance 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 undeniable 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 virtually 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 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 château, but a French château 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 Ages. 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 architectural, 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. Perhaps 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 building looks as the architect intended it to look, in a 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 subordinated

to these--so far subordinated, indeed, that the axial lines of the openings in the lower stories are disregarded 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 decoration, 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 ambitious work of Mr. Hunt; though, indeed, he may ascribe 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 development 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 to accentuate the structural features, nor is it designed with reference either to its place or to its function 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 intention 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 architectural 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 building in the walls of which it is cut. Much of the detail is 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 architectural 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 meaning, with here and there a pretty architectural phrase which in some other context may have meant something. These houses have another misfortune in their very lugubrious color. A vivid piece of painted decoration 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 gilded railings of the windows at each side of this balcony. But it is to be hoped that courage may be found to let loose a discreet decorator with unlimited goldleaf upon the whole sad fronts. A mode of decoration which has been found so effective in the fogs of London might profitably be employed to animate façades 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 original, 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.

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 standing (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 century. Its towers, at least, bid fair to outlast every structure 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 hangs between the stark masses of the towers may have disappeared, 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 builded them; and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.” It is not unimaginable that our future archæologist, looking from one of these towers upon the solitude of a mastless river and a dispeopled land, may have no other means of reconstructing our civilization 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 people 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 massiveness and durability. It is Roman, too, in its disregard of art, in resting satisfied with the practical solution 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 everywhere, in whole and in part, made the structure tell of the work it was doing. There have been periods in history when this æsthetic 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 noble work of engineering; it is not a work of architecture.

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 frivolous and irrelevant to the work upon which he is engaged, and consoles himself for his ignorance 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. Ruskin 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 expected 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 mediæeval 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 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 actually 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 impracticable, the land ends of the ropes are hoisted some distance 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 platform 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 consideration of the complicated structure in its ultimate evolution, 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

function, 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 openings through which the roadways run are closed above by steep pointed arches, and the spandrels of these filled with a wall which rises to the summit of the piers, where a flat 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 subordinated to a mere filling. It should be distinctly withdrawn from the face of the piers instead of being, as in fact it is, only distinguished from them by their shallow and ineffectual projections. It should be distinctly dropped below their summits instead of rising to the same height, and being included under a common cornice. To see what a difference in effect this very obvious 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 subduing of the archway to a strut between the piers explains--not forcibly, perhaps, nor elegantly, but unmistakably--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 expressing the structure. It is of the first practical necessity 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 themselves

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 architecture of this crowning member of the tower has nothing 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 shelters? Here the very channel through which the cable runs is not designed, but is a mere hole occurring casually, and not by premeditation, in the midst of the mouldings which form the cornice of the tower. This is architectural barbarism.