Part 6

Other opportunities offered for architectural expression 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 girth 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 efficiency of these counter-forts whether their area be narrow 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 inherent effect would be very greatly enhanced if the offsets themselves were accentuated by sharp and decisive modelling. As it is, emphasis seems to have been studiously 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 between 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 attempt to reproduce in his work “those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower.” That would be a more fatal fault than the rudeness and crudeness 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 suggestion. 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 decoration of the cathedrals), that all this transcendent superiority 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 cathedral 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 desirable 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 generation which built the bridge looked backward and downward 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. The 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 probably 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 impracticability without as exhaustive an investigation as the modern bridge-builder has given to the mechanical aspects of his problem. But it was certainly practicable to indicate 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 projection at this point is to secure as great a breadth as possible 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 unmistakably expressed, by the bold projection of a granite spur from the angle of the pier.

There are, probably, few arches in the world--certainly there can be none outside of works of modern engineering--of anything like the span, height, thickness, 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 magnitude. The great depth of the archway is only seen as a matter of mensuration, not felt as a poetical impression, as it would have been if the labors of the constructor had been supplemented 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 successions of withdrawal, instead of being merely tunnelled through the mass; if the intrados of the arch itself had been accentuated by modelling, instead of being weakened by the actual recession of its voussoirs behind the plane of the wall.

The approaches themselves are greatly impressive, as indeed the towers are also, by magnitude and massiveness. 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 unemphasized 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 mechanical 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 horizontal. 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 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. Imitations in cast iron of stone capitals surmount and emphatically 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 integral portion of the great work itself. There is nothing 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 journal 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 inexpressive, 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 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 interplay 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 architecture, 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 relation 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 dictates. 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 architect who pursued his calling in the spirit and with the skill of the mediæval builders of whom we have been speaking, who knew in his province the lesson the engineer 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.

produced any manifestations that can be called monumental. 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 temples 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 structures 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 æsthetic 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 American cathedral, 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 function 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 exercised, they feel at every turn the pressure of the utilitarian spirit. They are required to “accommodate” 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 sanitary plumbing preside over their labors, necessarily to the greater or less detriment of architecture. The features that give dignity to the minsters of the Middle 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 building 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 considerable 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 mediæval 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 culmination of its interior design, as it can scarcely be said

to be the centre of “congregational worship.” The old cathedrals are most admirably adapted to be the theatres of ecclesiastical processions and pageants; and although the Episcopal Church has a more highly developed 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 modern 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 mediæval 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 nations, 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 mediæval, 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 mediæval 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 generation the popular need which the mediæval minsters were meant to answer as it is shown to travellers on one of the great feasts of the Church in Toledo or Seville. The tardy completion of Cologne under the auspices of a Protestant emperor, and by the contributions of Protestant Germany, not as any longer the temple of the national faith, but as an architectural monument of which the German people have reason to be proud, and the completion of which is a monument also of the union of Germany, more fitly represents the modern attitude of mind respecting cathedrals.

An American Protestant church nearly as long as Cologne (and such is the dimension proposed for the Cathedral of New York) is obviously far beyond the limits of a convenient auditorium, and beyond the ritual requirements of the Episcopal Church. In such a structure the space occupied by the largest congregation that can be assembled within the sound of a single voice is but a fragment, and such a congregation itself but an incident to be recognized and provided for, indeed, but by no means to be allowed to become the chief object of design. But the aim of these remarks has been to show that it is by its success as an architectural monument that the cathedral must be justified, if it is to be justified at all. In this point of view the very excess, which in any utilitarian point of view is wasteful, becomes an element of impressiveness as being an emphatic rejection in a building erected to the glory of God, of “the nicely calculated less or more” that is suitable and inevitable to buildings erected primarily for the use of man.

II

Mr. Richardson’s design for the Cathedral of All-Saints at Albany is herewith so fully illustrated as to enable the architect to estimate the effect the interior would have had in execution, and the untrained reader to form an impression of the exterior effect, which, however

incomplete, can scarcely be misleading. The design is, perhaps, the most suggestive contribution that has thus far been made to the solution of the architectural problem of a modern cathedral which the diocese of New York has undertaken. At all events, the influence of it was more easy to be traced in the designs for that work than the influence of any building actually 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 executed works of its author--qualities that have so impressed themselves upon the younger generation of American architects that there is scarcely a contemporary work of importance that does not betray his influence, and that the Provençal Romanesque, in which his personal power of design was manifested, may already 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 contribution 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 limitation. 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 “seating capacity” still so important, that the accommodation of the congregation became a main object rather than an incident of the plan from which the structure proceeds.