Architecture

In varying degree Romantic Classicism left its mark on all the major cities of Europe. Paris without the Napoleonic monuments that Louis Philippe brought to completion is inconceivable, while Karlsruhe, Munich, Petersburg, and Edinburgh owe most of their architectural interest to this period.

In the New World, where the independence of the principal colonies of the European nations, British, Spanish, and Portuguese, was generally established in this period or just before it, one might expect that Romantic Classicism would have made a still more conspicuous contribution to the architectural scene. Yet the very youth of most of the countries of the New World, settled though many of them had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also the strong cultural links that they still maintained with the ancient traditions of their several homelands, tended to hold them back from entering fully into the new international movement of the day in architecture. What national libraries, moreover, were yet needed in Venezuela or Colombia, what sculpture galleries in the American Middle West? Columns and obelisks, if not triumphal arches, rose—frequently very belatedly—to celebrate national heroes of the various wars of independence; but outside the eastern United States the still very simple organization of society and the primitive means of transport required neither the institutional edifices of France—markets, hospitals, and prisons—nor the new railway stations of England.^[82]

Yet in the United States, and not alone along the eastern seaboard, the period of Romantic Classicism left a very rich architectural deposit. The monuments of real distinction range all the way from such a church as Latrobe’s Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore (Plate 5), one of the very finest ecclesiastical edifices of the first half of the century to be seen anywhere, to Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia of 1823-35, the first to be planned on the radial cellular system (Figure 11). Studied and published by the English penologist William Crawford as well as by Demetz and Blouet,^[83] this provided a new functional concept for penal architecture influential abroad from the time that Gilbert projected his Nouvelle Force Prison in the late thirties. Haviland’s prison was Castellated like Lebas’s Petite Roquette, not Grecian in detail; his New York prison of 1836-8, however, was Egyptian in detail, to which it owed its curious nickname, ‘The Tombs’. That both Latrobe and Haviland were English-born and English-trained is certainly significant; the latter, who was a cousin of the painter Haydon and a pupil of H. L. Elmes’s father James (1782-1862), had first tried his luck in Petersburg.

The characteristic and almost universal use of Grecian forms in domestic building, however, in many parts of the country continuing down to the Civil War of 1861-5, was the result of no foreign influence. Moreover, the Grecian details were not drawn by most architects and builders from the great basic treatise of Stuart and Revett, available in America only to a very few, but at second hand from the local Builders’ Guides^[84] prepared by Haviland in Philadelphia, Asher Benjamin (1773-1845) in Boston, Minard Lafever (1798-1854) in New York, and various others. Such authors consciously Americanized what they borrowed from European sources in order to adapt Classical masonry forms to the ubiquitous wooden construction of the American countryside.

There are two levels of Romantic Classicism in America. Work of the upper professional level is found chiefly in the big eastern cities where architects operated who were either themselves foreign-born and foreign-trained or else pupils and emulators of such. The lower vernacular level is more conspicuous in America than in Europe because it includes a much greater proportion of building production than in older countries, where so many structures of earlier periods remain extant. ‘Carpenter’s Grecian’, so to call it, represents the perhaps naïve, but culturally significant, determination of all who built to exploit, in some degree at least, the modern style of their day.

The frontiersman in the Oregon of 1850 when raising a tavern in the Willamette Valley thus shared with the new and old royalties of Europe the satisfaction of architectural patronage. Moreover, like so many English gentlemen of the eighteenth century or such a nineteenth-century prince as Frederick William IV, he often took a hand at design himself. In this he was assisted by memories of the relatively settled towns he had left behind in the Middle West, themselves largely products of this period architecturally, and also by the Builders’ Guides issuing from the east in recurrent editions.

It was not alone the transient patronage of a Corsican soldier, for a few brief years heir to Louis XIV and overlord of Europe, nor the Building Committee of an autocrat on the banks of the Neva controlling all public and private architecture in an Imperial capital for a quarter of a century, that really established Romantic Classicism as the last universal style before that of our own day. It is the fact that Boston architects and builders, when Quincy granite (that most perfect of Romantic Classical building materials) became readily available in the mid twenties, arrived at a rational sort of trabeated design as distinguished as Schinkel’s; while three thousand miles to the west, and a quarter of a century later, amateur builders working in wood produced almost the same sort of ‘pilastrades’, simplified well beyond the Americanized paradigms of Greek antae they found in the plates of Asher Benjamin’s books, as Schinkel had in Berlin.

The Grecian writ ran far south to Buenos Aires in Latin America, where the broad portico of the cathedral, designed by the French engineer Prosper Catelin and built in 1822, follows closely Grand Prix designs of the 1790s; and deep into the Antipodes as well where Australia moved like the United States into nationhood and into the Greek Revival at much the same time, but at a slower pace and with less sophistication.

Washington, as the greatest fiat city of the period, might well have been, rather than Edinburgh, the Romantic Classical city par excellence. Even so, as it was laid out by a French engineer in the 1790s the prototype of its plan was not the Baroque city but the French hunting park. And L’Enfant envisaged for it no walled-in streets and squares but rather the isolated block-like structures that once stood around his ‘circles’ as some still stand around Fischer’s Karolinenplatz in Munich. In Washington, moreover, from 1803 when Jefferson made him Surveyor of Public Buildings until 1817, Latrobe generally had his headquarters; there his pupil Mills became Government Architect and Engineer in 1836, retaining the post until 1851.

The great monuments of the thirties still stand in Washington, mostly designed by Mills himself at the peak of his career. But at the Capitol (Plate 82A), rising at the head of the main axis of the city, the Romantic Classical elements of the edifice completed in 1827 by Bulfinch are now all but invisible between and below the wings and the dome added after 1851 by Thomas U. Walter (1804-87). Hoban’s White House, moreover, on the cross axis, remains, despite its restoration by Latrobe after the War of 1812 and two twentieth-century campaigns of enlargement and reconstruction, a quite Anglo-Palladian—indeed, almost Gibbsian—work. These focal edifices largely belie the Romantic Classical ideals so boldly epitomized in the tallest of all nineteenth-century obelisks, Mills’s Washington Monument. This was designed in 1833, begun in 1848, and not completed until 1884, when T. L. Casey, an Army engineer, sharpened the pitch of the pyramidon and crowned it with solid aluminium.

Immediately beside the White House, however, the Grecian granite of Mills’s Treasury (Plate 38A), worthy of Playfair if not of Schinkel, is overshadowed by the former State, War and Navy Department Building with its tremendous Second Empire plasticity (Plate 82B). Begun in 1836, when Mills received his official appointment, the Treasury was largely completed by 1842; the west wing was added by Isaiah Rogers (1800-69) in 1862-5 following the original design.

Mills’s career got under way decades before he was called to Washington (see Chapter 1). Churches in Philadelphia, Richmond, and Baltimore occupied him first, of which the most notable is the octagonal Monumental Church in Richmond begun in 1812. This is an austere structure with a strongly geometrical organization of the elements, but much less suave and refined than Latrobe’s Baltimore Cathedral. Polygonal planning also gives original character to his Insane Asylum of 1821-5 in Columbia, S.C.; but this has, at the front, a giant Greek Doric portico such as was just becoming even more conventional in America than in Europe at this time.

In an age so monumentally-minded it was a much earlier work, for which Mills won the competition in 1814, the monument erected in honour of Washington at Baltimore in 1815-29, that first made his national reputation. This was the first giant column to be erected in the New World. Superbly placed on a square podium of almost Egyptian severity at the centre of cruciform Mt Vernon Place, this Doric shaft is one of the most effective of the many that this period produced, even if it lacks the megalomaniac scale of his later obelisk in Washington. Mills claimed credit also for proposing the obelisk form for the Bunker Hill Monument^[85] which Solomon Willard (1783-1861) erected in Charlestown, Mass., in 1825-43.

In Washington Mills’s Government buildings include, besides the Treasury and the Monument, the Patent Office and the old Post Office Department, both begun in 1839. These are sober masonry edifices of wholly fireproof construction incorporating much vaulting. They are dominated by Grecian porticoes, like the Treasury, but without that more conspicuously sited structure’s peristyles along the sides. Mills’s smaller custom houses in various seaboard towns are simple and massive blocks of granite ashlar, the best preserved today being that in New London, Conn. These provided worthy symbols of Federal authority among the slighter edifices of wood and brick that filled the seaports of this period. Like Latrobe, Mills was as much engineer as architect, which helps to explain his preoccupation with fireproof construction; moreover, lighthouses and waterworks figured prominently in his total production.^[86]

Mills, more than anyone else, set the high standard of design and construction for Federal buildings that was fortunately maintained by his successors until after the Civil War. These were Ammi B. Young (1800-74), who took over the Government post^[87] in 1852, and Rogers, who followed him ten years later in 1862. In remote San Francisco the Grecian rule in Federal architecture continued very late, as the U.S. Mint there of 1869-74 rather surprisingly indicates. This was possibly designed by Rogers just before his death even though A. B. Mullet had succeeded him in office in 1865.

Related to the Romantic Classicism of Washington is certain Virginia work. Arlington House, as remodelled by the English-born and English-trained Hadfield, rises just across the Potomac River on a high hill-crest; by its tremendously overscaled Paestum-like temple portico, added in 1826 to give grandeur to a modest earlier mansion, this provides a more monumental note in the Washington scene than anything of this period inside the city except Mills’s obelisk and his Treasury.

Just outside Charlottesville, Jefferson, after his retirement from the Presidency, devoted himself architecturally as well as educationally from 1817 until his death to the organization of the University of Virginia and the construction of its buildings. The layout, with pavilions for the various professors’ use linked by porticoed galleries behind which the students’ rooms are placed, culminated at the upper end in the Library and was originally open^[88] to the view at the bottom (Figure 12). Although most of the pavilions reflect earlier stages of Romantic Classicism—if not usually the Anglo-Palladian with which Jefferson’s architectural career had begun half a century earlier—this is a more remarkable entity than his Virginia Capitol. Perhaps it has a lesser general historical importance, yet it is certainly not without special significance for America. This is most notably true of one of the pavilions whose design was suggested to Jefferson by Latrobe in 1819. Here for the first time a modern American dwelling, and one of quite modest size—for these pavilions were used as houses for the professors as well as providing classrooms on the ground storey—was encased within the shell of a prostyle Greek temple. Moreover, Jefferson accomplished this rather more successfully than Beaumont in France in the late eighteenth century at the Temple de Silence, or Wilkins in England at Grange Park in 1809.

Not the least successful among the innumerable imitations of the Roman Pantheon, the building which originally served as the Library of the University, built in 1822-6, dominated the two ranges of colonnade-linked pavilions (Plate 38B). Here more drastically than by Wilkins at Downing College or Ramée at Union, the earlier Anglo-Saxon patterns of educational architecture were reconstituted in Romantic Classical guise, yet the University of Virginia did not have a very considerable influence, then or later. The central group at Amherst College in Massachusetts—two dormitories of 1821 and 1822 and a chapel between of 1827—offers a modest group of quite different but equally notable quality on a splendid hill-crest site (Plate 45). At other colleges only individual structures usually survive from this period.

The temple house, initiated by Jefferson and Latrobe, had a tremendous success with builders in the thirties and forties, particularly in the new territories west of the Alleghenies. But the finest and most paradigmatic came rather earlier and were architect-designed. Ithiel Town (1784-1844), for example, built the Bowers House in Northampton, Mass., in 1825-6 with an Ionic portico on the main block and fronted the lower side wings with antae. The big Corinthian Russell house, a pure temple with no side wings—the present wing was added later—rose in Middletown, Conn., to the design of his partner, A. J. Davis (1803-92), in 1828.

From such a ‘Parthenon’ as Berry Hill in Virginia, built by its owner James Coles Bruce in 1835-40, which is flanked by two lodges also of temple form, to innumerable more modest houses in the older towns of Ohio and Michigan, the roster of such edifices is infinitely extensive. It is also surprisingly varied in scale and in the materials used—most, but not all, are of white-painted wood—as also in the handling of the dominating columnar porticoes. In the South, for example, the characteristic plantation houses of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi are peripteral but unpedimented, with external galleries splitting the height of the giant columns. Natchez in Mississippi has several fine examples; in Louisiana, Greenwood near St Francisville of about 1830 may be specifically mentioned, and also Oak Alley of 1836 at Vacherie near New Orleans.

The most ambitious Grecian houses of the Deep South are often very late in date, and architects were rarely employed to design them. Moreover, Greek detail was adopted in the South only very slowly and rarely used with the correctness of the Northern builders, who leaned so heavily on the plates of the orders in the books of Benjamin and others. Belle Meade, near Nashville, of 1853, being by the distinguished Philadelphia architect Strickland, is something of an exception in several ways; it had, for example, a fine portico of square antae executed in white marble that was almost Schinkelesque. Vast Belle Grove at White Castle, Louisiana, built by Henry Howard in 1857, was probably more effective in the romantically ruinous state in which it existed for many years before its final destruction than in its pristine condition, so confusedly eclectic was the general composition, with Italianate as well as Classical elements quite casually mixed.

Unpedimented porticoes are not unknown in the North, both east and west of the Alleghenies, as in the Levi Lincoln house of 1836 (once in Worcester, Mass., now moved to nearby Sturbridge) by Elias Carter (1781-1864) with its convex-fluted Doric order. Such original touches, which many carpenters introduced out of plain ignorance and more sophisticated architects developed out of a conscious desire to nationalize and personalize even such absolute paradigms as those of the Greek orders, often lend variety and piquancy to the mode. The finest Grecian houses, such as Elmhyrst at One Mile Corner, Newport, R.I., built probably by Russell Warren (1783-1860) about 1833, certainly owe their originality to the studied intentions of architects. This house, in particular, has a façade composed in overlapping planes that is not unworthy of Cockerell (Plate 42B). On the other hand, the Hermitage near Savannah, Georgia, designed by Charles B. Cluskey c. 1830, could almost be by Schinkel, so simple and pure is its design.

Trained architects, on the whole, were too rationalistic or too adventurous to follow closely the plain temple model in domestic or institutional work. Walter presumably surrounded Andalusia, the home of the philhellene banker Nicholas Biddle outside Philadelphia, with a Doric temple-shell in 1833 only against his own better judgement. In 1833-47 he also built for Girard College in Philadelphia, of which Biddle was the trustee who called the tune, an enormous Corinthian temple. Inside this he incorporated a variety of educational functions only with considerable difficulty, but he vaulted all the interiors in the manner of Latrobe and Mills in order to provide a completely fireproof structure.^[89] Curiously enough, this was one of the first American buildings to be published abroad,^[90] thus rivalling Haviland’s prison, but it attracted no emulators in Europe. By the thirties, of course, these buildings by Walter were no novelties in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, the former colonial metropolis and briefly the national capital, was much more than Washington the cultural centre of the country in the early decades of the century. Here Latrobe had had his start, significantly with a bank in the form of an Ionic temple. Now in 1818 Strickland,^[91] a native-born American and quite untravelled, won in competition the commission for building the Branch Bank of the United States with a much more archaeologically correct temple. Like various European and British public monuments of the period, but unlike any bank abroad, this is a marble Parthenon. But the various needs of the banking business were skilfully provided for inside, and the principal barrel-vaulted interior is very fine indeed. Built in 1819-24, this bank (later a Custom House) rivals the Bavarian Walhalla and the Scottish National Monument, though lacking their splendid hill-top sites. It was just the thing to establish Strickland’s national reputation. But his Merchants’ Exchange in Philadelphia of 1832-4, with a rounded end and a trabeated ground storey, provides more interesting and impressive evidence of his talent, perhaps the greatest of the generation following Latrobe in America (Plate 40).

Strickland’s latest major work, the State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee, of 1845-9, still a temple but with various accretions, has the high site his bank lacked, but it suffers otherwise from the general deterioration of the sense of Grecian style after the mid thirties, a deterioration quite as evident in American architecture as in European. This Tennessee temple was the last but one of a series of state capitols that followed the model of Jefferson’s at Richmond, Virginia, rather than Bulfinch’s dome-crowned Boston State House or the national Capitol in Washington. The first example that was correctly Greek in detail seems to have been that for Connecticut in New Haven; it was built by Town and his partner Davis in 1827-31, and has long since been demolished. However, that designed by Gideon Shryock (1802-80) in Frankfort, Kentucky, was going up at about the same time.

In 1831-5 Davis built a larger and grander Greek Doric temple (no longer extant) as a Capitol for Indiana at Indianapolis, but provided it with a small central dome. The latest of all the temples built to serve as state capitols was a very modest one of 1849 at Benicia, California, where the columnar portico was reduced to two Doric columns in antis—it is worth noting that this was erected in the very year that Sutter’s gold strike first put California on the map of the world.

Other state capitols of this period are Grecian but not of temple form; a good example is that Town & Davis built at Raleigh, North Carolina, which was begun in 1833. The finest of all is that for Ohio at Columbus,^[92] begun in 1839-40 and carried to completion over the years 1848-61. Here the giant ‘pilastrade’, for which columns are substituted in the central third of the front, has a Schinkel-like directness and severity (Plate 39A). Not so happy is the flat-topped central lantern, which is also surrounded by a pilastrade. In conscientious pursuit of trabeated consistency the architects thus sought to mask the rounded shape of the dome within, as had been tried in various French projects of the late eighteenth century and by Schinkel in the Altes Museum already.

After Philadelphia, Boston was the architectural metropolis of this period; and from Boston, beginning in 1827, issued the later treatises of Benjamin purveying the Grecian orders to carpenters and builders all over the North and the Middle West. Here Bulfinch, however, established as the leading architect in the 1790s, long remained faithful to the ideals of Chambers and Adam (see Chapter 1).

At University Hall, built for Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., in 1813-15, Bulfinch used granite for the ashlar of the walls as he had done for his Boston City Hall of 1810, but the white-painted wooden trim is not yet Grecian. The Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, also of granite, was designed by him in 1816-17, just before he left for Washington to take over from Latrobe supervision of the construction of the Capitol. The hospital building (now known as the Bulfinch Pavilion) as executed by Alexander Parris (1780-1852) in 1818-20 is certainly a mature Romantic Classical edifice if not a typically Grecian one. Above the plain pediment of the central portico a square attic with corner chimneys supports the saucer dome, and the long side wings with three ranges of unframed windows display the fine granite ashlar of Boston in all its cold pride. Compared to Latrobe, however, Bulfinch remained a provincial if not a colonial designer, high as is the intrinsic quality of his best work.

A younger generation, hitherto much influenced by Bulfinch’s established manner, took over leadership in Boston on his departure for Washington. Parris soon provided the first Greek temple in conservative New England when he built St Paul’s Church (now the Anglican Cathedral) in Tremont Street in 1819-21. Where Strickland’s contemporary Philadelphia bank was Doric and of marble, this is Ionic with the portico executed in the Acquia Creek sandstone from Virginia which was then being used so much in Washington. Solomon Willard carved the capitals. Parris’s Stone Temple of 1828, the Unitarian ‘Church of the Presidents’—the two Adams presidents—in Quincy, Mass., is not at all a temple in form but more comparable to the Grecian churches built in England in this decade. The Stone Temple outranks most of them in dignity, however, because of the superbly appropriate local material of which it is built. It was from this town that the Quincy granite came that was employed for the best Boston buildings of the next thirty years and more, and this church was a relatively early instance of its monumental use. Quincy granite had become more readily available after the first American railway was built from the quarries to the seashore by Willard solely to facilitate bringing it out by water.^[93]

The first notable use of this granite away from Quincy had been for the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Mass., built by Willard in 1825-43. Not only Mills, as has been mentioned, but the sculptor Horatio Greenough^[94] and also Parris claimed, and perhaps deserve, some credit for the particular form of this simple but grandiose obelisk, which rivalled those of the Old World a decade before Mills’s in Washington was designed. On its completion, a steam-operated lift or elevator was provided in 1844 capable of carrying six people; this was one of the earliest examples of an important technical device that would later influence architecture profoundly (see Chapter 14).

Granite imposed rigid restrictions on detailing. But the new generation knew how to make of those restrictions an opportunity for developing a highly original sort of basic classicism such as even the most determined European rationalists rarely approached. The houses at 39-40 Beacon Street in Boston, now occupied by the Women’s City Club, and the David Sears house at No. 42, now the Somerset Club (Plate 43B)—the latter by Parris and of 1816, the former probably by him and of 1818—as also the granite terrace at Nos. 70-75, probably by Benjamin, are good examples of domestic work of this period. More important is Parris’s Quincy (properly Faneuil Hall) Market in Boston, designed in 1823 for Mayor Joseph Quincy as the central feature of a considerable urbanistic development on the site of earlier docks. This domed and porticoed structure lacks the geometrical severity of the Sears house with its great bow on the front and its superbly placed scroll panel; but in the Market House Parris not only used cast iron for the internal supports but also experimented on the exterior with a trabeated framework of monolithic granite piers and lintels. The same sort of ‘granite skeleton’ construction (so to call it) was also used but with greater delicacy of proportion and elegance of finish—note the Soanic incised detail of the wooden window-frames—for the commercial buildings^[95] which Parris designed and that various lessees shortly built along the streets that flank the Market House to the north and the south (Plate 112B). This was one of the major structural innovations of the period (see Chapter 14).

Within a few years other Boston architects and builders were currently using this sort of construction, and it soon spread to several New England cities. However, more typical of the urban ambition of the twenties and thirties than the destroyed block of 1824 in Providence by J. H. Green (1777-1850), which followed line for line Parris’s commercial work, are two other buildings there. The Providence Arcade of 1828 by Warren has not one, but two terminal porticoes of Ionic columns executed in granite and also a fine interior consisting of raised side galleries under an iron-and-glass roof. Few extant galleries of this decade in Europe are as notable in scale and in finish. The Washington Buildings of 1843 by James C. Bucklin (1801-90), who had assisted Warren on the Arcade, had a plain range of three storeys of window-pierced red-brick wall above a trabeated granite ground storey, the whole dominated by a central pedimented feature (Plate 39B). This was a commercial project as grand as any in contemporary Europe in scale, in materials, and in finish, although without the originality of the trabeated all-granite bow-front of Rogers’s contemporary Brazier’s Buildings on State Street in Boston. Yet Bucklin’s Westminster Presbyterian Church in Providence of 1846 is a straight Greek Ionic temple like so many other non-Anglican edifices of this period in England and America.

Where Romantic Classicism, and more specifically the Greek Revival, found its noblest opportunities in Europe in public monuments, in America after the days of Latrobe it was rather commercial, institutional, and even industrial^[96] commissions that stimulated architects and builders to original achievement, while public work grew more and more conventional. For instance, the Lippitt Woollen Mill of 1836 in Woonsocket, R.I., and the Governor Harris Manufactory at Harris, R.I., dating from as late as 1851 can both be properly described as ‘in the Grecian vernacular’. They are most admirably proportioned and very soundly built, with walls of random ashlar masonry and boldly scaled wooden trim, very plain, yet of generically Greek character. The discipline of Romantic Classicism accorded well with the requirements of industrial building; not until the present century would factories of comparable architectural quality be built. Moreover, they were often complemented by consonant low-cost housing, as in the extant mill village at White Rock, R.I., of 1849.

No European public edifice has a grander Greek Doric portico than that which dominates the tremendous four-storey front block of the Lunatic Asylum in Utica, N.Y., of 1837-43, designed by no architect, according to the records, but by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, William Clarke (Plate 46). Still later, in 1850, after the Grecian mode was passé with most architects if not with the general public, Davis built in the Renaissance Revival mode that he called ‘Tuscan’ the Insane Asylum at Raleigh, North Carolina; this is distinguished by his characteristic arrangement of the windows in tall vertical bands. Such American institutions are not at all unworthy of comparison with the best French productions of the period by Gilbert and others, although generally of rather smaller size (Plate 20).

Hotels in Europe had not as yet received much architectural elaboration, nor did they in general before the mid century. Such English hotels of Grecian pretension as the Queen’s by W. C. and R. Jearrad at Cheltenham, which opened in 1837, or the Great Western in Bristol by R. S. Pope (1781-?), opened two years later, are rather exceptional, being located at spas, and in any case a decade later in date than the first notable American example. It was in Boston, at the Tremont House built in 1828-9, a Grecian granite structure of dignified grandeur externally (Plate 41) and of considerable functional elaboration internally (Figure 13), that Rogers and his clients consciously initiated a new standard of hotel design. For thirty years Rogers himself, in various hotels from New Orleans—the St Charles—to Cincinnati—the Burnet House—all long ago demolished, personally maintained and, at least in terms of functional organization, continued to raise that standard. Not for nothing did the big new London hotels of a generation later label their bars and their barber-shops ‘American’.

In 1832 Rogers began the Astor House in New York; when completed in 1836 this already outranked the Tremont House in every way. Not least extraordinary must have been the elaborately fan-vaulted hall. This reflected that eclectic interest in Gothic of which Rogers’s wooden Unitarian Church of 1833 in Cambridge, Mass., provides extant evidence. The last hotel that he built was the Maxwell House in Nashville, Tennessee, of 1854-60.

Rogers’s pre-eminence at hotel design was signalized from the first by the publication in 1830 of a monograph on the Tremont House;^[97] thus the hotel joined the prison as a type of building in which American influence became important internationally. But Rogers’s practice was by no means confined to hotels; among other things he gave both Boston and New York their Merchants Exchanges long before he became Supervising Architect in Washington. The colonnade of the latter, a little like that of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, still survives at the base of McKim, Mead & White’s First National City Bank in Wall Street to illustrate Rogers’s high competence at handling a standard Romantic Classical theme.

Resort hotels repeated the same Grecian themes in wood, their columns being often much attenuated in order to rise three and four storeys above the circumambient verandas. However, an early example, the first Ocean House of 1841 at Newport, R.I., had a colonnade only two storeys tall set against the main four-storey block. On the Atlantic House there of 1844 the fourth storey occupied the broad Greek entablature surrounding the entire main block, but the front portico of elongated Ionic columns was only hexastyle. Both were burnt many years ago, but later examples of inferior quality remain in several forgotten spas and mountain resorts of the period, particularly in New York State.

New York City was drawing architectural talent in these years from other cities. Before Rogers moved there from Boston in 1834, mid way in the Astor House campaign, Town & Davis had arrived from Connecticut. Davis’s Sub-Treasury in Wall Street begun in 1834,^[98] however, is rather less successful than the earlier New England houses of similar temple form that he and Town had designed. Davis was himself more notably a protagonist of the Picturesque, despite all the very large and prominent Grecian buildings for which he was responsible (see Chapter 6). Yet his Colonnade Row in Lafayette Street of 1832, a terrace all of freestone with a free-standing giant Corinthian colonnade, equals in grandeur anything of the period that London or Edinburgh have to offer (Plate 42A). More typical of New York in this period than Colonnade Row, and of uncertain authorship, is the terrace of red-brick Grecian houses built on the north side of Washington Square in the thirties, of which a few have survived on sufferance the vandalous encroachments of New York University.

Some of the finest Greek houses are by provincial architects. One such is stone-built Hyde Hall in Cooperstown, N.Y., very crisp and severe as it was remodelled in 1833 by Philip Hooker (1766-1836) of Albany, who had built it originally in 1811. Still others are of uncertain authorship, notably the Alsop house of 1838 in Middletown, Conn. This is a symmetrical Grecian villa almost worthy of Schinkel’s Potsdam, with very fine murals on the exterior as well as inside. The Alsop house (now the Davison Art Centre of Wesleyan University) was probably designed by a relative of the family who had access to the resources of the Town & Davis office; however, the painters employed were Italian or German. The Wooster-Boalt house of 1848 in Norwalk, Ohio, indicates the late continuance of real restraint and sophistication of design in the Middle West, something already lost in the sumptuous mansions of New Orleans and the Deep South. But many Middle Western houses illustrate rather the surprising elasticity of Carpenters’ Grecian.

A mode that approaches the German Rundbogenstil—indeed, in the work of such foreign-trained architects as the Prague-born Leopold Eidlitz (1823-1908) relatively authentic examples of that mode—was not uncommon in the America of the mid century.^[99] The Astor Library in Lafayette Street opposite Colonnade Row, built by A. Saelzer in 1849, was a good example. Less successful was Appleton Chapel at Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., by Paul Schulze (1827-97), who sent over the drawings from Germany, and later settled in America. Begun in 1856, this was a very reduced version of Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche in Munich with only one tower. However, the largest and finest example was by a precocious student at Brown University, Thomas A. Tefft (1826-59).^[100] This was the Union Station in Providence, begun in 1848 and gradually carried out by Bucklin and his partner Talman (Plate 44). This station rivalled in extent and in the distinction and ingenuity of its rather Lombardic Romanesque detailing, simply executed with ordinary red brick, the German ones by Eisenlohr and Bürklein in Baden and Bavaria; without much question it was the finest early station in the New World. Tefft also designed various New England churches of somewhat similar character, all dominated by very tall and simple spires. However, his churches in the East are outrivalled by such a Middle Western example as the Union Methodist in St Louis, built by George I. Barnett (1815-98) in 1852-4. Tefft’s best works, other than the station, are not Rundbogenstil but Barryesque; such is the brownstone Tully-Bowen house on Benefit Street in Providence of 1852-3, for example. Others were building as fine ones there, however. The consistent use of brownstone and red brick well illustrates the sharp reaction that had set in by his time against the pale tones and untextured surfaces of the Greek Revival.

The towered Italian Villa^[101] was introduced by John Notman (1810-65) in Bishop George W. Doane’s house at Burlington, NJ., in 1837 and soon actively propagandized by A. J. Downing (1815-52) in his influential books (see Chapters 6 and 15). Indeed, the Barryesque Renaissance mode was also probably first introduced by the Scottish-born Notman at the Philadelphia Atheneum^[102] built in 1845-7 (Plate 47A). These non-Grecian, yet still basically Romantic Classical, modes were in relatively common use by 1850, though not very much earlier. Young, for example, who had made his reputation with the saucer-domed but otherwise Greek Custom House^[103] that he built in Boston in 1837-47, substituted a somewhat Barryesque manner for Mills’s Grecian as the current mode for Federal buildings^[104] when he became Supervising Architect in 1853. But neither Notman nor Young was a Barry—nor even as competent at such design as the youthful Tefft—and the most notable result of the waning of the Greek Revival in the forties, in the East at any rate—it waned much more slowly in the South and West—was the rise of a rather considerable variety of Picturesque modes of suburban-house design, of which the Italianate was only one (see Chapters 6 and 15). In cities, the shift from the characteristic granite or, more usually, hard red brick with white trim to the chocolate tones of brownstone, used alone or with brick, is much more indicative of a general change of taste than any widespread exploitation of Renaissance forms.

A fine relatively early Italian Villa such as the Stebbins house of 1849 on Crescent St, off Maple St, in Springfield, Mass., by Henry A. Sykes belongs to the realm of Romantic Classicism like Schinkel’s or Barry’s country houses in this mode (Plate 43A). But on the whole the Italian Villa in America is rather one of the many vehicles of the Picturesque reaction against a doctrinaire Greek Revival. This fact was well illustrated in one by Eidlitz, also in Springfield, on Maple Street, that was built of brick with much wooden ‘gingerbread’ of a vaguely Tyrolean order and latterly, at least, painted a warm pink where Sykes’s villa is painted white with brown trim. Sykes’s originality within the Italian Villa mode is most happily illustrated by the former observatory at Amherst College, now known as the Octagon, whose stuccoed polygonal elements stand in such interesting contrast to the severe row of red-brick dormitories and chapel behind. Not often did the mid century add so effectively to groups of buildings produced in earlier decades.

Just as the Iberian peninsula was in general devoid of significant architectural activity in the first half of the nineteenth century, so in the Spanish and Portuguese lands beyond the seas there came no early wave of autochthonous Romantic Classicism to submerge and succeed the Baroque that had flourished there to the end of the colonial period and beyond. In Brazil Dom Pedro, later the first Brazilian Emperor, under whose rule the centre of gravity of Portuguese civilization moved from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, imported in 1816 a group of French artists. They were expected to found a new post-Baroque Brazilian culture much as Alexander I’s architects had done a little earlier in Russia. One was the French architect Grandjean de Montigny, author with Famin of that most influential work L’Architecture toscane to which all Europe turned for quattrocento models, who had been employed by Jerome Bonaparte in Westphalia as long as Napoleon’s Empire lasted. He erected in Rio in 1826 the first home for the new Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, founded of course on the model of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, the Market, and the extant Custom House. He also trained a group of Brazilians who gave local architectural production an Empire flavour that lasted until it was superseded well after the mid century by a wave of Second Empire influence.

In vernacular building traditional treatments were often maintained in Brazil, notably the use of azulejos (glazed tiles) for wall surfaces and of rich painted colour for the ubiquitous stucco. But more sophisticated work can be very French indeed. For example, the Itamaratí Palace in Rio of 1851-4 by J. M. J. Rebelo, a pupil of Grandjean de Montigny, might well be taken for a hôtel particulier erected in the new quarters of Paris in the earlier decades of the century (Plate 47B). Beautifully restored, this now houses the Brazilian Foreign Office—one says ‘Itamaratí’ as one says ‘Quai d’Orsay’. Rebelo also built the Summer Palace at Petrópolis. The Santa Isabel Theatre at Recife, Pernambuco, built about 1845, which is so like a French provincial theatre of this period, is by another French architect who had settled in Brazil in 1840, L.-L. Vauthier.

In Chile, on the other side of the South American continent, C.-F. Brunet-Debaines (1799-1855), a brother of the architect who built the Museum and Library at Le Havre, was employed on government work in Santiago. But the schools that such French architects assisted in founding had more significance than the few buildings they were able to erect. Henceforth, Latin America would be less dependent in architecture on the Spanish and Portuguese homelands than on Paris. The character of the larger cities outside their colonial cores—if, indeed, more than a few early monuments remain extant—was henceforth determined by this fact. However, it is the Second Empire and not the First which left the more visible mark; for the various capitals, some like Montevideo in Uruguay almost without earlier architectural history, saw their greatest expansion in the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth.

The establishment of a Latin American architecture of really autochthonous character, as distinguished from the continuance of various local vernacular building traditions, had to await the present period (see Chapters 22 and 25). Once again French influence had a significant role to play. But between the arrival of Grandjean de Montigny in 1816 and Le Corbusier’s first visit to South America in 1929 that continent took little part in the major architectural developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the United States, building on the professional foundations laid by Latrobe and exploiting to the full new structural materials and methods, rose before the nineteenth century was over to a position of world leadership (see Chapters 13, 14, and 15).

What is true of Latin America is not altogether untrue of the British Dominions in the New World and at the Antipodes, as also of various British Colonies throughout the rest of the world. No French architects were imported, of course, and the links with England remained very close and strong. As in all colonial situations, however, the transfer of new ideas from the homeland was slow and inefficient and the capacity of émigré architects usually rather low. No Latrobes or Havilands seem to have gone to the Dominions; and the Greek Revival was hardly accepted before the forties, when it was already passing out of favour in the United States.

The first professional to work in Australia, Francis Greenway (1777-1837), who arrived in Sydney in 1814 as a convict and almost at once became Governor Macquarie’s architect, remained faithful in most of his public work to the modes of his eighteenth-century youth in Bristol. But his house of 1822 for Robert Campbell, Jr, in Bligh Street in Sydney showed that he had real skill as a designer of up-to-date Regency villas. Canada had no early architect of comparable ability to serve the British community.

As the western world expanded in the nineteenth century, significant architectural achievement tended to move outwards from the old centres on the Tiber, the Seine, and the Thames; but that movement was always very uneven, and still remains so today. Russia was building more and finer structures of Western European character than Spain and Portugal; while the United States, not yet fantastically disparate in size and population, produced many more productive Romantic Classical architects than either Holland or Sweden. All the same, the architectural leadership of the western world remained for at least a generation longer in the old centres of Europe; our story must return to where it started in order to proceed beyond the mid century or even to complete the account of the period 1810-50.

Romantic Classicism came to no sudden end. If in Vienna a monumental Grecian Parliament house could rise as late as the seventies, so in the desert of Arizona the Crystal Palace Saloon of 1878 at Tombstone is still in the Greek Revival vernacular. From the very first, on the other hand, there was some admixture of the Picturesque in Romantic Classicism. Almost all the architects that have been mentioned, both of the earlier and of the later generation, were more eclectic in their practice and even in their theories than this account of their major works has made altogether evident. But in the main, down into the forties, Romantic Classicism, while increasingly eclectic, remained a coherent style whose canons controlled most of the accepted variants to the Grecian.

The dissolution of the dominant stylistic discipline, hardly completed even in the fifties, had nevertheless begun very early indeed. In terms of historical significance, if not of absolute achievement, the Picturesque rises rapidly in comparative importance from the time of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey in the 1790s. Beside Soane’s crisp Bank interiors it is necessary to carry in the mind’s eye the prophetic image which his renderer J. M. Gandy (1771-1843) provided of them as a Romantic ruin; nor should the vast dream-like Gothic cathedrals that Schinkel made the centre of some of his early paintings be forgotten in the cool presence of his Grecian Schauspielhaus and Museum. Fortunately no one is likely in looking at Barry’s palazzi to forget that they are contemporary with his Gothic Houses of Parliament; one does, however, tend to forget that the career of his associate Pugin as protagonist of the mature Gothic Revival ended well before Barry’s did as the chief English protagonist of the Renaissance Revival. Earlier the Gothic Revival was hardly more than a special aspect of the Picturesque; with Pugin, however, it became a major movement in its own right and actually anti-Picturesque in theory, if rarely so in practice. To a considerable extent, moreover, the Gothic Revival usurped during the forties the centre of the stage in England, if hardly to the same degree in other countries even in the following decades.