Architecture

In the cities of Germany and of Northern Europe generally there were in this period no such comprehensive urbanistic developments as in Paris and Vienna. Some individual public monuments are, perhaps, not inferior to those that Napoleon III and Francis Joseph obtained from their architects; but these are rarely grouped into such coherent entities as the Marktplatz in Karlsruhe of the first quarter of the century or the Ludwigstrasse in Munich of the second quarter. The domestic building of the period is also considerably less consistent in character than in Paris and Vienna.

The architectural scene in Germany was overshadowed by the distinguished achievements of the previous period. The Schinkel tradition, although increasingly corrupted, lasted on almost indefinitely not merely in Prussia but in most German states. Stüler, Schinkel’s ablest disciple in Berlin after the death of the short-lived Persius, remained an internationally respected practitioner. He was employed in Sweden and in Hungary, as has been noted, not to speak of German cities, down to his death in 1865. By him and by many others the Rundbogenstil was employed quite as late as in Austria-Hungary both in the various German states and also in the Scandinavian countries. Such a very large and prominent public building as the Berlin Rathaus of 1859-70 by H. F. Waesemann (1813-79) well indicated the long-continued hold of this mode on German officialdom. Nor was this particularly inferior in quality to much similar work produced in the earlier heyday of the Rundbogenstil before 1850. As in Austria, however, alternative modes were growing increasingly popular, even though none rose to a local dominance comparable to that of revived Renaissance in Vienna. The taste of the period for elaboration, both in general composition and in detail, is everywhere evident regardless of the mode employed.

French influence was not absent; indeed, specifically Second Empire features were perhaps more common than in Austria. G. H. Friedrich Hitzig (1811-81), a former assistant of Schinkel’s, had actually studied in Paris. After Stüler, he was the most prominent and successful architect of the period in Berlin, and in the fifties he built a few mansarded houses there. Along the new Viktoriastrasse in the Tiergarten quarter, where he did a great deal of work in 1855-60, one house among the eight that he built was mansarded; the others and most of those he was erecting near by in the Bellevuestrasse, the Stülerstrasse, and other streets at the same time were, however, in a much elaborated Schinkelesque vein. Suburban houses of the sixties occasionally followed Parisian modes also; but far more were clumsy variants of Schinkel’s and Persius’s Italian Villas, or else in some sort of equally clumsy Gothic.

Public buildings in Germany were only occasionally designed in the mansarded mode and, in general, only after the mid sixties. The Baugewerkschule in Stuttgart, built in 1866-70 by Josef von Egle (1818-99) its director, had projecting centre and end pavilions with crudely Parisian detailing. It is curious to realize that it was contemporary with Leins’s belated but rather distinguished Grecian Königsbau there. In Cologne the High School of 1860-2, and the Stadttheater of 1870-2 by Julius Raschdorf (1823-1914), both destroyed in the last War, were heavily mansarded and very plastically modelled; the latter, at least, on which H. Deutz collaborated with Raschdorf, had some real compositional interest in the tight interlocking of the masses (Plate 77B). Despite their very evidently French character, both were considered by contemporaries to be ‘German Renaissance’—as, for that matter, was Wieleman’s Justizpalast in Vienna—because of the specific precedent of much of the detail; German Renaissance was by this time the latest fashion, but to later eyes these buildings in Cologne were no more characteristic examples of it than the one in Vienna. Raschdorf is better known in any case for his much later Neo-Baroque work, notably the Berlin Cathedral, for which he prepared the design in 1888, although it was not built until 1894-1905.

The Military Hospital by F. Heise in Dresden of 1869 was considerably more French in the strong articulation of the mansarded centre and end pavilions and also in its quite Parisian detailing than Raschdorf’s contemporary buildings in Cologne. More prominent in Dresden by far, however, is the Hoftheater, which is not at all French in character. This was designed in 1871 by Semper after his earlier theatre there had been destroyed by fire; its construction was supervised by Semper’s son Manfred after he settled in Vienna, and completed in 1878. Gone was most of the festive grace and delicacy of his Hamburg and Dresden work of the forties, even though the auditorium was not dissimilar to the one that had been destroyed. Yet in the arrangement of the interior and the disposition of the masses this rivals in clarity of organization the opera-houses of Garnier in Paris and of Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in Vienna. The plans undoubtedly owed a great deal to the elaborate studies Semper had made for Ludwig II in 1865-7 for an opera-house to be built in Munich especially for the production of Wagner’s operas.

The relative importance of Berlin was, of course, rising well before its establishment as the imperial capital in 1871. Friedrich Hitzig’s most considerable public building in Berlin, the Exchange, built in 1859-63 at the same time that the Rathaus was in construction, was neither Schinkelesque nor Rundbogenstil but in a rather academic sort of Late Baroque (Plate 77A). Hitzig seems to have been consciously recalling what Knobelsdorf built for Frederick the Great and thus presaging the more overt Neo-Baroque of the last decades of the century. His later Reichsbank of 1871-6, on the other hand, was in general considerably more Classical despite its banded and diapered walls in two colours of brick.

The public buildings of Martin K. P. Gropius (1824-80) are also indicative of the general stylistic stasis of this period in Germany. His Museum of Decorative Art in Berlin, begun in 1877 and completed in 1881 by Heinrich Schmieden (1835-1913), resembled Hitzig’s houses of the fifties in its Grecian elaboration; it also recalled Klenze’s Hermitage Museum, built more than a generation earlier in Petersburg. Gropius & Schmieden’s still later Gewandhaus in Leipzig of 1880-4, however, is less reminiscent of Schinkel or Klenze and more conventionally academic. This concert hall was renowned for its superb acoustics.

It is easy to forget how much the architects of these decades, apparently obsessed with stylistic elaboration, were also concerned to incorporate in their buildings all sorts of technical advances. Iron may show less than in the previous period, but it was quite consistently used behind the scenes. Central heating, extensive sanitary equipment, vertical transportation, and various other things that are taken for granted today first became accepted necessities in these decades. But it was only in the commercial field—and in England and the United States above all—that such technical innovations influenced architecture very positively or visibly (see Chapter 14), however much they must actually have preoccupied architects who seem today so imitative and retardataire. The Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin by Franz Schwechten (1841-1924), however, built in 1872-80, did represent a real advance over the principal English railway station of this period, St Pancras in London of 1863-76, in the clarity and coherence of its organization. One can hardly say that the shed roof of the Anhalter Bahnhof was in the Rundbogenstil; yet it is much more happily related in scale and shape to the masonry elements of the station than are the two parts of that in London, world-famous nonetheless until the nineties for the unrivalled span of its shed.

Architectural activity in Bavaria was of a very different order. The Ludwigsschlösser,^[204] the country palaces that Ludwig II of Bavaria erected for his private delectation after he succeeded Maximilian II in 1864, are the playthings of a monarch mad about Louis XIV. Linderhof, built in 1870-86, revived a local Bavarian sort of Baroque, and was thus even more premonitory of a favourite German mode of the eighties and nineties than Hitzig’s Berlin Exchange (Plate 84). Herrenchiemsee, first projected as early as 1868 but begun only in 1878, is a direct imitation of Versailles. Neuschwanstein, on the other hand, is a wild Wagnerian fantasy of a medieval castle occupying a superb mountain site.

It must be assumed that the architect of the first two, Georg von Dollmann (1830-95), was little more than the draughting agent of his master’s dreams of grandeur. More interesting than the exteriors are the incredibly rich interiors of Linderhof, operatic recreations of the Bavarian Rococo. Appropriately enough these were designed by Franz von Seitz (1817-83), then director of the Munich State Theatre, who was famous for his stage-sets. At Herrenchiemsee, however, many of the interiors were exact copies of the main apartments of Louis XIV at Versailles. These were executed by Julius Hoffmann (1840-96), who began to work under Dollmann in 1880 and succeeded him in 1884. More original were certain other rooms at Herrenchiemsee designed by F. P. Stulberger after 1883 in an even more elaborate and fantastic Neo-Rococo than those by Seitz at Linderhof.

Ludwig II had another obsession besides the majesty of Louis XIV, and that was the genius of Richard Wagner. This cult is almost nauseatingly reflected at Neuschwanstein, for which Riedel, who had built Schloss Berg in 1849-51, prepared the original design in 1867. Construction there began in 1869, was taken over by Dollmann in 1874, and only completed as regards the exterior in 1881; much of the decoration is still later. Despite Ludwig’s romantic love of the real Romanesque of the Wartburg, Neuschwanstein really differs very little from the fake castles of the first half of the century, except in its very ingenious adaptation to a most precarious site. It is the later interiors, designed by Hoffmann in the early eighties, that attempt to realize the Wagnerian legends both in the architectural detailing and in endless murals. The whole culminates in the Byzantinesque throne room of 1885-6 intended by Ludwig to be a sort of ‘Grail Hall’ from Parsifal. The results of his other obsession are more gratifying to the eye.

Never again would any ruler, however, not even in Germany, be so spendthrift a patron of architecture. Considering the deterioration in quality evident in these palaces and castles of the seventies and eighties from the work done for Ludwig’s predecessor Ludwig I or for Frederick William IV of Prussia in the thirties and forties, this was just as well. Fortunately the activities of William II were less related to the building arts; and Hitler, a thwarted architect, had too little time.

Far more typical of the turn German architecture in general was taking in the seventies than the Ludwigsschlösser were such things as the von Tiele house in Berlin by Gustav Ebe (1834-1916) and Julius Benda (1838-97). In its crawlingly rich German Renaissance detail and its irregularly gabled silhouette this prepared the way far more definitely than Raschdorf’s contemporary Cologne buildings for a veritable flood of such coarse work all over Germany in the next decade. This characteristic German mode has analogies with the English style-phase of the seventies and eighties somewhat perversely known as ‘Queen Anne’; more specifically it often resembles very closely what is called ‘Pont Street Dutch’ in England. But leadership comparable to that provided in England by Webb and Shaw was entirely lacking, and even lesser talent of the order of George’s or Collcutt’s (see Chapter 12).

Usually executed in dark-coloured brick with stone trim, this prime manifestation of the bourgeois ambitions of the Bismarckian Empire produced a spate of buildings of all sorts that have come to look very grim indeed with the accumulated smoke of years. Old photographs indicate that many of them once had a certain lightness and even a quite festive air, Wagnerian in the Meistersinger vein rather than in that of the Ring as at Neuschwanstein. But the materials used were always hard and mechanically handled and the execution of the detail at once fussy and metallic. No positive originality in general composition or in planning made up, as with much comparable work in England, for the anti-architectonic character of the basic approach.

A prominent late example is the Rathaus^[205] in Hamburg built in 1886-97. This vast and turgid edifice contrasts most unhappily with the suave High Renaissance design of Wimmel & Forsmann’s contiguous Exchange built in the thirties. Its tall tower, moreover, has neither the richness of outline of Scott’s on the Nikolaikirche nor the simple directness of de Chateauneuf’s on the Petrikirche, with both of which it still disputes the central position on the Hamburg skyline.

The nationalistic ‘Meistersinger mode’, so to call it, had only too long a life, lasting well into the twentieth century. But it was early challenged by a new modulation of German taste in the eighties, parallel to that which the English also experienced, towards an eighteenth-century revival—here in Germany definitely Neo-Baroque—of which Linderhof was probably the first really sumptuous and striking example. Ebe & Benda early deserted the German Renaissance for a German Baroque at least as chastened as that of Hitzig’s much earlier Exchange when they built their Palais Mosse in Berlin of 1882-4. In 1882 Paul Wallot (1841-1912), who had also worked earlier in the Meistersinger mode, won the competition for the Reichstag Building with an overpoweringly monumental Neo-Baroque project recalling Vanbrugh more than Bernini or Schlüter. Erected by him in 1884-94, this was soon matched at the inner end of Unter den Linden by Raschdorf’s cathedral.

Unlike Napoleon III and Francis Joseph, the German emperors William I, Frederick I, and William II did not succeed in making their capital an important exemplar of nineteenth-century urbanism. Moreover, the influential position that Germany had occupied in the international world of architecture in the first half of the century was less and less maintained after the death of Stüler. Not until the twentieth century did Germans again make a significant contribution to European architectural history (see Chapter 20).

With the deterioration of German leadership in the seventies and eighties went also a general decline in the architectural standards of the Scandinavian countries that had so successfully based their later Romantic Classicism and their Rundbogenstil on German models of the thirties, forties, and fifties. In Denmark the work of Meldahl was increasingly inferior to that of Herholdt. Although he was only nine years younger than Herholdt, his direction of the Copenhagen Academy, beginning in 1873, coincided with the feeblest and most eclectic period in Danish architecture, from which recovery started only in the nineties with the early work of Martin Nyrop (1849-1925) in Copenhagen and of Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) in Aarhus (see Chapter 24).

A characteristic urbanistic development of the seventies in Copenhagen, the Søtorvet built in 1873-6 by Vilhelm Petersen (1830-1913) and Ferdinand Vilhelm Jensen (1837-90), is French not German in its ultimate inspiration. This grandiose pavilioned and mansarded range of four tall blocks forms a shallow U-shaped square along a canal (Figure 16). Its definitely Second Empire character may not, all the same, have derived directly from Paris but via German or English intermediaries, so much more typical is this of the international than of the truly Parisian mode of the third quarter of the century.

As late as 1893-4 the much more conspicuous Magasin du Nord department store, built by A. C. Jensen (1847-1913) and his partner H. Glaesel in the Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen, also carried the high mansarded roofs of the new Louvre, both flat-sided and convex-curved, above its end and centre pavilions. The detailing was chastened, however, by memories of local palaces and mansions in the nearby Amalie quarter of the city, where Jensen had worked on the completion of the eighteenth-century Marble Church. The Magasin du Nord thus combines two characteristic aspects of the architecture of the period, evident in most countries but rarely thus joined: a reflection of Napoleon III’s Paris, elsewhere reaching its peak around 1870, and a revival of the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generally beginning about a decade later.

In Sweden also there was some Second Empire influence, although nothing very notable resulted from it. The Jernkontovets Building in Stockholm erected by the brothers Kumlien (A.F., 1833-?; K.H., 1837-97) in 1873-5 has a high mansard and pavilions combined with a respectably academic treatment of the façades that is quite different from the bombast of the Søtorvet. Bern’s Restaurant in Stockholm of 1886 by Åbom, whose more conservative Renaissance Revival theatre of thirty years earlier has been mentioned, is similarly Parisian, particularly in the decorations that were provided by Isaeus.

With I. G. Clason (1856-1930) the tide of eclecticism in Sweden turned more nationalistic. The Northern Renaissance of his Northern Museum, built in 1889-1907, parallels somewhat belatedly the Meistersinger mode in Germany; but it also shows a more refined and delicate touch, somewhat like that of George and of Collcutt in England. As in most other countries, the revival of the native sixteenth-century style was soon succeeded by a revival of the Baroque, here rather academically restrained. This phase is most conspicuously represented in Stockholm by the grouped Parliament House and National Bank of 1897-1905 by Aron Johansson (1860-1936). In the nineties Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1946) was also initiating a new movement somewhat comparable to that led by Nyrop in Denmark (see Chapter 24).

The modes of Second Empire Paris left rather more mark on Holland than did those of the First Empire, particularly in the work of Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75), whose iron-and-glass Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam of the late fifties has been mentioned earlier. That is long gone, but the related Galerij, a U-shaped range of mansarded blocks linked by a sort of veranda of cast iron, till lately bounded the south of the Frederiksplein. His enormous Amstel Hotel, near by on the farther side of the Amstel, was built in 1863-7. At Scheveningen the Oranje Hotel (1872-3), also by him, was one of several typical resort establishments there of an international Second Empire order, as is also his hotel at Berg-en-Dal near Nijmegen (1867-9). Fairly generally high mansards rose in the sixties and seventies over the narrow house-fronts in the new quarters of Dutch cities. However, the opposing Neo-Gothic is more significant historically in Holland, and the secular work of Cuijpers as well as his churches, although rather like Clason’s, is better considered in that connexion (see Chapter 11). As in the Scandinavian countries, the nineties saw new beginnings in Holland, in this case with the appearance of Berlage and Kromhout (see Chapter 20).

The principal Anglo-American developments in the second half of the century were in the specialized fields of domestic and commercial building (see Chapters 14 and 15). England, moreover, had from 1850 to the early seventies a lively stylistic development of her own, the High Victorian Gothic, rather different from the later Neo-Gothic of the Continent, which was also very influential in the Dominions and in the United States (see Chapters 10 and 11). Nevertheless, the international Second Empire mode flourished on both sides of the Atlantic among Anglo-Saxons to a greater extent, perhaps, than anywhere in Europe. It is not, of course, possible to subsume all non-Gothic work of these decades in England under the Second Empire rubric any more than on the Continent. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, the most vigorous and conspicuous buildings of a generically Renaissance character were clearly inspired by Paris, and often specifically by the New Louvre, as Prosper Mérimée noted and wrote to Viollet-le-Duc while on a visit to London in the mid sixties.

The most considerable English public monument built just after the mid century, the Leeds Town Hall of 1855-9, is by Cuthbert Brodrick (Plate 78A). That Brodrick was an architect markedly French in his leanings has already been noted in describing his Leeds Corn Exchange, which is later in date but earlier in style than his Town Hall (see Chapter 4). But this major early work, for which Brodrick won the commission in a competition in 1853, is not easily pigeon-holed stylistically. The great hall inside derives quite directly from Elmes’s in Liverpool, designed almost a quarter of a century earlier, though not opened until 1856. The exterior recalls in its grandiose scale the English Baroque of Vanbrugh more than it does anything that had even been projected since the megalomaniac French projects of the 1790s. The Leeds Town Hall is certainly no longer Romantic Classical, no longer Early Victorian; yet except for the rather clumsy originality of some of the detail and the varied outline of the tower—a late emendation of the original project of 1853—it is hard to say how or why it is so definitely High Victorian, and rather a masterpiece of the High Victorian at that. Wallot in Berlin in the eighties approached Brodrick’s mode of design in the Reichstag but had little of his command of scale or his almost Romantic Classical control of mass.

When Brodrick designed his town hall very little was known in England of Visconti’s project of 1852 for the New Louvre, and Lefuel had not yet begun to elaborate the design. So vigorously individual an architect as Brodrick was hardly likely, moreover, to find inspiration in the Hope house of Dusillion or the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. But the wave of Second Empire influence arrived in England well before the Leeds Town Hall was finished. When the English swarmed to Paris to visit the International Exhibition of 1855 the character of the New Louvre became generally known to architects and to the interested public. The Crimean War in the mid fifties served, moreover, to bring English and French officialdom into close contact. To English ministers and civil servants, even more than to architects and ordinary citizens, the existing governmental accommodations in Whitehall contrasted most unfavourably with those Napoleon III was providing in the New Louvre. When a competition was held in 1856-7 for a new Foreign Office and a new War Office to be built in Whitehall, it is not surprising that most of those entrants who were not convinced Gothicists should have modelled their projects more or less on the work of Visconti and Lefuel.

Barry, the head of the profession, did not enter the competition; but unofficially—for he was still an employee of the Government at the Houses of Parliament—he prepared at this time a comprehensive scheme for the development of the whole length of Whitehall from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square. In this project he crowned all his façades—including that of his already executed Treasury—with mansards, introduced stepped-back courts like that of the New Louvre, and marked the corners and the centres of the court façades in the most Louvre-like way with pavilions crowned by still taller mansards. Had this project of Barry’s been followed, London would rival Paris and Vienna in the extent, the consistency, and the boldness of her public buildings of this period. In fact, practically nothing ever came of it nor, indeed, of the official competition; for by this period earlier traditions of urbanism had all but completely died out and architectural initiative was largely in private hands.

When the competition was judged in 1857, the designs that received the top prizes both for the War Office and for the Foreign Office were in the pavilioned and mansarded manner; they derived, however, at least as much from the Tuileries as from the New Louvre. It was the rising prestige of Napoleon III, of course, that called public attention at this time to the Tuileries which was his residence—as it had been, for that matter, the residence of earlier nineteenth-century French monarchs. Otherwise no one in England would probably have thought of reviving any of the various periods, covering some four centuries, represented in its conglomerate mass or of emulating its pavilioned and mansarded composition.

Since neither of these projects for ministries was ever executed, and their respective architects—Henry B. Garling (1821-1909), on the one hand, and H. E. Coe (1826-85) and his partner Hofland, on the other—never built much else of consequence, it is not necessary to linger over them. However, their designs and other Second Empire ones that received minor premiums were extensively illustrated in professional and general periodicals, and they provided favourite models in the sixties both in England and in the United States. The Paris originals, on which graphic data was not only scarcer but also less readily accessible, were not on the whole so influential. This helps to explain why French influence appears to have been stronger in the Anglo-Saxon world than on the Continent, even though there was probably less direct contact with Paris.

There was also in England at this time a general tendency, even more notable than in Austria or Germany, to enrich and elaborate plastically the long-established Renaissance Revival mode. This is less specifically inspired by Paris. An excellent example is provided by the extensive range of terraces, designed by Sancton Wood (1814-86) in 1857, that flank Lancaster Gate in the Bayswater Road in London with their boldly projecting bay windows linked by tiers of colonnades. In other examples, such as the National Discount Company’s offices at 65 Cornhill built by the Francis Brothers in 1857, the capping of the whole block with a boldly dormered mansard^[206] is more obviously of Second Empire inspiration, though the façades below are merely of a much enriched palazzo order.

When the Moseley Brothers designed in 1858 the vast Westminster Palace Hotel near Westminster Abbey at the foot of Victoria Street, a caravanserai intended to exceed the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel of 1850-2 in international luxury, they took over its pavilioned and mansarded design. To judge from the relative dignity and sobriety of their detailing, they would seem to have studied contemporary Parisian work—not the New Louvre but the quieter maisons de rapport along the boulevards—rather than merely basing themselves on the prize-winning Government Offices projects as so many others were content to do at this time. This hotel, which proved a failure, now serves as a block of offices, and has been remodelled almost beyond recognition.

The next year Barry designed the Halifax Town Hall, his last work. He did not himself propose to cap this, like the Government Offices in his Whitehall scheme, with French mansards; those that were executed are an emendation by his son, E. M. Barry, who carried the building to completion in 1862 after his father’s death in 1860. But the richly arcaded articulation of the walls and the emphatic forward breaks of the great tower and of the more modest pavilion at the other end clearly emulate, without directly imitating, the sumptuous plasticity of the New Louvre. Nevertheless, the boldly asymmetrical composition, dominated by a single corner tower, is more in the Italian Villa vein (Plate 78B).

This tower—but not the site—was lined up with the axis of Prince’s Street, which enters Crossley Street at this point. The assured quality of its design and above all that of its tremendous spire, more than worthy of Wren in the ingenuity with which the silhouette of a Gothic steeple was built up out of Renaissance elements, makes the Halifax Town Hall thoroughly English and one of the masterpieces of the High Victorian period. Totally devoid of Gothic elements, it has more Gothic vitality than Barry’s Houses of Parliament, at this time just approaching completion nearly thirty years after they were first designed.

E. M. Barry went on to crown two London station hotels, that at Charing Cross in 1863-4 and that at Cannon Street in 1865-6, with mansards; but these were far from being masterpieces, and that at Charing Cross has lately been much modified. The Grosvenor Hotel, built beside the new Victoria Station in 1859-60 by Sir James T. Knowles (1831-1908), is far more original. He covered the whole enormous mass with a very tall convex mansard, giving further emphasis to the broad pavilions at the ends by carrying their roofs still higher and capping them with lanterns. Beyond this nothing was French. The detail indeed, defined by its architect as ‘Tuscan’, i.e. Rundbogenstil, is highly individual, partaking of the coarse gusto and even somewhat of the naturalism of the most advanced Victorian Gothic foliage carving of the period (see Chapter 10).

Similar mansards, but flat-sided not bulbous, and similar detail characterize a pair of tall terraces that Knowles built in 1860 on the north side of Clapham Common, south of London. These constituted a subtle suburban attack on Early Victorian traditions of terrace-design that soon had metropolitan repercussions. His Thatched House Club in St James’s Street in London of 1865 has a great deal of very rich carving by J. Daymond in the naturalistic vein, but is less interesting in general composition.

Knowles’s Grosvenor was still new when John Giles outbid it with the Langham Hotel, begun in 1864. Given a much finer site than Knowles’s at the base of the broad avenue of Portland Place across from Nash’s All Souls’, Langham Place, Giles rose boldly—most people now think too boldly—to the occasion (Plate 80A). Certainly he overwhelmed Nash’s delicate and ingenious steeple by the rounded projection and the tall square corner tower—now bombed away at the top—with which he faced it. Equally certainly his massive north façade, with its boldly modelled flanking pavilions and its profusion of lively animal carvings, would overwhelm the urbane refinement of the nearby Adam terraces flanking Portland Place had these not by now been replaced by far inferior buildings. For all its gargantuan scale and the somewhat elephantine playfulness of the detail (not to speak of the dinginess to which the ‘Suffolk-white’ brickwork and the stone trim have now been reduced), the Langham is a rich and powerfully plastic composition, most skilfully adapted to a special site, and more original than most of what was produced in the sixties in Paris. The carved animals at the window heads, so varied and so humorous, deserve an attention they rarely receive; these scurrying creatures almost seem to come out of Tenniel, but may actually derive from Viollet-le-Duc.

That this degree of architectural originality, presented with such bold assurance and even bombast, should within a decade or two have come to seem tasteless and actually ugly—as, indeed, it has seemed to many ever since—is not of major historical consequence. The age that achieved it rejected as tasteless and insipid the architectural production of the previous hundred years, and most notably Late Georgian work of the sort to which the Langham stood in close proximity. What is of consequence is that such High Victorian buildings, even when not Gothic, possessed a vitality and a contemporaneity within their period that was very largely lacking in parallel work on the Continent, most of which in any case is a decade or more later in date. In their parvenu brashness, the Grosvenor and Langham balance the contemporary achievement of the Gothic church architects—an achievement generally more acceptable even today as it was already to highbrows and aesthetics in the sixties—without necessarily equalling it (see Chapter 10).

In the English hotel boom of the early and mid sixties which these big London hotels set off, some variant of the anglicized Second Empire became the accepted type of design; indeed, a mansarded French mode continued to be used as late as the nineties^[207] for such a big London hotel as the Carlton built by H. L. Florence (1843-1916) in 1897. Many heavily mansarded London hotels of the seventies and eighties are now gone or have been turned, like the earlier Westminster Palace and the Langham, to other uses—among these the former Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square of 1878-80 by H. Francis and the front block of the former Cecil in the Strand built in 1886 by Perry & Reed may at least be noted here, since they remain so conspicuous and are so exasperatingly unavailable to travellers.

It is a resort hotel, however, the Cliff (now the Grand) at Scarborough in Yorkshire, built by Brodrick at the height of the boom in 1863-7, just before he retired to live in France, that remains internationally the most notable example of the type (Plate 79). And the type could be found in such remote spots as the famous ‘ghost town’ of the Comstock Lode, Virginia City, Nevada, where the large and elaborate hotel is no more, or Leadville, Colorado, where the more modest and much later Vendome Hotel, built by Senator Tabor for his ‘Baby Doe’, is still in use, as well as in big European cities such as Amsterdam, Frankfort, Brussels, and Budapest.

The site of Brodrick’s Grand Hotel is a superb one on the edge of the Scarborough cliffs above the North Sea, as different as possible from the setting of the New Louvre. Its corner pavilions are capped, not with ordinary high mansards, but with curious roofs like pointed domes, richly crowned with elaborate cornices. In the intricacy of their silhouette these are not unworthy rivals of Barry’s Halifax tower. The massive walls are not of freestone in the manner of Paris nor yet of pallid Suffolk brick with light coloured stone or cement trim as in London. Instead, they are of warm red brick with incredibly lush decorative trim of tawny terracotta—a combination that M. D. Wyatt also used on the most elegant Second Empire mansion in London, Alford House, which stood from 1872 until 1955 in Prince’s Gate at the corner of Ennismore Gardens (Plate 83A).

Public and private architecture could hardly hope to rival the sumptuousness of the new hotels, and in Britain rarely attempted to do so. At Liverpool T. H. Wyatt in 1864-9 carried a U-shaped range of ornately pavilioned and mansarded blocks that housed the Exchange around the open space at the rear of the Town Hall, somewhat as Outshoorn carried his Galerij around the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam; but that is now all gone.

In the English countryside, the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County Durham, built in 1869-75 by J.-A.-F.-A. Pellechet (1829-1903), and Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire by another French architect, G.-H. Destailleur (1822-93), largely of 1880-3, are unique examples of extensive mansions completely in the Second Empire mode (Plate 76B). In London Montagu House, designed in 1866 by the elderly Burn for the Duke of Buccleuch, once raised in Whitehall the mansarded pavilions that Barry and the winners of the Government Offices competition had proposed in 1857, but this has now been demolished.

The most notable Second Empire ensemble in London, however, still partly survives (Plate 80B). Facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace and extending southward from the group of Late Georgian monuments around Hyde Park Corner, are the terraces of Grosvenor Place. These were designed^[208] in 1867 and built in the following years. They provide one of the more striking features of the London skyline inherited from the Victorian period. Rivalling the high roofs and, almost, the tall steeples of the Victorian Gothic, the mansards over the end houses are carried to fantastic heights and capped with pointed upper roofs, providing several storeys of attics; while the centre houses have convex mansards like square domes taken straight from the New Louvre.

Below these Alpine crests, elaborated at the base with rich stone dormers, the enormous houses are all of fine Portland stone—hardly to be found in any earlier nineteenth-century London terraces except those of Ennismore Gardens—and detailed with a plausibly Parisian flair—it is even said that draughtsmen were sent to Paris to study Second Empire work at first hand. English are the porches, however, which make plain that these pretentious ranges are rows of dwellings like those in nearby Belgrave Square. English, also, are the red stone bands, novel touches echoing the fashionable ‘structural polychrome’ of the contemporary Victorian Gothic, just as the tall mansards echo its pointed roofs (see Chapter 10).

Beyond the first two blocks of Grosvenor Place the new construction of the sixties stops; but it starts again at the farther end and surrounds the two triangles of Grosvenor Gardens, of which Knowles’s hotel occupies part of the farther side. It is characteristic of the Parisian inspiration of the whole that on the east side of the Gardens great blocks of flats—’mansions’ in a Victorian euphemism—replaced the usual London terraces of individual tall houses, but these now serve as offices as do all the extant houses in Grosvenor Place. For one of these blocks red brick was used, but set like a mere panel-filling within stone frames according to a French rather than an English tradition.

There are no other comparably pretentious examples of Second Empire terraces in London except Cambridge Gate (1875) by Thomas Archer and A. Green (?-1904), an unhappy intrusion among Nash’s stuccoed Regent’s Park ranges despite its handsome execution in fine ashlar of Bath stone. Characteristically, London domestic architecture of the late fifties and sixties merely elaborated the Renaissance Revival formulas of the previous decade. Not only were the chosen models generally later and richer as in Vienna; wherever possible bolder plastic effects were achieved by a more extensive use of ground-storey colonnades, first-storey porches, and projecting bay windows, as on Wood’s magniloquent terraces at Lancaster Gate or those of 1858 by C. J. Richardson (1800-72) that followed them in Queen’s Gate.

The high standards of the earlier period were maintained only in business palazzi, not those of London’s City, but those in big Northern towns like Bradford and in Scotland. There good freestone was readily available and a certain cultural lag, as well as a regional sobriety of temperament, led to the maintenance of a more Barry-like tradition. Notable everywhere for their academic virtues are the various National Provincial Bank buildings by Barry’s pupil John Gibson (1819-92). The earliest, but not the most typical, is the head office in Bishopsgate, which was begun in 1863.

A special school of Renaissance design is associated with Sir Henry Cole’s Department of Practical Art, and this produced the various buildings that he sponsored in the new London cultural centre in Brompton (now usually called South Kensington). The Exhibition of 1862, on the southern edge of the estate belonging to the Commissioners of the Great Exhibition, was housed in a structure designed by Francis Fowke (1823-65), an army engineer. As at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, the metal and glass construction of this was masked externally with masonry walls, but, unlike Cendrier’s and Viel’s Palais de l’Industrie, the whole was pavilioned and mansarded in the Second Empire mode. A still more elaborate Second Empire project was prepared by Fowke for the Museum of Science and Art (later Victoria and Albert), Cole having evidently accepted all too abjectly the criticism of his earlier temporary structure, the notorious ‘Brompton Boilers’ (see Chapter 7). As Fowke died at this point the Museum (Plate 83B), begun in 1866, as also the associated Royal College of Science (Huxley Building), built in 1868-71, were carried out in a much less French vein under another army engineer, H. G. D. Scott (1822-83). The walling material is a fine smooth red brick, very rare in the London of the nineteenth century, beautifully laid up with thin joints. With this is combined an enormous quantity of elaborately modelled pale cream terracotta, as on various Central European buildings deriving from Schinkel’s Bauakademie in Berlin of 1831-6.

In these South Kensington structures, planned by an engineer, the emphasis is on the sculptural embellishment designed and executed by Godfrey Sykes and other artists associated with the Department. This team-work, by-passing as it did over-all control by an architect, was not very successful in achieving the coherence of Knowles’s and Giles’s hotels, although those were built for much less sophisticated clients. Much the same team, but with still more sculptors collaborating, was responsible for the Albert Hall, the vast circular auditorium built in 1867-71 on the northern edge of the Commissioners’ Estate facing the most characteristic monument of the age, G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic Albert Memorial. The engineer Scott’s really notable achievement here in the metal construction of the vast dome is unfortunately swamped by the profuse investiture of sculptural detail in terracotta, intrinsically elegant though much of that is.

In the sixties there was some coherence in the planning of the Commissioners’ Estate as a whole, with a garden court surrounded by a great hemicycle of terracotta arcading by M. D. Wyatt lying behind the 1862 Exhibition Building and below the Albert Hall. In Vienna the cultural edifices were admirably grouped along the Ringstrasse with plenty of open space between them, however much they may have lacked intrinsic architectural quality. In sad contrast is the way the following decades allowed this considerable tract to become clogged up until almost no urbanistic organization at all remains.

Other European countries tended in this period, like Denmark, Sweden, and Holland, to follow Paris and Vienna rather than London. Only a few works of the sixties and seventies need be singled out from the welter of pretentious public and private construction that turned Brussels, for example, into a ‘Little Paris’.^[209] The Boulevard Anspach as a whole suggests the Cannebière in Marseilles, although the mansards on the buildings that line it are more plastically handled; the Exchange, in its own square half-way down the boulevard, was built by L.-P. Suys (1823-87) in 1868-73, and this provides the focus of the mid-nineteenth-century city, as does Garnier’s Opéra in Paris. A provincial variant of the Opéra in many ways, despite its quite different function, this is somewhat more academic in composition yet also rather coarser in its profuse ornamentation. Brussels as a whole is dominated, however, by one of the grandest and most original monuments erected anywhere in this period.

The Palace of Justice,^[210] built by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79) in 1866-83, occupies so high a site and is mounted on so mountainous a substructure that almost the whole of its gargantuan mass is visible from all over the city. Although generically Classical, a good deal of the external treatment has an indefinable flavour of the monuments of the ancient civilizations of the East, somewhat like that of the exotic churches Alexander Thomson built in the late fifties and sixties in Glasgow (Plate 81). Even more than Thomson’s relatively small and delicately scaled work, the Palace of Justice also suggests the megalomaniac architectural dreams of such a Romantic English painter as John Martin. Heavy and almost literally cruel, it has a Piranesian spatial elaboration and a plastic vitality of the most exaggeratedly architectonic order. Thus it quite puts to shame the urbane Renaissance costuming of most Continental public architecture of this period and the usual Neo-Baroque of the next.

The existence of this extraordinary edifice in a minor European capital prepares one a little for the important part that Brussels was to play in the nineties, even though there could hardly be two architects further apart in spirit than Poelaert and Victor Horta, who initiated there the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 16). So also in Glasgow, the originality of Thomson’s Queen’s Park Church of the sixties at least opened the way for the notable international contribution to be made by the Glaswegian C. R. Mackintosh in the nineties. But it was Alphonse Balat (1818-95), not Poelaert, who was Horta’s master and also in these decades professor of architecture at the local Academy. Balat’s Musée Royale des Beaux Arts of 1875-81 already represents a reversion to a more restrained and academic classicism with none of Poelaert’s force and vitality. Yet this building is not without a certain correct elegance of detail and conventional skill in composition for which his houses of the sixties, with their Barry-like handling of the High Renaissance palazzo theme, prepared the way. The real eclecticism of this period lies less significantly in the variety of nominal styles employed than in the variety of ways of employing them. It is this, rather than the concurrent multiplication of fashionable modes, that makes it so difficult to characterize broadly the production of the period between the mid century and the nineties.

In several other European countries the situation was made even more complicated than in Belgium by a very considerable cultural lag such as has already been noted in Scandinavia. While the Rütschi-Bleuler House in Zurich of 1869-70 by Theodor Geiger (1832-82) had the fashionable Second Empire mansard, here high and concave, at nearby Winterthur Semper’s Town Hall of precisely the same date, with its dominating temple portico, might at first sight be taken for a provincial French public edifice of the second quarter of the century. At the Zurich Polytechnic School, where Semper became a professor in 1855,^[211] the large building begun in 1859 that he erected with the local architect Wolff is equally retardataire in style. His Observatory there of 1861-4 is a delicate and rather picturesquely composed exercise in the quattrocento version of the Rundbogenstil, rather like his Hamburg houses of twenty years earlier.

If a German architect of established international reputation could be thus affected by the conservative tastes of his Swiss clients, it is not surprising that in the Iberian peninsula almost nothing of interest was built in this period. It may, however, be mentioned that the building for the National Library and Museums in Madrid, designed in 1866 by Francisco Jareño y Alarcón (1818-92) and almost thirty years in construction, while still of the most conventional Classical character as regards its façades, has convex mansards over the end pavilions of quite definitely Second Empire character. Characteristically, the Chamber of Commerce in Madrid, completed in 1893 by E. M. Repulles y Vargas (1845-1922), illustrates the general return of official architecture to still more conventional academic standards towards the end of the century. But in the seventies there began in Barcelona the career of a Spanish—or more accurately Catalan—architect, Antoni Gaudí, who was destined to produce around 1900 some of the boldest and most original early works of modern architecture. Gaudí’s real links in the seventies and eighties, spiritually if not so much actually, are with the High Victorian Gothic not the Second Empire, although the earliest project on which he worked reflected the Palais Longchamps at Marseilles (see Chapter 11).

The situation in the United States was naturally most like that in England. As has already been noted, a French-trained Danish architect, Lienau, prefigured the Second Empire mode in the Shiff house in New York as early as 1849-50. By the mid fifties mansards of rather modest height, often with shallow concave slopes, had appeared in Eastern cities on many houses not otherwise particularly Frenchified. Richard M. Hunt (1827-95),^[212] the first American to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and actually an assistant as well as a pupil of Lefuel, returned from Paris to America in 1855. But he brought with him no lush Second Empire mode but rather the basic academic tradition of the French official world, despite the fact that he had himself worked in 1854 on the New Louvre. Although some of the earliest work of H. H. Richardson, who returned from Paris a decade later after working for several years for Labrouste’s brother Théodore, was of Second Empire character, he showed himself from the first more responsive to influences from contemporary England (see Chapters 11 and 13). On the whole, the Second Empire mode, as it was practised in America through the third quarter of the century, derived almost as completely as the local Victorian Gothic from England. Most American architects were kept informed of what was going on abroad through the English professional Press, and so they naturally followed the models that were offered in the Builder and the Building News rather than those in the publications of César Daly.^[213]

The Civil War of 1861-5 did not bring architectural production to a stop; indeed, it seems to have had a less inhibiting effect than the aftermath of the financial crash of 1857 in the immediately preceding years. In Washington the building of Walter’s new wings of the Capitol, initiated in 1851,^[214] and of his cast-iron dome, designed in 1855, continued until their completion in 1865, right through the war years at President Lincoln’s express order (Plate 82A). There is nothing specifically French about this new work at the Capitol, even though Walter had the assistance from 1855 of the Paris-trained Hunt. On the other hand, the original more-or-less Romantic Classical edifice that had finally been brought to completion in 1828 by Bulfinch after so many changes of architect was largely submerged. The new wings echo in their academic porticoes the broader portico of the original late eighteenth-century design; but the cast-iron dome (see Chapter 7), rivalling in size the largest Baroque domes of Europe, has a high drum and a Michelangelesque silhouette of the greatest boldness in contrast to the Roman saucer shape of that designed by Latrobe and not much raised in execution by Bulfinch.

It was not in Washington that the Second Empire mode was first introduced for public buildings; Washington, indeed, would never again be the centre of architectural influence that it was in the Romantic Classical period, although the new state capitols begun in the sixties and seventies were mostly capped with imitations of Walter’s dome. A ‘female seminary’ on the Hudson River, endowed by a brewer, and the new City Hall in Boston, Mass., both dating from the opening of the sixties, are the first monumental instances of the new mode that dominated the field of secular public building until the financial Panic of 1873 brought the post-war boom to a close. James Renwick,^[215] who designed the very extensive Main Hall for Matthew Vassar’s new college at Arlington near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1860, was specifically instructed by his client to imitate the Tuileries—not the New Louvre—and so he did in an elaborately pavilioned composition of U-shaped plan crowned by various sorts of high mansards. This overshadows in significance his earlier Charity Hospital of 1858 on Blackwell’s Island in New York, already mansarded but very plain, and his Corcoran Gallery of 1859, now the Court of Claims, in Washington, with a rich but muddled façade still rather flatly conceived.

Renwick was at least as eclectic as such Europeans as Ballu and Ferstel. Having made his first reputation with the building of the Anglican Grace Church in New York in 1843-6—if not very Camdenian, this is at least a fair specimen of revived fourteenth-century English Gothic—he continued in the Gothic line with the Catholic St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, begun in 1859 and completed (except for the spires) in 1879. That vast two-towered pile, however, is Gothic in a very Continental way, resembling Gau’s and Ballu’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris and Ferstel’s Votivkirche in Vienna more than anything English of the period. In the late forties Renwick had also been the agent of Robert Dale Owen’s ‘Romanesque Revival’ aspirations in designing the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (see Chapter 6).

For such things as the Smithsonian and his churches Renwick had plenty of visual documents on which to lean, either archaeological treatises on the buildings of the medieval past or illustrations of contemporary foreign work. But for Vassar College, very evidently, he was dependent for his inspiration on rather generalized lithographic or engraved views of the Tuileries. Nor could he, at this relatively early date, borrow much from published illustrations of contemporary English work in the new international Second Empire mode. The particular plastic vitality of the Americanized Second Empire is already notable in this early example, however, even though the rather crude articulation of the red brick walls is remote from anything French of any period from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. Later buildings by Renwick in the same mode are richer and closer to Parisian standards, but their architectonic vitality is considerably less.

The Boston City Hall,^[216] built by G. J. F. Bryant (1816-99) and Arthur D. Gilman (1821-82) in 1862-5, is a smaller but suaver edifice. Although it is a compactly planned block, the articulation of the walls by successive Roman-arched orders, coldly but competently executed in stone, is boldly plastic below the crowning mansards. However, just before this, for the Arlington Street Church of 1859-61, the first edifice erected in the Back Bay district that Gilman was just laying out,^[217] he had turned not to France but to eighteenth-century England for inspiration, basing himself chiefly on the same churches by Gibbs that had been the most popular American models in later Colonial times.

A leading opponent of the Greek Revival, Gilman, like most Continental architects of the day, evidently knew better what he meant to leave behind than whither he wished to proceed. His Boston church initiated no national wave of Gibbsian church architecture; indeed, the sixties were the heyday of Victorian Gothic design for churches in the United States. His City Hall, on the other hand, set off a nation-wide programme of public building in the Second Empire mode; for Boston was now for a score of years the artistic as well as the intellectual headquarters of the country in succession to Philadelphia. In this programme municipalities, state authorities, and the Federal Government all participated actively during the decade following the Civil War. In the case of many Federal buildings, only nominally the work of the office of the Supervising Architect, where A. B. Mullet (1834-90) succeeded Rogers in 1865, Gilman acted in these years as consultant, and was probably the real designer rather than Mullet or his assistants.

These vast monuments were mostly constructed during General Grant’s presidency. Parisian in intention, yet American in their materials, they are withal rather similar to Second Empire work in England. Few were completed before the mode went out of favour as changes in architectural control sometimes make evident. In the case of the New York State Capitol in Albany, for example, begun in 1868 by Thomas Fuller (1822-98) and his partner Augustus Laver (1834-98), both arriving from England via Canada, Eidlitz and Richardson took over jointly in 1875, modifying the design of the building very notably above the lower storeys towards the Romanesquoid. Thus it was finally brought to completion by them and others in the following twenty years. The very tall tower on the Philadelphia City Hall, begun in 1874, was finished over a decade later. This tower, whose crowning statue of William Penn still tops the local skyline, has hardly anything in common with the Louvre-like pavilions below; yet the whole is nominally the work of one architect, John McArthur, Jr (1823-90), the grandfather of General Douglas McArthur.

Undoubtedly the association of these prominent buildings with the unsavoury Grant administration and the fact that there were—at least in the two cases mentioned above—major financial scandals involved in their slow and incredibly costly construction played an important part in the early rejection of a mode so associated with the public vices of the decade after the Civil War. Not many of them are extant today other than the Boston, Albany, and Philadelphia structures just mentioned and the old State Department Building in Washington (Plate 82B).

In New York, Boston, and other large cities the vast granite piles in this mode that long served as post offices are all gone. In Chicago the Cook County Buildings built by J. J. Egan in 1872-5 have also long since been replaced. In San Francisco Fuller & Laver’s extensive group of Municipal Buildings was destroyed in the fire that followed the earthquake of 1906. This must have been the largest, the richest, and plastically the most complex production of the whole lot, with its triangular site, boldly articulated massing, and central dome.

Though threatened by every new administration, the State, War and Navy Department Building built by Mullet in 1871-5 still stands, overshadowing the nearby White House. This is perhaps the best extant example in America of the Second Empire—or as it is sometimes called locally, the ‘General Grant’—mode (Plate 82B). The tiers of Roman-arched orders in fine grey granite, borrowed by Gilman as consultant architect and presumptive designer from his earlier Boston City Hall rather than from Paris, tower up storey above storey to carry mansards of various different heights above the complex pavilioned plan. Cold and grand, almost without sculptural decoration, this could hardly be less like the New Louvre or the old Tuileries in general texture; nor is there any of the playful semi-Gothic detail of Knowles’s and Giles’s London hotels or of the festive colouring and lush ornamentation of Brodrick’s at Scarborough.

The contrast of the old State Department Building with its pendant on the other side of Lafayette Square, Mills’s Grecian Treasury, finally completed by Rogers a decade earlier, is shocking to most people. Yet it is fascinating to read here the representational aspirations of an age that found its most significant expression, not in its public buildings, but in the new skyscrapers which first rose in New York at just this time, Hunt’s Tribune Building and the Western Union Building by his pupil George B. Post. Both, incidentally, were heavily mansarded, and the one by the American-trained Post was much more typically Second Empire than is the French-trained Hunt’s (see Chapter 14).

In urban domestic architecture, both on large mansions and on the more usual terrace houses, mansards became characteristic but not ubiquitous in the late fifties and remained so down to the mid seventies and even later in the West. Boston’s Back Bay district, laid out by Gilman in 1859, has a few mansions along Commonwealth Avenue that resemble somewhat the hôtels particuliers of Paris, and also several mansarded terraces by Bryant & Gilman and other architects in that avenue and in Arlington and Beacon Streets. The materials used are un-Parisian—brownstone like Gilman’s nearby church or dark-red brick with brownstone trim—and the detail is rarely very plausibly French. In general, inspiration still came from London, even if nothing so extensive and spectacularly monumental as Grosvenor Place and Grosvenor Gardens was ever produced. In New York Lienau’s finest terrace, that built in Fifth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets in 1869, was rather more sumptuous than the Boston examples, being of white marble with very literate ranges of superposed orders. Hunt’s New York work was often so authentically Parisian as quite to lack the bombast of the international Second Empire mode. Especially interesting were his Stuyvesant Flats in 18th Street, New York, of 1869-70. This block was a very early example of an apartment house of the Parisian sort in America, where they did not generally flourish much before the late eighties.

For the more characteristic free-standing houses that were built outside cities, in suburbs, in towns, and even in the country, the Second Empire mode was also very popular. Interpreted in wood, painted brown or grey stone colours, these have a distinctly autochthonous character. Generally symmetrical and tightly planned, they did not advance the development of the American house in the way of the rival ‘Stick Style’; but in their emphasis on complicated three-dimensional modelling, especially the modelling of the roofs, they prepared the way for one important aspect of the later and more original ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter 15).

The Second Empire episode in the United States is a curious one. On the one hand, it was a consciously ‘modern’ movement, deriving its prestige from contemporary Paris, not from any period of the past like the Greek, the Gothic, or even the Renaissance Revivals—of which last, of course, it was in some limited sense an heir. On the other hand, the considerable originality of the mode as it was actually employed was largely unconscious and due to the lack of accurate visual documents, or even a codified body of precedent, to be followed. At this time contemporary conditions demanded, as in Europe, the construction of many public edifices, Federal, state, and municipal, to house a complexity of functions. It would have been almost impossible to compress these within the rigid rectangles of the Greek Revival even had the Greek Revival not already been rejected by most critics twenty years or more earlier.

Yet the Second Empire episode was necessarily brief, lasting little more than a decade. The crass assurance it reflected, particularly the special arrogance of the post-war politicians in Washington, the state capitals, and in the bigger cities, was much shaken by the Panic of 1873. The mode did not therefore, as in much of Europe, continue in America into the eighties and nineties.

The episode has a longer-term significance, nevertheless. Slight as was the actual relationship to the Second Empire mode of the first two Americans to be trained at the École des Beaux Arts, Hunt and Richardson, their personal influence and their prestige encouraged a growing trek of architectural students to Paris; their recommendations alone would hardly have had much effect had not fashion already established Paris rather than London in the public mind as the centre of modern architectural achievement and inspiration. From the mid eighties on, the long-maintained dependence on England in architectural matters began to be notably weakened; for a generation and more very many American architects would seek their roots abroad, but henceforth in France, or even Italy, not England.

It is not surprising that in the British Dominions there was no such direct French influence in this period as in Latin America. Urban entities like the Colmena and its terminal square in Lima, Peru, pavilioned and mansarded throughout, rival European examples like the Søtorvet in Copenhagen or the Galerij in Amsterdam. Before they gave way to skyscrapers, the hôtels particuliers along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City were more numerous and more plausibly Parisian than along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston or Bellevue Avenue at Newport. But both in Canada and in Australia the Second Empire mode arrived from England late and in a more corrupted form than in America. The mansarded Windsor Hotel of 1878 in Montreal hardly rivalled the Palmer House of 1872 in Chicago by J. M. Van Osdel (1811-91), to which the rich merchant Potter Palmer was as proud to give his name as to the incredible fake castle that he built for his own occupancy a decade later. The Princess Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, built by William Pitt in 1877, with its three square-domed mansards, has an appealing nonchalance, like that of the contemporary edifices of the mining towns high in the American Rocky Mountains—the hotel in Virginia City, Nevada, that has been mentioned earlier, or the much more modest Opera House in Central City, Colorado, for example. But the public architecture of the third quarter of the century in Australia was more restrained in design just because it was generally so very retardataire.

The Parliament House in Melbourne, begun in 1856 by John G. Knight (1824-92) and completed in 1880 by Peter Kerr (1820-1912), has academic virtues not unworthy of Kerr’s master Barry, though its giant colonnades recall rather those of Brodrick’s contemporary Town Hall in Leeds. The Treasury Buildings in Melbourne, by John James Clark (1838-1915) of 1857-8, are not unworthy of comparison with High Renaissance work of the period on the Continent. Other public buildings of the sixties and seventies are of more definitely Victorian character, but Early Victorian rather than High. For example, Clark’s Government House of 1872-6 in South Melbourne is a towered Italian Villa consciously modelled on Queen Victoria’s Osborne House of a generation earlier. Both in Australia and in Canada the Victorian Gothic had more vitality in this period (see Chapter 11).

There is little profit in pursuing farther in the outlying areas of the western world evidence of direct influence from Paris (of which there is, for example, some in Russia) or autochthonous variants of the Second Empire mode. In this generally rather unrewarding period the best work mostly falls under the High Victorian Gothic rubric, or else it illustrates specifically the development of commercial and domestic architecture in the Anglo-American world (see Chapters 10 and 11; 14 and 15). In an attempt to give an over-all picture too many buildings of low intrinsic quality and little present-day interest have already been cited.

What makes especially difficult the proper historical assessment of the widespread influence of Paris in the decades following 1850 is that this influence, whether direct or indirect, rarely produced buildings on the Continent of real distinction or even of much vitality. Only in England and the United States, where the mode was quite reshaped by a different cultural situation and the bold use of local materials, is it of much independent interest. The more plausibly Parisian the work outside France, the less vigour it usually possesses. Some of it can be very plausible indeed, as for example the street architecture of Mexico City and Buenos Aires, even if what appears to be carved French limestone in the Argentine capital is usually but a triumph of imitative craftsmanship on the part of stucco-workers imported from Italy. In general, Mexican and Argentine Second Empire is very dull, as dull as in Belgium, say, with no Poelaerts to redress the balance. Yet along the Malecón in Havana, Cuba, where the traditional galleried house-fronts were reinterpreted in a generically Second Empire way with Andalusian lushness, the results are much more notable, not least because the soft local stone has been very richly weathered by the strong sea breeze. As was mentioned earlier, the use of azulejos in extraordinary tones of brilliant green and purple gives autochthonous character to similar work in Brazil.