Architecture

The High Victorian Gothic produced in the United States no such roster of distinguished—or at least prominent and highly characteristic—monuments as in Britain. The period of its florescence was much briefer, and few assured and sophisticated talents came to the fore. If, in the case of Richardson, one such did appear, his maturity came only in the mid seventies, when the High Victorian Gothic was all but over. Why the period was so much shorter in the United States, in effect only the decade 1865-75, is not altogether clear. One reason, undoubtedly, is that the speed of transmission of new architectural ideas from England to America had increased so much by the seventies that the influence of the later English mode which succeeded the High Victorian Gothic around 1870 reached America very promptly indeed (see Chapters 13 and 15). Another quite different reason is that a wave of nationalism in America, parallel to those current in North European countries at the time, encouraged from the mid seventies developments that were more autochthonous. Leadership in commercial and in domestic architecture crossed the Atlantic almost precisely at the moment when, in 1876, the centenary^[235] of American political independence was being celebrated.

The phenomenal success in the United States of Ruskin’s treatises, The Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1849 and The Stones of Venice^[236] of 1851-3, should be emphasized; from 1855 Street’s Brick and Marble Architecture was also available. Yet, despite the warm reception of such relevant writings, few reflections of the High Victorian Gothic can be discerned in American production before 1860. The first is probably the Nott Memorial Library^[237] at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., designed by Edward T. Potter (1831-1904) in 1856 and built in 1858-76. Here the banded arches are pointed and the plan is circular, perhaps in emulation of the Pisa Baptistery to which Ruskin had called attention, but more probably in deference to Ramée’s general plan for the college (see Chapter 1).

The years immediately following the Panic of 1857 and, quite understandably, the Civil War years 1861-5 were relatively unproductive of new buildings, as has already been noted. An edifice far more overtly Ruskinian than Potter’s Library was the National Academy in New York, built by Peter B. Wight (1838-1925) in 1863-5, although apparently first designed as early as 1861. Its Venetian Gothic mode, with pointed arches boldly banded and walls diapered in coloured stones, was still the subject of considerable contemporary controversy as it would hardly have been in England by this date.

Potter and Wight were both young men. Established Gothic Revivalists in America did not swing over as rapidly as in England from the Early Victorian to the High. Upjohn, Potter’s master, was no Butterfield; Renwick when designing St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1859 followed contemporary Continental rather than English models, as has been noted, presumably because his clients were Catholics.

At best the sort of High Church Anglican patronage which sponsored Butterfield’s and Street’s innovations in England was relatively much less important in the United States—or Canada and Australia, for that matter. Enthusiasm for the High Victorian Gothic, although widespread in the later sixties and early seventies, was rarely exclusive as is evidenced by the disparate interests and activities of the members of the prominent and successful firm of Ware & Van Brunt. It has already been noted that when William Robert Ware founded in 1865 the first American architectural school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he based its instruction on that of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts.^[238] His partner Henry Van Brunt (1832-1903) was one of the first to follow Richardson’s lead away from the High Victorian Gothic in the seventies. So little were either of them dyed-in-the-wool Gothicists in these decades.^[239]

However, Ware & Van Brunt designed and built in Cambridge, Mass., one of the largest and most conspicuous of mature High Victorian Gothic edifices in America, Memorial Hall^[240] at Harvard College, first projected in the late sixties and erected in 1870-8. This somewhat cathedral-like edifice has walls of red brick liberally lashed with black and a massive central tower now denuded by fire of its high roof (Plate 95A). The manner is more than a little Butterfieldian, but the quality is not even up to G. G. Scott.

Before Memorial Hall was designed, a competition held in 1865 for the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston in the new Back Bay residential district had brought out a variety of rather feeble attempts by Boston architects to follow the High Victorian Gothic line. The winning design of Ware & Van Brunt, executed in 1865-7, while not of the wilder Low Church order of Teulon’s or Keeling’s London work of these years, is hardly comparable to Street’s or Butterfield’s, much less to the contemporary production of younger architects such as Brooks, Bodley, or Shaw. Its best feature is the material, the richly mottled and textured local Puddingstone from nearby Roxbury.

The High Victorian Gothic of the sixties and early seventies in the United States was no more restricted to the ecclesiastical field than in England. Despite its churchy look, Memorial Hall served a variety of secular purposes from refectory to concert hall; only the wide transeptal lobby was strictly memorial in purpose. But there was rarely even such relative devotion to the Gothic in this period in the United States as the major works of Ware & Van Brunt display. For example, the untutored Elbridge Boyden (1810-98), best known for introducing the cast-iron commercial front into New England in 1854, could build two buildings for the Polytechnic Institute of Worcester, Mass., in the same year 1866 of which one, the Washburn Machine Shop, is mansarded with crude, vaguely Second Empire, detailing; while the other, Boynton Hall, is in a very provincial sort of High Victorian Gothic. Hunt, product of a Parisian education, designed the Yale Divinity School in New Haven in 1869 in a frenzied, rather Teulonian, Gothic; while in his precisely contemporary Lenox Library in New York, built in 1869-77, he followed closely and with some dignity French, if not specifically Second Empire, models.

It is not really surprising, therefore, that Richardson, returning from Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts at the end of the Civil War and entering a competition for a new Unitarian church to be built at Springfield, Mass., offered a High Victorian Gothic project that seems to derive rather directly from the work of Keeling and other Low Church English practitioners. What is surprising, however, considering the lack of special interest to later eyes in his Unity Church as executed in 1866-8, is the fact that he won the competition! The warm colour and texture of the rock-faced brownstone from nearby Longmeadow laid up in random ashlar, a certain masculine scale in the details, and an attempt at least at a boldly asymmetrical composition evidently struck his contemporaries as very promising, however. (The church was demolished in 1961.)

It was not in the Unity Church, but in Richardson’s second church, Grace Episcopal, in Medford, Mass., happily still extant, of 1867-8, that one recognizes strong personal expression. The more massively pyramidal character of the asymmetrical composition and, above all, the great boulders of which the walls are built, with heavy trim of rough quarry-faced granite, announce an original approach (Plate 91B). Yet this approach was evidently still nurtured on the English High Victorian Gothic models that Richardson knew through the wood engravings in imported periodicals. It is even specific enough here so that one can describe this Medford church as Burgessy rather than Butterfieldian or Street-like; it is certainly no longer Keelingesque like the church in Springfield. Incidentally, when Richardson visited England in 1882 it was the work of Burges, who had just died, that he went out of his way to see—by that time, however, he found it rather disappointing.

If Richardson’s first churches were Gothic, his Western Railway Office at Springfield, built in 1867 for a client associated with the Unity Church commission, was generically Second Empire. Yet this was still more directly derived from current English work that was closely related to that mode, notably the Francis Brothers’ National Discount Building of 1857 in the City of London, than from anything Parisian. His brick and stone Dorsheimer^[241] house of 1868 in Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, N.Y., is also Second Empire rather than Victorian Gothic, but very restrainedly so, and hence rather more French in effect. Other work by Richardson dating from the late sixties, such as the B. H. Crowninshield house in Marlborough Street in Boston of 1868-9, was more experimental in design, often recalling wild English work of the early years of the decade. Although built of wood and of very modest size, Richardson’s most interesting house of this period was the one that he built for himself in 1868 at Arrochar on Staten Island near New York.^[242] This combines the use of a high mansarded pavilion with a sort of imitation half-timbering related to the contemporary American ‘Stick Style’ (see Chapter 14).

In Farnam Hall at Yale College in New Haven (Plate 96A), begun in 1869, the German-trained Russell Sturgis (1836-1909),^[243] who had been for a time Wight’s partner, somehow arrived at an almost Webb-like—or at least Brooks-like—simplicity and sophistication of late High Victorian Gothic design, in marked contrast to the stridency of Hunt’s precisely contemporary Divinity School there. This, however, is almost unique. The most characteristic work of the day was produced by such home-trained architects as Ware & Van Brunt, Wight, Edward T. Potter, and his younger brother William A. Potter (1842-1909).^[244] Wight’s National Academy in New York has been mentioned. His Mercantile Library in Brooklyn, N.Y., completed in 1869, of red brick with ranges of pointed-arched windows regularly but asymmetrically disposed, is similar—and not inferior—to much of G. G. Scott’s secular work. Edward T. Potter’s Union College Library has also been mentioned. His Harvard Church in Brookline, Mass., of 1873-5 is more conventional for its period. Largely renewed internally after being gutted by a fire in 1931, this shows how effectively such American materials as the popular brownstone from Portland, Conn., and the light-coloured Berea sandstone from Ohio, enlivened by accents of livid green serpentine from Pennsylvania, could produce a polychromy richer and more enduring than the endemic Butterfieldian or Teulonian red brick, with banding of bricks dipped in black tar, that had been in general use for a decade. Along this line Richardson himself followed for a while (see Chapter 13). At the same time William A. Potter, who became very briefly Supervising Architect in Washington in succession to Mullet in 1875, produced a few post offices, such as the one in Pittsfield, Mass., that are characteristic but not very distinguished examples of secular High Victorian Gothic executed in stone. (Both Potters, however, gave up the High Victorian Gothic to accept Richardson’s leadership within the next few years.)

The Boston & Albany Railroad station in Worcester built by Ware & Van Brunt in 1875-7, with its tall and striking tower and its vast segmental-pointed arches at the ends of the shed, provides one of the happiest illustrations of what the rather illiterate approach of even the most highly trained Eastern architects of this period could produce. By working in an almost primitive way, along lines suggested by the half-understood work of the bolder English innovators, something was often achieved of which few Continental architects were capable in this period. In less sophisticated hands, whether of provincial architects or of builders, the results were naturally still cruder, though sometimes equally vital and fresh. In church design,^[245] where ecclesiological control of planning was not accepted outside the Episcopal denomination, galleried auditorium schemes with rows of exposed iron columns were often executed with a violence of polychromy and a gawkiness of notched detailing that exceeded Teulon or Keeling at their most extreme. One of the most prominent extant examples is the squarish New Old South Church at Copley Square in the Back Bay district of Boston, built in 1874-5 by Charles A. Cummings (1833-1905) and his partner Sears in 1875-7. Its impressive tower resembling an Italian campanile has now been much reduced in height and chastened in silhouette.

Even more extreme than most churches, but of the highest quality, is the intensely personal work of Frank Furness (1839-1912)^[246] in Philadelphia. His building for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Broad Street was erected in 1872-6 in preparation for the Centennial Exhibition. The exterior has a largeness of scale and a vigour in the detailing that would be notable anywhere, and the galleries are top-lit with exceptional efficiency. Still more original and impressive were his banks, even though they lay quite off the main line of development of commercial architecture in this period (see Chapter 14). The most extraordinary of these, and Furness’s masterpiece, was the Provident Institution in Walnut Street, built as late as 1879 (Plate 95B). This was most unfortunately demolished in the Philadelphia urban renewal campaign several years ago, but the gigantic and forceful scale of the granite membering alone should have justified its respectful preservation. The interior,^[247] entirely lined with patterned tiles, was of rather later character than the façade and eventually much cluttered with later intrusions, but it was equally fine in its own way originally. Later work by Furness is of less interest, and his big Broad Street Station of 1892-4 has also been demolished. No small part of Furness’s historical significance lies in the fact that the young Louis Sullivan picked this office—then known as Furness & Hewitt—to work in for a short period after he left Ware’s school in Boston. As Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea testifies, the vitality and originality of Furness meant more to him than what he was taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (see Chapter 14).

In the realm of house-design the more-or-less Gothic-based ‘Stick Style’ represented a largely autochthonous American development not without considerable significance and interest (see Chapter 15). In public architecture there was little serious achievement even at the hands of English-trained architects such as Calvert Vaux (1824-95) and his partner F. C. Withers (1828-1901)^[248] or second-generation Gothicists like Upjohn’s son (Richard M., 1828-1903). The younger Upjohn’s Connecticut State Capitol^[249] in Hartford begun in 1873, the only major American example of a High Victorian Gothic public monument of any great pretension or luxury of materials, is singularly vulgar and stylistically ambiguous, with its completely symmetrical massing and its tall central dome, compared to Burges’s contemporary project for Trinity College there.^[250] Doubtless G. G. Scott would not have disdained it, even so!

Still more comparable to Scott’s own thwarted ambitions for a High Victorian Gothic governmental architecture, which led him as late as the seventies to enter various Continental competitions, is an earlier group of buildings in the New World outside the United States, the Parliament House (Plate 97A) and associated structures at Ottawa, Canada, designed by Fuller & Jones and Stent & Laver in 1859 and built in 1861-7. F. W. Stent had come out from England some considerable time before this, having last exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1846. Thomas Fuller (1822-98), also English, had settled in Toronto in 1856. Of their respective partners, Augustus Laver (1839-98) and Herbert Chilion Jones (1836-1923), less is known. In the course of the work Fuller and Laver joined forces, moving on shortly to the United States, as has been noted.

The main block at Ottawa, which was by the first-named firm, has been rebuilt after a fire in the present century in a considerably chastened vein, except for the big chapterhouse-like library at the rear, which is original. But the variety of form, the gusto of the detail, and the urbanistic scale of this project made of the Dominion Capitol a major monumental group unrivalled for extent and complexity of organization in England.^[251] The buildings flanking the vast lawn extending in front of the Parliament House are by Stent & Laver. These are somewhat less exuberant in scale and more provincial in the character of their detailing than the Parliament House was originally.

Most of the Neo-Gothic in Canada up to this time is more properly to be considered Early rather than High Victorian (see Chapter 6). An exception to this, perhaps, is University College in Toronto, designed in 1856 by F. W. Cumberland (1821-81), who had come out from England in 1847. Yet its rich and rather bombastic Norman design is closer to English work of the earlier decades of the century than to the round-arched Ruskinian Gothic of the fifties.

Australia, the other major British Dominion, had nothing comparable to Canada to offer in this period. Wardell’s English, Scottish, and Australian Bank in Melbourne is a passable example of secular High Victorian Gothic but no more than that. St John Evangelist’s, which he built at Toorak south of Melbourne in 1860-73, is handsomer but very simple—still almost Puginian, indeed—and all of monochrome ashlar. The enormous Catholic cathedral of Melbourne, St Patrick’s, which Wardell began in 1860, is more Continental in character, with two west towers like Renwick’s St Patrick’s in New York and also a tall crossing tower completed only in 1939. The Catholic cathedral of Adelaide, St Francis Xavier’s, begun in 1870 and still without its intended western spires, reputedly goes back to a design prepared by Pugin before his death in 1852. But even the later design of his son E. W. Pugin, on which the executed work was actually based, must have been much modified over the years by W. H. Bagot (b. 1880), H. H. Jory (b. 1880), and Lewis Laybourne-Smith (b. 1888), who successively supervised the job. It is certainly no happier an example of High Victorian Gothic than Wardell’s Catholic cathedral in Melbourne.

The Anglican cathedral in Melbourne, St Paul’s, having been begun in 1850 from designs by Butterfield, ought to be finer. But Butterfield had made the drawings as early as 1847, before even he was a High Victorian, and the laggard execution of the church by Joseph Reed evidently entailed much modification of the original designs. Moreover, the spires by John Barr date only from 1934. For the very late Anglican cathedral at Brisbane, St John’s, perhaps the finest of the lot, which was begun in 1901 by F. L. Pearson from earlier designs by his father J. L. Pearson as has already been mentioned, Butterfield had also prepared designs in 1884.

The architecture of the Dominions remained Colonial in spirit, as these notes on a few Australian churches indicate, well into the present century. First the able Frank Wills, moreover, the English-born architect of Montreal Cathedral, and then Fuller & Laver were drawn away from Canada to the United States, where opportunities were greater. Despite the great interest of the Government Buildings at Ottawa, it was in the United States rather than the British Dominions that the High Victorian Gothic proved a stimulus to such highly original achievement as Furness’s in the seventies.

The High Victorian Gothic episode in American architecture balanced almost precisely the Second Empire episode. Both were disowned, even by many of their most successful protagonists, by the mid seventies. It was the Gothic, however, that prepared the way for the more original developments of the last quarter of the century; as has already been stated, those who had practised chiefly in the Second Empire mode continued to take their lead from Paris. Yet there are paradoxes in the situation which must not be ignored. Richardson, the most creative new force in the seventies and eighties, continually urged young aspirants to an architectural career to study at the École des Beaux-Arts as he had done. Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), Richardson’s first really able assistant, was Paris-trained; partly because of that training, it was he who became in the mid eighties the leader of the reaction against the Richardsonian. Sullivan, the first truly great modern architect not alone of America but of the whole western world, was also in part Paris-trained, even though he was always highly critical of the doctrine of the École and much stimulated by Furness. Finally, it was even more the later writings of the French Viollet-le-Duc than those of the English Ruskin that encouraged bold and imaginative thinking about architecture in America in the seventies and eighties when his Entretiens became available in translation and were first widely read.^[252]

Were this a history of architectural thought rather than of architecture—that is of what was actually built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Viollet-le-Duc would play a much larger part. But his production,^[253] while not negligible, is curiously ambiguous. His many ‘restorations’ are no contribution to nineteenth-century architecture; rather they represent a serious diminution of authenticity in the great monuments of the past subjected to his ministrations. These include most notably Notre-Dame in Paris, the refurbishing of which he continued alone after the death of Lassus in 1857, and the Château de Pierrefonds, Oise, the rebuilding of which began the next year and continued down to his death in 1879; but the whole list is very long indeed, including Carcassonne, Vézelay, and Saint-Denis, to mention only some of the best known things.

Viollet-le-Duc’s new parish church for the suburb of St-Denis, Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée in the Boulevard Jules Guesde, built in 1864-7, has considerable interest, however. Unlike most English High Victorian Gothic churches, it is vaulted throughout; but the vaulting does not have that look of a student exercise which characterizes Lassus’s at Saint-Jean-de-Belleville in Paris of the previous decade. The broad square bays of the nave are well lighted by groups of lancets in the clerestory, and there is a sturdy sort of articulation of the elements not unlike that in the early work of Burges (Plate 98). Externally the rather complex plan, with a large rectangular Lady Chapel projecting behind the altar, produces a gawky and confused composition; but the detailing is simple and virile as in the interior. A massive western tower rises over the entrance porch, culminating in a tall slated roof rather than a stone spire. But the plate tracery of the large west window over the porch and the lancets of the stage above are stony enough and have a quite Street-like scale and vigour of form. It is perhaps unfortunate that Viollet-le-Duc built so few new churches; certainly most other French Neo-Gothic work is very inferior to this, as such a large and prominent church as Saint-Epvre at Nancy, begun in 1863 by M.-P. Morey (1805-78), a pupil of Leclerc, well illustrates.

In secular work Viollet-le-Duc was too often content to follow the current Second Empire mode with a good deal of the eclecticism, but little of the plastic boldness, of the English and the Americans. Such more or less Gothic blocks of flats as those that he built in the late fifties and sixties in the Rue de Condorcet and at 15 Rue de Douai in Paris are somewhat more comparable to the secular High Victorian Gothic in England (Plate 101A). These are certainly praiseworthy for the urbanistic politeness with which they fit between more conventional Second Empire neighbours despite their distinctly ‘Victorian’ detail,^[254] but there is little originality of conception. On paper Viollet-le-Duc later showed great boldness, however, in certain projects proposing the use of metal structural elements that he published with the second volume of the Entretiens (see Chapter 16).

In the late fifties and sixties the vigour of the ‘Early French’ detailing of certain English architects and a related logic of structural expression then called ‘real’ was often derived in part from a study of Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire. But Shaw’s book of Continental Sketches of 1858 and Nesfield’s similar book of 1862 make evident how intense and how idiosyncratic was their own first-hand study of medieval work across the channel. Certainly the ‘Early French’ detail of the English leaders is generally of higher quality than even Viollet-le-Duc’s best at Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée.

If there was very little Gothic work done in the third quarter of the century in France comparable in quality or in interest to that of the Anglo-Saxon countries, yet there was a general movement there away from the somewhat mincing attitudes of the forties and early fifties. Just as the Medieval Revival in America, considered in a broad sense, came to its climax in the mature work of Richardson (see Chapter 13)—which is much more Romanesque than Gothic in so far as it leans at all on the past—in France the Romanesquoid work of Vaudremer represents the highest achievement of the period in a non-Renaissance mode (Plate 72A). The same may even be said up to a point of most of the other countries of Europe. Yet the Germanic Rundbogenstil of the third quarter of the century was, for all the size, prominence, and elaboration of such public monuments as Waesemann’s Berlin City Hall or Hansen’s Vienna Waffenmuseum and the real excellence of Herholdt’s Danish work, already a sinking rather than a rising mode.

In Germany and Austria more Neo-Gothic edifices, both secular and ecclesiastical, were built after 1850 than before; several of them have already been mentioned. These are, however, rather examples of contemporary eclecticism than of a concerted movement. In addition to his school and his Rathaus, however, Schmidt built in Vienna some eight Gothic churches ranging in date from the Lazaristenkirche of 1860-2 to the Severinkirche of 1877-8. Most of them are brick-vaulted hall-churches—that is, of the characteristic medieval German plan and section, with aisles of the same height as the nave. However, the largest and most interesting, the Fünfhaus Parish Church of 1868-75, is centrally planned. This is an aisled octagon rising to a ribbed dome with hexagonal chapels grouped around the irregularly polygonal apse (Plate 99B). The spatial complexity of the interior is of real interest, and the walls are painted to suggest polychromatic brickwork of almost English brashness. Two front towers flanking the gabled entrance bay are set close against the dome to provide a very Baroque sort of composition—this is really, therefore, a sort of Sant’ Agnese in Agone or Karlskirche carried out with a G. G. Scott vocabulary of Neo-Gothic elements.

In Hungary the eighties saw a very belated manifestation of secular Neo-Gothic. The Parliament House, begun in 1883 by Imre Steindl (1839-1902) and completed in 1902, was surely inspired by Barry’s in London begun nearly a half-century earlier, but in character it is (not surprisingly) more like Schmidt’s Vienna Rathaus. Thus did outlying countries in the later decades of the century continue to take up modes long obsolescent in the major architectural centres.^[255]

The Gothic of C. F. Arnold (1823-90) at Dresden, as seen in his secular Kreuzschule of 1864-5 or the two-towered Sophienkirche of the same years, is inferior to Schmidt’s, both in command of the idiom and in architectonic organization, as indeed is most such German work of these decades. The Johanniskirche in Dresden of 1874-8 by G. L. Möckel (1838-1915), however, has a rather fine tower set in the transeptal position so much favoured in Victorian England. This is bold in scale and carefully detailed in a literate twelfth-century—not to say ‘Early French’—way much as Burges or Pearson might have designed it in England. More characteristic of German work of these decades is the Munich Rathaus, built in 1867-74 by G. J. von Hauberrisser (1841-1922) and extended by him in 1899-1909. Excessively spiky, this seems almost to have borrowed back from G. G. Scott the more Germanic features of his Broad Sanctuary terrace in London of fifteen years earlier. But the Neo-Gothic of the seventies and eighties in Germany is in general no more aggressive and gawky than the popular Meistersinger mode that revived so turgidly the forms of the Northern Renaissance (see Chapter 10).

Holland, which made almost no significant architectural contribution in the first half of the nineteenth century, now produced in P. J. H. Cuijpers (1827-1921) a sort of Dutch Viollet-le-Duc. In addition to undertaking important restorations, he built many vast new Gothic churches of brick which he exposed once more in reaction against the earlier nineteenth-century practice of stucco-coating. Cuijpers was learned and ambitious, and in such work he could be rather more original than Viollet-le-Duc in France, if less so perhaps than Schmidt in Austria. His Vondelkerk, a church of 1870 near the Vondel Park in Amsterdam, is not centrally planned like Schmidt’s Fünfhaus church in Vienna, but he obtained a somewhat similar spatial effect by making the crossing octagonal. The brickwork of the piers and the vaults is very richly treated but in a fashion as much polytonal as polychromatic. The banding is in bricks of different sizes and textures rather than of different colours, and the result has something of the subtlety of the interior of White’s Aberdeen Park church in London.

A larger and later Amsterdam church by Cuijpers, the Maria Magdalenakerk in the Zaanstraat of 1887, is considerably more impressive, both inside and out. Occupying one of those narrow triangular sites so often assigned to important urban churches in this period, the exterior builds up grandly to the rather severe crossing tower at the rear. Inside, Cuijpers made the most of the difficulties of the site also. The east end is conventionally Gothic in plan, and the choir here is brick-vaulted, as is the Vondelkerk throughout. But the taller nave, covered with a wooden roof of ogival section, is much more effective spatially because of the way it is widened by triangular elements at the front where the aisles are cut off owing to the narrowing of the site (Plate 101B). The later painted decorations in this church are harmonious in tone with the brickwork, and the whole has a breadth of attack comparable to some of the best English churches of the seventies, such as Pearson’s in Kilburn or Edmund Scott’s St Bartholomew’s, Brighton, without resembling any of them very much.

Curiously enough for so dedicated a church-builder, Cuijpers’s secular work is more conspicuous, and hence better known, than are his churches. The two largest and most prominent nineteenth-century buildings of Amsterdam are both by him. In these, the Rijksmuseum built in 1877-85 (Plate 101C) and the Central Station of 1881-9, he moved away from the emulation of thirteenth- or fourteenth-century ecclesiastical Gothic towards a more elastic sixteenth-century sort of design, rather similar to the English mode of these decades known as ‘Pont Street Dutch’ (see Chapter 12).

The similarity to the Northern Renaissance mode of this period in Germany is nearly as great, as also to such somewhat later Scandinavian buildings as Clason’s Northern Museum in Stockholm and Nyrop’s Town Hall in Copenhagen (Plate 173A). But Cuijpers’s touch is lighter than that of the Germans, and his precedent rather more Late Gothic than Mannerist, while his two chief works precede those that they most resemble in Sweden and Denmark by a decade or more. In both cases the frank incorporation of iron-and-glass elements is notable, a vast shed at the station and two almost equally vast covered courts in the museum. Above all, being the Gothic Revivalist he was, Cuijpers saw to it that the craftsmanship was excellent throughout; while his handling of scale, though ambiguous as in much work of these decades everywhere, is surprisingly successful. Both are very large buildings, placed in isolation where they can be seen from a distance and with carefully studied silhouettes varied by towers and other skyline features; yet the membering is delicate and almost domestic, quite as in the rather comparable English work of George (Plate 104B) or Collcutt (see Chapter 12).

In Italy projects of restoration led, as elsewhere, to the designing of certain fairly ambitious new façades in Gothic to complete medieval churches. The most conspicuous is that of the cathedral of Florence. After many abortive earlier moves, this was finally begun by Emilio de Fabris (1808-83) in 1866, when Florence became briefly the capital of Italy, and completed only in 1887. The earlier and less successful façade of Santa Croce in Florence had been carried out in 1857-63 by Niccoló Matas (1798-1872). It is characteristic of the international architectural scene in these decades that neither of these carefully archaeological compositions in polychrome Italian Gothic comes alive in the way that Italianate High Victorian Gothic often did in the hands of English architects, or even American ones, in the fifties and sixties.

Churches were built for Anglicans in most of the principal cities of Europe in the mid nineteenth century, usually by English architects and always in Victorian Gothic. Sometimes, as in the case of the Crimean Memorial Church by Street^[256] at Istanbul and Shaw’s English Church at Lyons, these were by the most distinguished English designers of the day, but more often they were by hacks who lived abroad and specialized in such work. Among the ‘English churches’ of this period that provided good samples of the High Victorian Gothic for foreigners—many were still to all intents and purposes Early Victorian—are two by Street^[257] in Rome, one for the English community, the other not ‘English’ at all in fact but built for American Episcopalians. The former, All Saints’, in the Via del Babuino, with a much later tower not by Street, provides internally a moderately successful example of his later work, although it is unimpressive and largely invisible externally. It was begun in 1880, a year before Street’s death, and opened in 1885.

Far finer is St Paul’s, the American church, prominently located among the contemporary banks and blocks of flats of the Via Nazionale and built in 1873-6. Boldly banded in brick and stone and with a tall square campanile at the front corner, this is indeed a richer and more striking example of an Italian Gothic basilica than the Middle Ages ever produced in Rome (Plate 100). The interior, with a rich apse mosaic by Burne-Jones on a glittering gold ground, has an originality and a coherence that is quite lacking in such Italian churches as were redecorated in the later nineteenth century. Late though this is in Street’s œuvre, it remains one of his best works.

If the English High Victorian Gothic was to some extent an article of export—and, of course, this account has hardly touched on the vast outlying areas of the British Empire, notably including India, to which it was exported in the greatest quantity—it was nevertheless largely without real influence outside the United States and the British Dominions. In the world picture, it was the British architectural critics of this period, Ruskin and Morris, who would have a vital influence, but that influence came for the most part rather later, around 1890 (see Chapter 16). Cuijpers, however, was a reader of Ruskin from the fifties.

Still to be discussed is the early work of one great architect, also reputedly a reader of Ruskin, whose career began in the seventies with a sharp revulsion from the Second Empire mode towards the Neo-Gothic. The Spanish (or more precisely Catalan) architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852-1926) was one of the most intensely personal talents that either the nineteenth or the twentieth century has produced. His style hardly matured before the nineties, and what are generally considered his typical works must be discussed later in connexion with the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 16). But what he had accomplished already in the seventies and eighties can be better appreciated here in relation to the contemporary work of those decades in other countries.

Gaudí’s earliest work was at the Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona, laid out in 1872, where he assisted the master of works Eduardo Fontseré, while still a student, in various projects for its embellishment. The elaborate Cascade there, incorporating an Aquarium, on which he worked in 1877-82 derives in the main from Espérandieu’s at the Palais Longchamps in Marseilles. But some of the detail, both plastic and incised, has a flavour more comparable to that of the wildest and most eclectic English and American Second Empire work of the previous decade than to anything French.

The first commission for which Gaudí was wholly responsible is the house of Don Manuel Vicens at 24-26 Carrer de les Carolines in Barcelona. This was erected in 1878-80, immediately upon his graduation from the local Escuela Superior de Arquitectura, and in it no trace of Second Empire influence, French or international, remains. A large suburban villa built of rubble masonry liberally banded with polychrome tiles, the Casa Vicens passes beyond the extravagances of a Teulon or a Lamb in the sixties into a world of fantasy that only one or two High Victorian designers such as the Scottish Frederick T. Pilkington (1832-98) ever entered. Yet Gaudí’s general inspiration came definitely from the medieval past. In Spain that past included the semi-Islamic Mudéjar, however, and much of the detailing which appears most original to non-Spanish eyes is, in fact, dependent on local precedents of one sort or another. For example, the floral tiles are merely what the Iberian world knows as azulejos and has continued to use down to the present time, especially in Portugal and Brazil (see Chapter 25).

In all the flamboyance of the decoration of the Casa Vicens, the most personal note is in the ironwork. This is naturalistic in theme and bold in scale; it also includes curious linear elements that wave and bend in a way which is more than a little premonitory of the Art Nouveau of the nineties (see Chapter 16). The entrance grille is a masterpiece of decorative art of this period, rivalled only by some of Morris’s contemporary stained glass.

The very utilitarian industrial warehouse for La Obrera Mataronense of 1878-82 at Mataró, with its great arched principals of laminated wood, should be mentioned to balance the Casa Vicens. Here Gaudí’s prowess as an imaginative constructor—almost a straight engineer—was very evident, as also the fact that the unfamiliar forms he continually used—the shape of the arches here was parabolic not semicircular or pointed—were not a matter of personal crankiness but selected for statical reasons: Gothic in theory, that is, like some of Soufflot’s vaulting, though not very Gothic in appearance.

In 1884, however, Gaudí was made director of works for a large new Gothic church in Barcelona, and from this time forward a considerable part of his activity, extending down through his restoration of the cathedral of Palma on the island of Mallorca in 1900-14, was that of a Gothic Revivalist, if an increasingly unconventional one. Towards such a career his own intense religiosity inclined him quite as much as was the case with Pugin and reputedly also with Cuijpers—Viollet-le-Duc, by exception, was strongly anti-clerical. Unlike Pugin’s or Cuijpers’s, however, Gaudí’s career as an ecclesiastical architect was rather unproductive. Yet from the first he designed and executed church furnishings and, while still a student in 1875-7, he assisted the architect Francesc de Paula del Villar i Carmona (1845-1922) on a project for adding a porch to the monastery church of Montsarrat.

In 1881 Villar was made architect of the proposed Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia),^[258] for which a large square site had been obtained between the Carrers de Mallorca, de Marina, de Provença, and de Sardenya in an outlying part of Barcelona, and the construction of the crypt of a great cruciform Gothic church was started in 1882. Two years later Gaudí took over charge of the work, as has been said, completing the crypt by 1891 almost entirely according to Villar’s original and quite conventionally thirteenth-fourteenth-century Gothic design. There followed the construction of the outer walls only of the chevet; these were finished by 1893. The further history of the church will be considered later; for Gaudí’s style underwent extraordinary changes in the nineties as he designed and built one transept façade of the church and its towers—which is about all that exists above ground even today (see Chapter 17).

Contemporaneously with Gaudí’s construction of the crypt and the chevet walls of the Sagrada Familia came four secular works, two of them also quite Neo-Gothic in character and two others of very great originality. The Bishop’s Palace at Astorga of 1887-93 and the Fernández-Arbós house, known as the Casa de los Botines, in the Plaza de San Marcelo at León of 1892-4 might well be mistaken for provincial High Victorian Gothic done in England or America twenty or thirty years earlier. But the city mansion of Don Eusebio Güell at 3-5 Carrer Nou de la Rambla (now Conde del Asalto) in Barcelona, built in 1885-9, is an edifice of the greatest distinction, rivalled for quality in its period only by the very finest late work of Richardson in America (see Chapter 13). The Teresian College at 41 Carrer de Ganduxer in Barcelona is also quite remarkable in its simpler way.

Far suaver than his earlier Casa Vicens, the Palau Güell is quite as strikingly novel all the same. At the base yawn a pair of parabolic arches, their tops filled above a plain reticulated grille with sinuous seaweed-like ornament of the most extravagant virtuosity (Plate 96B). The ‘Dragon Gate’ of the Finca Güell of 1887 in the Avenida Pedralbes is still stranger, with a nightmare quality which those of the house in town happily lack. On either side of the entrance arches and in the projecting first storey the façade of the Palau Güell is no more than a rather plain rectangular grid of stone mullions and transoms. In scale this grid is more like Parris’s Boston granite fronts of the twenties than like English window-walls, but it is detailed in a cranky medievalizing way that is more comparable to Webb’s handling of stonework (Figure 17). The rear façade towards the court includes in the middle a broad bay-window with curved corners protected by sunscreens as original but less fantastic than the grilles at the entrance. The most extraordinary features of the exterior, however, are the chimney-pots rising in profusion above the flat roof like an exhibition of abstract sculpture and entirely covered with a mosaic of irregular fragments of glass, rubble, or coloured tiles. In them the extravagance of his earlier houses was continued, and such terminal features remained characteristic of all his later secular work.