276. See Brandon-Jones, J., ‘Notes on the Building of Smeaton Manor’, Architectural History, I (1958), 31-59.
CHAPTER 13 - Notes
278. See Richardson, H. H., Trinity Church, Boston, Boston, 1888.
279. 3 vols, Paris, 1868-73. It will be noted that the last volume of this appeared after the original competition drawings for Trinity Church were prepared.
282. See Olmsted, F. L., and Kimball, T., Frederick Law Olmsted, 2 vols, New York, 1922-8.
283. See Richardson, H. H., Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, Boston, 1885.
284. See Richardson, H. H., Description of Drawings for the Proposed New County Building for Allegheny County, Penn., Boston, 1884.
285. See Schuyler, M., ‘The Romanesque Revival in New York’, Architectural Record, I (1891), 7-38, 151-98.
286. See Bragdon, C., ‘Harvey Ellis’, Architectural Record, XXV (1908), 173-83.
287. Hunt, of the older generation, was generally recognized as a leader in this camp also, although his energies in these years were principally engaged in designing and building a series of François I châteaux for the Vanderbilts and other millionaires that are anything but academic in their involved picturesqueness.
This curious episode, which has been given exaggerated importance by some historians of American architecture, began with the designing of the W. K. Vanderbilt house in New York in 1879-80 (see Andrews, W., The Vanderbilt Legend, New York, 1941). Other architects were also briefly affected by what was hardly more than a recrudescence of a mode popular in France under Louis Philippe in Hunt’s youth (see Chapter 3).
A few houses by McKim, Mead & White of the early eighties are definitely François I, and Richardson used François I dormers, probably independently of Hunt, on the Albany Capitol. Moreover, the round towers of the ‘Shingle Style’ undoubtedly owe something to Stanford White’s sketching trips in France. This episode obviously parallels the interest in revived Northern Renaissance modes of design in Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia in these decades, and has analogies also to the contemporary work in England of George & Peto and Collcutt (see Chapters 9 and 12).
288. In the designing of the Sherman house—particularly in the Shavian detailing—White had probably played an important part; he was, moreover, called on by the Shermans to enlarge the house in 1881. The library, of this date, is one of his finest pieces of interior decoration.
289. One of the earliest examples of the serious study of Colonial precedent is Arthur Little’s Early New England Interiors, Boston, 1878. However, his own work remained relatively free for some years.
290. See Building News, 28 April 1882.
291. These tiles wore out some years ago and have now been replaced. The smooth black roof seen on Plate 111 lacks the fine scale and rich texture the pantiles provide.
292. The conceptual organization of the exterior has seemed to most critics to have been borrowed from a much later monument, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris of the 1840s, even though McKim would not admit it. There is certainly none of Labrouste’s exposed metalwork in the interior; but the extensive use of Guastavino tile vaults, at this time a real technical innovation, is worth noting.
293. See Burnham, D. H., World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1894, and Ives, H., The Dream City, St Louis, 1893.
294. The area round the ‘Wooded Isle’ was much less regular than that round the Lagoon in continuance of Olmsted’s earlier and more naturalistic sort of landscaping. Into this area were shunted most of the buildings by local architects, doubtless because McKim distrusted their capacity to conform to the academic standards he was setting.
CHAPTER 14 - Notes
296. Somewhat fuller accounts of English commercial architecture in this period will be found in Hitchcock, ‘Victorian Monuments of Commerce’, Architectural Review, CV (1949), 61-74, and in Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, Chapters XI and XII. Most of the English buildings mentioned in this chapter are illustrated either in the book or the article.
297. See Weisman, W., ‘Commercial Palaces of New York’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XXXVI (1954), 285-302.
298. See Bogardus, J., Cast Iron Buildings: Construction and Advantages, New York, 1856.
299. See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Early Cast Iron Façades’, Architectural Review, CIX (1951), 113-16.
300. See Weisman, W., ‘Philadelphia Functionalism and Sullivan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 3-19.
301. See Sturges, W. K., ‘Cast Iron in New York’, Architectural Review, CXIV (1953), 233-8.
302. See Peterson, C., ‘Ante-bellum Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 27-9; X (1951), 25. The Jayne Building, begun by Johnston, was completed by Thomas U. Walter. It has unfortunately been demolished since 1958.
303. See Woodward, G., ‘Oriel Chambers’, Architectural Review, CXIX (1956), 268-70. Fine measured drawings by students of the University of Liverpool School of Architecture were published in Architectural History, II (1959), 81-94.
305. See Weisman, W., ‘New York and the Problem of the First Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XII (1953), 13-20. For a rather different opinion, see Webster, J. C., ‘The Skyscraper: Logical and Historical Considerations’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVIII (1959), 126-39.
306. It is worth noting that neither cast-iron façades nor the vertical articulation of the Philadelphia buildings of the fifties was used in either case. Both developments of the mid century proved cul-de-sacs since the New York architects followed the established modes of the sixties for monumental buildings in these first two skyscrapers. In the same years 1873-4, however, Hunt did build the five-storey edifice at 478-482 Broadway in New York with an all cast-iron front, employing a sort of attenuated ‘giant order’ subsuming the three middle storeys.
307. Giedion first called attention to the importance of ‘balloon-frame’ construction in Space, Time and Architecture in 1941; but see Field, W., ‘A Re-examination into the Invention of the Balloon Frame’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, II (1942), 3-29.
308. See Randall, G., The Great Fire of Chicago and its Causes, Chicago [1871].
309. See Hope, H., ‘Louis Sullivan’s Architectural Ornament’, Magazine of Art, XL (1947), 110-17. Sullivan thought of his early ornament as somehow ‘Egyptian’, but it is not very easy to see why. A later, so far unpublished study by Etel Kramer seems to establish, contrary to his own statements, that Sullivan owed a good deal to the theories of Owen Jones and that his ornament matured, earlier than has hitherto been supposed, in 1884-5.
310. This is not the same as the Revell Store.
311. Several more storeys were added later and appear in many of the published views.
312. One must say ‘metal’, because structural steel was only gradually replacing cast and wrought iron at this time; all these types of ferrous material were probably used in the Home Insurance, the Rookery, and other skyscrapers of the mid eighties. Two books by W. Birkmire, Architectural Iron and Steel, New York, 1891, and Skeleton Construction in Buildings, New York, 1893, best present the technical aspects of large-scale metal construction as it matured in the eighties and early nineties.
314. I owe this suggestion to Vincent Scully.
315. Incidentally, the signature Frank L[loyd] Wright on the drawings for a rather Richardsonian group of three masonry houses in Chicago, designed in the Adler & Sullivan office in 1888 for Victor L. Falkenau, suggests that it was Sullivan’s brilliant draughtsman, as it was Jenney’s assistant on the Leiter Building, who was responsible for this example of overt Richardsonian influence.
316. The discovery by Condit that this building was begun in 1890 seemed to lend it a special importance, up until then unrecognized. But the text gives the correct dating.
317. It is so generally assumed that Sullivan’s mature style is without historical antecedents that the even more definitely quattrocento character of the entrance here, as well as of those of the Guaranty Building, is rarely noted.
318. The five southernmost bays are an addition made in 1906 by D. H. Burnham & Co. They follow, with some slight diminution in the bay-width, Sullivan’s original design.
The form of the Burnham firm’s name in these years is significant of the increasing anonymity of architectural practice in America as the scale of operation increased (see Chapter 24).
319. See Purcell and Elmslie Architects (Walker Art Gallery Exhibition Catalogue), Minneapolis, 1953, and Gebhard, D., ‘Louis Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 62-8, and A Guide to the Existing Architecture of Purcell and Elmslie, Roswell, N. M., 1960.
320. Of more interest than the skyscraper is a smaller and earlier Singer Building, also by Flagg. Flagg was one American who retained contact with the French tradition of exposed metal construction as well as with the academic aspects of ‘Beaux Arts’ design as his first Singer Building illustrates.
321. See Schuyler, M., ‘The Work of N. LeBrun & Sons’, Architectural Record, XXVII (1910), 365-80. The Metropolitan Tower is, of course, the work of a firm not of a single architect; LeBrun himself had been dead for some years.
322. See Schuyler, M., ‘“The Towers of Manhattan” and Notes on the Woolworth Building’, Architectural Record, XXX (1913), 98-122.
CHAPTER 15 - Notes
324. For a remarkable later development of the veranda outside England, see Robertson, E. G., ‘The Australian Verandah’, Architectural Review, CXXVII (1960), 238-45.
331. In the Builder for 15 January 1859 and in the Supplement to Kerr, R., The Gentleman’s House, 2nd ed., London, 1865.
332. Contemporaries saw this house rather as a reaction towards the ‘Old English’ after the ‘modernism’ of the High Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire of the preceding decade. How conscious Shaw himself was of the significance of his own innovations it is difficult to say.
333. The plan was first published by Muthesius in 1904; this does not mean that its character was not known to contemporary architects, however.
334. By this time photo-lithographic processes made it possible for Shaw’s perspectives to appear in the Building News practically as facsimiles of his originals. Had it been necessary, as in the fifties and sixties, to ‘translate’ them into wood-engravings the transmission of the Shavian influence abroad would certainly have been much less effective.
336. See Wheeler, G., Rural Houses, New York, 1851, with later editions to 1868, and his Homes for the People in Suburb and Country, New York, 1855, with later editions to 1867.
337. See Gardner, E. C., Homes and How to Build Them, Boston, 1874, and also his Illustrated Homes, Boston, 1875.
338. See Woodward, G. E., Woodward’s Country Houses, New York, 1865; Woodward’s Architecture, Landscape Gardening and Rural Art, New York, 1867; Woodward’s Cottage and Farm Houses, New York, 1867; and Woodward’s National Architect, New York, 1868. Of Woodward’s Country Houses there were eight successive editions within a decade, thus rivalling in this period the popularity of Downing’s Cottage Residences in the forties and fifties; however, it is worth noting that the latter still remained in print.
339. See Sturges, W. K., ‘Long Shadow of Norman Shaw: Queen Anne Revival’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 21-5.
340. Scully in The Shingle Style provides evidence that the idea of a great hall was not unknown in America well before this. It may be unnecessary to suppose that Richardson knew of the Hinderton plan, since one or two comparable ones can be found in books appearing in America in the fifties; see, for example, the Nathan Reeve house in Newburgh, N.Y., published as ‘Design No. 22’ in Vaux, C., Villas and Cottages, New York, 1857. However that may be, the great hall theme was rarely exploited in Second Empire or Stick Style houses of the sixties. It makes a notable appearance or re-appearance, as the case may be, in Richardson’s planning just after 1870. See Notes VI-4 and VIII-2 in the 1961 edition of my Richardson book.
341. The term is Vincent Scully’s. Various themes touched on in this and succeeding paragraphs are discussed at length in his homonymous volume and provided there with a full roster of illustrations.
342. It is of interest that when the Monograph of the Work of McKim, Mead & White was prepared in 1915 almost all this early work was omitted. It has been rediscovered by critics and historians in the last thirty years, beginning with Mumford in the Brown Decades in 1931.
343. Just how the influence reached American architects so early is not altogether clear. The first treatise in English on Japanese architecture is Morse, E. S., Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, Boston, 1886; new ed., New York, 1961. See Lancaster, C., ‘Japanese Buildings in the United States before 1900: Their Influence upon American Domestic Architecture’, Art Bulletin, XXXV (1953), 217-24.
344. See Hitchcock, H. R., ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and the “Academic Tradition” in the Nineties’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VII (1947), 46-63.
345. For an unsuspected but possible influence on Wright in this façade, see Gebhard, D., ‘A Note on the Chicago Fair of 1893 and Frank Lloyd Wright’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVIII (1959), 63-5.
346. Japanese influence was more evident at the Chauncey L. Williams house at 520 Edgewood Place in River Forest, Ill., of 1895, notably in the use of rough boulders at the foot of the brick wall and flanking the entrance. Wright by this time was enthusiastically interested in Japanese prints; whether he also knew Morse’s book of 1886 (see Note 20 supra) is not clear.
347. This was very much extended, but along the original lines, in 1901, as shown on Plate 128B. The present River Forest Tennis Club, a much smaller structure, is not the same, though it bears some superficial resemblance to the Golf Club. The building of 1898-1901 was demolished in 1905.
348. I am grateful to John Brandon-Jones for allowing me to read the manuscript of his unpublished monograph on Voysey. Without his assistance of various sorts this account of Voysey could not have been written and illustrated.
350. The ‘House at Doverscourt for A. J. W. Ward’, published in the British Architect, 11 April 1890, was apparently never executed any more than those illustrated the previous year. It is very like Perrycroft, built in 1893, the first of Voysey’s important country houses, thus suggesting that on paper his style had in fact largely crystallized by this date before his Forster house was begun. It is of interest that the plan of the Ward project is more open than those of any of his executed houses; it may well have influenced Baillie Scott (see below).
351. Brandon-Jones suggests, however, that the very plain Regency villa in which Voysey was then living in St John’s Wood may have had some generic influence on the Forster house.
352. At Perrycroft the mullions are of wood, originally painted green. At the Forster house they were of stone, and that is true of almost all the later houses. So also the slates here were Welsh and grey; when he began to work in the Lake District he turned to green slates, earlier used by Godwin on Whistler’s house. These became standard on his later houses wherever they were built.
354. For a remarkable later work of Lethaby, see Pevsner, N., ‘Lethaby’s Last’, Architectural Review, CXXX (1961), 354-7. This church, at Brockhampton-by-Ross in Herefordshire, was roofed with pre-cast concrete slabs at the surprisingly early date of 1900-2; and its simplified, rather angular, Gothic design is, in effect, already proto-Expressionist.
355. See Pevsner, N., ‘George Walton, His Life and Work’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XLVI (1939), 537-48.
356. Voysey was also a notable designer of wallpapers and chintzes, perhaps the most notable of his generation in England.
CHAPTER 16 - Notes
357. See Madsen’s Sources of Art Nouveau, 75-83.
358. See Schmutzler, R., ‘English Origins of the Art Nouveau’, Architectural Review, CXVII (1955), 108-16. The question is discussed further at a later point in this chapter (pp. 284-5).
360. The one large structure built for this exhibition in permanent form, the Palais du Trocadéro by Davioud, has since been replaced. Vaguely Saracenic in design, yet not altogether unworthy in silhouette of its splendid site on the Chaillot heights, this shared none of the qualities of Eiffel’s temporary pavilion. See Davioud, G., Le Palais du Trocadéro, Paris, 1878. As long as it lasted, however, the Trocadéro provided a sort of pendant on this side of Paris to Abadie’s Sacré-Cœur atop Montmartre, begun in the same rather dreary decade of French architectural production.
362. See Alphand, A., L’Exposition universelle de Paris de 1889, Paris, 1892.
363. See Eiffel, G., La Tour de trois-cents-mètres, Paris, 1900.
364. Bogardus’s shot-towers of the fifties in New York, which were of essentially similar construction, received little contemporary or later publicity. It is still uncertain whether Jenney knew of them when he built the Home Insurance Building in Chicago in 1883-5. See T. C. Bannister, ‘Bogardus Revisited, Part II’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVI (1957).
366. See Grady, J., ‘Bibliography of the Art Nouveau’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV (1955), 18-27 and Art Nouveau (Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Catalogue), New York [1960].
367. This applies particularly to Art Nouveau decoration; the major architectural works were frequently very plastically organized, although most of the detail was linear.
368. See Schmutzler, R., ‘Blake and the Art Nouveau’, Architectural Review, CXVIII (1955), 90-7.
369. See Lancaster, C., ‘Oriental Contributions to Art Nouveau’, Art Bulletin, XXXIV (1952), 297-310.