The story of Shaw’s career is a fascinating one, far more interesting in fact than the general history of English architecture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was a success-drama in four or five acts, of which the last was by no means the least brilliant. Richardson’s career was less eventful, even though, at its peak in the mid eighties, it was at least as successful as Shaw’s. It was also incomplete, since death brought his production to an end at that peak when he was only forty-eight. Yet Richardson’s achievement must be considered greater than Shaw’s, qualitatively if not quantitatively, because his work was better integrated and his development more intelligently directed. Moreover, his influence operated on two levels: on one it was as wide, if more evanescent, than Shaw’s—say, what Shaw’s might have been if he had died at the age of forty-eight, that is, in 1879—on another level it was more like that of Webb, affecting deeply several of the most creative American architects of the next two generations.

Henry Hobson Richardson was born in 1838 near New Orleans in Louisiana. Upon graduation from Harvard in 1858 Richardson, bilingual on account of his Louisiana birth, not unnaturally proceeded to Paris to the École des Beaux-Arts, entering there the atelier of L.-J. André (1819-90), a pupil of Lebas who had become a professor at the École in 1855. But after two years the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States cut off his remittances from home and he had to find work in order to maintain himself. His experience in the office of Théodore Labrouste, notably in working on the designs for the Asile d’Ivry outside Paris, was perhaps of more ultimate value to him than what he learned in André’s atelier and at the École. Several of his earliest works in America, designed immediately after his return from Paris in 1865, have been discussed already (see Chapter 11). It was with the Brattle Square (now First Baptist) Church on Commonwealth Avenue at Clarendon Street in the new Back Bay residential district of Boston, the commission for which he won in a competition held in 1870, that his career seriously began. During the years that this was in construction, 1871-2, he had in his office a young assistant, Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), who had returned from Paris at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. It may well be that the forceful McKim helped Richardson to crystallize the divergent elements evident in his earlier work into a coherent personal style. The Brattle Square Church somewhat resembles in its round-arched medievalism such a Paris church of the sixties as Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge, which Richardson himself may have seen and admired in the early stages of its construction. But the squarish T-shaped plan, without aisles but with transepts, would have been as unusual in France at this period as in England. The material is the richly textured Roxbury Puddingstone rising in broad plain surfaces to the medium-pitched gables. The detail strikes a sort of balance between the French Romanesquoid and the English High Victorian Gothic, the forms being more French, the execution more English. The varied polychromy of the deep voussoirs of the arches is certainly English, but with a personal note in the great variety of the coloured banding. The corner placing of the tall tower, with its fine frieze by the French sculptor Bartholdi, is English in spirit, but its shape is rather more campanile-like than any English church tower had been since the forties.

A similar stylistic crystallization can be seen in the very extensive plant of the State Hospital at Buffalo, N.Y., a commission also won by Richardson in competition in 1870. This was largely re-designed before construction began in 1872 and was in building throughout the whole decade. It was, functionally, the sort of commission for which Richardson’s French training best prepared him, and the planning is French. The other sources of the design seem to have been mostly English, particularly the projects of Burges.

Two buildings in Springfield, Mass., where Richardson had been working on and off since his return from Paris, are even more significant than the Buffalo asylum for the rather definite evidence they offer as to his chief contemporary sources of inspiration at this point. The spire of the North Congregational Church there—commissioned as early as 1868, but built in 1872-3, after being re-designed in 1871 or 72—is a rather squat pyramid of quarry-faced brownstone with four corner spirelets rising from the same square base, apparently a version of the spire Burges designed for his Skelton church begun in 1871 or that of Street’s St James the Less. The tower of the Hampden County Courthouse of 1871-3 also comes from Burges, in this case from the project that he entered in the London Law Courts competition of 1866. The general composition owes more to the slightly earlier English town halls at Northampton and Congleton by Godwin, who was also Burges’s collaborator on the Law Courts project. But the magnificent scale of the random ashlar walls of quarry-faced Monson granite, their coldness relieved by bright red pointing, is as personal to Richardson as the similar brownstone masonry of the North Church and the Buffalo Hospital.

Richardson’s American Express Building,^[277] his first work in Chicago, which was begun in 1872, and his contemporary Andrews house in Newport, R.I., both showed comparable evidence of generic influence from contemporary England (see Chapters 14 and 15:ch15#). In this same year, 1872, Richardson won the competition for Trinity Church^[278] in Boston, which was to occupy a conspicuous site on the east side of Copley Square, the principal open space in the new Back Bay district. Preceding by a year the Panic of 1873, which slowed building almost to a standstill, this commission and that for the Buffalo Hospital kept him busy through five lean years. As Trinity rose to completion over the years 1873-7, this big Boston church established Richardson’s reputation as the new leader among American architects (Plate 108A). Even before Trinity was finished others were producing crude imitations of it; and over the next twenty years many prominent American churches, particularly in the Middle West, followed in some degree the paradigm that it provided.

Trinity is in plan an enlarged and modified version of the Brattle Square Church. A deep semicircular chancel provides a fourth arm, and a great square lantern rises over the crossing. The elaborate porch, so archaeologically Provençal Romanesque, was added by Richardson’s successors, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, in the nineties, as were also the tops of the western towers; the present decorations of the chancel are much later and by Charles D. Maginnis (1867-1955).

The materials of Trinity are pink Milford granite in quarry-faced random ashlar for the walling and the Longmeadow brownstone that he had first used on the Unity Church in Springfield for the profuse trim. The detail changed in character as the work proceeded; in the earliest portions executed it is heavy and crude, with the foliage carved in a naturalistic High Victorian Gothic vein. But the logic of the round arches that Richardson had been consistently using since he designed the Brattle Square Church in 1870 led him to study Révoil’s Architecture romane du midi de la France,^[279] and such a characteristic feature as the polychromy on the outside of the apse is specifically Auvergnat. Moreover, the executed lantern was rather closely based on that of the Old Cathedral of Salamanca in Spain—a model that Richardson’s assistant Stanford White (1853-1906), who succeeded McKim in his employ in 1872, seems to have suggested.

Most contemporaries, supposing all worthy nineteenth-century architecture to be necessarily derivative from this or that style of the past, believed that Richardson had initiated a Romanesque Revival here. But Richardson remained really as responsive to contemporary English ideas as he had been earlier. For example, the curious double-curved wooden roof with kingpost trusses derives from published examples of similar roofs built or projected by Burges. Equally symptomatic of English influence is the use of stained glass by Morris and Burne-Jones in the north transept windows. That glass, however, is inferior in richness of tone to the small windows in the west front designed by the American artist John LaFarge. LaFarge was also responsible for the painted decoration on the walls and the roofs.

To take over Fuller & Laver’s New York State Capitol at Albany when already partly built in the way that Richardson and Eidlitz—a foreign-born exponent of Romanesque of the earlier Rundbogenstil sort, it will be recalled—were asked to do in 1875 was a thankless job; but this call for Richardson’s aid illustrates the rapidity with which he achieved a national reputation. More important, both historically and intrinsically, than what he was able to carry out in Albany—chiefly the Senate Chamber—were a second house that he built in Shepard Avenue in Newport, R.I., in 1874-6 and a building in Main Street in Hartford, Conn., of 1875-6 (see Chapters 14 and 15). The Sherman house is the first example of a Shavian manor successfully translated into American materials; the Cheney Block (now Brown-Thompson Store) is not Shavian at all, but very similar to the arcaded façades common in England since the late fifties (Plate 116A).

To the late seventies belong two remarkably fine buildings, still obviously related to slightly earlier English work, but more personal than either the Newport house or the Hartford commercial building. With the Winn Memorial Library in Woburn, Mass., of 1877-8 Richardson initiated a line of small-town public libraries that reached its climax in the Crane Library in Quincy, Mass., of 1880-3 (Plate 110). The high window-bands of the stack wings, a monumental stone version of Shaw’s ‘ribbon-windows’, and the stone-mullioned ‘window-walls’ at the ends are more significant than the round stair-turrets and the cavernous entrance arches—Early Christian from Syria^[280] in origin, not Southern French Romanesque, it should be noted—that romanticize their generally compact massing. The highly functional planning is asymmetrical yet very carefully ordered, perhaps the one remaining trace of his Paris training.

In building Sever Hall, a classroom building for Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., in 1878-80 Richardson abandoned rock-faced granite and brownstone, materials whose common use would, a little later, mark the extent of his influence on other architects, for the red brick of the nearby eighteenth-century buildings in the old Harvard Yard. He even imitated the plain oblong masses of these Georgian edifices under his great red-tiled hip-roof; but the front, with its deep Syrian arch and two tower-like rounded bays, and the rear, with a broader and shallower central bow, are wholly Richardsonian. There is a rather Shavian pediment over the centre of the front, however; while the moulded brick mullions of the banked windows and the very rich cut-brick panels of floral ornament seem to reflect current English work by Stevenson and by Godwin as well as by Shaw. Yet the whole has been amalgamated into a composition quite as orderly as anything the English ‘Annites’ had produced. At the same time Sever Hall is almost as vigorous and manly in scale as his contemporary libraries of granite and brownstone.

Two domestic buildings of 1880, one entirely shingled, the other of rough glacial boulders, are even more personal works; and both, particularly the former, represent the American domestic mode of this period now called the ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter 15). The John Bryant house in Cohasset, Mass., of 1880 first illustrated his emancipation from the direct Shavian imitation that had begun with the Sherman house and continued in several projects—probably mostly White’s work in actual fact—that were prepared in the later seventies but never executed. Quite a series of later shingled houses by Richardson followed the Bryant house between 1881 and 1886 (Plate 124B).

The contemporary Ames Gate Lodge^[281] in North Easton, Mass., has a sort of antediluvian power in the bold plasticity of its boulder-built walls—a theme exploited once before in Grace Church in Medford, Mass., of 1867 it will be recalled—as remote from the Romanesque as from the Queen Anne. A similarly absolute originality of a more gracious order can be seen in the Fenway Bridge of 1880-1 in Boston; its tawny seam-faced granite walls happily echo the easy naturalistic curves of the landscaping by his friend F. L. Olmsted (1822-1903),^[282] of which it is a principal feature.

1881 saw the initiation of a more monumental building for Harvard, Austin Hall,^[283] then the Law School, which was completed in 1883. Rich Auvergnat polychromy and a great deal of rather Byzantinesque carved ornament somewhat confuse the direct structural expressiveness of the thoroughly articulated masonry walls; as a result Austin Hall provided a multitude of decorative clichés for imitators to abuse. Much more modest and also much more significant was the station at Auburndale, Mass., also of 1881, built for the Boston & Albany Railroad. This was the first and the finest of a series of small suburban stations notable for the simplicity of their design and for the compositional skill with which the open elements, carried on sturdy but gracefully shaped wooden supports, were related to the solid masonry blocks of granite and brownstone beneath sweeping roofs of tile or slate. If Shaw was called on in the nineties to design the interiors of an ocean liner for the White Star Line, Richardson had already provided in 1884 a railway carriage for the Boston & Albany. This was neither Romanesque nor Queen Anne in inspiration, but had domestically scaled interiors lined with small square oaken panels and no carved ornament of any sort.

Stations, libraries, and houses form the bulk of Richardson’s production from 1882 until his death. But two much larger buildings, which he himself judged to be his master works, were also fortunately initiated, one in 1884 and the other in 1885, well before his last illness began, though both had to be finished by his successors Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge after his death. The Allegheny County Buildings^[284] in Pittsburgh, Penna., consist of a vast quadrangular courthouse dominated by a very tall tower that rises in the centre of the front and a gaol across the street to the rear. Except for the courtyard walls, interesting for the variety and the openness of their ranges of granite arcading, the courthouse offers on the whole only a sort of summary of his talents; the detail, above all, is afflicted with an archaeological dryness that must be due to the increasing dependence of his assistants on published documents of medieval carving. The courthouse provided, however, the model for many large public buildings in the next few years. Among these, the City Hall in Minneapolis, Minn., begun by the local firm of Long & Kees in 1887, is not unworthy of comparison with the original, particularly as regards the tower. That of Toronto in Canada, built by E. J. Lennox in 1890-9, is less interesting but even more monumental; it also signalizes the supersession of English by American influence in Canadian architecture at this point, as does the almost equally Richardsonian Windsor Station in Montreal begun by the American architect Bruce Price in 1888.

The Pittsburgh Jail is a masterpiece of the most personal order, Piranesian in scale, nobly expressive of its gloomy purpose, and as superb an example of granite masonry as exists in the world (Plate 108B). It epitomizes Richardson’s genius where the courthouse merely summarizes his talents.

Richardson’s highest achievement, however, was in the field of private building not in that of the public monument. By a happy coincidence his ultimate masterpiece rose in Chicago where, at this very moment, technical advances in construction were being made that would soon bring to a climax the whole story of nineteenth-century commercial architecture (see Chapter 14). Chicago retains Richardson’s last great masonry house, that of 1885-7 for J. J. Glessner, almost as perfect a domestic paradigm of granite construction as the Pittsburgh Jail. To her shame, however, Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store, built during the same years, was torn down a generation ago to provide a car park.

The Field store occupied an entire block with a dignity and a grandeur no other commercial structure had ever attained before (Plate 116B). Internally it was of iron-skeleton construction; externally the arcaded masonry walls represented a development from those of the Cheney Building of ten years earlier (Plate 116A). Segmental arches covered the broad low openings in the massive ground storey, all built of great ashlar blocks of rock-faced red Missouri granite. The next three storeys, built of brownstone, were combined under a single range of broad arches, yet also articulated within these arched openings by stone mullions and transoms. Above this stage the rhythm doubled, with the windows of the next two storeys joined vertically under narrower arches. The scale of the quarry-faced ashlar was graded down as the walls rose, quite as were the window sizes, and the non-supporting spandrels were filled with small square blocks. The full thickness of the bearing masonry walls was revealed at all the openings. Finally there came a trabeated attic of somewhat Schinkel-like character over which appeared almost the only carved detail on the building, a boldly crocketed cornice. That was ‘Early French’, i.e., of twelfth-century Gothic rather than Romanesque or Byzantine inspiration.

The result was a monument as bold and almost as Piranesian in its scale and its forcefulness as the Pittsburgh Jail; but the walls were also as open, as continuously fenestrated, as those of the court of the Pittsburgh Courthouse. The logical and expressive design of commercial buildings with walls of bearing masonry could hardly be carried further. But in the very year that the Field Store was finished Holabird & Roche, in designing the Tacoma Building, also in Chicago, first showed how the exterior of such edifices might express instead a newly developed sort of construction that allowed the internal metal skeleton to carry the external cladding of masonry (see Chapter 14).

In one last commercial building, much more obscurely located and built of far less sumptuous materials, which was started just before Richardson’s death—it was only commissioned after his last illness had begun—he carried the logic of the design of the Field Store one step farther. It was almost as if he had already sensed, like Holabird & Roche, the implications of the Home Insurance Building in Chicago of 1883-5 by their former employer William Le Baron Jenney, in which the new sort of construction was first used but not at all expressed. On Richardson’s Ames Building in Harrison Avenue in Boston a tall arcade rose almost the full height of the wall beneath a machicolated attic; the depth of the reveals around the sash at the sides of the brick piers was minimized; and above the ground storey the spandrels were of metal panels set almost flush with both piers and sash.

When Richardson died in 1886 the evidence of his great late works indicates that his powers were at their highest. His office, moreover, had never been busier. How Richardson might have developed further it is impossible to say. In the hands of his imitators the Richardsonian mode did not grow in any very creative way during the decade or more that it continued a favourite for churches, public buildings, and even houses built of masonry. Those who had been closest to Richardson when his style was maturing, McKim and White, rarely imitated him; even before his death, in fact, they had already set under way a reaction against the Richardsonian. Their buildings and not his provide the real American analogue to the later work of Shaw in England. Moreover, their leadership succeeded his in many professional circles from coast to coast almost before he was dead.

Leaving aside the modes inherited from the sixties, in any case transmuted almost beyond recognition by the early eighties if not yet entirely superseded, there were at the time of Richardson’s death three main currents in American architecture as against the four or five more or less Shavian modes then popular in England. One was the Richardsonian.^[285] This was practised with some success by various Boston firms such as Peabody & Stearns and Van Brunt & Howe. It had been carried to Kansas City, Missouri, by Van Brunt, moreover, and it was being developed with some originality by other Middle Westerners such as George D. Mason (1856-1948) in Detroit, D. H. Burnham (1846-1912) and his partner J. W. Root (1850-91), H. I. Cobb (1859-1931) and his partner Frost, and several other firms in Chicago. The very able designer Harvey Ellis (1852-1904),^[286] working for L. S. Buffington (1848?-1931) in Minneapolis, should also be mentioned. Another current was represented by the development leading towards the Chicago skyscrapers of the nineties, in Richardson’s last years more in the hands of technicians than of architects (see Chapter 14).

The third, and for the next few years the most expansive, current was what can already be called the Academic Reaction. This was parallel to, yet already pushing well ahead of, Shaw’s somewhat coy approach to a programmatic revival of eighteenth-century forms; and McKim, Mead & White were its acknowledged leaders.^[287] During the years that White was working for Richardson he seems to have been devotedly Shavian. Certain unexecuted house projects from the Richardson office which White signed, done for the Cheney family of Manchester, Conn., the clients for Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, make this particularly evident. When White replaced Bigelow in the firm of McKim, Mead & Bigelow, on his return from the European trip that he took after leaving Richardson in 1878, he found McKim designing Shavian houses with a considerably less sure decorative touch than his own. The McKim, Mead & White country houses that followed, however, such as that for H. Victor Newcomb in Elberon, N.J., of 1880-1 (Plate 125A), that for Isaac Bell, Jr, in Newport, R.I., of 1881-2 (Plate 126), and that for Cyrus McCormick in Richfield Springs, N.Y., of the same years, represent in several ways a real advance over Richardson’s Sherman house.^[288] Such an advance is equally to be observed in various houses built around Boston in these years by W. R. Emerson (1833-1918) and by Arthur Little (1852-1925), the very earliest of which doubtless influenced Richardson when he designed the Bryant house (see Chapter 15).

For McKim, Mead & White’s Tiffany house in New York of 1882-3, all of tawny ‘Roman’ brick with much moulded brick detail, the inspiration was largely Shavian also; only the rock-faced stone base and the broad low entrance arch were at all Richardsonian. In the New York house that they began the next year, however—really a group of houses arranged in a U around an open court across Madison Avenue from the rear of St Patrick’s Cathedral—for the railway magnate Henry Villard an entirely different, even quite opposed, spirit appears (Plate 109B). The Villard houses, although on Villard’s insistence still built of brownstone rather than of light-coloured limestone, are as much a High Renaissance Italian palazzo as anything Barry or his contemporaries on the Continent ever designed in the preceding sixty years. Reputedly Joseph M. Wells (1853-90), an assistant in the McKim, Mead & White office who later refused membership in the firm, was responsible for the decision to follow Roman models of around 1500, most notably the Cancelleria Palace, as that was known to him—he had never been abroad—through the plates of Letarouilly’s Édifices de Rome moderne.

This type of design represented a conscious reaction against the Neo-Picturesque, whether Richardsonian, Shavian, or François I, a return to formal order of the most drastic sort. It represented also a return to close archaeological imitation of a style from the past such as had ended in America, on the whole, with the decline of the Greek Revival a generation earlier. Curiously enough this turn was also something of a declaration of independence from Europe, since the American Academic Reaction as initiated in the design of the Villard houses seems to have had no contemporary sources abroad. However much Shaw’s Queen Anne had, for about a decade, been moving towards an equivalent formality—of a more eighteenth-century sort—Shaw had neither gone as yet so far in this direction nor did he ever turn to the High Renaissance for his models. Continental parallels in the eighties are not hard to find in the work of such men as Balat in Belgium, Koch in Italy, and Wagner in Austria; but their current production was probably not known in the United States, whose foreign relations in architecture had always been largely restricted to England, France, and Germany.

This American return to order was at first more significant for its absolute aspect than for its archaeological bent. Although McKim, Mead & White used a Renaissance arcade at the base of their Goelet Building erected in Broadway at 20th Street in New York in 1885-6, the upper storeys of this modest skyscraper offer a very free, and at the same time a highly regularized, expression of the hive of offices behind, and even of the metal grid of the internal skeleton. Certain houses by McKim, Mead & White in New York of these years were even freer from the imitation of specific Italian precedents; while their Wm. G. Low house of as late as 1886-7, on the seashore south of Bristol, R.I., is a masterpiece of the ‘Shingle Style’ despite the tightness and formality of its plan (see Chapter 15). Carefully ordered under its single broad gable, which even subsumes the veranda at the southern end, the Low house is yet quite without reminiscent detail or, indeed, much of any detail at all (Plate 127). In a group of small houses at Tuxedo Park, not at all academic in their exterior treatment, Bruce Price (1845-1903) was reorganizing the open plan of the Americanized Queen Anne in a schematically symmetrical way at just this time also (Plate 125B; Figure 28).

The possibility of a revival of the American Colonial and Post-Colonial in all their successive phases from the medievalism of the seventeenth-century origins to what can be called the ‘Carpenters’ Adam’ of 1800 had been in the air ever since the early seventies, when McKim had added a Neo-Colonial room to a real Colonial house in Newport, R.I. In the local Colonial architecture Americans found obvious parallels to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedent that Shaw was exploiting in England.^[289] The ‘Shingle Style’ employed various features and treatments—such as the all-over covering of shingles itself—that recall American work of the periods before 1800. But because of the continued strength of inherited Picturesque ideals there was no programmatic imitation of formal eighteenth-century house design before the mid eighties. Even such a highly orderly example as Little’s Shingleside House at Swampscott, Mass., of 1880-1 was still quite un-archaeological. Interestingly enough, this seems to have been about the first up-to-date American house to be published in a foreign magazine^[290] since the Allgemeine Bauzeitung in 1846 presented examples of Greek Revival terrace-houses in New York.

Following on the completion of the Bramantesque Villard houses in New York in 1885, McKim, Mead & White built in Newport, R.I., in 1885-6 the H. A. C. Taylor house, lately destroyed, which was as Neo-Georgian, in its American Colonial way, as the Fred White house Shaw began in London two years later. For this the American architects adopted the symmetrical Anglo-Palladian plan of the mid eighteenth century and capped the resultant rectangular mass with the special gable-over-hip roof of Colonial Newport. Elaborately embellished with Palladian windows and with much carved detail of a generically Georgian order, the Taylor house provided a new formula of design for domestic work that soon superseded almost completely the ‘Shingle Style’. From the Taylor house stems that mature Colonial Revival which was to last longer in the end in America than had the Greek Revival.

Down to the early nineties, however, McKim, Mead & White were rarely so programmatic in their Neo-Colonial work, and their principal public building of the late eighties, the Boston Public Library, was entirely Italianate (Plate 111). In 1887 they were commissioned to build this major monument on the west side of Copley Square. There it was to face the Trinity Church that had initiated the Richardsonian wave more than a decade earlier—a monument in whose designing, moreover, both McKim and White had actually participated. The Library as built in 1888-92 was a major challenge to the Richardsonian, at least as contemporaries then generally understood and employed what they thought was Richardson’s mode. The contrast it offers to the church opposite is almost as great as to the prominent but low-grade High Victorian Gothic structures that flanked the new site to north and south, the New Old South Church by Cummings & Sears of the mid seventies, still standing across Boylston Street, and the contemporaneous Museum of Fine Arts by John H. Sturgis (?-1888) and Charles Brigham (?-1925) which long occupied the south side of the square.

Trinity is dark and rich in colour, a complex pile rising massively to its large central lantern. Moreover, it was flanked at the left on the Boylston Street side, where Richardson took Picturesque advantage of the corner cut off his site by Huntington Avenue, with an asymmetrically organized and domestically scaled parish house. The Library is light coloured and monochromatic, all of a smooth-cut Milford granite ashlar originally almost white and even today much lighter than the rock-faced pink Milford granite of Trinity. It is, moreover, a simple quadrangular mass, capped by a pantiled^[291] hip-roof of moderate height; the scale throughout is monumental and the detail sparse but eminently suave. Yet if the contrast with Richardson’s Trinity of 1873-7 is so great—and even greater with the ponderous vernacular Richardsonian as that was long illustrated south of the Library in the all-brownstone S. S. Pierce Store just built by S. Edwin Tobey in 1887—the continuity with Richardson’s work of the mid eighties is equally notable.

For example, none of Richardson’s own late work was polychromatic. Three of his more prominent edifices, the Allegheny County Buildings in Pittsburgh and the Glessner and MacVeagh houses in Chicago, were all of light-coloured granite, while the Warder house in Washington is of smooth-cut limestone such as Wells had wished to use for the Villard houses. Above all, the quadrangular block of the Boston Library with its regular arcuated fenestration parallels rather closely the design of Richardson’s just completed masterpiece, the Marshall Field Store. Thus, in fact, Richardson’s former assistants, for all the Renaissance precedent of their detailing—and the courtyard of tawny Roman brick is almost more Bramantesque in treatment than the Villard houses—were to a very notable extent only proceeding farther in a direction that he himself had already taken.

Since most contemporaries, in their innocence, thought the Richardsonian merely a Romanesque Revival, it is understandable that they saw in such things as the Villard houses and the Boston Public Library an alternative—and anti-Richardsonian—Renaissance Revival. Nor can it be denied that the handling of the exterior of the Library derives from the sides of Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini almost as directly as the arcade in the court is copied from that of the Cancelleria Palace in Rome.^[292]

The stair-hall, the reading-room, and even the minor corridors reveal clearly their Letarouillian origins when they are studied in the architects’ drawings, drawings which imitate the very style of draughtsmanship of Letarouilly’s plates. The stair-hall, executed in yellow Siena marble, has walls decorated allegorically by the French painter Puvis de Chavannes, generally considered the greatest muralist of the age; the delivery room has an entirely different sort of illustrative Shakespearean frieze painted by Edwin A. Abbey; the hall in the top storey contains John Singer Sargent’s most ambitious murals. The associated sculpture by Augustus St Gaudens and others is less interesting; but these notable decorative increments from the hands of painters and sculptors of considerable reputation help to explain why for a generation this building was thought to have initiated a real ‘American Renaissance’ in which all the arts participated. Of this ‘Renaissance’ an international exhibition represented the moment of early triumph.

When, in 1891, it was decided to hold in Chicago the first American international exhibition in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, the initial architectural responsibility lay with the Chicago firm of Burnham & Root. They were working at that very moment on two of the most remarkable of early Chicago skyscrapers, the Reliance Building (Plate 115B) begun in 1890, which eventually offered the frankest expression of the new all-skeleton construction, and the Monadnock Building begun the next year, which was the last very tall building to have exterior walls of bearing masonry (see Chapter 14). The more representational Chicago skyscrapers of this period by Burnham & Root, the Women’s Temple and the Masonic Building, were of generically Richardsonian character; and Richardsonian influence was never stronger and more general in Chicago than in the five years following his death. But the principal buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition,^[293] as they rose in 1892-3, proved to be neither Richardsonian nor at all expressive of metal construction in the way of those at the Paris Exhibitions of 1878 and 1889 (see Chapter 16).

Burnham in 1891 called in various leading Eastern architects to assist him in designing the World’s Fair, as the Chicago exhibition was usually called. Then in that same year his partner Root, the designer of the pair, died. So it came about that the Easterners, not so much the ageing Hunt, dean of the profession, as the energetic and executive McKim, called the tune; McKim even provided Burnham with a new designer in the person of Charles B. Atwood (1849-95) to replace Root. The Fair, with the landscape architect Olmsted to collaborate on the planning, came out a great ‘White City’, the most complete new urbanistic concept^[294] to be realized since the replanning of Paris and of Vienna in the third quarter of the century (Figure 20).

The metal-and-glass construction of the regular ranges of vast exhibition buildings was almost entirely hidden by the elaborately columniated façades of white plaster that were reflected, dream-like, in Olmsted’s formal lagoons. The architects’ inspiration was generically academic, not specifically Italianate or Classical, and only one or two small State pavilions followed Colonial Revival models. The dominant scale was very large indeed, and the façades of the various buildings, although by many different architects both Eastern and Western, were surprisingly harmonious. The young men back from the École in Paris must have worked overtime to bring up to McKim’s increasingly academic standards the projects of various well-established architects who had been doing more or less Richardsonian work for the last decade.

Despite the major importance of the Shavian influence in America around 1880, after the designing of the Villard houses in 1883 American architects moved far more rapidly than Shaw himself along the path towards abstract order and stylistic discipline. The H. A. C. Taylor house introduced, in an American version, the formal eighteenth-century revival—whether one calls it ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ or ‘Neo-Georgian’—before Shaw began his house for Fred White. It is even perhaps significant that this was done for an American client. The World’s Fair of the early nineties brought to the fore a more Classical and ordered sort of Neo-Academicism than Shaw ever reached. By the standards of the next generation, for example, Atwood’s Fine Arts Building at Chicago (Plate 109A), though based on a Prix de Rome project of 1857, was more advanced than Shaw’s Piccadilly Hotel of 1905-8 (Plate 107). The Paris Exhibition of 1889 was notable for its great feats of metal construction, Eiffel’s Tower (Plate 130A) and Contamin’s Galerie des Machines (see Chapter 16). But the façades of the Grand Palais built for the Paris Exhibition of 1900, executed permanently in stone, seem merely a solider realization of the plaster ‘dream-city’ that Burnham and McKim had conjured up on the Chicago lake-front earlier in the decade.

Whether or not there was really influence from Chicago on Paris in the late nineties, there can be no question that the influence of the Fair in America was very great indeed. While the buildings of the Fair were rising in 1892 the young Frank Lloyd Wright built his Blossom house in Chicago in rather obvious emulation of McKim, Mead & White’s Taylor house (see Chapter 15). The following year he submitted in competition a completely academic project for a Museum and Library in Milwaukee. Moreover, this project, based on Perrault’s east front of the Louvre, was more suave in its academicism than the buildings that Richardson’s successors, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, who had already gone over like almost everyone else to the McKim camp, were erecting that year for the Chicago Public Library and for the Chicago Art Institute on Michigan Avenue.

It is the great historical paradox of this period in Chicago that at the very time the academic triumph of the Fair was being prepared, nineteenth-century commercial architecture was also reaching its climax there. Even before Richardson died, his tradition had split in the mid eighties. One side of it, that related to his own French training and his dependence on various styles of the past, limited though that was, as also his growing concern with architectonic order, went forward under the leadership of McKim (see Chapter 24). The other side, derived from his sense of materials, at once intelligent and intuitive, and his interest in functional expression—the qualities that were most notable in his shingled houses and his commercial buildings—provided the platform from which first Sullivan and then Wright in the late eighties and the nineties advanced to the creation of the first modern architecture (see Chapters 14 and 15).

If the importance of Richardson and, indeed, that of Shaw—as regards the development of domestic architecture—are to be fully appreciated the stories of the general development of the commercial building and of the dwelling-house in England and America down to 1900 must be known. Of the two, that of commercial architecture is the simpler and also the more dramatic. The culmination of this story in the American skyscrapers of the nineties has been recognized, from the time when so many foreign visitors came to Chicago in 1893 on account of the Fair, as one of the major and most characteristic architectural achievements of the whole period with which this volume deals.