William Morris Hunt, then at the height of his powers, was commissioned to paint two large mural compositions for the assembly chamber of this blessed building. So much time had been spent in mismanaging the structure that Hunt was given only two months to transfer his cartouche to the panels; but he worked heroically, and, as one of his biographers says, the work was a great triumph. Great, perhaps—but temporary! “The building had fallen into the hands of a political ring, and the poor construction was revealed in the leaking of the massive roof and the settling of the whole structure. Before ten years had passed, great portions of Hunt’s paintings flaked off, and what remained was walled up behind the rebuilding necessary to avert utter ruin.” In a period like this, Richardson’s comparative success takes on heroic proportions.
II
With the little eddies of eclecticism, with the rage for the Mansard roof, or the introduction of German Gothic, and, a little later, the taste for Queen Anne domesticity, there is scarcely any need to deal; they represented only the dispersion of taste and the collapse of judgment which marked the Gilded Age.
Up to the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, Richardson had imitators, and they were not always mean ones. L. H. Buffington, in Minneapolis, had to his credit a number of buildings which would not, perhaps, have dishonored the master himself; but, as so often happens, the tags in Richardson’s work were easier to imitate than his spirit and inventiveness; and the chief marks of the style he created are the all-too-solid courses of rough stone, the round arch, the squat columns, and the contrasts in color between the light granite and the dark sandstone or serpentine. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, an excellent architectural critic, once said, not without reason, that Richardson’s houses were not defensible except in a military sense; but one is tempted to read into these ponderous forms partly the architect’s unconscious desire to combat the infirmity and jerry-building of his lower contemporaries, and partly his patron’s anxiety to have a seat of refuge against the uneasy proletariat. A new feudalism was entrenching itself behind the stockades of Homestead and the other steel-towns of the Pittsburgh district. Here was a mode of building, solid, formidable, at times almost brutal, that served the esthetic needs of the barons of coal and steel almost as well as the classic met those heroes who had survived the War of Independence.
I have emphasized what was strong and fine in Richardson’s work in order to show how free it was from the minor faults of romanticism; and yet it reckoned without its host, and Richardson, alas! left scarcely a trace upon the period that followed. Romanticism was welcomed when it built churches; tolerated when it built libraries; petted when it built fine houses; but it could not go much farther. Richardson was a mason, and masonry was being driven out by steel; he was an original artist, and original art was being thrust into the background by connoisseurship and collection; he was a builder, and architecture was committing itself more and more to the paper plan; he insisted upon building foursquare, and building was doomed more and more to façaderie. The very strength of Richardson’s buildings was a fatal weakness in the growing centers of commerce and industry. It takes more than a little audacity to tear down one of Richardson’s monuments, and so, rather ironically, they have held their own against the insurrections of traffic and realty speculation; but the difficulty of getting rid of these Romanesque structures only increased the demand for a more frail and facile method of construction.
Romanticism met its great defeat in the office-building. By the use of the passenger elevator, first designed for an exhibition-tower adjacent to the Crystal Palace in 1853, it had become possible to raise the height of buildings to seven stories: the desire for ground-rents presently increased the height to ten. Beyond this, mere masonry could not go without thickening the supporting piers to such an extent that on a twenty-foot lot more than a quarter of the width would be lost on the lower floors. Richardson’s Marshall Field Building in Chicago was seven stories high; and that was about as far as solid stone or brick could climb without becoming undignified and futile by its bulk. The possibilities of masonry and the possibilities of commercial gain through ground-rents were at loggerheads, and by 1888 masonry was defeated.
Richardson, fortunately, did not live to see the undermining of the tradition he had founded and almost established. Within a decade of his death, however, only the empty forms of architecture remained, for the steel-cage of the engineer had become the new structural reality. By 1890 the ground-landlord had discovered, in the language of the pioneer’s favorite game, that “the roof’s the limit.” If that was so, why limit the roof? With this canny perception the skyscraper sprang into being.
During this Gilded Age the standard of the best building had risen almost as high as it had been in America in any earlier period; but the mass of good building had relatively decreased; and the domestic dwellings in both city and country lost those final touches of craftsmanship that had lingered, here and there, up to the Civil War. In the awkward country villas that began to fill the still-remote suburbs of the larger cities, all sense of style and proportion were lost: the plan was marked by meaningless irregularities; a dingy, muddy color spread over the wooden façades. There exists a huge and beautifully printed volume, of which, I believe, there are not more than a hundred copies, on the villas of Newport in 1876: the compiler thereof sought to satisfy the vanity of the original owners and the curiosity of
