Download Buildings to Know - Gothic vs Classic in the mid-19th

Lecture notes for Classicism and Gothic in the later 19th century
“Riverside”, outside Burlington, NJ; Designed by John Notman, built 1837-39
The earliest known representation of the Italianate style in the United States was at the country
house of Episcopal Bishop John Doane along the Delaware River in Burlington, NJ, near
Philadelphia. It was designed by Scottish architect John Notman. Riverside was published by
Downing in Treatise on Landscape Gardening of 1841; he described it as “ one of the best
example of the Italian style in this country”. The house was demolished in 1961.
St Mary’s Episcopal Church, Burlington, NJ, Designed by Richard Upjohn, 1845-54,
Designed by Richard Upjohn, the English-trained architect, St Mary’s is considered the earliest
“archaeologically correct” Gothic church in the United States. It was modeled on St John’s
Church in Shottesbrook, England, near Upjohn’s own home town. The use of brownstone made
use of a locally available and easily workable stone, but also gave the building the instant look
of being old and weather-worn
King Villa, Newport, Rhode Island, Designed by Richard Upjohn, 1845-47.
Also designed by Richard Upjohn, a British-born architect who immigrated to the United States
in 1829, and who is best known for his Gothic churches. The large summer house Upjohn
designed for Edward King, an early promoter of Newport as a summer haven for the wealthy, is
an early representation of the Italianate style in the United States. It features asymmetrical
massing, arched window heads, bracketed eaves, and a prominent tower – all of which came to
characterize the style. The classical vocabulary is Roman, rather than Greek, and it is clearly a
“new” structure rather than an archaeologically/historically correct version of an existing old
style.
-Blandwood Mansion, Greensboro, North Carolina, Designed by A.J. Davis, 1844
Originally built as a four room Federal style farmhouse in 1795, it was home to o governor John
Morehead under whose ownership it was transformed into its present appearance. It is
believed to be the oldest extant example of the Italian Villa Style of architecture in the United
States. With this design, Davis produced a popular prototype for American house designs in the
Italianate style: a central tower projecting from the main façade, and a calm, symmetrical
appearance overall with rounded arched windows and prominent brackets along the eaves.
Grace Hill or Litchfield Villa, Brooklyn, NY, Designed by A.J. Davis, 1854-57
The country estate first called “Grace Hill” and later “Litchfield Villa” was designed by Davis for
the Litchfield family on an estate in Brooklyn. The house and its property became part of
Prospect Park (designed by Olmstead & Vaux in 1865). The house is considered A.J. Davis’s
finest Italianate villa, fully asymmetrical and Picturesque. It was originally covered with stucco,
scored and tinted to resemble a light-color stone.
Morse-Libby Mansion, Portland, Maine, Designed by Henry Austin, 1860
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This stately brownstone Italianate villa was completed in 1860 as a summer home for hotelier
Ruggles Sylvester Morse. Its distinctive asymmetric form includes a four-story tower,
overhanging eaves, verandas, and ornate windows – but it is essentially the “L” plan house
worked out by Downing in the 1840s. The brick and brownstone villa is recognized as one of the
finest, and least-altered examples of a large Italianate style house.
Philadelphia Athenaeum, Philadelphia, PA, Designed by John Notman, 1845
The Athenaeum was a private library, founded in 1814 to “collect materials connected with the
history and antiquities of America”. But by 1845 the library needed a new home, and they
hired Notman to design a building that contained both collections space, book storage, reading
rooms, and “club rooms” for small gatherings of the literati. Notman looked back but not to the
Greek Revival, as the name Athenaeum might have suggested, but to Renaissance Italy and the
palazzo form. A variant of “Italianate”, the Renaissance Revival style worked well in urban
settings, where there was not space for a rambling asymmetrical composition. The building
was intended to have been built with a marble façade over a masonry sub-structure, but the
less-expensive brownstone was chosen, a material that through the 1840s was increasingly
associated with the Italianate and Renaissance Revival styles.
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY, Designed by
Frederick Peterson, 1853-59
The Cooper Union was established by iron mining and steel manufacturer Peter Cooper to
provide free higher education in the sciences and art to deserving students regardless of
gender, race or religion. This radical idea was housed in an equally radical building, with a full
steel frame; its rolled “I” beams invented by the entrepreneur/founder of the institution, Peter
Cooper. It is the oldest surviving steel framed building in the Americas. The steel frame was
completely covered in brownstone and terra cotta cladding, both to confirm to aesthetic taste
of the day, and to make it fireproof. It suggests a Renaissance palazzo, although a staggeringly
large one. The building was fireproof and had a self-supporting metal frame, two of the three
requirements for a skyscraper, but it did not have an elevator, and so Cooper Union is not quite
a skyscraper but its technology made a big step forward for that type of building.
Corcoran Gallery/ Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Gallery of American Art
Washington, DC, Designed by James Renwick, Jr., 1858-1861; 1869-74
The building now known as the Renwick Gallery was originally designed to house the art
collection of William Wilson Corcoran, a prominent banker, philanthropist, and art collector. In
1858 Corcoran engaged the noted architect James Renwick Jr., who had earlier designed the
Smithsonian museum “Castle” in Washington and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, to
design a public museum in which to display his collection of American art. Renwick designed it
after the Louvre's recent addition by Hector Lefuel. The building combined the fashionable
French Second Empire mansard roof and massing with an American corn cob capital (after
Latrobe in the US capital) and an American art collection. The exterior of the building was
nearly completed when the Civil War broke out and it was seized by the U.S. Army; in 1869, the
building was returned to Corcoran, and construction and repairs commenced for an opening in
1874.
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Boston City Hall, Boston, Massachusetts, Designed by Arthur Gilman, 1862-65
The Boston City Hall was the rare civic structure commissioned and built during the American
Civil War. It was designed, like the Corcoran/Renwick Gallery to closely resemble the renovated
Louvre, and it seems to be the first major public building to use the French Second Empire style
– a style that would quickly become almost ubiquitous in public buildings. Again, the bulbous
mansard roof over the taller, projecting center pavilion offers classical symmetry but a more
active and “picturesque” surface than a Greek, Roman, or even genuine Renaissance building.
State, War and Navy Building, (Old Executive Office Building), Washington, DC, Supervising
Architect for the government, Alfred Mullett, 1870-88
The office building created next to the White House in the 1870s vividly illustrates the growth
of America’s federal government in the period during and after the Civil War. Its scale, and its
design in the fashionable French Second Empire style meant it stood in sharp contrast to the
classical lines and pre-war scale of the rest of official Washington. The State, War & Navy
Building is fireproof, but where Robert Mills’ fully vaulted masonry Treasury Building achieved
fireproofing with mass, the interior of here is much brighter and lighter due to a cast iron
interior encased in the stone exterior. The cast iron structure is frankly expressed inside, even
highlighted with polychromatic paints. Again the exterior’s plan as a large box is modified by
the three-dimensionality of the classical ornament on the upper floors – rows of columns and
cornices casting shadows above a tall rusticated base.
Philadelphia City Hall, Philadelphia, PA, Designed by John McArthur, Jr., 1871-1901
Philadelphia is one of the most original American expressions of the French Second Empire
style. It was intended to be the world's tallest building, although its long construction period
meant it was surpassed during its construction by the Washington Monument and the Eiffel
Tower. Philadelphia City Hall remains the world's tallest masonry building, made of thick
granite, limestone and brick walls up to 22 feet thick a its base.
The Equitable Life Assurance Company Building, New York, NY, Designed by George B. Post,
1868-70
It has been called the first American skyscraper, and although only 6 stories tall (with a 7 th floor
storage area) it stood at 130 feet, twice as tall most buildings around it. It was designed with a
steel interior frame, made fireproof with a load-bearing masonry exterior, and it depended on
an elevator to move people within the structure. The Equitable was designed by Arthur Gilman,
who had recently completed the French Second Empire Boston City Hall, and George B. Post, an
architect/engineer who literally topped himself several times in his career, designing ever taller
structures through the 1870s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.
Western Union Telegraph Building, New York, New York, Designed by George Post, 1872-75
Post’s building was the first building in the world to achieve a height of over 10 stories, and rose
230 feet above the pavement.
Tribune Building, New York, New York, Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, 1873-75
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Hunt’s building was only nine stories but rose 260 feet, twice the height of the newly finished
Equitable Life Assurance Building, the first skyscraper in the United States.
Together, these two buildings forecast the race to the top that would characterize urban
building for the next century and more. However, they were both still made of massive
masonry on the exterior, and although they had metal frames to carry the interiors, it would be
Chicago architects who introduced the true skyscraper with a load-bearing metal frame, an
elevator, and fire-proof construction. But the aesthetic of Post and Hunt was still very much
tied to architectural taste and fashion of the 1870s with decorations alluding to Second Empire
forms in Post’s work and to Modern Gothic design in Hunt’s work. The tower that each uses to
punctuate the verticality of the building sets a precedent that would be followed in New York’s
tall buildings for decades.
Tenth Street Studio, New York, New York , Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, 1857
Hunt was the first American to train at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, perhaps the greatest school of
architecture in the world at the time. He worked in Paris on projects that included the
renovations to the Louvre under Hector Lefuel. Hunt returned to the United States and
established a practice in New York in 1856. He designed the Tenth Street Studio Building to
serve as his office and a place to teach students. Hunt's studio within the building housed the
first architectural school in the United States where he taught architecture in the atelier system
or studio system of the Ecole de Beaux Arts. Hunt was also interested in seeing architecture
develop as a respected, regulated profession, as it was in France, and to that end, he and 12
others founded what would become the American Institute of Architects in 1857.
Roosevelt Building, New York, New York, Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, 1873
Some of Hunt’s early work in New York was commercial buildings, with cast iron fronts that
daringly opened up even larger expanses of glass with ever-more-slender columns. These were
some of the last cast-iron buildings created in New York, because of concern about fire.
Although there were still classical references in the heavy support columns that divided the
building into 3 bays, the incised, flat ornament tells of a more modern sensibility. Hunt
embraced the ironwork, and did not want it to be perceived as stone. The flat, incised décor
and polychromatic decoration celebrating the iron façade gained popularity, even as cast iron
itself faded from use. Sometimes, motifs like these were imitated in terra cotta and brick, in an
odd reversal of influence. Called “Neo-Grec”, it stands in contrast to the ornament of the more
robust Franco-Italianate trend of classicism, and was considered more “modern” to the late 19 th
century viewer.
Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, Designed by John, George, and Emily Roebling, 1876-83
After the success of the metal suspension bridge between Cincinnati and Covington, backers of
a bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn got the financial and popular support they needed
to start this major infrastructure project. The bridge piers were designed to be obviously
medieval, even gothic, with their pointed arches, but with no extraneous detail. Picturesque
“Gothick” had given way to a fuller understanding of the engineering sophistication of Gothic
cathedrals, and the basic forms of the style came to be associated not just with piety but with
craftsmanship, solidity, and human daring.
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Trinity Church, New York, New York, Designed by Richard Upjohn, 1839-44
The Trinity Church building on lower Broadway in New York is a classic example of Gothic
Revival architecture. It was a more-or-less “perfect” rendition of a gothic church with all its
finials and decoration intact. Upjohn was designing at this point more in the Picturesque mode,
but it has genuine precedents in English gothic buildings. Trinity Church was brownstone,
helping to establish the taste for the material for both Gothic and Italianate buildings on the
east coast in the 1840s and ‘50s.
St Mark’s Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, PA, Designed by John Notman, 1847-49
One of the first American churches that fits the aesthetic and structural desires of the English
Ecclesiologists. The full masonry building is noted as having some of the earliest uses of
structural vaulting in an ecclesiastical building in the United States – returning to the original
medieval techniques for building. (But remember the Spanish Missions: some of them, like San
Javier del Bac or Mission Concepcion were also vaulted, constructed in the 18th century. They
were not gothic in style, but Baroque). The tower was designed by Notman, but not completed
until after the Civil War.
St Mark’s Episcopal Church West Orange, NJ, Attributed to Richard Upjohn, 1861-62
Another classic example of the Gothic Revival church within the spirit of the Ecclesiology
Movement. In the 1860s, St Mark’s became the largest and wealthiest Episcopal congregation
in Essex County New Jersey. It was the local church for the residents of Llewellyn Park, the
country’s first planned suburb founded in 1855, with its picturesque streets and common open
space “The Ramble” designed by Calvert Vaux and A.J. Davis. St Marks uses brownstone walls
and a medieval-looking wooden truss roof. The building is attributed to Richard Upjohn,
although it may have been designed by his son, also Richard, Jr., who followed him into church
architecture. Upjohn’s designs were broadly adopted through his 1852 publication, Upjohn’s
Rural Architecture, which showed how to build small, wooden Gothic churches that met the
requirements of the Ecclesiologists. The adaptation of a stone gothic building to a small
wooden one was a generous gift of this well-connected architect to American Episcopalians in
small towns across the country, and permitted the building of innumerable “Carpenter Gothic”
churches.
Memorial Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Designed by Ware & VanBrunt, 1870-78
The polychromatic effects of High Victorian Gothic were brilliantly used in Memorial Hall at
Harvard, designed to resemble a gothic church for an entirely secular purpose. The
monumental building honoring the sacrifices made by Harvard men in defense of the Union
during the American Civil War was "a symbol of Boston's commitment to the Unionist cause
and the abolitionist movement in America.” It has three main divisions: a theater, for academic
ceremonies; a vast dining hall covered with a timber truss roof, and a memorial space.
From the exterior, the building displays the inherent polychromy of stone, brick, terra cotta,
and slate in a massive structure that contrasted sharply with the surrounding colonial and
neoclassical buildings of the old campus.
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Plum Street Synagogue, Cincinnati, Ohio, Designed by James Keys Wilson, 1866
The Plum Street Synagogue is a spectacular use of the Moorish style to define a distinct building
for the Reformed Jewish community of Cincinnati. The building reflects a synagogue
architecture that emerged in Germany in the nineteenth century, a Byzantine-Moorish style.
The complex design of Plum Street Temple mirrors many cultures: from the outside the tall
proportions, three pointed arched entrances, and rose window suggest a Gothic Revival church;
the crowning minarets hint of Islamic architecture; the motifs decorating the entrances,
repeated in the rose window, and on the Torah Ark introduce a Moorish theme. The interior of
the Plum Street Temple is covered with stenciled designs, bringing polychromatic color and
overall design to a whole new level. They are derived from Owen Jones Grammar of Ornament,
a popular book produced by English architect Owen Jones.
Olana, Hudson, New York, Designed by Frederic Church & Calvert Vaux, 1870-1891
Olana was the country home of Hudson River landscape painter Frederic Church. He had visited
the Middle East and on his return was determined to build a house that captured elements of
buildings he saw there. The rambling house is essentially an asymmetrical villa, but the details
are in the architectural traditions of Jerusalem, Damascus, and Beirut. The house is arranged
around a center courtyard (enclosed for a New York state climate) and decorated with stencils
and tilework that recalls Islamic design. The intentional eclecticism fit perfectly with the idea od
an artist’s home, and allowed for the display of antiques, curios, and new furnishings that
reinforced the idea of the exotic. The siting of the house and the surrounding 250 acres of
landscape are a high point of the integration of design and landscape in the late phase of the
Picturesque movement.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Designed by Frank Furness, 1871-76.
Furness attended Richard Morris Hunt’s Beaux-Arts inspired atelier in New York from 1859-61
and 1865-66. The tri-partite massing of the façade almost recalls a standard Second Empire
gallery form like the Corcoran/Renwick Gallery. The bold center arch and entry recalls the
Moorish composition of the Plum Street Temple. But the tiny door and the looming presence of
the cornices do not make this an accessible or welcoming building from the street. The exterior
is colorful in the best High Victorian Gothic mode, with patterns created in colored brick and
stone contrasting with the terra-cotta colored brick walls. The interior supports are iron, and
painted in multiple colors to celebrate that fact. Floral motifs are stylized – no realistic
American corncob capitals here.
His work is characterized by a bold, modern approach to the Gothic in detailing, and the
rational planning of the Beaux Arts. Toward the end of his life, his bold style fell out of fashion,
and many of his significant works were demolished in the 20th century.
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