Chapter 11: )—that at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston

opened in 1865 and the somewhat later school at Columbia University in New York, were both based on the methods of the École.[197] French winners of the Prix de Rome were increasingly imported to serve as teachers, and three generations later the last of them had not yet left the United States. The influence of the École in Latin America was even more powerful, and the dominance of its ideas has lasted in some countries down almost to the present.[198]

Both in the New World and the Old most cities grew like weeds in the third quarter of the century; the analogy is, indeed, a rather accurate one, for the growth was characteristically rank, uncontrolled, and destructive of earlier architectural amenities. Various European capitals, however, imitating Napoleon III’s re-organization of Paris, took advantage of the clearing away of their fortifications to lay out something equivalent to the _grands boulevards_. Florence during the late sixties, for example, when it was very briefly the capital of Italy, saw the laying out, according to the general plan of Giuseppe Poggi (1811-1901), of a range of avenues and squares that extend around the city to the east, north, and west on the site of the old walls. These districts, built up over the years 1865-77, display little or none of the new Second Empire afflatus. For the most part everywhere in Italy in this period the architecture is of generically Renaissance revival character. Only in the much later Piazza della Repubblica, carved out of the slummy heart of the city in the 80s and 90s, is there a heavy pomposity of scale that is curiously un-Florentine—the centre of nineteenth-century Athens might be Neo-Greek, but it was Munich, not Florence, that became characteristically Neo-Tuscan!

In the old Savoy capital of Turin, where the first half of the century had seen such notable urbanistic projects, a vigorous local tradition continued to control most of the new work.[199] However, at the farther side of the Piazza Carlo Felice the Porta Nuova Railway Station was built in 1866-8, as was mentioned in Chapter 3, by the engineer Mazzuchetti and the architect Ceppi in a rather original sort of _Rundbogenstil_. The vast iron and glass lunette at the front still provides a handsome termination to the long axis of the Via Roma, although the rear of the station has been rebuilt since the War. Along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II the earlier arcades of Promis were continued almost indefinitely; but the detailing of the façades grew continually richer in evident emulation of Second Empire Paris. This influence also affected the building up of the contiguous quarter of the city. In the fine new square at the end of the Via Garibaldi, however, balancing the earlier Piazza Vittorio Veneto at the end of the Via Po, the Piazza dello Statuto opened in 1864, the façades by Giuseppe Bollati (1819-69) are not at all Parisian, but recall rather the local Academic Baroque of Juvarra. Especially effective, and rare in Turin, are the warm and tawny colours of the painted stucco walls here.

With the uniting of Italy and the eventual taking over of Rome as the capital of the kingdom of Italy on the downfall of Napoleon III in 1870, a tremendous expansion[200] of the old Papal city began. The two principal new streets extending eastward, the Via Venti Settembre and the Via Nazionale, were laid out in 1871 and built up over the next fifteen years. Vast and tawny-coloured like the Piazza dello Statuto in Turin, but much less distinguished in design, is the Finance Ministry in the former street built by Raffaele Canevari (1825-1900) in 1870-7. Equally grand in scale and much more dignified are the quadrantal façades of the Esedra built by Gaetano Koch (1849-1910) in 1885 at the head of the Via Nazionale facing Michelangelo’s Santa Maria degli Angeli (Plate 76A). With the fine later fountain by A. Guerrieri and Mario Rubelli in the centre this provides a most impressive piece of late-nineteenth-century academic urbanism. It still offers a not altogether unworthy preface to the Baths of Diocletian—of which it actually occupies the site of the largest exedra—and to the new railway station (Plate 183B), both so near, which epitomize between them the ancient and the modern worlds in the architecture of Rome.

Koch’s Palazzo Boncampagni in the Via Vittorio Veneto, now the American Embassy, built in 1886-90, is also very dignified. It represents very well the occasional tendency in that decade towards restraint and sobriety in Renaissance design, a tendency that balances the contemporary stylistic development towards the Neo-Baroque. In the Via Nazionale the two most prominent edifices[201] by Italian architects, the Palazzo delle Belle Arti of Pio Piacentini (1846-1928) begun in 1882 and Koch’s Banca d’Italia of 1889-1904, are both quite academic in a respectable Renaissance way, and in the latter case impressively monumental as well. The same applies _a fortiori_ to the two principal public edifices begun in Rome in the eighties—not the respectability, goodness knows, but the monumentality. The enormous Palazzo di Giustizia, in a new quarter across the Tiber, is an incredibly brash example of Neo-Baroque loaded down with heavy rustication, doubtless of Piranesian inspiration. This was designed by Giuseppe Calderini (1837-1916) in 1883-7 and built in 1888-1910 without the intended high mansards.

But the most overpowering new structure in Rome, dominating the whole city and blocking the view of both the ancient Forum and the Renaissance Campidoglio, is the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, rising above the much enlarged Piazza Venezia at the head of the Corso. Largely the work of Count Giuseppe Sacconi (1854-1905),[202] who in 1884 won the third competition held for its design, this was begun in 1885 and continued after his death by Koch, Piacentini, and M. Manfredi (1859-1927), being finally brought to completion only in 1911 by the engineer R. Raffaelli. Hardly Second Empire nor yet quite ‘Beaux-Arts’, this most pretentious of all nineteenth-century monuments well illustrates the total decadence of inherited standards of Classicism in Europe towards the end of the century. It can be compared only with Poelaert’s Palace of Justice in Brussels, begun twenty years earlier, and entirely to the latter’s advantage even as regards mere gargantuan assurance.

In general, Italian production of the second half of the century is of relatively slight interest; moreover, it often seriously upsets the balance of earlier urban entities by its heavy scale. The great exception, and the one ranking Italian work of the period, is generally recognized to be the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan. In Genoa, behind the theatre, the Galleria Mazzini of 1871 also exceeds in length, in height, and in elaboration all the galleries and passages built in various European cities in the first half of the nineteenth century, yet it is not essentially very different from them in its scale or its detailing. The vast cruciform Galleria in Milan, however, extending from the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Scala, with a great octagonal space at the crossing, is in concept and in its actual dimensions more a work of urbanism than of architecture (Plate 75B). Built with English capital by an English firm, the City of Milan Improvement Company Ltd, and even, presumably, with some English professional advice—M. D. Wyatt was a member of the English board—this tremendous project more than rivals the greatest Victorian railway stations of London in the height, if not the span, of its metal-and-glass roof. But the actual designing architect was Italian, Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-77), and the Galleria de Cristoforis provided him with at least a modest local prototype. Erected in 1865-77 and now completely restored to its pristine richness and elegance, the Galleria scheme involved the enlargement of the Piazza del Duomo and the lining of two of its sides with related façades—executed only partly from Mengoni’s designs—as also the regularization of the Piazza della Scala. Alessi’s sixteenth-century Palazzo Marino, itself of almost Second Empire lushness, was enlarged to serve as the offices of the municipality and provided with a new façade in Alessi’s extreme Mannerist style across one side of the square facing La Scala. This was carried out in 1888-90 by Luca Beltrami (1854-1933), who had studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, to serve as municipal offices.

Like all the other most prominent buildings of this period, Mengoni’s Galleria makes its impression by its size, its elaboration of detail, and above all its unqualified assurance. From the triumphal-arch portal, rising as high as the nave of the medieval Duomo, to the gilded arabesques of the pilasters, all is obvious, expensive, and rather parvenu; yet the setting—at once so comfortable and so magnificent—that it provides for urban life, centre as it has always remained of so much Milanese activity, has not been equalled since.[203] The Galleria Umberto I in Naples is a late and rather inferior imitation whose ornate entrance most ungenerously overpowers the San Carlo Theatre across the street. This was built by Emmanuele Rocco in 1887-90.

After Paris the most extensive and sumptuous example of the re-organization of a great city carried out in this period is not in Italy but in Austria. Vienna had been relatively inactive architecturally in the first half of the nineteenth century under Francis I (see Chapter 2). His successor Francis Joseph, however, who came to the throne in 1848, set out in the following decades as _Kaiser_ and _König_ to see that his Imperial and Royal capitals should rival Napoleon III’s Paris. In 1857 the fortifications surrounding the old city of Vienna were removed, and the following year Ludwig Förster (1797-1863) won the competition for the layout of the Ringstrasse that was to take their place. The execution of this project, with many modifications, took some thirty years (Plate 74). Outside the actual walls there had been a wide glacis, and therefore the Ring could be developed not merely as a series of wide tree-lined boulevards like those of Paris but with large open spaces in which major public buildings were grouped. These edifices are even more various in style than the comparable ones in Paris, despite the fact that they were the work of a very closely knit group of architects. None of them is of specifically Second Empire character, though the high mansards and the pavilion composition of the New Louvre were used fairly frequently on private buildings in Vienna and throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The earliest major project of Francis Joseph was the construction of the Arsenal, begun in 1849, where most of the leading architects of the period worked (see Chapter 2). All in various versions of the _Rundbogenstil_, this group of buildings culminates in the centrally placed Army Museum of 1856-77 by Förster and his Danish son-in-law Theophil von Hansen (1813-91). On this the very ornate detail is Byzantinesque and Saracenic in inspiration, yet it is not without a distinctive flavour that is unmistakably of this particular period: the brilliant polychromy of the red and yellow brick walls almost seems to echo, like Vaudoyer’s Marseilles cathedral, the bolder effects of the contemporary High Victorian Gothic architects of England.

Ferstel’s bank in the Herrengasse of 1856-60, also _Rundbogenstil_, has been mentioned earlier. The North Railway Station of 1858-65 by Theodor Hoffmann was _Rundbogenstil_ of an even more ornate sort, with only a rather modest iron-and-glass-roofed shed set between its two massive masonry blocks. This was badly damaged by bombing in the last War but not totally destroyed. On the other hand, the South Station, built in 1869-73 by Wilhelm Flattich (1826-1900), a pupil of Leins in Stuttgart, was of rather conventional High Renaissance character.

The typical and, one may suppose, the preferred stylistic vehicle of most Viennese architects in these decades was, indeed, a rather rich High Renaissance mode. This, for example, Hansen used very effectively for the Palace of Archduke Eugene of 1865-7 and for the Palais Epstein at 1 Parlamentsring of 1870-3. He and Förster, and after Förster’s death Hansen alone, as well as many other architects, employed this mode ubiquitously for various big blocks of flats along the Ring and elsewhere (Plate 74). Good examples are such new hotels of the period as the former Britannia, still standing in the Schillerplatz, and the Donau, which once rose opposite the North Station. Both are by Heinrich Claus (1835-?) and Josef Grosz (1828-?) and were built in the early seventies. Their rather Barryesque raised end-pavilions, without mansards, and the heavily sumptuous detailing of the façades are most characteristic. The better known Sacher’s Hotel behind the Opera House, built by W. Fraenkel in 1876, is somewhat smaller and less lush, at least externally. The block at 8 Operngasse, built by Ehrmann in the early sixties, was topped with Parisian mansards, as are also the long blocks in the Reichstrasse behind the Parlament and the University on either side of the Rathaus; these also have open arcades at their base somewhat like those in Turin.

As along the boulevards of Paris, there is a considerable homogeneity in the private architecture that lines the Ring and the many squares and streets that were built up at the same time. Only in the design of public monuments—often by much the same architects, it is worth noting—did a pompous and somewhat retardataire eclecticism rule. Consider the major works of Ferstel: his bank is _Rundbogenstil_; his Votivkirche of 1856-79 is Gothic; his University something else again.

Ferstel’s Gothic must be compared, not with the distinctly original High Victorian churches of its period in England (see Chapter 10), but with Gau’s earlier Sainte-Clotilde in Paris (see Chapter 6): it is certainly a considerable improvement over that in the general justness of the scale and the plausible laciness of the fourteenth-century detail. But in English terms the Votivkirche is still Early rather than High Victorian. The painted decoration by J. Führich and others, somewhat more discreet than that in the chief _Rundbogenstil_ churches of Vienna, relieves effectively the coldness usual in these big Continental examples of Neo-Gothic.

Ferstel’s much later University of 1873-4, which stands next door to his church and balances Hansen’s precisely contemporaneous Grecian Parlament (see Chapter 2), is a richly plastic pavilioned composition of generically Renaissance character. It also has a high convex mansard over the central block like those on the New Louvre, a feature echoed on the Justizpalast in the Schmerlingplatz, built by Alexander Wielemans (1843-1911) after the University in 1874-81. So much for the main works of one leading architect of the period. Not all Ferstel’s contemporaries had quite so varied a stylistic repertory, however.

In Vienna, as in Paris, one of the most conspicuous and also one of the most successful and original of the new public buildings was the Opera House. This was built in 1861-9 by Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in a mode quite unrelated to their earlier work at the Arsenal but one not easy to define. The Vienna Opera House is a somewhat simpler and less boldly plastic structure than Garnier’s, both in its generally right-angled massing, with pairs of rectangular wings projecting on each side towards the rear, and in the rather flat, somewhat _François I_ detail. Yet the vast curved roof, actually rather like that over the buildings along the Rue de Rivoli, does give it a distinctly Second Empire air (Plate 74). Less grandly sited than the Paris Opéra, it was none the less balanced across the Opernring by one of the largest and handsomest of Hansen’s private works, the Heinrichshof of 1861-3 (Plate 73B). This had a fine glass-roofed passage through its centre and ranges of flats behind the elaborate Late Renaissance façades. It has unfortunately been demolished since the War to make way for a very poor modern block of offices.

Here by the Opera House, as at the Place de l’Opéra in Paris, the Viennese urban achievement of the age was concentrated. The Heinrichshof, with its raised central portion matching the high roof of the Opera House opposite and its corner towers corresponding to the mansarded pavilions of more definitely French-styled blocks of flats, offered a handsomer Austrian equivalent of the Second Empire mode than does the Opera House itself; for the Opera House lacks externally the lushness and bombast characteristic of the period at its most assured, while the auditorium within, re-opened in 1955, is today a much simplified reconstruction by Erich Boltenstern (b. 1896). Yet the masonry exterior of the Opera House is clean and fresh today thanks to Boltenstern’s restoration and, with the great staircase and foyer regilded and refurbished generally, it offers a lighter and more festive vision of the period than do the vast majority of Viennese buildings whose stucco so often badly needs a coat of paint.

Hansen’s Musikvereinsgebäude of 1867-9 in the Dumbagasse is academic in an almost eighteenth-century way, both as regards the general organization of the exterior and the restraint of the detailing. In his still later Parlament of 1873-83, as has been noted earlier, he produced the last grandiose monument of the Greek Revival. More characteristic, however, is his contemporaneous Academy of Fine Arts of 1872-6 in the Schillerplatz. This is externally in the Renaissance mode that he presumably preferred after he left Athens, but it has Grecian detailing inside of a delicacy and elegance that recalls the thirties. Especially handsome is the colonnaded Aula in the centre, even though its rich painted ceiling of 1875-80 by Anselm Feuerbach is inappropriately Baroque in a rather Rubens-like way.

Another Austrian architect besides Ferstel was using Gothic for prominent Viennese edifices in this period (see also Chapter 11). After Ferstel’s Votivkirche the next Neo-Gothic structure was the Academische Gymnasium in the Beethovenplatz; this was built in 1863-6 by Friedrich von Schmidt (1825-91), who had worked earlier under Zwirner on the restoration and completion of Cologne Cathedral. But the school was soon outshone in size and in elaboration by Schmidt’s Rathaus of 1872-83. This stands between Hansen’s Parlament and Ferstel’s University but in a line with the Reichstrasse at their rear. The Vienna Rathaus is certainly not unrelated to G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic and that of Waterhouse in England, particularly in the side wings that end, eclectically enough, in high-mansarded pavilions. But the general fussiness of the turreted front recalls rather pre-Puginian Gothic, say Porden’s Eaton Hall of seventy years earlier (see Chapters 6 and 10).

Despite the total visual unlikeness of the Rathaus to its Grecian neighbour, the Parlament, both have a similarly obsolete air. It is as if Francis Joseph’s presumptive intention in the fifties of outbuilding Napoleon III had been succeeded by a belated and rather provincial desire to outrival the larger structures in other countries in the two leading modes of the previous period, the Greek Revival and the Gothic Revival, neither much represented hitherto in Vienna.

Yet an equally prominent public monument of the seventies and eighties, the Burgtheater, which stands just opposite the Rathaus, is of a Late Renaissance, almost Neo-Baroque order, with a distinctly Second Empire flavour to its bowed front and generally very plastic composition (Plate 73A). This, the most distinguished of all the public monuments along the Ringstrasse, was built in 1874-88 by Semper, whose international career in Germany, England, and Switzerland wound up in Vienna after he was called there in 1871 by Francis Joseph to advise on the extension of the Hofburg Palace. Except perhaps in its bowed front, this Viennese theatre does not much resemble the rebuilt Dresden Opera House of 1871-8 which Semper had just designed (see Chapter 9). Perhaps Semper and his Viennese partner Karl von Hasenauer (1833-94), a pupil of Van der Nüll and of Siccardsburg, were somewhat influenced by the plans on which they were working together for the extension of the nearby palace; these were, not inappropriately, in the Austrian Baroque of Fischer von Erlach’s unfinished Michaelertrakt of the Hofburg dating from the second quarter of the eighteenth century. However that may be, the theatre, boldly scaled and tightly composed, is a far more successful building than the very derivative Neue Hofburg projecting out towards the Ring as that was executed in 1881-94 by Hasenauer after Semper’s death. The post-War restoration of the theatre and the rebuilding of its auditorium are by Michel Engelhart (b. 1897).

Semper and Hasenauer’s two vast Museums of Art History and Natural History face each other on a large square across the Burgring from the Neue Hofburg. Of identical design, they were both largely built in 1872-81. In the treatment of the exteriors—they were finished internally only very much later—as also in some of Hansen’s very latest work in Vienna, one senses a conscious rejection of the bold plasticity and the compositional elaboration characteristic of the preceding decades, and most notably of the Burgtheater. The Renaissance detail is by no means sparse, but there is an academic sort of primness and orderliness belonging to the last quarter of the century such as has been noted earlier in Koch’s Roman work.

The Bodenkreditanstalt built by Emil von Förster (1838-1909), Ludwig’s son, in 1884-7 is still more severe in its Florentine _quattrocento_ way, recalling the more Tuscan aspects of the _Rundbogenstil_. With this may be contrasted the unashamed Neo-Baroque of Karl König’s Philipphof of 1883, introducing one of the modes most characteristic of the end of the century in both Austria and Germany.

Budapest, the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was also much embellished with public buildings by Francis Joseph. Stüler from Berlin worked here, using a quiet version of the _Rundbogenstil_ for the Academy of Sciences in 1862-4. But the later and more ornate _Rundbogenstil_ of Berlin and Vienna had already been echoed in Budapest by Frigyes Feszl (1821-84) in the Vigado Concert Hall of 1859-65. This could easily be by Ferstel, so similar is it to his bank in Vienna. The leading Hungarian architect of the period, Miklós Ybl (1814-91), who was trained in Vienna, also used the _Rundbogenstil_, but of a rather more Romanesquoid sort, for the Ferenczváros Parish Church which he built in 1867-78. However, his Renaissance Revival Custom House of 1870-4 is more nearly up to the best Vienna standards of the day as maintained by Hansen. The Opera House that Ybl built in 1879-84, with its boldly convex mansards, vies in its rich plasticity with Garnier’s, but none too successfully. The Szent Lukásh Hotel by R. L. Ray (1845-99), a Swiss-born pupil of Gamier, is one of the largest mansarded Second Empire hotels anywhere in the western world. On the whole, the dominant influences in Hungary were Austrian and German, however, not Parisian, as is hardly surprising. No autochthonous note was struck; as is true of all Eastern Europe, the architecture of this age is as essentially colonial in character as in the outlying British Dominions or in Latin America, although the models emulated were rather different.

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