Chapter 9: Second Empire and Cognate Modes Elsewhere

IN the cities of Germany and of Northern Europe generally there were in this period no such comprehensive urbanistic developments as in Paris and Vienna. Some individual public monuments are, perhaps, not inferior to those that Napoleon III and Francis Joseph obtained from their architects; but these are rarely grouped into such coherent entities as the Marktplatz in Karlsruhe of the first quarter of the century or the Ludwigstrasse in Munich of the second quarter. The domestic building of the period is also considerably less consistent in character than in Paris and Vienna.

The architectural scene in Germany was overshadowed by the distinguished achievements of the previous period. The Schinkel tradition, although increasingly corrupted, lasted on almost indefinitely not merely in Prussia but in most German states. Stüler, Schinkel’s ablest disciple in Berlin after the death of the short-lived Persius, remained an internationally respected practitioner. He was employed in Sweden and in Hungary, as has been noted, not to speak of German cities, down to his death in 1865. By him and by many others the _Rundbogenstil_ was employed quite as late as in Austria-Hungary both in the various German states and also in the Scandinavian countries. Such a very large and prominent public building as the Berlin Rathaus of 1859-70 by H. F. Waesemann (1813-79) well indicated the long-continued hold of this mode on German officialdom. Nor was this particularly inferior in quality to much similar work produced in the earlier heyday of the _Rundbogenstil_ before 1850. As in Austria, however, alternative modes were growing increasingly popular, even though none rose to a local dominance comparable to that of revived Renaissance in Vienna. The taste of the period for elaboration, both in general composition and in detail, is everywhere evident regardless of the mode employed.

French influence was not absent; indeed, specifically Second Empire features were perhaps more common than in Austria. G. H. Friedrich Hitzig (1811-81), a former assistant of Schinkel’s, had actually studied in Paris. After Stüler, he was the most prominent and successful architect of the period in Berlin, and in the fifties he built a few mansarded houses there. Along the new Viktoriastrasse in the Tiergarten quarter, where he did a great deal of work in 1855-60, one house among the eight that he built was mansarded; the others and most of those he was erecting near by in the Bellevuestrasse, the Stülerstrasse, and other streets at the same time were, however, in a much elaborated Schinkelesque vein. Suburban houses of the sixties occasionally followed Parisian modes also; but far more were clumsy variants of Schinkel’s and Persius’s Italian Villas, or else in some sort of equally clumsy Gothic.

Public buildings in Germany were only occasionally designed in the mansarded mode and, in general, only after the mid sixties. The Baugewerkschule in Stuttgart, built in 1866-70 by Josef von Egle (1818-99) its director, had projecting centre and end pavilions with crudely Parisian detailing. It is curious to realize that it was contemporary with Leins’s belated but rather distinguished Grecian Königsbau there. In Cologne the High School of 1860-2, and the Stadttheater of 1870-2 by Julius Raschdorf (1823-1914), both destroyed in the last War, were heavily mansarded and very plastically modelled; the latter, at least, on which H. Deutz collaborated with Raschdorf, had some real compositional interest in the tight interlocking of the masses (Plate 77B). Despite their very evidently French character, both were considered by contemporaries to be ‘German Renaissance’—as, for that matter, was Wieleman’s Justizpalast in Vienna—because of the specific precedent of much of the detail; German Renaissance was by this time the latest fashion, but to later eyes these buildings in Cologne were no more characteristic examples of it than the one in Vienna. Raschdorf is better known in any case for his much later Neo-Baroque work, notably the Berlin Cathedral, for which he prepared the design in 1888, although it was not built until 1894-1905.

The Military Hospital by F. Heise in Dresden of 1869 was considerably more French in the strong articulation of the mansarded centre and end pavilions and also in its quite Parisian detailing than Raschdorf’s contemporary buildings in Cologne. More prominent in Dresden by far, however, is the Hoftheater, which is not at all French in character. This was designed in 1871 by Semper after his earlier theatre there had been destroyed by fire; its construction was supervised by Semper’s son Manfred after he settled in Vienna, and completed in 1878. Gone was most of the festive grace and delicacy of his Hamburg and Dresden work of the forties, even though the auditorium was not dissimilar to the one that had been destroyed. Yet in the arrangement of the interior and the disposition of the masses this rivals in clarity of organization the opera-houses of Garnier in Paris and of Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in Vienna. The plans undoubtedly owed a great deal to the elaborate studies Semper had made for Ludwig II in 1865-7 for an opera-house to be built in Munich especially for the production of Wagner’s operas.

The relative importance of Berlin was, of course, rising well before its establishment as the imperial capital in 1871. Friedrich Hitzig’s most considerable public building in Berlin, the Exchange, built in 1859-63 at the same time that the Rathaus was in construction, was neither Schinkelesque nor _Rundbogenstil_ but in a rather academic sort of Late Baroque (Plate 77A). Hitzig seems to have been consciously recalling what Knobelsdorf built for Frederick the Great and thus presaging the more overt Neo-Baroque of the last decades of the century. His later Reichsbank of 1871-6, on the other hand, was in general considerably more Classical despite its banded and diapered walls in two colours of brick.

The public buildings of Martin K. P. Gropius (1824-80) are also indicative of the general stylistic stasis of this period in Germany. His Museum of Decorative Art in Berlin, begun in 1877 and completed in 1881 by Heinrich Schmieden (1835-1913), resembled Hitzig’s houses of the fifties in its Grecian elaboration; it also recalled Klenze’s Hermitage Museum, built more than a generation earlier in Petersburg. Gropius & Schmieden’s still later Gewandhaus in Leipzig of 1880-4, however, is less reminiscent of Schinkel or Klenze and more conventionally academic. This concert hall was renowned for its superb acoustics.

It is easy to forget how much the architects of these decades, apparently obsessed with stylistic elaboration, were also concerned to incorporate in their buildings all sorts of technical advances. Iron may show less than in the previous period, but it was quite consistently used behind the scenes. Central heating, extensive sanitary equipment, vertical transportation, and various other things that are taken for granted today first became accepted necessities in these decades. But it was only in the commercial field—and in England and the United States above all—that such technical innovations influenced architecture very positively or visibly (see Chapter 14), however much they must actually have preoccupied architects who seem today so imitative and retardataire. The Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin by Franz Schwechten (1841-1924), however, built in 1872-80, did represent a real advance over the principal English railway station of this period, St Pancras in London of 1863-76, in the clarity and coherence of its organization. One can hardly say that the shed roof of the Anhalter Bahnhof was in the _Rundbogenstil_; yet it is much more happily related in scale and shape to the masonry elements of the station than are the two parts of that in London, world-famous nonetheless until the nineties for the unrivalled span of its shed.

Architectural activity in Bavaria was of a very different order. The Ludwigsschlösser,[204] the country palaces that Ludwig II of Bavaria erected for his private delectation after he succeeded Maximilian II in 1864, are the playthings of a monarch mad about Louis XIV. Linderhof, built in 1870-86, revived a local Bavarian sort of Baroque, and was thus even more premonitory of a favourite German mode of the eighties and nineties than Hitzig’s Berlin Exchange (Plate 84). Herrenchiemsee, first projected as early as 1868 but begun only in 1878, is a direct imitation of Versailles. Neuschwanstein, on the other hand, is a wild Wagnerian fantasy of a medieval castle occupying a superb mountain site.

It must be assumed that the architect of the first two, Georg von Dollmann (1830-95), was little more than the draughting agent of his master’s dreams of grandeur. More interesting than the exteriors are the incredibly rich interiors of Linderhof, operatic recreations of the Bavarian Rococo. Appropriately enough these were designed by Franz von Seitz (1817-83), then director of the Munich State Theatre, who was famous for his stage-sets. At Herrenchiemsee, however, many of the interiors were exact copies of the main apartments of Louis XIV at Versailles. These were executed by Julius Hoffmann (1840-96), who began to work under Dollmann in 1880 and succeeded him in 1884. More original were certain other rooms at Herrenchiemsee designed by F. P. Stulberger after 1883 in an even more elaborate and fantastic Neo-Rococo than those by Seitz at Linderhof.

Ludwig II had another obsession besides the majesty of Louis XIV, and that was the genius of Richard Wagner. This cult is almost nauseatingly reflected at Neuschwanstein, for which Riedel, who had built Schloss Berg in 1849-51, prepared the original design in 1867. Construction there began in 1869, was taken over by Dollmann in 1874, and only completed as regards the exterior in 1881; much of the decoration is still later. Despite Ludwig’s romantic love of the real Romanesque of the Wartburg, Neuschwanstein really differs very little from the fake castles of the first half of the century, except in its very ingenious adaptation to a most precarious site. It is the later interiors, designed by Hoffmann in the early eighties, that attempt to realize the Wagnerian legends both in the architectural detailing and in endless murals. The whole culminates in the Byzantinesque throne room of 1885-6 intended by Ludwig to be a sort of ‘Grail Hall’ from _Parsifal_. The results of his other obsession are more gratifying to the eye.

Never again would any ruler, however, not even in Germany, be so spendthrift a patron of architecture. Considering the deterioration in quality evident in these palaces and castles of the seventies and eighties from the work done for Ludwig’s predecessor Ludwig I or for Frederick William IV of Prussia in the thirties and forties, this was just as well. Fortunately the activities of William II were less related to the building arts; and Hitler, a thwarted architect, had too little time.

Far more typical of the turn German architecture in general was taking in the seventies than the Ludwigsschlösser were such things as the von Tiele house in Berlin by Gustav Ebe (1834-1916) and Julius Benda (1838-97). In its crawlingly rich German Renaissance detail and its irregularly gabled silhouette this prepared the way far more definitely than Raschdorf’s contemporary Cologne buildings for a veritable flood of such coarse work all over Germany in the next decade. This characteristic German mode has analogies with the English style-phase of the seventies and eighties somewhat perversely known as ‘Queen Anne’; more specifically it often resembles very closely what is called ‘Pont Street Dutch’ in England. But leadership comparable to that provided in England by Webb and Shaw was entirely lacking, and even lesser talent of the order of George’s or Collcutt’s (see Chapter 12).

Usually executed in dark-coloured brick with stone trim, this prime manifestation of the bourgeois ambitions of the Bismarckian Empire produced a spate of buildings of all sorts that have come to look very grim indeed with the accumulated smoke of years. Old photographs indicate that many of them once had a certain lightness and even a quite festive air, Wagnerian in the _Meistersinger_ vein rather than in that of the _Ring_ as at Neuschwanstein. But the materials used were always hard and mechanically handled and the execution of the detail at once fussy and metallic. No positive originality in general composition or in planning made up, as with much comparable work in England, for the anti-architectonic character of the basic approach.

A prominent late example is the Rathaus[205] in Hamburg built in 1886-97. This vast and turgid edifice contrasts most unhappily with the suave High Renaissance design of Wimmel & Forsmann’s contiguous Exchange built in the thirties. Its tall tower, moreover, has neither the richness of outline of Scott’s on the Nikolaikirche nor the simple directness of de Chateauneuf’s on the Petrikirche, with both of which it still disputes the central position on the Hamburg skyline.

The nationalistic ‘Meistersinger mode’, so to call it, had only too long a life, lasting well into the twentieth century. But it was early challenged by a new modulation of German taste in the eighties, parallel to that which the English also experienced, towards an eighteenth-century revival—here in Germany definitely Neo-Baroque—of which Linderhof was probably the first really sumptuous and striking example. Ebe & Benda early deserted the German Renaissance for a German Baroque at least as chastened as that of Hitzig’s much earlier Exchange when they built their Palais Mosse in Berlin of 1882-4. In 1882 Paul Wallot (1841-1912), who had also worked earlier in the Meistersinger mode, won the competition for the Reichstag Building with an overpoweringly monumental Neo-Baroque project recalling Vanbrugh more than Bernini or Schlüter. Erected by him in 1884-94, this was soon matched at the inner end of Unter den Linden by Raschdorf’s cathedral.

Figure 16A and 16B. Vilhelm Petersen and Ferdinand Jensen: Copenhagen,
Søtorvet, 1873-6, elevation
]

Unlike Napoleon III and Francis Joseph, the German emperors William I, Frederick I, and William II did not succeed in making their capital an important exemplar of nineteenth-century urbanism. Moreover, the influential position that Germany had occupied in the international world of architecture in the first half of the century was less and less maintained after the death of Stüler. Not until the twentieth century did Germans again make a significant contribution to European architectural history (see Chapter 20).

With the deterioration of German leadership in the seventies and eighties went also a general decline in the architectural standards of the Scandinavian countries that had so successfully based their later Romantic Classicism and their _Rundbogenstil_ on German models of the thirties, forties, and fifties. In Denmark the work of Meldahl was increasingly inferior to that of Herholdt. Although he was only nine years younger than Herholdt, his direction of the Copenhagen Academy, beginning in 1873, coincided with the feeblest and most eclectic period in Danish architecture, from which recovery started only in the nineties with the early work of Martin Nyrop (1849-1925) in Copenhagen and of Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) in Aarhus (see Chapter 24).

A characteristic urbanistic development of the seventies in Copenhagen, the Søtorvet built in 1873-6 by Vilhelm Petersen (1830-1913) and Ferdinand Vilhelm Jensen (1837-90), is French not German in its ultimate inspiration. This grandiose pavilioned and mansarded range of four tall blocks forms a shallow U-shaped square along a canal (Figure 16). Its definitely Second Empire character may not, all the same, have derived directly from Paris but via German or English intermediaries, so much more typical is this of the international than of the truly Parisian mode of the third quarter of the century.

As late as 1893-4 the much more conspicuous Magasin du Nord department store, built by A. C. Jensen (1847-1913) and his partner H. Glaesel in the Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen, also carried the high mansarded roofs of the new Louvre, both flat-sided and convex-curved, above its end and centre pavilions. The detailing was chastened, however, by memories of local palaces and mansions in the nearby Amalie quarter of the city, where Jensen had worked on the completion of the eighteenth-century Marble Church. The Magasin du Nord thus combines two characteristic aspects of the architecture of the period, evident in most countries but rarely thus joined: a reflection of Napoleon III’s Paris, elsewhere reaching its peak around 1870, and a revival of the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generally beginning about a decade later.

In Sweden also there was some Second Empire influence, although nothing very notable resulted from it. The Jernkontovets Building in Stockholm erected by the brothers Kumlien (A.F., 1833-?; K.H., 1837-97) in 1873-5 has a high mansard and pavilions combined with a respectably academic treatment of the façades that is quite different from the bombast of the Søtorvet. Bern’s Restaurant in Stockholm of 1886 by Åbom, whose more conservative Renaissance Revival theatre of thirty years earlier has been mentioned, is similarly Parisian, particularly in the decorations that were provided by Isaeus.

With I. G. Clason (1856-1930) the tide of eclecticism in Sweden turned more nationalistic. The Northern Renaissance of his Northern Museum, built in 1889-1907, parallels somewhat belatedly the Meistersinger mode in Germany; but it also shows a more refined and delicate touch, somewhat like that of George and of Collcutt in England. As in most other countries, the revival of the native sixteenth-century style was soon succeeded by a revival of the Baroque, here rather academically restrained. This phase is most conspicuously represented in Stockholm by the grouped Parliament House and National Bank of 1897-1905 by Aron Johansson (1860-1936). In the nineties Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1946) was also initiating a new movement somewhat comparable to that led by Nyrop in Denmark (see Chapter 24).

The modes of Second Empire Paris left rather more mark on Holland than did those of the First Empire, particularly in the work of Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75), whose iron-and-glass Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam of the late fifties has been mentioned earlier. That is long gone, but the related Galerij, a U-shaped range of mansarded blocks linked by a sort of veranda of cast iron, till lately bounded the south of the Frederiksplein. His enormous Amstel Hotel, near by on the farther side of the Amstel, was built in 1863-7. At Scheveningen the Oranje Hotel (1872-3), also by him, was one of several typical resort establishments there of an international Second Empire order, as is also his hotel at Berg-en-Dal near Nijmegen (1867-9). Fairly generally high mansards rose in the sixties and seventies over the narrow house-fronts in the new quarters of Dutch cities. However, the opposing Neo-Gothic is more significant historically in Holland, and the secular work of Cuijpers as well as his churches, although rather like Clason’s, is better considered in that connexion (see Chapter 11). As in the Scandinavian countries, the nineties saw new beginnings in Holland, in this case with the appearance of Berlage and Kromhout (see Chapter 20).

The principal Anglo-American developments in the second half of the century were in the specialized fields of domestic and commercial building (see Chapters 14 and 15). England, moreover, had from 1850 to the early seventies a lively stylistic development of her own, the High Victorian Gothic, rather different from the later Neo-Gothic of the Continent, which was also very influential in the Dominions and in the United States (see Chapters 10 and 11). Nevertheless, the international Second Empire mode flourished on both sides of the Atlantic among Anglo-Saxons to a greater extent, perhaps, than anywhere in Europe. It is not, of course, possible to subsume all non-Gothic work of these decades in England under the Second Empire rubric any more than on the Continent. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, the most vigorous and conspicuous buildings of a generically Renaissance character were clearly inspired by Paris, and often specifically by the New Louvre, as Prosper Mérimée noted and wrote to Viollet-le-Duc while on a visit to London in the mid sixties.

The most considerable English public monument built just after the mid century, the Leeds Town Hall of 1855-9, is by Cuthbert Brodrick (Plate 78A). That Brodrick was an architect markedly French in his leanings has already been noted in describing his Leeds Corn Exchange, which is later in date but earlier in style than his Town Hall (see Chapter 4). But this major early work, for which Brodrick won the commission in a competition in 1853, is not easily pigeon-holed stylistically. The great hall inside derives quite directly from Elmes’s in Liverpool, designed almost a quarter of a century earlier, though not opened until 1856. The exterior recalls in its grandiose scale the English Baroque of Vanbrugh more than it does anything that had even been projected since the megalomaniac French projects of the 1790s. The Leeds Town Hall is certainly no longer Romantic Classical, no longer Early Victorian; yet except for the rather clumsy originality of some of the detail and the varied outline of the tower—a late emendation of the original project of 1853—it is hard to say how or why it is so definitely High Victorian, and rather a masterpiece of the High Victorian at that. Wallot in Berlin in the eighties approached Brodrick’s mode of design in the Reichstag but had little of his command of scale or his almost Romantic Classical control of mass.

When Brodrick designed his town hall very little was known in England of Visconti’s project of 1852 for the New Louvre, and Lefuel had not yet begun to elaborate the design. So vigorously individual an architect as Brodrick was hardly likely, moreover, to find inspiration in the Hope house of Dusillion or the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. But the wave of Second Empire influence arrived in England well before the Leeds Town Hall was finished. When the English swarmed to Paris to visit the International Exhibition of 1855 the character of the New Louvre became generally known to architects and to the interested public. The Crimean War in the mid fifties served, moreover, to bring English and French officialdom into close contact. To English ministers and civil servants, even more than to architects and ordinary citizens, the existing governmental accommodations in Whitehall contrasted most unfavourably with those Napoleon III was providing in the New Louvre. When a competition was held in 1856-7 for a new Foreign Office and a new War Office to be built in Whitehall, it is not surprising that most of those entrants who were not convinced Gothicists should have modelled their projects more or less on the work of Visconti and Lefuel.

Barry, the head of the profession, did not enter the competition; but unofficially—for he was still an employee of the Government at the Houses of Parliament—he prepared at this time a comprehensive scheme for the development of the whole length of Whitehall from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square. In this project he crowned all his façades—including that of his already executed Treasury—with mansards, introduced stepped-back courts like that of the New Louvre, and marked the corners and the centres of the court façades in the most Louvre-like way with pavilions crowned by still taller mansards. Had this project of Barry’s been followed, London would rival Paris and Vienna in the extent, the consistency, and the boldness of her public buildings of this period. In fact, practically nothing ever came of it nor, indeed, of the official competition; for by this period earlier traditions of urbanism had all but completely died out and architectural initiative was largely in private hands.

When the competition was judged in 1857, the designs that received the top prizes both for the War Office and for the Foreign Office were in the pavilioned and mansarded manner; they derived, however, at least as much from the Tuileries as from the New Louvre. It was the rising prestige of Napoleon III, of course, that called public attention at this time to the Tuileries which was his residence—as it had been, for that matter, the residence of earlier nineteenth-century French monarchs. Otherwise no one in England would probably have thought of reviving any of the various periods, covering some four centuries, represented in its conglomerate mass or of emulating its pavilioned and mansarded composition.

Since neither of these projects for ministries was ever executed, and their respective architects—Henry B. Garling (1821-1909), on the one hand, and H. E. Coe (1826-85) and his partner Hofland, on the other—never built much else of consequence, it is not necessary to linger over them. However, their designs and other Second Empire ones that received minor premiums were extensively illustrated in professional and general periodicals, and they provided favourite models in the sixties both in England and in the United States. The Paris originals, on which graphic data was not only scarcer but also less readily accessible, were not on the whole so influential. This helps to explain why French influence _appears_ to have been stronger in the Anglo-Saxon world than on the Continent, even though there was probably less direct contact with Paris.

There was also in England at this time a general tendency, even more notable than in Austria or Germany, to enrich and elaborate plastically the long-established Renaissance Revival mode. This is less specifically inspired by Paris. An excellent example is provided by the extensive range of terraces, designed by Sancton Wood (1814-86) in 1857, that flank Lancaster Gate in the Bayswater Road in London with their boldly projecting bay windows linked by tiers of colonnades. In other examples, such as the National Discount Company’s offices at 65 Cornhill built by the Francis Brothers in 1857, the capping of the whole block with a boldly dormered mansard[206] is more obviously of Second Empire inspiration, though the façades below are merely of a much enriched _palazzo_ order.

When the Moseley Brothers designed in 1858 the vast Westminster Palace Hotel near Westminster Abbey at the foot of Victoria Street, a caravanserai intended to exceed the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel of 1850-2 in international luxury, they took over its pavilioned and mansarded design. To judge from the relative dignity and sobriety of their detailing, they would seem to have studied contemporary Parisian work—not the New Louvre but the quieter _maisons de rapport_ along the boulevards—rather than merely basing themselves on the prize-winning Government Offices projects as so many others were content to do at this time. This hotel, which proved a failure, now serves as a block of offices, and has been remodelled almost beyond recognition.

The next year Barry designed the Halifax Town Hall, his last work. He did not himself propose to cap this, like the Government Offices in his Whitehall scheme, with French mansards; those that were executed are an emendation by his son, E. M. Barry, who carried the building to completion in 1862 after his father’s death in 1860. But the richly arcaded articulation of the walls and the emphatic forward breaks of the great tower and of the more modest pavilion at the other end clearly emulate, without directly imitating, the sumptuous plasticity of the New Louvre. Nevertheless, the boldly asymmetrical composition, dominated by a single corner tower, is more in the Italian Villa vein (Plate 78B).

This tower—but not the site—was lined up with the axis of Prince’s Street, which enters Crossley Street at this point. The assured quality of its design and above all that of its tremendous spire, more than worthy of Wren in the ingenuity with which the silhouette of a Gothic steeple was built up out of Renaissance elements, makes the Halifax Town Hall thoroughly English and one of the masterpieces of the High Victorian period. Totally devoid of Gothic elements, it has more Gothic vitality than Barry’s Houses of Parliament, at this time just approaching completion nearly thirty years after they were first designed.

E. M. Barry went on to crown two London station hotels, that at Charing Cross in 1863-4 and that at Cannon Street in 1865-6, with mansards; but these were far from being masterpieces, and that at Charing Cross has lately been much modified. The Grosvenor Hotel, built beside the new Victoria Station in 1859-60 by Sir James T. Knowles (1831-1908), is far more original. He covered the whole enormous mass with a very tall convex mansard, giving further emphasis to the broad pavilions at the ends by carrying their roofs still higher and capping them with lanterns. Beyond this nothing was French. The detail indeed, defined by its architect as ‘Tuscan’, i.e. _Rundbogenstil_, is highly individual, partaking of the coarse gusto and even somewhat of the naturalism of the most advanced Victorian Gothic foliage carving of the period (see