Chapter 10: )

Beyond the first two blocks of Grosvenor Place the new construction of the sixties stops; but it starts again at the farther end and surrounds the two triangles of Grosvenor Gardens, of which Knowles’s hotel occupies part of the farther side. It is characteristic of the Parisian inspiration of the whole that on the east side of the Gardens great blocks of flats—’mansions’ in a Victorian euphemism—replaced the usual London terraces of individual tall houses, but these now serve as offices as do all the extant houses in Grosvenor Place. For one of these blocks red brick was used, but set like a mere panel-filling within stone frames according to a French rather than an English tradition.

There are no other comparably pretentious examples of Second Empire terraces in London except Cambridge Gate (1875) by Thomas Archer and A. Green (?-1904), an unhappy intrusion among Nash’s stuccoed Regent’s Park ranges despite its handsome execution in fine ashlar of Bath stone. Characteristically, London domestic architecture of the late fifties and sixties merely elaborated the Renaissance Revival formulas of the previous decade. Not only were the chosen models generally later and richer as in Vienna; wherever possible bolder plastic effects were achieved by a more extensive use of ground-storey colonnades, first-storey porches, and projecting bay windows, as on Wood’s magniloquent terraces at Lancaster Gate or those of 1858 by C. J. Richardson (1800-72) that followed them in Queen’s Gate.

The high standards of the earlier period were maintained only in business _palazzi_, not those of London’s City, but those in big Northern towns like Bradford and in Scotland. There good freestone was readily available and a certain cultural lag, as well as a regional sobriety of temperament, led to the maintenance of a more Barry-like tradition. Notable everywhere for their academic virtues are the various National Provincial Bank buildings by Barry’s pupil John Gibson (1819-92). The earliest, but not the most typical, is the head office in Bishopsgate, which was begun in 1863.

A special school of Renaissance design is associated with Sir Henry Cole’s Department of Practical Art, and this produced the various buildings that he sponsored in the new London cultural centre in Brompton (now usually called South Kensington). The Exhibition of 1862, on the southern edge of the estate belonging to the Commissioners of the Great Exhibition, was housed in a structure designed by Francis Fowke (1823-65), an army engineer. As at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, the metal and glass construction of this was masked externally with masonry walls, but, unlike Cendrier’s and Viel’s Palais de l’Industrie, the whole was pavilioned and mansarded in the Second Empire mode. A still more elaborate Second Empire project was prepared by Fowke for the Museum of Science and Art (later Victoria and Albert), Cole having evidently accepted all too abjectly the criticism of his earlier temporary structure, the notorious ‘Brompton Boilers’ (see Chapter 7). As Fowke died at this point the Museum (Plate 83B), begun in 1866, as also the associated Royal College of Science (Huxley Building), built in 1868-71, were carried out in a much less French vein under another army engineer, H. G. D. Scott (1822-83). The walling material is a fine smooth red brick, very rare in the London of the nineteenth century, beautifully laid up with thin joints. With this is combined an enormous quantity of elaborately modelled pale cream terracotta, as on various Central European buildings deriving from Schinkel’s Bauakademie in Berlin of 1831-6.

In these South Kensington structures, planned by an engineer, the emphasis is on the sculptural embellishment designed and executed by Godfrey Sykes and other artists associated with the Department. This team-work, by-passing as it did over-all control by an architect, was not very successful in achieving the coherence of Knowles’s and Giles’s hotels, although those were built for much less sophisticated clients. Much the same team, but with still more sculptors collaborating, was responsible for the Albert Hall, the vast circular auditorium built in 1867-71 on the northern edge of the Commissioners’ Estate facing the most characteristic monument of the age, G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic Albert Memorial. The engineer Scott’s really notable achievement here in the metal construction of the vast dome is unfortunately swamped by the profuse investiture of sculptural detail in terracotta, intrinsically elegant though much of that is.

In the sixties there was some coherence in the planning of the Commissioners’ Estate as a whole, with a garden court surrounded by a great hemicycle of terracotta arcading by M. D. Wyatt lying behind the 1862 Exhibition Building and below the Albert Hall. In Vienna the cultural edifices were admirably grouped along the Ringstrasse with plenty of open space between them, however much they may have lacked intrinsic architectural quality. In sad contrast is the way the following decades allowed this considerable tract to become clogged up until almost no urbanistic organization at all remains.

Other European countries tended in this period, like Denmark, Sweden, and Holland, to follow Paris and Vienna rather than London. Only a few works of the sixties and seventies need be singled out from the welter of pretentious public and private construction that turned Brussels, for example, into a ‘Little Paris’.[209] The Boulevard Anspach as a whole suggests the Cannebière in Marseilles, although the mansards on the buildings that line it are more plastically handled; the Exchange, in its own square half-way down the boulevard, was built by L.-P. Suys (1823-87) in 1868-73, and this provides the focus of the mid-nineteenth-century city, as does Garnier’s Opéra in Paris. A provincial variant of the Opéra in many ways, despite its quite different function, this is somewhat more academic in composition yet also rather coarser in its profuse ornamentation. Brussels as a whole is dominated, however, by one of the grandest and most original monuments erected anywhere in this period.

The Palace of Justice,[210] built by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79) in 1866-83, occupies so high a site and is mounted on so mountainous a substructure that almost the whole of its gargantuan mass is visible from all over the city. Although generically Classical, a good deal of the external treatment has an indefinable flavour of the monuments of the ancient civilizations of the East, somewhat like that of the exotic churches Alexander Thomson built in the late fifties and sixties in Glasgow (Plate 81). Even more than Thomson’s relatively small and delicately scaled work, the Palace of Justice also suggests the megalomaniac architectural dreams of such a Romantic English painter as John Martin. Heavy and almost literally cruel, it has a Piranesian spatial elaboration and a plastic vitality of the most exaggeratedly architectonic order. Thus it quite puts to shame the urbane Renaissance costuming of most Continental public architecture of this period and the usual Neo-Baroque of the next.

The existence of this extraordinary edifice in a minor European capital prepares one a little for the important part that Brussels was to play in the nineties, even though there could hardly be two architects further apart in spirit than Poelaert and Victor Horta, who initiated there the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 16). So also in Glasgow, the originality of Thomson’s Queen’s Park Church of the sixties at least opened the way for the notable international contribution to be made by the Glaswegian C. R. Mackintosh in the nineties. But it was Alphonse Balat (1818-95), not Poelaert, who was Horta’s master and also in these decades professor of architecture at the local Academy. Balat’s Musée Royale des Beaux Arts of 1875-81 already represents a reversion to a more restrained and academic classicism with none of Poelaert’s force and vitality. Yet this building is not without a certain correct elegance of detail and conventional skill in composition for which his houses of the sixties, with their Barry-like handling of the High Renaissance _palazzo_ theme, prepared the way. The real eclecticism of this period lies less significantly in the variety of nominal styles employed than in the variety of ways of employing them. It is this, rather than the concurrent multiplication of fashionable modes, that makes it so difficult to characterize broadly the production of the period between the mid century and the nineties.

In several other European countries the situation was made even more complicated than in Belgium by a very considerable cultural lag such as has already been noted in Scandinavia. While the Rütschi-Bleuler House in Zurich of 1869-70 by Theodor Geiger (1832-82) had the fashionable Second Empire mansard, here high and concave, at nearby Winterthur Semper’s Town Hall of precisely the same date, with its dominating temple portico, might at first sight be taken for a provincial French public edifice of the second quarter of the century. At the Zurich Polytechnic School, where Semper became a professor in 1855,[211] the large building begun in 1859 that he erected with the local architect Wolff is equally retardataire in style. His Observatory there of 1861-4 is a delicate and rather picturesquely composed exercise in the _quattrocento_ version of the _Rundbogenstil_, rather like his Hamburg houses of twenty years earlier.

If a German architect of established international reputation could be thus affected by the conservative tastes of his Swiss clients, it is not surprising that in the Iberian peninsula almost nothing of interest was built in this period. It may, however, be mentioned that the building for the National Library and Museums in Madrid, designed in 1866 by Francisco Jareño y Alarcón (1818-92) and almost thirty years in construction, while still of the most conventional Classical character as regards its façades, has convex mansards over the end pavilions of quite definitely Second Empire character. Characteristically, the Chamber of Commerce in Madrid, completed in 1893 by E. M. Repulles y Vargas (1845-1922), illustrates the general return of official architecture to still more conventional academic standards towards the end of the century. But in the seventies there began in Barcelona the career of a Spanish—or more accurately Catalan—architect, Antoni Gaudí, who was destined to produce around 1900 some of the boldest and most original early works of modern architecture. Gaudí’s real links in the seventies and eighties, spiritually if not so much actually, are with the High Victorian Gothic not the Second Empire, although the earliest project on which he worked reflected the Palais Longchamps at Marseilles (see Chapter 11).

The situation in the United States was naturally most like that in England. As has already been noted, a French-trained Danish architect, Lienau, prefigured the Second Empire mode in the Shiff house in New York as early as 1849-50. By the mid fifties mansards of rather modest height, often with shallow concave slopes, had appeared in Eastern cities on many houses not otherwise particularly Frenchified. Richard M. Hunt (1827-95),[212] the first American to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and actually an assistant as well as a pupil of Lefuel, returned from Paris to America in 1855. But he brought with him no lush Second Empire mode but rather the basic academic tradition of the French official world, despite the fact that he had himself worked in 1854 on the New Louvre. Although some of the earliest work of H. H. Richardson, who returned from Paris a decade later after working for several years for Labrouste’s brother Théodore, was of Second Empire character, he showed himself from the first more responsive to influences from contemporary England (see Chapters 11 and 13). On the whole, the Second Empire mode, as it was practised in America through the third quarter of the century, derived almost as completely as the local Victorian Gothic from England. Most American architects were kept informed of what was going on abroad through the English professional Press, and so they naturally followed the models that were offered in the _Builder_ and the _Building News_ rather than those in the publications of César Daly.[213]

The Civil War of 1861-5 did not bring architectural production to a stop; indeed, it seems to have had a less inhibiting effect than the aftermath of the financial crash of 1857 in the immediately preceding years. In Washington the building of Walter’s new wings of the Capitol, initiated in 1851,[214] and of his cast-iron dome, designed in 1855, continued until their completion in 1865, right through the war years at President Lincoln’s express order (Plate 82A). There is nothing specifically French about this new work at the Capitol, even though Walter had the assistance from 1855 of the Paris-trained Hunt. On the other hand, the original more-or-less Romantic Classical edifice that had finally been brought to completion in 1828 by Bulfinch after so many changes of architect was largely submerged. The new wings echo in their academic porticoes the broader portico of the original late eighteenth-century design; but the cast-iron dome (see Chapter 7), rivalling in size the largest Baroque domes of Europe, has a high drum and a Michelangelesque silhouette of the greatest boldness in contrast to the Roman saucer shape of that designed by Latrobe and not much raised in execution by Bulfinch.

It was not in Washington that the Second Empire mode was first introduced for public buildings; Washington, indeed, would never again be the centre of architectural influence that it was in the Romantic Classical period, although the new state capitols begun in the sixties and seventies were mostly capped with imitations of Walter’s dome. A ‘female seminary’ on the Hudson River, endowed by a brewer, and the new City Hall in Boston, Mass., both dating from the opening of the sixties, are the first monumental instances of the new mode that dominated the field of secular public building until the financial Panic of 1873 brought the post-war boom to a close. James Renwick,[215] who designed the very extensive Main Hall for Matthew Vassar’s new college at Arlington near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1860, was specifically instructed by his client to imitate the Tuileries—not the New Louvre—and so he did in an elaborately pavilioned composition of U-shaped plan crowned by various sorts of high mansards. This overshadows in significance his earlier Charity Hospital of 1858 on Blackwell’s Island in New York, already mansarded but very plain, and his Corcoran Gallery of 1859, now the Court of Claims, in Washington, with a rich but muddled façade still rather flatly conceived.

Renwick was at least as eclectic as such Europeans as Ballu and Ferstel. Having made his first reputation with the building of the Anglican Grace Church in New York in 1843-6—if not very Camdenian, this is at least a fair specimen of revived fourteenth-century English Gothic—he continued in the Gothic line with the Catholic St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, begun in 1859 and completed (except for the spires) in 1879. That vast two-towered pile, however, is Gothic in a very Continental way, resembling Gau’s and Ballu’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris and Ferstel’s Votivkirche in Vienna more than anything English of the period. In the late forties Renwick had also been the agent of Robert Dale Owen’s ‘Romanesque Revival’ aspirations in designing the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (see Chapter 6).

For such things as the Smithsonian and his churches Renwick had plenty of visual documents on which to lean, either archaeological treatises on the buildings of the medieval past or illustrations of contemporary foreign work. But for Vassar College, very evidently, he was dependent for his inspiration on rather generalized lithographic or engraved views of the Tuileries. Nor could he, at this relatively early date, borrow much from published illustrations of contemporary English work in the new international Second Empire mode. The particular plastic vitality of the Americanized Second Empire is already notable in this early example, however, even though the rather crude articulation of the red brick walls is remote from anything French of any period from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. Later buildings by Renwick in the same mode are richer and closer to Parisian standards, but their architectonic vitality is considerably less.

The Boston City Hall,[216] built by G. J. F. Bryant (1816-99) and Arthur D. Gilman (1821-82) in 1862-5, is a smaller but suaver edifice. Although it is a compactly planned block, the articulation of the walls by successive Roman-arched orders, coldly but competently executed in stone, is boldly plastic below the crowning mansards. However, just before this, for the Arlington Street Church of 1859-61, the first edifice erected in the Back Bay district that Gilman was just laying out,[217] he had turned not to France but to eighteenth-century England for inspiration, basing himself chiefly on the same churches by Gibbs that had been the most popular American models in later Colonial times.

A leading opponent of the Greek Revival, Gilman, like most Continental architects of the day, evidently knew better what he meant to leave behind than whither he wished to proceed. His Boston church initiated no national wave of Gibbsian church architecture; indeed, the sixties were the heyday of Victorian Gothic design for churches in the United States. His City Hall, on the other hand, set off a nation-wide programme of public building in the Second Empire mode; for Boston was now for a score of years the artistic as well as the intellectual headquarters of the country in succession to Philadelphia. In this programme municipalities, state authorities, and the Federal Government all participated actively during the decade following the Civil War. In the case of many Federal buildings, only nominally the work of the office of the Supervising Architect, where A. B. Mullet (1834-90) succeeded Rogers in 1865, Gilman acted in these years as consultant, and was probably the real designer rather than Mullet or his assistants.

These vast monuments were mostly constructed during General Grant’s presidency. Parisian in intention, yet American in their materials, they are withal rather similar to Second Empire work in England. Few were completed before the mode went out of favour as changes in architectural control sometimes make evident. In the case of the New York State Capitol in Albany, for example, begun in 1868 by Thomas Fuller (1822-98) and his partner Augustus Laver (1834-98), both arriving from England via Canada, Eidlitz and Richardson took over jointly in 1875, modifying the design of the building very notably above the lower storeys towards the Romanesquoid. Thus it was finally brought to completion by them and others in the following twenty years. The very tall tower on the Philadelphia City Hall, begun in 1874, was finished over a decade later. This tower, whose crowning statue of William Penn still tops the local skyline, has hardly anything in common with the Louvre-like pavilions below; yet the whole is nominally the work of one architect, John McArthur, Jr (1823-90), the grandfather of General Douglas McArthur.

Undoubtedly the association of these prominent buildings with the unsavoury Grant administration and the fact that there were—at least in the two cases mentioned above—major financial scandals involved in their slow and incredibly costly construction played an important part in the early rejection of a mode so associated with the public vices of the decade after the Civil War. Not many of them are extant today other than the Boston, Albany, and Philadelphia structures just mentioned and the old State Department Building in Washington (Plate 82B).

In New York, Boston, and other large cities the vast granite piles in this mode that long served as post offices are all gone. In Chicago the Cook County Buildings built by J. J. Egan in 1872-5 have also long since been replaced. In San Francisco Fuller & Laver’s extensive group of Municipal Buildings was destroyed in the fire that followed the earthquake of 1906. This must have been the largest, the richest, and plastically the most complex production of the whole lot, with its triangular site, boldly articulated massing, and central dome.

Though threatened by every new administration, the State, War and Navy Department Building built by Mullet in 1871-5 still stands, overshadowing the nearby White House. This is perhaps the best extant example in America of the Second Empire—or as it is sometimes called locally, the ‘General Grant’—mode (Plate 82B). The tiers of Roman-arched orders in fine grey granite, borrowed by Gilman as consultant architect and presumptive designer from his earlier Boston City Hall rather than from Paris, tower up storey above storey to carry mansards of various different heights above the complex pavilioned plan. Cold and grand, almost without sculptural decoration, this could hardly be less like the New Louvre or the old Tuileries in general texture; nor is there any of the playful semi-Gothic detail of Knowles’s and Giles’s London hotels or of the festive colouring and lush ornamentation of Brodrick’s at Scarborough.

The contrast of the old State Department Building with its _pendant_ on the other side of Lafayette Square, Mills’s Grecian Treasury, finally completed by Rogers a decade earlier, is shocking to most people. Yet it is fascinating to read here the representational aspirations of an age that found its most significant expression, not in its public buildings, but in the new skyscrapers which first rose in New York at just this time, Hunt’s Tribune Building and the Western Union Building by his pupil George B. Post. Both, incidentally, were heavily mansarded, and the one by the American-trained Post was much more typically Second Empire than is the French-trained Hunt’s (see Chapter 14).

In urban domestic architecture, both on large mansions and on the more usual terrace houses, mansards became characteristic but not ubiquitous in the late fifties and remained so down to the mid seventies and even later in the West. Boston’s Back Bay district, laid out by Gilman in 1859, has a few mansions along Commonwealth Avenue that resemble somewhat the _hôtels particuliers_ of Paris, and also several mansarded terraces by Bryant & Gilman and other architects in that avenue and in Arlington and Beacon Streets. The materials used are un-Parisian—brownstone like Gilman’s nearby church or dark-red brick with brownstone trim—and the detail is rarely very plausibly French. In general, inspiration still came from London, even if nothing so extensive and spectacularly monumental as Grosvenor Place and Grosvenor Gardens was ever produced. In New York Lienau’s finest terrace, that built in Fifth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets in 1869, was rather more sumptuous than the Boston examples, being of white marble with very literate ranges of superposed orders. Hunt’s New York work was often so authentically Parisian as quite to lack the bombast of the international Second Empire mode. Especially interesting were his Stuyvesant Flats in 18th Street, New York, of 1869-70. This block was a very early example of an apartment house of the Parisian sort in America, where they did not generally flourish much before the late eighties.

For the more characteristic free-standing houses that were built outside cities, in suburbs, in towns, and even in the country, the Second Empire mode was also very popular. Interpreted in wood, painted brown or grey stone colours, these have a distinctly autochthonous character. Generally symmetrical and tightly planned, they did not advance the development of the American house in the way of the rival ‘Stick Style’; but in their emphasis on complicated three-dimensional modelling, especially the modelling of the roofs, they prepared the way for one important aspect of the later and more original ‘Shingle Style’ (see