Chapter 15: )

The Second Empire episode in the United States is a curious one. On the one hand, it was a consciously ‘modern’ movement, deriving its prestige from contemporary Paris, not from any period of the past like the Greek, the Gothic, or even the Renaissance Revivals—of which last, of course, it was in some limited sense an heir. On the other hand, the considerable originality of the mode as it was actually employed was largely unconscious and due to the lack of accurate visual documents, or even a codified body of precedent, to be followed. At this time contemporary conditions demanded, as in Europe, the construction of many public edifices, Federal, state, and municipal, to house a complexity of functions. It would have been almost impossible to compress these within the rigid rectangles of the Greek Revival even had the Greek Revival not already been rejected by most critics twenty years or more earlier.

Yet the Second Empire episode was necessarily brief, lasting little more than a decade. The crass assurance it reflected, particularly the special arrogance of the post-war politicians in Washington, the state capitals, and in the bigger cities, was much shaken by the Panic of 1873. The mode did not therefore, as in much of Europe, continue in America into the eighties and nineties.

The episode has a longer-term significance, nevertheless. Slight as was the actual relationship to the Second Empire mode of the first two Americans to be trained at the École des Beaux Arts, Hunt and Richardson, their personal influence and their prestige encouraged a growing trek of architectural students to Paris; their recommendations alone would hardly have had much effect had not fashion already established Paris rather than London in the public mind as the centre of modern architectural achievement and inspiration. From the mid eighties on, the long-maintained dependence on England in architectural matters began to be notably weakened; for a generation and more very many American architects would seek their roots abroad, but henceforth in France, or even Italy, not England.

It is not surprising that in the British Dominions there was no such direct French influence in this period as in Latin America. Urban entities like the Colmena and its terminal square in Lima, Peru, pavilioned and mansarded throughout, rival European examples like the Søtorvet in Copenhagen or the Galerij in Amsterdam. Before they gave way to skyscrapers, the _hôtels particuliers_ along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City were more numerous and more plausibly Parisian than along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston or Bellevue Avenue at Newport. But both in Canada and in Australia the Second Empire mode arrived from England late and in a more corrupted form than in America. The mansarded Windsor Hotel of 1878 in Montreal hardly rivalled the Palmer House of 1872 in Chicago by J. M. Van Osdel (1811-91), to which the rich merchant Potter Palmer was as proud to give his name as to the incredible fake castle that he built for his own occupancy a decade later. The Princess Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, built by William Pitt in 1877, with its three square-domed mansards, has an appealing nonchalance, like that of the contemporary edifices of the mining towns high in the American Rocky Mountains—the hotel in Virginia City, Nevada, that has been mentioned earlier, or the much more modest Opera House in Central City, Colorado, for example. But the public architecture of the third quarter of the century in Australia was more restrained in design just because it was generally so very retardataire.

The Parliament House in Melbourne, begun in 1856 by John G. Knight (1824-92) and completed in 1880 by Peter Kerr (1820-1912), has academic virtues not unworthy of Kerr’s master Barry, though its giant colonnades recall rather those of Brodrick’s contemporary Town Hall in Leeds. The Treasury Buildings in Melbourne, by John James Clark (1838-1915) of 1857-8, are not unworthy of comparison with High Renaissance work of the period on the Continent. Other public buildings of the sixties and seventies are of more definitely Victorian character, but Early Victorian rather than High. For example, Clark’s Government House of 1872-6 in South Melbourne is a towered Italian Villa consciously modelled on Queen Victoria’s Osborne House of a generation earlier. Both in Australia and in Canada the Victorian Gothic had more vitality in this period (see Chapter 11).

There is little profit in pursuing farther in the outlying areas of the western world evidence of direct influence from Paris (of which there is, for example, some in Russia) or autochthonous variants of the Second Empire mode. In this generally rather unrewarding period the best work mostly falls under the High Victorian Gothic rubric, or else it illustrates specifically the development of commercial and domestic architecture in the Anglo-American world (see Chapters 10 and 11; 14 and 15). In an attempt to give an over-all picture too many buildings of low intrinsic quality and little present-day interest have already been cited.

What makes especially difficult the proper historical assessment of the widespread influence of Paris in the decades following 1850 is that this influence, whether direct or indirect, rarely produced buildings on the Continent of real distinction or even of much vitality. Only in England and the United States, where the mode was quite reshaped by a different cultural situation and the bold use of local materials, is it of much independent interest. The more plausibly Parisian the work outside France, the less vigour it usually possesses. Some of it can be very plausible indeed, as for example the street architecture of Mexico City and Buenos Aires, even if what appears to be carved French limestone in the Argentine capital is usually but a triumph of imitative craftsmanship on the part of stucco-workers imported from Italy. In general, Mexican and Argentine Second Empire is very dull, as dull as in Belgium, say, with no Poelaerts to redress the balance. Yet along the Malecón in Havana, Cuba, where the traditional galleried house-fronts were reinterpreted in a generically Second Empire way with Andalusian lushness, the results are much more notable, not least because the soft local stone has been very richly weathered by the strong sea breeze. As was mentioned earlier, the use of _azulejos_ in extraordinary tones of brilliant green and purple gives autochthonous character to similar work in Brazil.

The international Second Empire mode has so far found no historian or even a sympathetic critic. Perhaps no other mode so widespread in its acceptance and so prolific in its production has ever received so little attention from posterity. Yet beside it the contemporary stream of the Victorian Gothic mode, which has been recurrently studied, must seem more than a little parochial and also excessively dependent on the individual capacities—not to say the caprices—of its leading practitioners. Within the areas in which the Victorian Gothic was employed, however, an area effectively confined to the Anglo-Saxon world geographically and to certain kinds of buildings typologically, it was capable of major architectural achievement. Moreover, thanks to the line of spiritual descent from the leaders of the generation of architects active in the third quarter of the century to those of the next, the more creative aspects of the architecture of the turn of the century derive in not inconsiderable part from the later Victorian Gothic.

The Lefuels and Hansens, or such men as Brodrick, Poelaert, and Gilman, trained no worthy pupils. But the disciples of the Victorian Gothic leaders not only include such very able young men who actually worked in their offices as Webb and Shaw and Voysey but also, in some sense at least, so great an American architect as Richardson, whose formal training had been wholly Parisian (see Chapters 11, 12, and 13). The advance of domestic architecture in the second half of the nineteenth century and, to a somewhat lesser extent, also that of commercial architecture therefore owed a great deal to the Victorian Gothic, at least in England and America (see Chapters 14 and 15).

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