American Architecture

E

Richardsonian Romanesque

American architecture before and after the Civil War remained heavily indebted to ancient and recent European sources, but one American architect managed to assimilate various European influences and create a highly personal and individual style. Henry Hobson Richardson rose to national and international prominence with his design for Trinity Church (1872-1877) in Boston. Although the use of multicolored stone in the church came from High Victorian Gothic, and the round arches were inspired by 12th-century French Romanesque architecture, the broad pyramidal mass is Richardson’s own. In the years afterward, before his early death at age 48 in 1886, Richardson simplified his work and created an architecture of strong, broad masses and minimal but exquisite detail. His designs exerted great influence across the United States and began to influence European architecture, particularly in Scandinavia.

VI

Innovation and Tradition: 1890 to 1920

American architecture in the years between 1890 and 1920 was dominated by academically trained architects, many of whom had studied at the acclaimed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Their knowledge of the history of architecture surpassed that of most architects before or since, but they tempered this interest in the past with an ability to design buildings that fully accommodated the needs of their time. They received commissions from industrialists who had amassed enormous fortunes before the institution of personal income tax in the United States in 1913. These clients built sumptuous residences, both in fashionable residential neighborhoods of industrial cities (such as Fifth Avenue in New York City and Prairie Avenue in Chicago) and in exclusive summer enclaves (such as Newport, Rhode Island, and Bar Harbor, Maine). These grand houses were objects to convey “conspicuous consumption,” as American economist Thorstein Veblen would soon call the ostentatious display of wealth at that time. Architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had trained in Paris, became the designer of choice for several of these grand houses, particularly for the Vanderbilt family. For Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Hunt designed an enormous Italian Renaissance summer palace called The Breakers (1892-1895) at Newport. For Cornelius’s younger brother, George Washington Vanderbilt, Hunt designed a huge French Renaissance chateau called Biltmore (1888-1895), which is surrounded by formal gardens, at Asheville, North Carolina. Although such over-exuberant display disturbed some socialists, it also inspired many other Americans to strive to achieve this American dream.

A

Public Buildings

The spirit of grandeur in building prompted many cities to erect grand public buildings as well. The Boston Public Library (1887-1895), designed by the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, provided a model for this kind of public grandeur. Inspiration for the library’s sumptuous entry staircase and voluminous upstairs reading room came from ancient Roman and Italian Renaissance sources. Although McKim, Mead, and White received many commissions for city townhouses and for summerhouses in the country, they specialized in major urban buildings. One of their best was the spacious Pennsylvania Station (1902-1910) in New York City. The train station’s soaring public spaces provided a majestic gateway to the city; it was demolished in 1963, however, to make room for Madison Square Garden. Equally expansive is Union Station (1903-1907) in Washington, D.C., designed by Daniel H. Burnham. Both of these vast railway stations used classical Roman elements in their broad exteriors and barrel vaults (ceilings in the form of a half-cylinder) or groin vaults (intersecting barrel vaults, with ridges called groins at the intersections) for their huge interior spaces.

B

Office Towers

As American business grew, the need for urban office space expanded. In most cities, architects could create office space only by building upward. Typical office towers had self-supporting outer masonry (stone or brick) walls, with the interior structure formed by a skeleton of iron columns and wrought iron beams. By the 1880s these office towers rose to 15 stories or more, requiring the outer stone or brick walls to be 2 to 3 m (6 to 9 ft) thick. In Chicago, for example, the Monadnock Building (1884-1892), designed by Burnham and John Wellborn Root, had a solid brick outer wall that was 2 m (6 ft) thick at the insistence of the client. The architects wanted to use metal throughout, but the clients did not trust this new building method.

---

---

In 1883 Chicago architects began to build office blocks with a skeleton entirely of metal; all the outer cladding of brick or stone, as well as the windows, attached to this internal skeleton. After inexpensive steel for a building’s skeleton became more widely available during the 1880s, office towers grew taller and taller. The first architects to accept, and visually accentuate, this vertical character were Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan of Chicago. Their 10-story Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St. Louis, Missouri, features strongly emphasized vertical piers on the outside that enclose the steel frame inside. Sullivan used the same approach in his even taller 12-story Guaranty Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York. For the Schlesinger & Mayer department store (1895-1904, now Carson Pirie Scott) in Chicago, Sullivan designed a corner public entrance accentuated with elaborate cast-iron ornament. To emphasize the large, open floors for displaying merchandise inside, Sullivan used broad windows and clad the building’s steel frame with wide horizontal bands of terra-cotta.

By the end of the 19th century, architects across the country had switched to skeleton framing completely of steel, which was lighter and less susceptible to fire damage than iron. The framing was protected from weather by masonry insulation and an outer skin of stone and glazed terra-cotta. One of the most visually startling early skyscrapers is the Fuller Building (1902-1903) in New York City, popularly called the Flatiron Building, by D. H. Burnham & Company of Chicago. Because this building stands on a narrow triangular lot, it seems even taller than its 21 stories when viewed from its pointed end. The Flatiron Building was the tallest building in New York City for a short time, but it was soon surpassed by the soaring Woolworth Building (1910-1913) a few blocks away, designed by Cass Gilbert. With a steel skeleton heavily braced to resist sideways pressure from wind, this so-called Cathedral of Commerce rises 55 stories, to a height of just over 241 m (792 ft). The Woolworth Building retained the record for the world’s tallest building for almost 20 years, until the construction of the Chrysler Building in 1930. To emphasize the enormous height of the Woolworth Building, Gilbert stressed its vertical lines, using Gothic detailing and capping the office tower with a series of setbacks and a pointed Gothic crown.

C

Prairie Houses

Soaring office towers represented a totally new building type in the history of architecture. Another entirely new American building type was the suburban, detached single-family residence. This building type became the focus of attention of Frank Lloyd Wright, who from 1897 to 1912 built houses in several suburbs rising up around Chicago. During those years Wright analyzed the needs of the American family and designed a new kind of house adapted to those evolving needs and to the flat landscape of the Midwest. Wright’s new design, called the prairie house, had distinctive, long horizontal lines and planes on the outside. Inside, extended interconnected spaces, especially in public areas such as the dining and living rooms, distinguished the prairie house. In his open plans, a series of spaces extended from a central mass that housed the fireplace. Wright’s approach to design was closely associated with that of the Arts and Crafts movement, in which the architect designed not only the house but also the interior detailing, furniture, lighting fixtures, and even doorknobs, hinges, and other hardware. Wright’s prairie house style is well illustrated by the Ward Willitts house (1900-1902) in Highland Park, north of Chicago, and even better by the Frederick C. Robie house (1906-1909), on the south side of Chicago. A number of Wright’s associates (mostly former office assistants) extended his prairie style in Chicago suburbs and in other Midwestern states, forming what became known as the Prairie School.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain