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Dictionary of Art
and Artists

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CHAPTER THREE
POST-IMPRESSIONISM, SYMBOLISM,
AND ART NOUVEAU
PAINTING
SCULPTURE
- Part 1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11
ARCHITECTURE
- Part 1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12
PHOTOGRAPHY
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ARCHITECTURE
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United States
The search for a modern architecture first began in earnest around
1880.
It required wedding the
ideas of William Morris and a new machine aesthetic, tentatively
explored some
15 years earlier in the
decorative arts, to new construction materials and techniques. The
process itself took several decades, during which architects
experimented with a variety of styles. It is significant that the symbol
was the skyscraper, and that its first home was Chicago, then a
burgeoning metropolis not yet encumbered by allegiance to the styles of
the past.
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RICHARDSON.
The Chicago fire of 1871
had opened enormous opportunities to architects from
older cities such as Boston and New York. Among them was Henry Hobson
Richardson (1838-1886),
who profited as a young man from contact with Labrouste in Paris (see
fig. 976).
Most of his work along the eastern seaboard shows a massive
Neo-Romanesque style. There are still echoes of this in his last major
project for Chicago, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store designed in
1885 (fig. 1022).
The huge structure filled an entire city block. In its
symmetry and the treatment of masonry, it may remind us of Italian Early
Renaissance palaces (see fig. 589).
Yet the complete lack of ornament proclaims its
utilitarian purpose.
Warehouses and factories as commercial building types had a history
of their own dating to the later eighteenth century. Richardson must
have been familiar with this tradition, which on occasion had produced
remarkably impressive ''stripped-down" designs (see fig.
1023). In contrast to
these earlier structures, however, the walls of the Marshall Field
Wholesale Store do not present a continuous surface pierced by windows.
Except for the corners, which have the effect of heavy piers, they show
a series of superimposed arcades, like a Roman aqueduct (see fig.
246), an impression
strengthened by the absence of ornament and the thickness of the
masonry. (Note how deeply the windows are recessed.) These arcaded walls
are as functional and self-sustaining as their ancient predecessors.
They invest the building with a strength and dignity unrivaled in any
earlier commercial structure. Behind them is an iron skeleton that
actually supports the seven floors, but the exterior does not depend on
it, either structurally or aesthetically.
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1022.
Henry Hobson Richardson.
Marshall Eield Wholesale Store (demolished 1930), Chicago. 1885-87
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1023. Warehouses on New Quay, Liverpool.
1835-40
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Henry Hobson Richardson
Henry Hobson Richardson, (born , Sept. 29, 1838, Priestley
Plantation, La., U.S.—died April 27, 1886, Brookline,
Mass.), American architect, the initiator of the Romanesque
revival in the United States and a pioneer figure in the
development of an indigenous, modern American style of
architecture.
Richardson was the
great-grandson of the discoverer of oxygen, Joseph
Priestley. His distinguished pedigree and his own affability
made his move from the South to Harvard University in 1855
as easy as it was eventually to be rewarding. Harvard then
offered more in personal contacts than in intellectual
stimulation, and Richardson’s later clients, such as Henry
Adams, were largely drawn from the Porcellian Club and other
social circles that he entered with ease. He never returned
to the South.
Sometime during his Harvard
days Richardson decided to become an architect. In Boston he
was surrounded by buildings of plain granite design that
affected the best of his own later work, but for formal
training he had to go abroad, for there were no schools of
architecture in the United States before the Civil War.
Fluent in French from his Louisiana childhood, he studied at
the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1860 to 1862, when
the Civil War at home cut off his income. He then worked in
the office of the French architect Théodore Labrouste until
he returned to the United States in October 1865. In Paris
he mastered the analytical architectural planning that
characterizes much of his mature work and that was
formulated by his friend, the architect and École professor
Julien Guadet, in his Éléments et théorie de l’architecture
(1902).
Richardson returned to
America with every expectation of quick success, for he was
among the best trained architects in the country and had
many important connections. In November 1866, he was awarded
his first commission, the Church of the Unity in
Springfield, Mass. (now demolished). His career launched,
Richardson married Julia Gorham Hayden of Boston on Jan. 3,
1867. They moved into a house of his own design (now
altered) on Staten Island, New York, where five of his six
children were born. Richardson’s neighbour was Frederick Law
Olmsted, the journalist and renowned landscape architect
with whom he later frequently collaborated.
Richardson lived and worked
in New York City for the next eight years, forming in 1867 a
partnership with the architect Charles D. Gambrill that
lasted 11 years but was never more than one of
administrative convenience. From his Manhattan office and
the drafting board in his Staten Island home came the
drawings for the early commissions in Springfield, the State
Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo (designed 1870–72), and the
Brattle Square (1870–72) and Trinity (1872–77) churches in
Boston. Designed for the renowned preacher Phillips Brooks,
Trinity was one of the most important Episcopal churches in
America. Richardson’s Romanesque revival design won him a
national reputation, many imitators, and so many New England
commissions that it became desirable to move to the Boston
area. In 1874 he bought a house in suburban Brookline,
Mass., and added to it his office and studio.
During these later years
Richardson produced the buildings upon which his reputation
principally rests. He designed houses, community libraries,
suburban railroad stations, educational buildings, and
commercial and civic structures. Instead of the splintered
massing, narrow vertical proportions, and disparate Gothic
features used by his contemporaries, he favoured horizontal
lines, simple silhouettes, and uniform, large-scale details
of Romanesque or Byzantine inspiration. Since his best
commercial structure, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in
Chicago (1885–87), and most of his railroad stations in the
northeastern United States were demolished long ago, the
development of Richardson’s work in the last years of his
life can now best be studied at Sever (1878–80) and Austin
(1880–84) halls at Harvard University; at the Allegheny
County Courthouse and Jail (1884–87) in Pittsburgh; at the
Glessner House in Chicago (1885–87); or in the series of
libraries in the small towns around Boston, from Woburn and
North Easton to Quincy and Malden. The Crane Memorial
Library in Quincy, Mass. (1880–82), with its tripartite
layering of a rough-faced granite base beneath continuous
clerestory windows topped with a tiled gable roof and its
cavernous entrance arch, stands with the finest and most
characteristic works of his maturity. Richardson’s
Romanesque style had an integrity seldom achieved by his
many imitators in the latter part of the 19th century.
Moreover, the functionalism of his designs and his
expressive use of materials presaged the revolutionary work
of Louis Sullivan.
Richardson suffered
throughout his career from chronic nephritis, or Bright’s
disease, but nevertheless he worked at a strenuous pace. He
died in 1886 at the top of his profession and with major
buildings rising in Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Ohio,
Chicago, and St. Louis. He left it to his successors, the
Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge,
to finish these, and to the Chicago architects Sullivan and
Frank Lloyd Wright to carry on in the direction he had
initiated.
James Francis
O’Gorman
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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In 1785 the American Congress ruled to
divide the area, which then comprised the United States, into uniform
arid squares. Many of the rapidly-growing centres adopted this
organizational format into their urban planning, including New York,
which in 1811 laid out its streets in a stereotypical grid form.
The chief arguments behind this move were efficiency and economy:
uniform areas could be developed more rationally and economically than
those with irregular shapes and varying sizes. In Chicago, where
expansion was particularly uninhibited, the first large construction
site was staked out in 1830 at the mouth of the Chicago River. By 1900
it was already home to 1.7 milion people.
Building proceeded simply and quickly, preferably using the
balloon-frame method of construction introduced in 1832, whereby wooden
laths were placed at close intervals on a foundation and reinforced with
diagonal studs. The parts were not mortised, but were simply joined with
steel nails. Over the course of time houses were built closer and closer
together, grew taller, and began to require solid masonry. In 1851
Gottfried Semper cited a technician familiar with the American
construction industry of the day: "If a Yankee wants a building plan, he
goes to an architect in the morning, tells him what he wants, the size
of the plot and the amount of money he can spend. He comes back that
evening to see the drawinqs. If he likes them, the foreman is allotted a
round sum, building is begun on the third day and he moves in during the
sixth week." The side walls and the rear facade were made of brick, and
the windows installed immediately. Wooden beams, whose length
corresponded to the - always identical - plot width, made up the false
ceilings, and only the depth of the houses varied. "Depending on the
client's budget, the stonecutter sticks ... slabs of sandstone, marble
or granite on the front facade and hangs this cladding with iron clips
to the back masonry and the carpenter's mullion-wings ... Then the
plasterer comes and transforms the whole edifice with some truly
excellent stucco into the most solid house in all the world." After
1855, cast-iron facade parts from Daniel Badger's New York factory were
also delivered to Chicago, but the majority of houses were still made of
wood. The risks this involved became evident in the great fire of 1871,
which destroyed most of Chicago. A second highly destructive fire in
1874 reinforced efforts to develop fireproof building. Since iron
constructions had proved very vulnerable to fire, tried-and-tested brick
construction was preferred and experimentation provisionally relegated
to the background.
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J. P. Gaynor (arch.)
Building made of cast iron on the corner of
Broadway and Broome Street, New York,
1857
View and plan of a facade made of cast iron elements
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J. W. Ritch
Gilsey Building, New York, before 1865
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Unlike New York, where single, tower-like buildings rose from a sea of
buildings to create a typical urban skyline, Chicago's houses grew
uniformly and in blocks. Speculative exploitation of desirable downtown
development sites forced architecture upwards,- there were many
multi-storey buildings in Chicago in the nineties which, even if they
only had eight or nine floors, were proudly called "skyscrapers". As
buildings grew taller, so did the advantages of iron construction. It
burdened foundations with less weight, and made it possible to avoid the
thick ground-floor walls which had stood in the way of generous shop
windows and thus the lucrative rental of ground-floor store space. One
by one the preconditions for high-rise building were all met: the
invention of a fireproof steel frame, the technology for sufficiently
load-bearing foundations and, above all, the passenger elevator which
Elisha Otis first introduced in New York in 1857.
Access became available to even higher levels, and the formerly cheaper
upper floors now become the more valuable. In using brick columns on the
facades and large, serially-ordered windows, James McLaughlin put a face
on the iron frame construction of a Cincinnati department store in 1877
which soon became typical for large commercia buildings throughout
America. William LeBaron Jenney followed this trend with his
Leiter Store in Chicago. Extensive glazing and the rejection of
ornamentation and any crowning of the facade made a factual, functional
impression.
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William LeBaron Jenney
Leiter Building in Chicago, Illinois, 1879
In Jenney's Leiter Store, iron pillars behind the brick columns
supported the wooden ceiling joists for each floor. The narrow frames
between the windows were made of wrought iron and rested on stone
parapets. Since the construction featured almost no tension-resist-ont
joints, it cannot be said to possess a true framework. Notablee is its
extensive rejection of facade decoration. In 1888 two storeys were added
to the building; when this photograph was taken they had already been
completed. The tracks of the "Elevated", the suburban railway which ran
in a loop araund the city centre, can be seen in the foreground. It gave
its name to the "Loop", Chicago's centre of commerce.
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Others building alongside Jenney in
Chicago's Loop included Daniel H. Burnham, John Wellborn Root,
John Holabird, Martin Roche, Henry Hobson Richardson,
Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. Richardson and Sullivan
tried determinedly to find an artistic form for commercial building
projects. While Richardson accented his powerful, even stone facades
with carefully-placed windows and rounded arches, Sullivan took
on the challenge at a more fundamental level. He summarized his thoughts
on office building design in the essay "The tall office building
artistically considered". Sullivan structures the building in
terms of three functions. The ground floor is thus for shops and for
access to the upper floors. It is followed by a middle section
containing any number of similar floors of offices,- its facade is hence
structured by a uniform grid of windows and columns. The top floor,
which houses elements of the building's utilities, is emphasized as a
concluding attic storey. His typical ideal multi-storey building
therefore features a base, shaft and capital, as in a classical column.
Sullivan's argumentation ends in the much-analyzed conclusion:
"It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all
things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and al! things
superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the
soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever
follows function. This is the law ..."
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Burnham & Root
Monodnock Building, Chicago, Illinois,
1889-1891
Built in the traditional manner with bricks and load-bearing
walls, this building was known for its complete làñk of facade
ornamentation. For contemporaries like the Frerch critic Jacques Hermant,
it was "the work of a mad builder, who thoughtlessly piles fifteen
identical floors on top of one another and stops whenever he feels it is
high enough". In comparison, the extension bv Holabird and Roche from
1891-1893 had a load-bearing steel structure and offered the public more
decoration at the upper ere.
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Burnham & Root with Charles B. Atwood
Reliance Building, Chicago, Illinois, 1894-1895
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Daniel H. Burnham & Co.
"Flatiron" , Fuller Building in New York,
1901-1903
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Daniel Hudson Burnham with Peirce
Anderson Union Station, Washington, D.C., 1905-1907
Ticket hall
At the time it was built, the main train station in Washington, D.C.,
was the largest in the world. To do justice to this prestigious
commission, located at a prominent site only five blocks from the
Capitol, the architect included many classical elements in the structure
and clad it in marble, white granite and gold leaf. Thus, he created one
of the few completed examples of the "City Beautiful Movement". Because
the American president James Garfield was shot and killed at a train
station in Washington in 1881, an exclusive presidential suite was built
to offer extra protection.
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William Holabird and Martin Roche
Tacoma Building in Chicago,
Illinois, 1887-1889
Technological progress and aesthetics did not always coincide.
Technically-innovative buildings frequently appeared conservative in
their exteriors, while facades which seemed to express new concepts
merely corcealed conventional stone constructions. The Tacoma Building
ultimately looked like the skeleton construction it was.
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Holabird and Roche
Marquette Building, Chicago, Illinois, 1895
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H. Burnham, E.H. Burnett and J. A.
Holabird
Travel and Transport Building of the "Century of Progress" Exposition in
Chicago, Illinois.
1933
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