18th and 19th Centuries Modern Architecture

In domestic architecture the modern comfort invented under Louis XV. came in at the same time with the classic style. The oval salon ;1 la francaise was adopted in the White House and the homes of many leaders in politics and fashion. In the North it was the delicate Adam versions of classical ornament which prevailed in the houses of Bulfinch, McIntire, McComb and Thornton; south of the Potomac the monumental portico spon sored by Jefferson at Monticello and the University of Virginia (1817-1825) adorned the great houses of the Piedmont.

Greek Revival.

The Greek revival came hard on the heels of the Roman. The leader was Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1766 1820) who had learned his Greek details in England but got his stimulus toward bodily imitation of the temple from the Ameri can laymen and amateurs, now filled with a sophomoric enthusi asm for antiquity. His Bank of Pennsylvania (1799) was the beginning; his Bank of the United States (1819-24), now the Philadelphia Custom House, an imitation of the Parthenon, was the culmination of the movement. His pupils Mills and Strick land rang the changes on the classical motives, as in Mills' great colonnade of the Treasury, and his Washington monuments in Baltimore (1815 ff.) and Washington (1836 ff.), a great Doric column (antedating the similar monuments abroad) and a vast obelisk. Churches and houses likewise followed the type of the temple, which became a single unconditional ideal for all classes of buildings. The white porticos rose alike in the whaling ports of New England, on the banks of the Delaware, the Potomac and the distant Ohio, and on the borders of the Great Lakes and the Gulf. Their tradition lingered until the Civil War.

Gothic Revival.

In tin. '3os it was already beginning to be undermined by the growth of romanticism. Jefferson and Latrobe had already toyed with the Gothic as an alternative. Downing, the landscape gardener, and Davis, his architect collaborator, used it with greater conviction. Newcomers from England like Richard Upjohn (1802-1878) designer of Trinity church in New York, brought a new knowledge and competence. The enthusiasm of Ruskin made a Victorian Gothic universal in churches, and drew civil architecture into the Gothic orbit. Later disciples of romanticism like Cram and Goodhue added the element of craftsmanship, on the stimulus of William Morris.

Eclecticism.

Meanwhile the widening historical horizon had evoked in America, as in Europe, a general eclecticism, a choice of many styles but half understood. The brilliance of the Second

Empire gave vogue to the mansard roof ; the influx of the Ger mans brought the floridity of the northern Renaissance; the Centennial Exposition, the English Queen Anne. For a moment in the '8os Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) carried all before him with his free and virile version of southern Roman esque, first embodied in Trinity Church in Boston. Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895), who had led the way to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, introduced its system of instruction (see ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION), and adopted the style of the Valois châteaux in his great Fifth avenue houses and country palaces, like Biltmore, N.C., for the new American plutocracy. While suggestions from early American buildings were taken up by McKim and others who inaugurated a Colonial revival, and the local traditions of Florida suggested to Carrere and Hastings a Spanish style, many of the students returning from Paris re mained faithful to the style of the Louis.

Steel.

In the midst of these historical reminiscences science and industrialism were evoking new materials and modes of con struction. The fruitful exploitation of iron came, along with the elevator, in the high office buildings, which the absence of legal restrictions allowed to rise on the preferred urban sites. At first these were amorphous structures of self-supporting ex ternal masonry walls, interior columns of cast iron, and beams of rolled iron, as in that of The World in New York, over 30o ft. As they grew higher and higher, the thickening of the walls com promised the rental value of the lower storeys. In the Home Insurance building designed by William LeBaron Jenny in Chi cago in 1883, the idea came of supporting the walls, as well as the floors, on the frame. Soon the structural type was crystallized by the adoption of a steel frame, riveted throughout. The last hindrance to ascent was swept away, the skyscraper appeared. (See ARCHITECTURE.) The idea of finding in this new structural development the key to a new and modern style grew out of the rationalistic archi tectural theory of Viollet-le-Duc and Semper. It was Louis Sulli van (1856-1924), of Chicago, who had the creative imagination to clothe the steel frame of the high building in new functional form. Its loftiness he accented by vertical lines replacing the old wall surfaces of masonry. His Wainwright building in St. Louis, designed in 1890, was the manifesto of a new school, and had an influence far beyond his own partisans.