It is needless to give examples of the American vernacular: it is far from extinct, and many of us live in its productions. Neat detached clapboarded houses with piazzas and Venetian blinds compose most coun try towns and villages, and are abundant in the suburbs of larger places. There is nothing worthy the name of Architecture, but the manner must be mentioned in a historical sketch, since a decade ago it was that of the whole nation, except in a few large cities.
Renaissance.—When the Greek revival had spent its force in England, "Italian," as it was called there—that is to say, the Palladian Renaissance of Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, and their followers—became prominent and held its own side by side with Gothic. This and other phases of Renaissance, including the Neo-Grecian of the second French empire, were extensively imitated in America, but always with certain peculiarities of composition which stamped the edifices erected in those styles as Ameri can. The changes brought about in the Renaissance by American archi tects, American tastes, and perhaps, to some extent, by American needs, converted the popular phase of Renaissance into another vernacular—the vernacular of public and large commercial buildings.
It may seem strange that English influence should predominate in the United States, when so many of our best architects have studied in France and so many German architects have practised and introduced German motives, especially in the South and the West; yet such is the case, and it may perhaps be pointed to as an example of an inheritance of taste.
Many of the largest commercial buildings—banks, stores, office-build ings, warehouses—were until recently, partly on account of the need of light, but chiefly from a belief in the fireproof nature of the material, built of iron; and these iron fronts almost always affect the Italian Renais sance, consisting of a screen of columns and entablatures placed in front of piers and round-arched windows.
was natural that the Gothic movement, which gained so much greater force in England than in any other European country, should be imitated in America, which had always looked rather to Eng land than to the European continent for guidance in architectural matters. But Gothic has never attained the importance here that it reached in Eng land, and this from several causes. Pure Gothic—that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—was even in England principally confined to churches, more because it had been the style of England's grand old cathedrals and other ecclesiastical buildings than from any inherent fitness of the style to modern purposes. Reverence for the past has kept the
Church of England to the Gothic style, but its representative in America, the Episcopalian Church, is a comparatively small body, and other sects have to a large extent refused to adopt a style that, though it produces impressive edifices, does not readily lend itself to the two great needs of a congregation—seeing and hearing.
T Yctorian unfitness of the Gothic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even of Perpendicular Gothic, for secular structures was more readily perceived in America than in England, and very few attempts were made to bring them into use; but it was otherwise with Victorian Gothic—or, as it was sometimes called here, " revived " Gothic—which, giving the liberty to use the lintel and the relieving-arch instead of tracery and pointed arches, could be adapted to commercial and private buildings. Various phases of this revived Gothic—or, at least, various manners the sentiment of which was Gothic and the details more or less so, including some of German origin—were employed to a consid erable extent until the "Queen Anne" came in, and a number of Gothic motives as well as much construction and sentiment which are really Gothic have mingled with the now popular style. The half-timbered house, at present now becoming very common, finds its originals in days before the Renaissance, and the oriels, the mullioned bay-windows, even the lofty chimneys, of the modern dwelling, though they may have changed their details, are of medieval parentage. Gothic, chiefly Batty Langley, or " Carpenter's Gothic," first made its appearance immediately after the subsidence of the Greek furore, but was improved into the Vic torian manner.
The condition of Architecture in the middle of the present century, notwithstanding some good work, was far from satisfactory. All styles were practised, but few were understood. Pretentiousness was the chief characteristic of public, commercial, and private dwellings; glitter was more highly prized than refinement or originality. The public had scarcely begun to care for Architecture, still less to exercise judgment concerning it.