Montgomery Schuyler

“ It is particularly absurd to assign the degradation of house-building which undoubtedly followed, and which made the typical American house, after the Greek temple had spent its force, the most vulgar habitation ever built by man, to the substitution of book-learned architects for handicraftsmen. People talk as if the middle part of Fifth Avenue, the brown-stone high-stoop house with its bloated detail, which displaced the prim precision of the older work, had been done by educated architects. ”

“ If beauty be its own excuse for being, this entrance needs no other, for assuredly it is one of the most beautiful and artistic works that American architecture has to show, so admirably proportioned it is, and so admirably detailed, so clear and emphatic without exaggeration is the expression of the structure, and so rich and refined the ornament. ”

“ It is scarcely fair to say, even, as was said by an architectural journal when the completion of the bridge was doubtful, that if it were left incomplete its towers would stand “in unnecessary ugliness.” Its defects in design are not misdeeds, but shortcomings. They are the defects of being rudimentary, of not being completely developed. The anatomy of the towers and of the anchorages is not brought out in their modelling. Their fingers, so to speak, are all thumbs. Their impressiveness is inherent in their mass, and is what it could not help being. ”

“ Why, before the fifteenth century, I don’t suppose any man who began to build a building ever thought in what style he should compose it any more than I thought before I got up here in what language I should address you; he simply built in the language to which he was accustomed and which he knew. You will find this perfect truth is the great charm of Grecian architecture, and ten or fifteen centuries later it was the great charm of Gothic architecture ”

“ The designer of the Brooklyn Bridge has made a beautiful structure out of an exquisite refinement of utility, in a work in which the lines of forces constitute the structure. Where a more massive material forbade him to skeletonize the structure, and the lines of effort and resistance needed to be brought out by modelling, he has failed to bring them out, and his structure is only as impressive as it needs must be. ”

“ With a contempt for the constituted authorities that it must be owned the constituted authorities have gone far to justify, they tether their horses in the shadow of their chief civic monument, like so many Arabs under the pillars of Palmyra or Persepolis, and heighten the impression of being the relic of an extinct race that is given to the pile not only by its unfinished state and by the stains of smoke, undistinguishable from those of time, but by its entirely exotic architecture. ”

“ Chairman and Gentlemen of the National Association of Builders,—You will not expect from me, in responding to this toast, any exhibition of that facetious spirit with which some of my predecessors have entertained you. It has, indeed, been said that American humor has never found full expression except in architecture. It has also been said by an honored friend of mine, himself an architect, whom I hoped to see here to-night, that American architecture was the art of covering one thing with another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, would not be desirable. ”

“ In what else does progress consist than in availing one’s self of the labor of one’s predecessors? If the Grecian builders had felt the pressure of the modern demand for novelty, and had endeavored to comply with it by making dispositions radically new, instead of refining upon the details of an accepted type, or if the mediæval builders had done the same thing, it is manifest that the typical temple or the typical cathedral would never have come to be built, that we should have had no Parthenon and no Cologne. ”

“ There are, probably, few arches in the world—certainly there can be none outside of works of modern engineering—of anything like the span, height, thickness, and conspicuousness of those in the bridge towers which are so little effective. Like the brute mass of wall above them, they are impressive only by magnitude. The great depth of the archway is only seen as a matter of mensuration, not felt as a poetical impression, as it would have been if the labors of the constructor had been supplemented by the labors of an artist ”

“ On the other hand, it is equally true that no progress can result from the labors of architects whose training has made them so fastidious that they are more revolted by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt to express a new meaning than by the failure to make the attempt, and so conceal what they are really doing behind a mask of historical architecture, of which the elegance is quite irrelevant. ”

“ AN AMERICAN CATHEDRAL I The saying that ours is not a cathedral-building age is so obviously true, and so familiar, that the proposal to erect in New York the most important religious monument on this side of the Atlantic strikes many, and perhaps most, cultivated persons with a sense of incongruity. It is so especially true that this is not a cathedral-building country that an American cathedral seems a violation of the unities in place not less than in time—an anatopism as well as an anachronism. ”

“ It is not so pleasant to turn to the Extreme Left, a frantic and vociferous mob, who welcome the “new departure” as the disestablishment of all standards, whether of authority or of reason, and as an emancipation from all restraints, even those of public decency, and who avail themselves of the remission of them from academic restraints to those imposed by their own sense of propriety by promptly showing that they haven’t any. ”

“ This, or something like this, ought to be a question with every man who builds a structure which is meant to outlast him, whether it be a temple of religion or a work of bare utility like this. It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. ”

“ The restraints in architecture of a recognized school, of a prevailing style, are useful and salutary in proportion to the absence of restraint that the architect is capable of imposing upon himself. The secular tradition of French architecture, imposed by public authority and inculcated by official academics, is felt as a trammel by many architects, who, nevertheless, have every reason to feel grateful for the power of design which this same official curriculum has trained and developed. ”

“ What mainly strikes a pilgrim from the East is not so much the merit of the best of these houses, as the fact that there are no bad ones; none, at least, so bad as to disturb the general impression of richness and refinement, and none that make the crude display of “new money” that is to be seen in the fashionable quarters of cities even richer and far older. The houses rise, to borrow one of Ruskin’s eloquent phrases, “in fair fulfilment of domestic service and modesty of home seclusion.” ”

“ It is questionable whether this massiveness is not carried too far, but everybody will admit that an excessive weight of wall is a “good fault” in the street architecture of New York, and that of the two, a dwelling is more dignified which approaches the solidity proper to a prison than one that emulates the precarious lightness proper to a greenhouse. The depth of the porch and of the recessed balcony over it in the central division of the avenue front assists this expression of solidity, and helps the building to wear its burden of decoration “lightly, like a flower.” ”

“ For though I have heard a considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so expressive as a cathedral. ’Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches day and night, not only telling you of man’s art and aspirations in the past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies.” At all events, a cathedral is much more and other than a place to preach in. ”

“ Richardson himself resisted this besetting temptation of the architect, and his work certainly loses nothing of the simplicity which, with the uninstructed builders of old Boston, was in large part mere ignorance and unskilfulness, but emphasizes it by the superior power of distributing his masses that belonged to him as a trained and sensitive designer; for the resources of an artist are required to give an artistic and poignant expression even of rudeness. The rebuilt commercial quarter of Boston is by no means an extreme example of misplaced ornateness. ”

“ No longer pent up, the whole boundless continent is Chicago’s, and the instinct of expansion is at liberty to assert itself in every direction but the east, where it is confronted by Lake Michigan. There is thus no east side in Chicago to supplement the north and the west and the south sides, among which the dwellings of the people are divided, but there is no natural obstacle whatsoever to the development of the city in these three directions, and no natural reason why it should expand in one rather than in another except what is again furnished by the lake. ”

“ There are some shabby and flimsy details of iron work, which mar the monumental effect of the great roadway itself, while the design of the iron stations at either end is grossly illiterate, and discreditable to the great work. Imitations in cast iron of stone capitals surmount and emphatically contradict posts profusely studded with bolt-heads; and other solecisms, alike against constructional reason and architectural tradition, are rife in these unfortunate edifices, which do what they can to vulgarize the great structure to which they give access. ”