Monday, October 29, 2007

Richard Morris Hunt, Architect of Grey Towers

Richard Morris Hunt, Architect of Grey Towers
An Architectural Appreciation
Third Article

Richard Morris Hunt was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In the mid 19th Century the Ecole had the highest esteem of any school in the West teaching the arts. In architecture it offered a rigorous eight-year course in the techniques and aesthetics of the classic Greek and Roman ideal as filtered through the Italian Renaissance. Not only was the course work rigid, but the aesthetics it taught were rigid as well. But there were many artists and architects who felt that it taught students to merely make copies of copies of copies. By the end of the nineteenth century it had fallen out of favor and was considered passé.

Hunt was born in Vermont to a wealthy and socially prominent family. His father, a U.S. Congressman, died when Hunt was six. His mother moved the family to Europe where he developed a love for antique Normandy architecture, a local variation of the Romanesque. That was the style he brought with him when he returned to America. With only one exception he never worked in the Beaux Arts style.

The Normandy style is characterized by large asymmetrical buildings in stone with towers and turrets. Grey Towers, in Milford, built for the James Pinchot family, (in 1886, the same year as The Allegheny County Court House), was an example of a summer country retreat on a domestic scale. A similar building, but on a very grand scale, is his Biltmore Estate in Ashville, N.C.

In essence, Hunt was a society architect, designing homes for the well to do. That is understandable: in those days that was where the money was. Inspired by the work done by Hunt and H.H. Richardson, that generation saw the monumental buildings erected by America’s robber barons to their self glorification. All of those buildings had the requirement that the buildings reflect European models; the most favored being the Beaux arts classic revival and the Gothic. The Woolworth Building in New York City is a Gothic cathedral of commerce. The Pennsylvania State Capitol Building is a masterpiece of Beaux Arts Classic Revival, although that architect never studied there.

Hunt is acknowledged as a good architect. But his work never realized a personal idiom, a signature quality. He is respected because he introduced an aesthetic beyond the prevailing style. By so doing he made it acceptable for others to explore beyond the boundaries of what was the accepted norm. He often worked in partnership with Frederick Olmstead who championed “naturalistic” architecture. We remember Hunt’s name because he was located in the cultural center of 19th Century America, the northeast corridor, Boston to Washington. He was active in arts circles: he opened the first American school for architecture and co-founded The American Institute of Architects.

Before leaving France for the United States, Hunt worked on the extension of the Louvre Museum. In Boston he designed the Fogg Art Museum. He designed the base for the Statue of Liberty and the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unfortunately, as a man of his time, many of the residential buildings he designed have been razed.

Grey Towers is a National Historic Landmark. It is a fine building and it affords a good example of the work of a man who was important in the history of American architecture. It is built of native stone and it has one interesting detail in regard to its setting, Milford. The cut blocks of local bluestone at the corners and around the windows and doors are staggered quoins, alternating short and long sides of the blocks. They do not appear on the original drawings and might have been added by James Pinchot in reference to his French ancestry. The Pinchot buildings subsequent to Grey Towers, Forest Hall and Normandy Cottage, have that same detail.

That detail can also be found on the Penn DOT facility on Bennett Avenue, 1933. If that references the Pinchot buildings, it acknowledges the contribution of the Pinchot family to the history of the State. In architecture, those detail references are called Quotations and it is a common device of Post Modern Architecture. The Pennstar bank on West Harford street references a 19th Century gable end domestic structure: it is a Post Modern building with a pronounced quotation. The beautiful wisteria planted around the building can be understood as quoting the Pinchot’s Finger Bowl.

Hunt’s contribution aside, the Landmark designation is primarily for the work of Gifford Pinchot. It was there that his father, James, encouraged him to give his thoughts to forestry. When that home was built, the surrounding hills had been clear-cut of their chestnut trees. Photographs in the Pike County Historic Society show the house as the area looked at that time.

The Pinchot family’s interest in forestry can be understood as one of the forces for change in America’s relationship to its natural resources and to its environment. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that the Pinchot’s reverence for the American landscape contributed to that aspect of the development of an American architecture as well. That, and the earlier American architects, Richard Morris Hunt, H.H.Richardson, Frederick Law Olmstead, and Louis Sullivan, all set the stage for the birth of an American architecture. With the invention of ferrocement in 1895, the year of Hunt’s death, the moment had arrived.

Published in The Pike County Dispatch

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

H.H. Richardson and The Allegheny County Courthouse

H.H. Richardson and the Allegheny County Court House.
An Architectural Appreciation
Article Two

The Allegheny County Courthouse is one of five Historic Landmarks in Pittsburgh. The building occupies an entire city block, rising majestically from the property line at the sidewalk. It is the seat of Justice and it projects an august presence to the people. It was designed by the American architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and was completed just after his death in 1886. The style is Romanesque, or more specifically, Richardson Romanesque. Richardson is the only world-class architect whose name has been given to a building style.

He was the second American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. After completing his studies he spent time in the south of France where he observed the native Romanesque style. Romanesque was the first architectural style in western civilization that did not follow the dictates of the classical order. In the south of France it was in essence a folk style which achieved a cultural identity. Its outstanding characteristics are Roman arches, barrel vaults, and flat walls. An earlier work of Richardson’s Romanesque reference is Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, his first major success.

A study of the two buildings, one at the beginning of his career and one at the end, will illustrate how the man used the historic reference to create a personal idiom. In the church, artistic decoration, as dictated by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was created by John La Farge in murals and stained glass windows. The exterior uses stones of different colors. In the courthouse the fully mature and confident Richardson has used only stone of one color to create surface textures and interest. He has allowed the flatness of the interior to be seen as having interest in and of its own. There is no need in Richardson Romanesque for applied ornamentation. Richardson Romanesque has its own integrity: it is organic.

Incidentally, when in Boston, do not fail to visit Richardson’s Sever Hall in Harvard Yard, a masterpiece in brick.

The Courthouse is six and seven stories high. Above the main block of the building there is a very high tower in the front and two smaller towers in the back. Square towers are at each corner. The construction is load-bearing walls. With load bearing walls, for every floor above the first an additional thickness of approximately six inches must be added to the first floor, thinning toward the top floors. This creates very thick walls on the ground floor and requires massive footings for the supporting piers. (In Boston, the footings for the piers for Trinity Church can be seen in that basement: those supports have a foot print the size of a Milford Mansion: it is a tall church.) One of the great challenges of architecture is to take this massive pile of stone and give it a sense of grace and lightness. Richardson succeeded.

The Courthouse building material is champagne colored granite. On the outside the stones are rough-hewn and on the inside the surfaces are flat but not polished. The floors are unpolished black marble. In early high-rise buildings one of the prime considerations was the need to supply light and air to the workers inside. Here Richardson created an open central courtyard that meets that need and gives him the opportunity to make a masterful display of architectural genius. The stones are varied in size, courses of large blocks alternate with courses of smaller blocks. The top floor is all small blocks, giving the building a sense of gracefulness. This is completed with a steeply pitched gable roof.

The doorways from the courtyard into the building are Romanesque arches, wide arches defined by several courses of stone and springing from low columns. The windows on each floor but the last are arched. On the top floor they are trabeate, with lintels. That, in effect, draws a straight line across the top of the building and indicates that the wall has come to an end. Because of the interplay between scale and proportion, this defined space is so beautiful one can sit in this courtyard and leisurely study this building for hours.

The highlight of the building’s interior is the grand staircase. It begins with a half flight of stairs framed by a Romanesque arch, one-third the width of the large area where it starts. It appears to have a vaulted ceiling, but it does not: it is a series of three arches, one at the bottom, one in the middle, and one at the top of those stairs. On the first landing, arches frame accesses to open hallways at both sides. The next level of stairs is also framed with an arch. At the top a landing directs the visitor to stairs at the left and to the right. There is a view from the windows down into the courtyard. The filtered sunlight is magnificent. The ascent continues through a series of arches, stairs, and landings for three floors. At the top landing one turns for the last half flight and sees a majestic arched doorway framing mahogany doors at the top. There can be no doubt that this is where Justice resides.

This stairway is a veritable symphony of arches, small, medium, and large. Climbing to the top I was reminded of T.S. Eliot’s remark that when poetry becomes music it ceases to be poetry. I will not say that this architecture is music but it does ring with a sustained note of purity.

Filling the city block behind the courthouse is the Allegheny County Jail built of the same stone. It was inspired by the series of etching done by Piranesi, “Imaginary Prisons.” High above the street the two building are connected by a pedestrian bridge. Those just sentenced were escorted over the street to the jail. The bridge is a copy of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. The pun was intended by the architect. Great art works are human; they have their sense of humor.

Richardson grew up in New Orleans. He spent his adult years and did most of his work in the Boston area. But his self acknowledged masterpiece, The Allegheny County Courthouse, is in Pennsylvania. A gourmand, a man with a taste for the good life, Richardson died at the age of forty-six.

Post script: The example of Richardson Romanesque architecture nearest to Milford is The Thrall Library in Downtown Middletown. The original Erie Railroad Station was Richardson Romanesque. Richardson designed many railroad stations. He did not design this one; it merely indicates his influence. When the new library was built, the station was beautifully restored and the new building adjoining it was perfectly married to it in the modern idiom through a very careful match of design and materials. The station is now a reading room. When you step into that room you are immediately captivated by its many charming details. When you turn back to the library you will be awed by the magnificent golden oak, Richardson Romanesque arch way that once lead to the waiting trains. Through his work and his influence, H.H. Richardson continues to make it possible for us to understand why great architecture is our highest art form.
Published in the Pike County Dispatch

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Pennsylvania State Capitol Building Designated a National Landmark

Historic Architecture and Modern Architecture.

In the Spring of 2007 the Building Task Force of our Pike County Library unveiled the design they had selected for the new building to be built on land purchased from money left to the library in her will by a local resident, with the stipulation that the building be located inside the Borough of Milford, Pennsylvania. There was an immediate hue and cry: it was widely felt that the library should uphold the architectural style of the community and that the library should erect an “old “ building. I wrote a letter to the editor on this subject and following that the editor asked me to write six articles about Pennsylvania architecture. I decided that I would publish the articles in such order that they would illustrate the history of the rise of modern architecture. The letter and the articles follow.


To the editor;

The responses to the publication of the proposed design for the new Pike County Public Library indicate that the public does not always understand architecture and in specific historic architecture.

To be considered historic architecture an entity must be innovative in its design and structure. A building “…in the style of…” in which there is reference to an historical period is not historic architecture per se. A building in the style of the Victorian period is Period architecture, as is Georgian and Colonial. If a building was the setting for an historic event it is an historic site. By definition there is no historic architecture in Milford. There is in fact only one example of historic architecture in Pike County and that is the Roebling Bridge in Lackawaxen, a precursor to Mr. Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge.

Some writers of Letters to the Editor have suggested that the new library building is not “historic” and that its façade should be, among other styles, colonial, in keeping with the colonial character of Milford village. American colonial architecture is Jacobean (English). There is no example of colonial architecture in Milford. There are no buildings that date from that period (1620-1750). There are one or two buildings in the Federal, or Georgian (also an English), style that might date from that period (1750-1825). There are approximately eight buildings in one or the other of the Victorian styles (1825-1900), most of them in the French or Italian manner, but Milford is not a Victorian village: the majority of buildings in Milford were built after 1900, and most of those after 1950; they are contemporary or adaptations of earlier styles. Milford is best described as a community with an eclectic architectural heritage.

In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed Harvard University in a lecture he titled The American Scholar. (This is available at the Pike County Library in The Collected Works of RWE.) In this lecture Emerson called on American scholars and artists to forego European models and to create a new American idiom in their writings and artworks. Sixty years later, inspired by that address, a young Chicago architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, turned away from the classic revival (European) styles and altered the course of world architecture by creating an American architecture, an architecture that referenced the land and the energy of its people. His work greatly influenced early twentieth century Europeans; it was seminal in the creation of Germany’s Bauhaus which lead to the International Style and Modern Architecture. American architects H.H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan influenced Wright and he in turn greatly influenced Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and I. M. Pei. Modern Architecture is American Architecture. It is completely appropriate that the new Pike County Library will be in the Modern (American) style.

Architecture is something more than post and beam construction with a historically reminiscent façade, it is an intellectual discipline in which three components, scale, geometry, and proportion, are employed to define a space in harmony with a specific environment. The first consideration for any new structure should be the building’s use, its function. The site must be taken into consideration. On seeing the new library design, I was pleasantly stunned to see that the site has been taken into consideration, that the structure will have a beautiful interplay between volumes and voids, and that reference will be made to local materials and textures. I love Emerson and I love Frank Lloyd Wright: it is so thrilling to see their works recognized on the local level. My compliments to the board for their “Scholarly” and “Wright” decision: it honors the American experience.

With appreciation…



Pennsylvania State Capitol Building Designated A National Historic Landmark.
An Architectural Appreciation


At the dedication ceremonies for the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt stated that the building was “the handsomest building in the United States.” Very likely what was true then is still true today. Recently it has been restored for its centennial: it defines ‘sumptuous’. So unique is this building that it has just received National Historic Landmark Status. Only five other United States capitol buildings have received that designation. Landmark status is distinct from Historic status; it denotes a building with irreplaceable national importance. Only three per cent of the buildings on the National Registry of Historic Places have Landmark status.

The building is faced with Vermont granite. The decorative style is Beaux Arts Classic Revival with an emphasis on the Italian. The dome is copied from the design by Michelangelo for St. Peter’s Basilica in The Vatican.

Upon entering the Rotunda one faces a white Carrara marble staircase inspired by that in the Paris Opera. The open dome soars 272 feet overhead; the 48 porthole windows fill the interior space with light. The walls are white marble with gold leaf trim. But the floor is terracotta tile with 377 mosaic insets in the Arts and Crafts style depicting the history of the state. It is the juxtaposition of these disparate elements that establishes the character of the building and explains its Landmark status: the style of the building is the Arts and Crafts philosophy but on a very grand scale. The architect, Joseph Huston, wanted to create a building that would reflect the achievements of the people of the state as interpreted by Pennsylvania artists. Despite its familiar silhouette, there is no other building like this one.

The tile floor was designed and made by Henry Mercer of the Moravian Tile Works. Mr. Mercer is also known for his collection of early American tools displayed in his home museum in Doylestown. Mercer contributed work to three National Landmark buildings, his museum included.

The building is noted for its murals. Edwin Austin Abbey was commissioned to do those for the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court Chambers, and the Rotunda. But after completing those for the Rotunda and two for the House Chamber, he died. Abbey was a noted painter in the pre-Raphaelite style.

Huston wanted to include a woman in the building’s works and commissioned Violet Oakley to do sixteen murals in the Governor’s office. Prior to that no woman had ever been given such a large commission. Violet Oakley was only 28 and was just establishing her reputation. Upon completion, her work, which took five years, met with such approval that, following Abbey’s death, she was given the balance of his commission. It took her another nineteen years to complete this work. In all she created 43 murals for the building.

Violet Oakley also worked in the pre-Raphaelite style. She was trained at the Philadelphia Academy of Arts and studied privately with the illustrator Howard Pyle. It was he who encouraged her to work on a larger format and to consider becoming a muralist.

William Brantley Van Ingen painted the murals in the House Hallway leading off the Rotunda. But his greater contribution to the building is the twenty-four stained glass windows in the Senate and House chambers. Trained as a muralist Van Ingen became fascinated with stained glass and studied with John La Farge, the man who revived stained glass as an art form in the nineteenth century. Van Ingen was employed by Tiffany Studios. His work in this building reflects the excellence of the work of both those artists.

On each side of the stairway leading into the building is a sculptural grouping with a total of 27 nude figures, each eight feet high. George Gray Barnard, a noted sculptor of his day, was the artist. He was trained at the Chicago Art Institute and worked in the nineteenth century academic style. In addition to his work he was an avid collector of Medieval artworks and amassed a collection so large he had to erect a building on Manhattan’s upper West side to house it. After his death it was purchased by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and it became the core of the Cloisters, the medieval art collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Each of the chambers in the building is in classic revival style but with a different emphasis. The Senate Chamber is French. The walls are clad in deep green Connamara Marble. Pilasters and decorative motifs throughout the room are gold leafed.
The House Chamber is decorated in the Italian Renaissance style. The marble here was quarried in the Pyrenees. This is the only building in the Western hemisphere to use that material.

Especially noteworthy are the chandeliers in the House and the Senate. They have a different design in each chamber but in both they are gilt metal armatures with a profusion of both frosted and cut glass globes. Those in the House weigh four and one- half tons each, and those in the Senate two tons each. Suspended from the ceilings, and despite their great weight, they seem to hover in the air. Their massiveness emphasizes the scale of these chambers.

The Supreme Court, at the center back of the building, is English. It has a lower ceiling and a more intimate feel than the other two rooms. In addition there are caucus rooms for the House and Senate and the Governor’s office and reception room.

Classic Revival design and decoration was a common motif in American public buildings of that time. What sets this building above the others is the excellence of the designs and the materials, and the achievements of these artists. But whatever a building’s style and design nothing better gives a building its sense of character than the architect’s love and enthusiasm for his art form. This building is exuberant.

Joseph Huston was the son of a Pennsylvania carpenter. He left school at the age of thirteen and apprenticed to a sign painter. Later, working for an architectural firm, he realized that he had a love of architecture. He studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics and applied for and was accepted for study at Princeton. Later he toured Europe and was very taken with Italian Renaissance art and architecture. After opening his own firm in Philadelphia he designed many private residences.

When the competition for the Capitol project was announced the architectural fraternity boycotted it. (That is another story.) Huston was denounced when he accepted the commission. While the work was in progress he was criticized on a regular basis. When the building was completed, he was charged with having taken bribes from the building contractors. He was tried and found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison. After serving six months he was released and he resumed his architectural practice but never again with commissions or success to equal this. His one masterpiece is the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building, a National Landmark.
Published in The Pike County Dispatch, April 12, 2007.