On comparing the Architectural Works of the present Century with those of the Middle Ages, the wonderful superiority of the latter must strike every attentive observer; and the mind is naturally led to reflect on the causes which have wrought this mighty change.
—Augustus Pugin Classicism held incontestable sway in Washington, DC. Even so, Henry Adams was far from alone among his countrymen in favoring late Romanesque and early Gothic, as he did in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In 1864, an American Pre-Raphaelite periodical published a remarkable piece that celebrated the construction of the National Academy of Design in New York City (see Fig. 3.1). The palatial building led a piteously foreshortened life, suffering dismantlement before the nineteenth century even concluded. Yet while still standing, the palazzo made an outsized impact. The first specimen of Venetian Gothic revival mode in the nation, it took as its principal architectural inspiration the Doge’s Palace in Venice (see Fig. 3.2).
Why would Americans of the Civil War era and beyond have gravitated toward medieval Italy as understood first by John Ruskin and later by Charles Eliot Norton?
Beyond aesthetics, Venice was a state in which elected representatives of the people held power. In its art and architecture, it offered a model that could serve for a modern democracy. In a letter written to Ruskin in July of 1871, Norton detailed the bases on which he held the lagoon city in the highest regard. In the same year, Adams himself became imbued in the writings and thought of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc during his first year of undergraduate teaching. More narrowly, and less politically, the republic known as Serenissima constituted a plausible parallel to Boston as a seafaring capital
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146.03
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with strong trading links to the East. Ruskin argued influentially that the Italian port took its distinctive form of arch, among other things, from Islamic architecture. In “The Nature of Gothic” he proffered his opinion: “The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal proportions—the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of the world.” He thus particularized the view, pervasive long before him, that the pointed arch came to Western Europe through contact with Eastern sophistication. In turn, this kind of vault propelled the transition from Romanesque to Gothic. He summed up: “In the eighteenth century no one doubted that all our Gothic art had been implanted by the Arabs!”
Fig. 3.1 National Academy of Design, New York. Photograph by Arthur Chiar, 1875. Published in King’s Handbook of New York City, ed. Moses King (Boston: Moses King, 1892), 279.
Fig. 3.2 Ducal Palace, Venice. Etching by Andrew F. Affleck, 1921.
Reproduced on halftone print. Jas. Connell & Sons, Ltd.
A poison-pen commentary of 1864 upon the Ruskinian National Academy of Design fulminated against the preferential treatment accorded to classicizing architecture elsewhere in the United States. Along the way, it took a hard swipe at the District of Columbia for making the Greek colonnade the default choice. As a clear alternative to the reigning Hellenism, American Pre-Raphaelites advocated Gothic. Writers preached this last option not just as one among many but as the sole architectural form of worth. As the different camps contended, Washington was not left untouched by the revival of medieval styles. In a skyscraper-less city full of low-rises, many of the tallest structures—apart from the iconic obelisk of the Washington Monument—are Gothic.
Four deserve careful attention, since collectively they help to clarify how Gothicism became a transatlantic enterprise: the Smithsonian Institution Building at the heart of the National Mall; Healy Hall at Georgetown University and the National Cathedral to the northwest; and, to the north, the Post Office Building—as it was called back in the day.
In the heavily touristed central belt of the nation’s capital today, the buckle is the Smithsonian. The most visible edifice in a medieval manner, it is odd man out in the low-slung cityscape. The Greco-Roman architecture of antiquity was mostly horizontal.
Although the Greeks and Romans could engineer marvels—the latter having left extraordinary aqueducts—they did not apply their skills in theory or practice to protoskyscrapers. In contrast, Gothic is all about height, sometimes hubristic.
James Smithson’s generosity funded construction of what is known popularly to this day as “The Castle.” The building was completed in 1855 after a design by James Renwick Jr. The museum and research complex in Washington was the first achievement of the Gothic revival in the United States that in magnitude stood on a par with the cathedrals of Europe. This fortress of science and culture, a veritable bastion of learning, is constructed of red sandstone. Evocative mainly of late Romanesque, it also incorporates traits drawn from early Gothic. Although its eclectic Gothicism fuses elements familiar from England, France, and Germany, its style is meant overall to be distinctively Norman. The edifice could hardly have escaped the notice of Henry Adams or any other Washingtonian. After all, it was built in precisely the manner of the time and place with which he identified most firmly. Furthermore, its architecture prompted furor, since it brought to the nucleus of the nation’s capital a towering mass that was ostentatiously nonclassical.
Completion of “The Castle” did not mark the end of construction at the site. A fire in 1865 destroyed the upper story as well as the north and south towers, which prompted the installation of fireproofing and firewalls. In addition, the east wing was enlarged in 1883, less than a decade after Adams’s arrival in Washington from Harvard (see Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). The reconstruction would have rekindled public consideration of the building and its style.
Robert Dale Owen, a social reformer active in American politics, had primary oversight of the original commission. Because of the fierce dissension surrounding the project, he published a treatise in 1849 to justify the choices of Renwick as architect
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and of Norman Romanesque as style (see Fig. 3.5). The title page of his screed is an elaborate Gothic fantasy. Its main structure is trelliswork composed of a stout vine that twists into a pointed arch and other shapes characteristic of the architecture, to hint at the intimate association between nature and Gothic. Owen closed the book by voicing confidence that the Smithsonian Building warranted special recognition as “the first edifice, in the style of the twelfth century and of a character not ecclesiastical, ever erected in this country.” Its Gothic was in the running to be designated the unofficial
“National Style of Architecture for America.” For a brief while from this point onward, a medieval revival in the United States could be presented as authentically indigenous.
The equivalent in the second half of the nineteenth century to the “midcentury modern” that dominated twentieth-century fashion, it could be tagged as late-century Middle Ages—but to be more precise, it was Gothic revival. This medieval modern sounded the bourdon note in a polyphony of styles, as a rainbow of historicizing manners competed over which would prevail as the main one for the whole nation.
Fig. 3.3 Stereoscopic postcard of the Smithsonian Institution (“The Castle”), Washington, DC (1880s).
Fig. 3.4 The Smithsonian Institution (“The Castle”), Washington, DC. Photograph, ca. 1860–1880.
Photographer unknown. Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection.
Fig. 3.5 Illustrated title page of Robert Dale Owen, Hints on Public Architecture (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849). Designed by James Renwick Jr., 1849.
In the architectural competition for the Smithsonian Building held in 1846, Renwick submitted to the selection committee two designs for consideration. The one accepted and erected was largely Norman; an alternative that hewed more closely to the typical Gothic revival architecture of the period was rejected, although soon enough the central section of this plan was adopted with only light modification for another imposing edifice soon erected in Washington, namely, Trinity Episcopal Church (see Figs. 3.6 and 3.7).
Right when Adams settled down in Washington, a gargantuan construction was underway across town at Georgetown University. Although the neighborhood is situated far to the northwest of downtown, its topography on steeply rising hills means that its tallest edifices hulk over the heart of the city leading down to the river.
The massive Healy Hall was designed to signal the presence of the Catholic university in the city and to bring home its salience, to the political and managerial elite of the capital as to others. This monumental edifice, the flagship of the academic institution, was built from 1877 to 1879. Its two architects amalgamated elements that ran the gamut from Romanesque through early Renaissance, with Gothic at the core. The chief features include a soaring clock tower, which made the colossus at the time handily the tallest nonfederal building in the District of Columbia.
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Fig. 3.6 James Renwick Jr.’s Gothic design proposal for the Smithsonian Institution building.
Drawing by James Renwick Jr., 1846. Reproduced in Robert Dale Owen, Hints on Public Architecture (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849), facing p. 99.
Fig. 3.7 James Renwick Jr.’s Trinity Episcopal Church, Washington, DC. Photograph by George N.
Barnard, 1862. Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection.
Two years after the completion of Healy Hall, a triumphal arch was erected for the 1881 inauguration of President James A. Garfield (see Fig. 3.8). Photography allows us to appreciate the timely singularity of the temporary structure. The curved shape stood perpendicular to the Renaissance revival style of the Corcoran office building. The two constructions butt heads stylistically, since the arc de triomphe is prevalently Victorian Gothic. At the same time, it is through-and-through American, with bales of banners and bunting complementing a flotilla of flags. Long gone, both are testimonials to the urgency that the United States felt over its relationship to European cultural history.
The Post Office Building was finished in 1899. Upon opening, it became the second highest construction in the District, after the Washington Monument (see Figs. 3.9 and 3.10). Its Romanesque revival style owes much to the architect Henry Hobson Richardson. The city’s first steel-frame structure, it relies heavily upon glass.
The glassiness is particularly apparent in an atrium that belongs to the lineage of the Crystal Palace from 1851. The melding of medievalizing architecture with what was meant to be the newest thing in modern functionality left more than one viewer displeased. Many faultfinders found the structure disagreeable. Most memorably and colorfully, Senator Joseph Roswell Hawley disemboweled it as “a cross between a cathedral and a cotton mill.” Whatever the flaws of the hybrid, it must not be forgotten for its prominence within the attempts at the time to add a medievalesque backdrop to a city that had been predominantly Greek and Roman revival. Then again, backdrop may be a poor choice of words: overtop might serve better, since much of what is at issue here is the urban skyline. The medieval was not always intended as a spiritual countermeasure against the power and politics that have exercised perpetual dominion in the capital, but it often could serve such a function. The solidity of quarried stone can help to neutralize the fragility inherent in a house of cards.
The Washington National Cathedral received its charter from Congress in 1893 (see Fig. 3.11). At the time, it would have commanded an unbroken view of the Washington Monument. Visually, the Gothic architecture to come communicated directly with the pseudo-Egyptian obelisk. The church staked its claim as a cultural translation of European Christianity, to match the governmental one of Greco-Roman democracy and empire. The foundation stone was laid in 1907, with President Theodore Roosevelt in attendance to deliver an oration. The block is a composite, with American granite having embedded within it a small stone quarried from a field beside the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem. Such lithic insertions from elsewhere are apprehensible even in the stained glass within, one pane of which contains moon rock brought back to earth by an American space mission.
The house of prayer occupies a site on Mount Saint Albans that heightens its visibility. Its position makes it more readily viewable from many directions than the Monument itself. One tourist is reported to have bantered that he “would willingly visit a dozen modern Gothic cathedrals for the sake of getting one such view.” At the same time, the spot was chosen not only to achieve a goal in height but also to emanate
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the unworldly serenity and spirituality with which Gothic architecture has been judged so often to be invested. Almost the entire great church is built of Indiana limestone, but Bishop Henry Yates Satterlee secured from the ramshackle ruins of Glastonbury Abbey blocks from which to fashion the cathedra, the bishop’s seat. These stones gave the prelate a storied history on which to plant himself, since the English monastic foundation was legendarily associated with Joseph of Arimathea, King Arthur, and the Holy Grail. From “the quarries of Solomon” with their biblical weightiness, Satterlee acquired white limestone for a stone altar. Despite such touches, the good bishop’s mental image of the church-to-be was “a kind of American Westminster Abbey, yet to belong to no denomination.” Such was the highly circumscribed cultural diversity of the early twentieth century.
The place of worship would be resolutely Gothic, the equal of Canterbury Cathedral. For the task, the prelate outsourced by hiring two English architects who worked in the Gothic revival style. In correspondence, one of them made apparent the extent to which he shared Satterlee’s conviction about Gothic. With its closeness to nature and its inherent spirituality, the style could suit the ambitions of America to lead modernity. Go, Gothic!
Fig. 3.8 President Garfield’s inaugural parade on March 4, 1881.
Photograph by George Prince, 1881.
Fig. 3.9 Postcard depicting the former Post Office Building, Washington, DC (Baltimore: I & M. Ottenheimer, date unknown).
Fig. 3.10 Old Post Office Building, Washington, DC. Photograph by Wikipedia user AgnosticPreachersKid, 2008, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Post_Office_
Building_Washington_DC.JPG, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Fig. 3.11 Postcard depicting the Peace Cross on Mt. St. Albans, erected to celebrate the end of the Spanish-American War and the founding of the National Cathedral, Washington, DC
(Washington, DC: B. S. Reynolds, date unknown).
The National Cathedral became the polestar in the quarter for architecture in this revival style, such as the adjacent Saint Alban’s School. A glimpse of a classroom brings home immediately the Gothic character of the building (see Fig. 3.12). The place of worship has also given its name to a neighborhood, Cathedral Heights. Diagonally across from both the church and educational institution stands the five-story Alban Towers, Washington’s largest apartment-hotel, constructed in 1928–1929 and completed in 1930 (see Fig. 3.13). The cluster of buildings in Gothic revival style helps to give the locale, at least remotely, the appearance of an Americanized, early twentieth-century medieval village, if such a concoction is not a contradiction in terms. Other bricks and mortar in the neighborhood were also spruced up with modest Gothicizing touches. It all came too late to have even the slightest impact on Adams, who focused adamantly upon France, especially Normandy. Understandably and rightly, even if romantically, he regarded the Norman French as contributors to the British stock from which his family traced its descent.
The Gothic revival was growing as Adams formed the germ of his thought, conducted his researches, and did his writing, and it was popularized well before Mont Saint Michel and Chartres came into print. Yet he concentrated the treatment of Gothic in his book upon the Middle Ages. Even so, he was too au courant of the developments swirling around him to remain insensible to the nineteenth-century revivals of medieval architecture. First Romanesque and then Gothic crazes swept the Washington of his time, as they did much of the rest of the country, even as they had carpeted Britain.
Fig. 3.12 Classroom in St. Alban’s School for Boys, Washington, DC. Photograph, 1916.
Photographer unknown. Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Fig. 3.13 Postcard depicting Alban Towers, Washington, DC (Yonkers, NY: Herbert C. Kahn Studios).