Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/882

ARCHITECTURE. rib vaulting, which was as yet barely under- stood, and consistent in all their parts, while the English work of the same period and Ameri- can imitations of it were very apt to be dis- figured within by plaster imitations of niedifeval forms. Since 1870 there have been some evi- dences of more thoughtful and therefore more original ways of working. There have been some designs wlich are not based upon buildings of the past more than this, that the old systems of ]jroportion. the old methods of making a building efl'ective, hae been in the designer's mind. One of the most carefully studied of these is the great building on the Trocadero hill at Paris, which was begun about 1875 and fmislied in time for the great E.position of 1878. This is a vast building, more than a quarter of a mile, measured in a straight line, from out to out, occupying a most advantageous position and richly adorned by sculpture on a large scale in its immediate surroundings and out- skirts rather than in its own walls and door- ways. It is not possible to say to what his- torical style it belongs ; it belongs to none. Less entirely free from possible classification under an ancient name is the best of American free work, such as Trinity Church in Boston, which, although entirely Romanesque in spirit, is studied from the Romanesque of Europe, and contains features dimly traceable to French, to Spanish, and to English antiquity, while all are harmonized into a modern design. Such a de- sign, too, was All Souls Church in New York, a study indeed of Italian Romanesque, but as completely a modern design as the Trocadero Palace itself. So there are some smooth-faced street fa(ades in which, the question being merely to design a front and to arrange the fenestration agreeably, great independence has been shown. Great Britain has been rich in buildings of this sort, for the devotion of many of her best designers to the Gothic revival had at all events given them the habit of constructional design- ing; they have been, on the whole, far less con- trolled by tradition than the Frenchmen, while also far less successful in producing buildings of permanent charm such as results from thor- oughly matured designing. It is to be noted that a tasteful and satisfactory design is much more quickly got in a style alread.y familiar to the artist and to his critics, the cultivated pub- lic. Cultivation in such matters must go far beyond the knowledge gained by travel and by general reading before the student can recog- nize the attempt at new methods of design and partlj- judge them. There is, therefore, a very strong inducement to every designer to work on the old lines.

The novel systems of building caused by mod- ern scientific advance have not had so nuich influence upon design as had been anticipated. In France, as earlj' as the middle of the Nine- teenth Century, it was seen that wrought-iron was to become an important element in future building, and those who sought to influence for good the designing of the time pointed out many ways in which it could be utilized. At the same time, in the United States, cast-iron in hol- low columns and in shells, imitating cut-stone work, was introduced ; and while the shop fronts of all American citiei? came to be made of this material, there were also very many fagades which, though apparently of stone masonry, were from street level to roof composed ex- clusively of a series of cast-iron members held together by riveting. Again, at a later time, when the steel-cage construction for high build- ings was introduced, as is shown below, the opportunity for a fresh movement in design seemed to be given; but this was rendered im- practicable, partly by the legal requii'emont that iron should every^vhere be protected from the efl'ect of heat in case of conflagration, and partly by the same willingness to repeat old forms under new conditions which had controlled the designing of the cast-iron fronts mentioned above. Still another opportunity seemed to be aft'orded for the use of ironwork in design; namely, in the buildings of the great expositions, from their commencement in London tn 18.51 through the entire half-century: but here it has been the exception rather than the rule to base the design upon the ironwork itself. The disposition to make the buildings of one of these great fairs as attractive as possible to a multi- tude of people, and the need of great haste in their construction, has prevented thoughtful con- sideration from being given to their design, and the introduction of staff and of plaster boards has facilitated the imitation of rec- ognized architectural forms in mere outside work, in the simulacra of architectural structures, supported, indeed, by an iron frame, but not recognizing that framework as part of the building proper. Thus, in one of the great halls of Chicago of 1893, or of Paris in IIIOO, there was, without, what passed for a cut-stone facade of great elaboration and necessary cost; but within, this character disappeared completely, and the whole interior was a vast cage — a greenhouse as completely non-architectural as the original building in Hyde Park in 1851. Here and there a building has been built con- structionally of wrought-ii'on. having the spaces between the members of its light frame filled in with colored brickwork or the like. Such a building was that of the municipality of Paris at the E.xposition of 1878. Its walls were of common hard brick, between uprights and hori- zontals of wrought-iron. while its wide and very high doorways were enriched beyond all modern practice by a combination of terra- cotta in high relief and glazed and richly painted tiles. .Similar attempts have not been more numerous during the later years of the cen- tury than when the subject first excited atten- tion. Thus, the excellent reading-room of the National Librar3- at Paris, roofed by means of wrought-iron arches carrying cupolas of brick- work faced with tiling, dates from the years before 1865. The most efl'ective ornamentation in the days of the Gothic revival is that of the Oxford Museum, completed abovit 1860; and the most efl'ective artistic ironwork in any of the larger buildings of the great expositions was that of the square domes of the Paris building of 1889. In this way the few attempts at artistic ironwork have been scattered over a half-century, without resulting in any deter- mined school of design. In like manner a few houses have been built fronting on the streets of Paris, and in certain Belgian cities, in which the iron framework is treated on the same Bound, constructional principles as those in- volved in the wooden "half-timbered" construc- tion of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries. These, however, are very rare exceptions, and the only recent development of the same fine-