American Architecture: StudiesSchuyler, Montgomery
General
American Architecture: Studies
Schuyler, Montgomery
Architecture -- United States
Mr. Cady, one of the most important and distinguished of the
contributors to the Gothic revival in New York, has also of late years
become a convert to the new movement, and seems from our point of view
to have thrown himself away with even less sufficient cause than that
which impelled Mr. Harney to his rash act. For we have distinctly
admitted that Mr. Harney had reason to be dissatisfied with his Gothic
detail, while we cannot make that admission in behalf of Mr. Cady. Mr.
Cady’s newer work is shown in a house of red-brick and brown sandstone,
which he contributed to the architectural competition just noticed. This
edifice shows a desire to live at peace in the midst of very quarrelsome
neighbors. Mr. Cady, indeed, could scarcely design a vulgar and
vociferous work if he tried. At any rate, he has never tried, and does
not in the least need to be put under the bonds of a style in order to
insure his keeping the peace. One wonders what Mr. Cady believes himself
to have gained in abandoning the style of his brilliant Art Building in
Brooklyn for the style of his not very noticeable house in Fifty-seventh
Street.
Quietude can, no doubt, be attained in Queen Anne; but it can also be
attained, by architects who are really in quest of it, in other styles
quite as well, which admit a much wider range of expression, while the
student is forced to doubt whether by means of the meagre repertory of
Queen Anne any other quality than quietude can be expressed. Its
successes in domestic architecture are mainly the successes of
unnoticeableness, which is really the character not only of the
dwellings just mentioned, but of a house by Mr. Robertson in Fifth
Avenue, of a house by Mr. Haight in Fifty-fifth Street, and of a house,
which has the great advantage of double the usual frontage, by Messrs.
McKim, Mead, & White, in Madison Avenue, adjoining Mr. Harney’s
reproduction; for the tall red-brick house in Thirty-fourth Street by
these latter architects, which looks less like a work of architectural
art than a magnified piece of furniture “with the Chippendale feeling,”
can scarcely be called successful, while the house they designed for Mr.
Astor in Fifth Avenue, a simply and quietly treated street front in
brick and sandstone, can certainly not be called Queen Anne, in spite of
the three rows of egg-and-dart moulding, already remarked, which crown
its rock-faced basement. The highest praise to which these typical Queen
Anne houses can aspire, in spite of some thoroughly studied detail, such
as the treatment of the oriel in that one designed by Mr. Haight, is
that they look like eligible mansions for highly respectable families
content with dwelling in the decencies; and this is also the highest
praise that can be bestowed upon their prototypes of the Georgian era.
We can repeat the admission that it is far better they should look like
that than like the habitations of vulgarly ostentatious persons,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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