American Architecture: StudiesSchuyler, Montgomery
General
American Architecture: Studies
Schuyler, Montgomery
Architecture -- United States
Renaissance. Mr. Haight, as we shall presently see more at large, is a
highly accomplished designer in Gothic. It is not their fault if Queen
Anne, when spread over an extensive façade, spreads thin.
Mr. Robertson is the only architect who has had the temerity to attempt
a Queen Anne church, and the success of his essay is not such as to
invite imitation. The essay itself is a little church in Madison Avenue,
with not much of Queen Anne in the main walls, which are of a rugged
rusticity, with the needful openings left square-headed and unmodelled;
but these walls are crowned with a clere-story faced with yellow
shingles, under a broad gable, and its openings united under a thin ogee
canopy of painted pine. There is here and there a little classic detail,
which, if it pleases the designer, certainly hurts nobody; but it is the
interior that is dedicated to Queen Anne. Here one may see what the
German critics call the “playful use” of forms devised for one
construction and one material in another material and with no visible
construction; and the result of this pleasantry is what a German
professor, celebrated in recent fiction, describes as “an important
joke.” In the main features of this interior, however, the treatment
passes a joke, for the mahogany nave arches, with their little
protruding key-woods, and their supporting posts incased
in boxed pedestals, are actually doing the work of carrying the
clere-story--unless, indeed, there is a concealed system of
iron-work--although their function is so far sacrificed to their form
that they are doing the work in the most ungainly and ineffective
fashion. Above this, as the repertory of Queen Anne contains no forms
that can be even tortured into the construction of an open ceiling, the
architect has omitted design altogether, and left his ceiling a mere
loft, sheathed underneath with yellow pine. Elsewhere, as in the
fittings of the chancel, the use of forms is entirely playful, so that
the interior of the church seems to be a collection of pleasantries. In
a dining-room, for example, we should pronounce them good jokes, but
really in a church a discussion of their merit as jokes seems to be
ruled out by the previous question as to the admissibility in the sacred
edifice of levity even of the highest order. It is perhaps fortunate for
the appliers of Queen Anne to ecclesiastical uses, and indeed for the
designers of “cozy” churches in general, that there is no official
censorship of church architecture as there is of church music, and that
no rubric makes it the duty of every minister, with such assistance as
he can obtain from persons skilled in architecture, to suppress all
light and unseemly architecture by which vain and ungodly persons
profane the service of the sanctuary. We may ask Mr. Robertson, in the
spirit in which we have been asking other architects, what he has gained
by abandoning such an effort as he made some ten years before in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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