American Architecture: StudiesSchuyler, Montgomery
General
American Architecture: Studies
Schuyler, Montgomery
Architecture -- United States
and “otherworldliness” which the Gothic architects attained, and prefers
the more robust, more massive, more mundane aspect of the Romanesque
monuments that preceded the great cathedrals. The modelling of these
cathedrals is carried so far that nothing is left unmodelled; there are
no longer any surfaces; the whole structure is anatomized; and the
modern architect, even while he stands astonished at the result of this
unsparing analysis, may yet say, “It were to consider too curiously to
consider so.” But it is not by refusing the aid these wonderful
structures offer him that he can advance upon or equal them. The
development of a cathedral requires, indeed, a system of piers and
vaults and flying arches and weighted buttresses. But these need not be
the same features in modelling, in detail, or in expression that we know
in historical examples. Instances are not wanting to show that they
[Illustration: TRANSVERSE SECTION THROUGH CHOIR.
Heyden Hawley]
may be massed with the stalwart simplicity of the Romanesque builders as
well as drawn into the complex and bewildering forms they assumed in the
later Gothic. In his design for Albany, Mr. Richardson has shown very
clearly that an artist, whose individuality is strong enough, can put
its stamp upon whatever he adopts. The common distinction that
Romanesque is a round-arched and Gothic a pointed style, is shown to be
baseless in an unmistakably Romanesque church in which all the openings
of the clere-story are pointed lancets, in which the pointed openings
elsewhere far outnumber the round arches, and in which the architect has
introduced tracery, sparingly but effectively, without at all marring
the unity of the structure. Nay, the church owes the suggestion of some
of its noblest features to works that did not exist until the period
classified as Romanesque had closed. A modern architect forfeits his
birthright who does not use all that the past has to offer him of help;
and his originality is impeached only if he does not overrule to his own
purposes what he adopts, if he copies instead of using. The west front
of Albany, for example, is the west front of Notre Dame of Paris, with
differences, as marked as the resemblances, which convert it into a new
creation. The three entrances, burrowed through the thickness of the
wall and not projected from the face, are repeated, but with a strong
and decorated belt course at their springing. The buttresses, bringing
down the line of the towers at Paris and dividing the front into three,
are omitted, and a balustrade in relief takes the place of the line of
statues. The flanking towers thus rise from a continuous base, and a
tall mock-arcade marks their lines in the next stage and emphasizes the
flanking wall, which in the mediæval example is pierced with a double
arch on each side of the rose-window, and the central wall is here
recessed to serve the same purpose of detaching the towers which in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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