Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
In the New World, where the independence of the principal colonies of
the European nations, British, Spanish, and Portuguese, was generally
established in this period or just before it, one might expect that
Romantic Classicism would have made a still more conspicuous
contribution to the architectural scene. Yet the very youth of most of
the countries of the New World, settled though many of them had been in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also the strong cultural
links that they still maintained with the ancient traditions of their
several homelands, tended to hold them back from entering fully into the
new international movement of the day in architecture. What national
libraries, moreover, were yet needed in Venezuela or Colombia, what
sculpture galleries in the American Middle West? Columns and obelisks,
if not triumphal arches, rose—frequently very belatedly—to celebrate
national heroes of the various wars of independence; but outside the
eastern United States the still very simple organization of society and
the primitive means of transport required neither the institutional
edifices of France—markets, hospitals, and prisons—nor the new railway
stations of England.[82]
Yet in the United States, and not alone along the eastern seaboard, the
period of Romantic Classicism left a very rich architectural deposit.
The monuments of real distinction range all the way from such a church
as Latrobe’s Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore (Plate 5), one of the very
finest ecclesiastical edifices of the first half of the century to be
seen anywhere, to Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia
of 1823-35, the first to be planned on the radial cellular system
(Figure 11). Studied and published by the English penologist William
Crawford as well as by Demetz and Blouet,[83] this provided a new
functional concept for penal architecture influential abroad from the
time that Gilbert projected his Nouvelle Force Prison in the late
thirties. Haviland’s prison was Castellated like Lebas’s Petite
Roquette, not Grecian in detail; his New York prison of 1836-8, however,
was Egyptian in detail, to which it owed its curious nickname, ‘The
Tombs’. That both Latrobe and Haviland were English-born and
English-trained is certainly significant; the latter, who was a cousin
of the painter Haydon and a pupil of H. L. Elmes’s father James
(1782-1862), had first tried his luck in Petersburg.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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