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
The Grecian writ ran far south to Buenos Aires in Latin America, where
the broad portico of the cathedral, designed by the French engineer
Prosper Catelin and built in 1822, follows closely Grand Prix designs of
the 1790s; and deep into the Antipodes as well where Australia moved
like the United States into nationhood and into the Greek Revival at
much the same time, but at a slower pace and with less sophistication.
Washington, as the greatest fiat city of the period, might well have
been, rather than Edinburgh, the Romantic Classical city _par
excellence_. Even so, as it was laid out by a French engineer in the
1790s the prototype of its plan was not the Baroque city but the French
hunting park. And L’Enfant envisaged for it no walled-in streets and
squares but rather the isolated block-like structures that once stood
around his ‘circles’ as some still stand around Fischer’s Karolinenplatz
in Munich. In Washington, moreover, from 1803 when Jefferson made him
Surveyor of Public Buildings until 1817, Latrobe generally had his
headquarters; there his pupil Mills became Government Architect and
Engineer in 1836, retaining the post until 1851.
[Illustration:
Figure 11. John Haviland: Philadelphia, Eastern Penitentiary, 1823-35,
plan
]
The great monuments of the thirties still stand in Washington, mostly
designed by Mills himself at the peak of his career. But at the Capitol
(Plate 82A), rising at the head of the main axis of the city, the
Romantic Classical elements of the edifice completed in 1827 by Bulfinch
are now all but invisible between and below the wings and the dome added
after 1851 by Thomas U. Walter (1804-87). Hoban’s White House, moreover,
on the cross axis, remains, despite its restoration by Latrobe after the
War of 1812 and two twentieth-century campaigns of enlargement and
reconstruction, a quite Anglo-Palladian—indeed, almost Gibbsian—work.
These focal edifices largely belie the Romantic Classical ideals so
boldly epitomized in the tallest of all nineteenth-century obelisks,
Mills’s Washington Monument. This was designed in 1833, begun in 1848,
and not completed until 1884, when T. L. Casey, an Army engineer,
sharpened the pitch of the pyramidon and crowned it with solid
aluminium.
Immediately beside the White House, however, the Grecian granite of
Mills’s Treasury (Plate 38A), worthy of Playfair if not of Schinkel, is
overshadowed by the former State, War and Navy Department Building with
its tremendous Second Empire plasticity (Plate 82B). Begun in 1836, when
Mills received his official appointment, the Treasury was largely
completed by 1842; the west wing was added by Isaiah Rogers (1800-69) in
1862-5 following the original design.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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