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
Unpedimented porticoes are not unknown in the North, both east and west
of the Alleghenies, as in the Levi Lincoln house of 1836 (once in
Worcester, Mass., now moved to nearby Sturbridge) by Elias Carter
(1781-1864) with its convex-fluted Doric order. Such original touches,
which many carpenters introduced out of plain ignorance and more
sophisticated architects developed out of a conscious desire to
nationalize and personalize even such absolute paradigms as those of the
Greek orders, often lend variety and piquancy to the mode. The finest
Grecian houses, such as Elmhyrst at One Mile Corner, Newport, R.I.,
built probably by Russell Warren (1783-1860) about 1833, certainly owe
their originality to the studied intentions of architects. This house,
in particular, has a façade composed in overlapping planes that is not
unworthy of Cockerell (Plate 42B). On the other hand, the Hermitage near
Savannah, Georgia, designed by Charles B. Cluskey _c._ 1830, could
almost be by Schinkel, so simple and pure is its design.
Trained architects, on the whole, were too rationalistic or too
adventurous to follow closely the plain temple model in domestic or
institutional work. Walter presumably surrounded Andalusia, the home of
the philhellene banker Nicholas Biddle outside Philadelphia, with a
Doric temple-shell in 1833 only against his own better judgement. In
1833-47 he also built for Girard College in Philadelphia, of which
Biddle was the trustee who called the tune, an enormous Corinthian
temple. Inside this he incorporated a variety of educational functions
only with considerable difficulty, but he vaulted all the interiors in
the manner of Latrobe and Mills in order to provide a completely
fireproof structure.[89] Curiously enough, this was one of the first
American buildings to be published abroad,[90] thus rivalling Haviland’s
prison, but it attracted no emulators in Europe. By the thirties, of
course, these buildings by Walter were no novelties in Philadelphia.
[Illustration:
Figure 12. Thomas Jefferson: Charlottesville, Va., University of
Virginia, 1817-26, plan.
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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