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
Within a few years other Boston architects and builders were currently
using this sort of construction, and it soon spread to several New
England cities. However, more typical of the urban ambition of the
twenties and thirties than the destroyed block of 1824 in Providence by
J. H. Green (1777-1850), which followed line for line Parris’s
commercial work, are two other buildings there. The Providence Arcade of
1828 by Warren has not one, but two terminal porticoes of Ionic columns
executed in granite and also a fine interior consisting of raised side
galleries under an iron-and-glass roof. Few extant galleries of this
decade in Europe are as notable in scale and in finish. The Washington
Buildings of 1843 by James C. Bucklin (1801-90), who had assisted Warren
on the Arcade, had a plain range of three storeys of window-pierced
red-brick wall above a trabeated granite ground storey, the whole
dominated by a central pedimented feature (Plate 39B). This was a
commercial project as grand as any in contemporary Europe in scale, in
materials, and in finish, although without the originality of the
trabeated all-granite bow-front of Rogers’s contemporary Brazier’s
Buildings on State Street in Boston. Yet Bucklin’s Westminster
Presbyterian Church in Providence of 1846 is a straight Greek Ionic
temple like so many other non-Anglican edifices of this period in
England and America.
Where Romantic Classicism, and more specifically the Greek Revival,
found its noblest opportunities in Europe in public monuments, in
America after the days of Latrobe it was rather commercial,
institutional, and even industrial[96] commissions that stimulated
architects and builders to original achievement, while public work grew
more and more conventional. For instance, the Lippitt Woollen Mill of
1836 in Woonsocket, R.I., and the Governor Harris Manufactory at Harris,
R.I., dating from as late as 1851 can both be properly described as ‘in
the Grecian vernacular’. They are most admirably proportioned and very
soundly built, with walls of random ashlar masonry and boldly scaled
wooden trim, very plain, yet of generically Greek character. The
discipline of Romantic Classicism accorded well with the requirements of
industrial building; not until the present century would factories of
comparable architectural quality be built. Moreover, they were often
complemented by consonant low-cost housing, as in the extant mill
village at White Rock, R.I., of 1849.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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