7. PALATIAL PALACES 1880–1930
Not the Truth, but a big bankroll will make you free. And being free you can build whatever you want.
—Alan Gowans, The Comfortable House, 1986
In 1870 America had a population of forty million and over seventy-five percent still lived in rural areas. The full impact of the industrial revolution was still to be felt, and the next forty years would be a period of enormous change. By 1910 the population had more than doubled and almost half lived in cities and large towns. The economic diversity of the country had never been greater nor the complexities of our social structure more intricate.
“Between 1870 and 1900, the national wealth quadrupled (rising from $30,400 million to $126,700 million and doubled again by 1914—reaching $254,200).” In 1892 “the Census Bureau estimated that 9 percent of the nation’s families owned 71 percent of the wealth.”*
With the influx of immigrants from abroad as well as the movement to the cities from rural areas, our urban areas underwent traumatic change. Ghettos formed in the inner cities, the suburbs burgeoned for the middle and upper classes, and resorts and enclaves were created for those who could afford the price. All this emphasized the strata of our society—our differences rather than our similarities. Technology and industry supported these changes. The railroad had perhaps the greatest effect for it was both a physical network of steel that bound the country together and a reflection of a restless mobility unprecedented in the history of mankind. Local commuter railroads like Philadelphia’s “Main Line” transformed rural farmland into areas of impressive estates that were synonymous with privilege and upper-class status. The automobile wasn’t far behind in reinforcing this rural mobility and solving what might have been one of the drawbacks of living apart from one’s neighbors.
Electricity, central heating, indoor plumbing, the telephone, the typewriter, and the washing machine all became commonplace in this era—and not just for the very rich. The American suburban “four-square” and the bungalow soon sprouted up throughout the new suburbs and small towns. Sears, Roebuck and Company, Aladdin Redi-Cut Houses, and other companies sold thousands of modest precut houses and shipped them by rail all over the country. In his excellent book The Comfortable House, Alan Gowans pointed out that between 1890 and 1930, “thanks to partial or total prefabrication, more houses were erected than in the nation’s entire previous history.”† Most of these modest houses incorporated the same amenities mentioned above and indeed provided a level of comfort never really known before, regardless of the income level of the owner.
Typical four-square
Even with the great diversity of architectural styles there was a search for order, unity, and structure—reassurance that this incredibly disparate land had a worthy history, a legitimate social order, and a class hierarchy that reflected that order. Above the fray of nationalistic pride stimulated by our centennial celebration in 1876 stood a newly formed social class bound together by enormous wealth. Many within this group sought comfort and reassurance from the power of their new-found money. Entrée into exclusive clubs, societies, and boards of philanthropic organizations—hospitals, schools, universities, and religious foundations—was a conspicuous reward for the work ethic and an almost Calvinistic confirmation that one was a member of God’s elect.
It was in the form of their houses that many of these “elect” chose to display the evidence of their material success. In this same era the Shingle style and the Colonial Revival were emerging, but these styles were not ostentatious enough for the more blatant show-offs and were only built by people who were less inclined to display their material success so conspicuously.
Richard Morris Hunt; McKim, Mead & White; and Warren & Wetmore were architectural firms that served immensely wealthy clients. The apotheosis of the palatial palace was G. W. Vanderbilt’s chateau Biltmore, designed by Hunt and built in Ashville, North Carolina, in 1893. It cost over half of his inheritance which was rumored to have been $6,000,000. Hunt had designed several Chateauesque houses for other members of the Vanderbilt family. Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age” was in full bloom. This was the era of the “Four Hundred,” and there was a pervasive determination among the new social class to establish an aristocracy of wealth. Daughters were married off to titled Europeans and the Social Register was first published in 1887 to be sure that everyone knew who everyone was and what they belonged to. But most revealing was the architectural expression of the age, in which was an implicit desire for social stability. Besides the Chateauesque, the most popular opulent styles were the Romanesque, Beaux-Arts, Tudor, Second Italian Renaissance Revival, and Neoclassical Revival. There were ample Colonial Revival and even Shingle style houses of considerable size (the Goelet house in Newport, Rhode Island, for example), but they tended to be more restrained and were not used if one wanted to really show off. Let’s see why each of these styles was so well suited to its purpose.
The Robert Goelet House, Newport, Rhode Island, by McKim, Mead & White, 1882
Perhaps “Richardsonian Romanesque” would be a better term for this style. Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886) graduated from Harvard in 1859 and then became the second American to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He began his practice in New York in 1865. In 1872 he won the competition for Trinity Church in Boston and moved his practice there. The rectory of the church was the first house ever built here in the Romanesque style.
Not a style for the masses, this pre-Gothic or English Norman style mandated masonry construction. The massive rusticated walls and semicircular arches made these houses expensive to build. Never a popular residential style, even for those who could afford it, Romanesque houses were built for wealthy industrialists who considered the fanciful chateaux and the Beaux-Arts classicism too arty or frivolous for their tastes. Several Romanesque houses were built in St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York in the 1880s and 1890s. A retrospective monograph of Richardson’s work was published in 1888 and gave impetus to the style, but the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was an effective advertisement for Beaux-Arts classicism.
The most obvious characteristics of the Romanesque style are the massive ashlar stonework, the half-round arches with neatly cut voussoirs, and the bold and simple massing. Windows are mostly 1 over 1 with masonry mullions and transom bars. Even with its turrets and multigabled composition, the style is more of a massive masonry version of the contemporaneous Shingle style than the more extravagant Queen Anne.
Though the Romanesque style was rarely used for freestanding houses, one can find occasional row houses with Romanesque facades built of brownstone or Roman brick with terra-cotta details.
Ames Gate Lodge, North Easton, Massachusetts, by Henry Hobson Richardson, 1882–1883
ROMANESQUE 1880–1900
Francis I became king of France in 1515, just six years after Henry VIII ascended the throne of England. They both died in 1547. Most of the famous chateaux that were the models for our Chateauesque style were built during Francis I’s reign. Chambord, Blois, and Chenonçeaux are perhaps the best known; they all combined the late Gothic style of fifteenth-century France with the new Italian Renaissance details just being introduced in France.
Although Richard Morris Hunt returned to the United States from Paris before our Civil War, not even the most extravagant of his clients were ready for so opulent and palatial a style until the 1880s. At that time, however, it became the ultimate style for the conspicuous display of wealth.
Too extravagant to be mannered in wood, Chateauesque mansions were built of either smooth, flat Roman brick with narrow mortar joints or smooth limestone. The dominant, steeply pitched roof was a stylistic reference to the French Gothic as were the hood molds above the windows and doors and the vestige of tracery featured in the pierced railings of the balconies. The characteristic “basket handle” arch above the front door was also a late Gothic detail and was a common feature of the Chateauesque style. In contrast, the horizontal string courses, pilasters, and the occasional round arch were all Renaissance in origin.
So-called wall dormers—upper-story extensions of the exterior wall that interrupt the continuity of the eave line—were characteristic of the style as interpreted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roof dormers were commonly used as well. Rounded turrets, decorated pinnacles, and assertively fanciful chimneys combined with spires, finials, and ornamental iron railings to identify the style. Besides Hunt’s Biltmore, smaller examples can be found in St. Louis, Chicago, outside of Philadelphia, and in Newport, Rhode Island.
CHATEAUESQUE 1885–1910
The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris was founded in the early eighteenth century and was the premier architectural school of the nineteenth century. America’s first school of architecture was founded at MIT in 1865. It was soon followed by Cornell, Syracuse, Michigan, and Columbia. All were patterned on the Paris prototype. But a year or so in Paris was still considered an impressive social as well as academic credential for most American architects—even those who already held degrees.
By the late nineteenth century the school had a long-established approach to design. The curriculum instilled in the students a feeling for grandiose axial formality in both planning and composition, articulation of building mass, and a predilection for pictorial extravagance. The magnificently rendered presentations in plan, section, and elevation captured the essence of their educational goal.
Heavy stone basements, coupled columns, grand staircases, decorative swags, shields and garlands, and freestanding statuary all help to identify the style.
In an era of rapid change and great diversity, the ordered symmetry of the Beaux-Arts formality lent a sense of unity to an otherwise disparate society. The Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was a triumph of the Beaux-Arts classicism and was seen as the unveiling of an American Renaissance. Classical forms, extravagant, yet controlled by Hunt’s cohesive plan, appealed to the successful businessmen of the day. Here the authority of French sophistication nurtured the Gilded Age. In 1879 Mark Twain had observed that the French “citizen requires ‘glory’—that is the main thing; plenty of glory, plenty of noise, plenty of show, . . . plenty of masked balls and fantastic nonsense.” But of course not everyone liked Twain.
BEAUX-ARTS 1890–1930
Some architectural writers call any house inspired by the English Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean (for James I) period “Jacobethan” or even “Tudorbethan.” I have always thought those terms a little patronizing. When used for buildings on college campuses in the 1920s this style was often called “Collegiate Gothic” which somehow seems less patronizing. One wonders why the style was not called Neo-Tudor or Tudor Revival.
Elizabeth I was the daughter of Henry Tudor—that is, Henry VIII. She died in 1603 and was the last of the Tudor line. Technically, then, Jacobean architecture was not Tudor even though the styles have much in common. This guide uses the term Tudor for masonry or stucco buildings, Elizabethan for half-timbered structures, and Jacobean for masonry structures with Dutch or Flemish gables. Though a bit of an oversimplification, this terminology is prevalent and helps to keep the styles straight.
The Tudor parapeted gables, large leaded windows detailed with stone mullions and transoms, and the characteristic Tudor arch all help to identify this style. Projecting oriel window bays were common in the originals and were incorporated into these early twentieth-century neo-Tudor houses.
Remember that at the turn of the century the predominant ethnic group in the United States was still British in origin. The successful businessman who chose to build a substantial house could easily identify with the early English manor house and all its associated values. The Beaux-Arts and Chateauesque styles were too affected for many solid Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the Romanesque, though certainly masculine, failed to evoke the image of the English landed gentry that seemed the inevitable reward for a successful businessman with British roots. By the 1930s the Tudor style had become a symbol of success for persons of any ethnic background.
TUDOR 1890–1930
SECOND ITALIAN RENAISSANCE REVIVAL 1890–1930
This was the first of the so-called “Mediterranean” styles and was based on the palaces of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Italian Renaissance. Symmetrical stone or stuccoed structures with red tiled hip roofs and substantial cornices supported with brackets or consoles were typical of these houses. They generally had more varied facades than houses of the early Italian Renaissance Revival of the mid-nineteenth century. Entrances were often marked with either a projecting portico or a recessed loggia emphasized with an arched Palladian motif.
The Villard house (1887) in New York by McKim, Mead & White was a harbinger of this style: but the Renaissance Revival wasn’t used for residences much before 1890. The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s house in New-port, Rhode Island, was designed by Hunt and was completed in 1895. It was certainly the apotheosis of this style. Rich in its varied facade yet ordered in its superimposition of classical orders, the building exemplifies the grandiose assertion of the Italian pallazzo. The illustration shown is simpler in its details and more representative of most houses of this style.
As more and more Americans studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and took the “grand tour” throughout Europe they saw palaces firsthand. Previously examples were only seen distilled in pattern books of the earlier Victorian era. After the First World War stone veneer construction was perfected and an increasing number of more modest examples of the style appeared. But it remained essentially a pretentious style. Lacking the charm of the Italianate or Italian Villa styles which were usually built of wood, these Renaissance Revivals always seem like a visiting grandee who never adapts to the American scene—who manages to keep his accent and clings to the security of his European manner. He is perhaps always a little bit suspect and more at ease in Palm Beach than in Northeast Harbor.
SECOND ITALIAN RENAISSANCE REVIVAL 1890–1930
NEOCLASSICAL REVIVAL 1895–1950
For those who found the excessive monumentality of the Beaux-Arts classicism too ostentatious, the Neoclassical Revival was a viable alternative. Some of the smaller pavilions at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 inspired this revival. Though grandly assertive with its characteristic two-story classical portico—usually featuring the Ionic or Corinthian order—the style was generally restrained in its use of decorative details. The wall surfaces were smooth and plain and the moldings had little depth. Builders as well as architects, at least in the first quarter of the twentieth century, showed a concern for correctly proportioned classical orders.
Pilasters or possibly subtle quoins might appear at the corners of the building, but without great emphasis on shadow and depth. Symmetry was important and the portico usually dominated the central section of the facade. Blinds were not initially associated with this style.
Before 1920 hipped roofs were common and classical proportions were respected. From the mid-twenties on the general trend was toward side-gabled buildings and a much less fastidious replication of the classical orders.
When well done, these houses had a certain dignity, but the line between dignity and pomposity was tenuous at best. The Neoclassical Revival style was apt to exceed that subtle boundary and become pretentious. This became increasingly evident when the architectural details and proportions diverged from the classical standards. Some of the most grotesque, tasteless, and nouveau-riche buildings offered by speculative builders today are pale shadows of the Neo classical Revival. One can often see the pretense carried to absurdity when a makeshift portico is slapped on the facade of a raised ranch or pseudo-colonial. Unfortunately it is not an uncommon sight.
NEOCLASSICAL REVIVAL 1895–1950
* Baltzell, E. Digby, The Protestant Establishment (New York: Vintage, 1966).
† Gowans, Alan, The Comfortable House (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).