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By James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell
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| Photo Courtesy of the Cupples House |
Although the light-hearted and infinitely adaptable Queen Anne-style house ruled almost unchallenged in America's late 19th-century suburbs and small towns,
it wasn't the only style on the block in big-city neighborhoods. A very different architectural model—the castlelike Romanesque Revival—briefly established small strongholds in urban areas from the late 1880s through the '90s.
Ironically, this masonry stalwart took the stage just as America
was reaching the peak of its great post-Civil War "wooden age"
of houses. Its massive stone or brick walls, arched and arcaded
entryways, and round-arch windows came to symbolize the prosperity and worldliness of the newly moneyed classes, rivaling even the superluxurious French Chateauesque style.
Does it seem strange that architecture with such a strong European flavor should have captured the fancy of builders on this side of the Atlantic? Well, the world was shrinking, with trans-Atlantic steamers regularly crisscrossing the big water and lots of folks with lots of money dashing off to see the Continent and bringing back ideas about Culture with a capital "C." As for why they were attracted to the Romanesque Revival, a little history lesson helps explain the appeal.
What's Roman about Romanesque?
One of the legacies of the Roman Empire's conquest of Great Britain and Europe was a pre-Gothic style of architecture loosely based on Roman construction and aesthetic principles. Stone arches and arcades, grouped columns, pilasters, shallow buttresses, and vaulted domes made up the sturdy backbones of the monasteries and cathedrals that abounded in the new Christian kingdoms of Europe from the 9th through the 12th centuries. While not strictly Roman in the classical sense, this type of architecture owed enough to Roman design to be called Romanesque and became the unifying model for church buildings across premedieval Europe.
Centuries later, European reformers of the 1840s such as art critic John Ruskin were seized by an urge to "purify" church architecture (which was by then inspired mostly by some form of Greek classicism) by returning to its medieval Christian roots. This fervor brought about a revival of both the Gothic and the Romanesque styles. In the United States, these styles were used mostly for churches and large public buildings, such as courthouses. The Smithsonian Institution's "Castle" on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (1846-51), by architect James Renwick Jr., is one of the most well-known of these early Romanesque Revival buildings.
The real rise of the Romanesque Revival came later, coinciding with the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution. Among the many byproducts of industrialization were booming cities and an increasing number of huge personal fortunes. Both these factors made an expensive style like the Romanesque Revival attractive to the wealthier classes. In the 1870s and 1880s, interest in Romanesque buildings was advanced by the work of a single genius, Henry Hobson Richardson. Although he didn't invent the style, the name of this brilliant Boston architect became so thoroughly identified with Romanesque in America that it has ever after been called "Richardsonian Romanesque." In the 1870s Richardson's designs for the Allegheny Courthouse in Pittsburgh and Boston's Trinity Church set his stamp on the Romanesque Revival. When he later transferred Romanesque elements to residential buildings, such as the Glessner House in Chicago, other architects and urban developers took note.
Richardson's powerful and controversial Glessner House, erected in 1886 in a closely built block of ornate, High Victorian homes, stunned (and in some cases offended) the Glessners' prosperous neighbors with its rugged simplicity, but its originality and forcefulness were not easily dismissed. Except for a massive, low-arched service entryway of stone and a row of big windows with colonnettes at the third floor, the face that Glessner House presented to the street seemed flat and almost featureless. To some critics, the building suggested a 150‰ long, low fortress of grey stone. Much of its monumental effect and subtle interest is due to Richardson's careful design and placement of each stone. In the rear of the U-shaped house the effect is softened. Here, brick-faced walls form a courtyard around a private garden, while large windows, rounded tower, porch, and veranda bring the architecture back to human scale.
Romanesque after Richardson
As it turned out, the Glessner House's austere form was far from typical of the way the Romanesque style would be used in most American houses. After Richardson's untimely death from kidney disease during the construction of the Glessner House, his successor firm, Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, did only a few buildings in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. However, Richard-son's bold use of masonry walls and arches was emulated by other architects throughout the country, particularly in the larger cities of the Northeast and the newer industrial centers of the Midwest.
In fact, some of the most talented architects of the 1880s and 1890s used the Romanesque style at least occasionally, sometimes to spectacular effect, although none of them adopted it as a signature. Among those who tried and soon abandoned the style were McKim, Mead, and White of New York; Burnham and Root of Chicago; J. C. Cady, who designed New York City's Museum of Natural History; and W. J. Edbrooke, architect of the Treasury, whose many Romanesque courthouses and Federal buildings are scattered across the nation.
Romanesque was harder to apply to residential buildings. For one thing, masonry construction has always been relatively expensive, requiring highly skilled workmen and plenty of labor to come off well. Then, too, all that stone seemed very cold and unhomelike to people who were used to the comfortable attractions of the Queen Anne house and the Gothic "cottage."
There were some, however, who found just what they were looking for
in the impressive solidity of the Romanesque. In 1888 railroad magnate James J. Hill engaged the prestigious Boston firm of Peabody and Stearns to design his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the Richardsonian style. As the house was nearing completion, Hill and his architects had a falling-out over control of the project. Furious when Peabody and Stearns repeatedly countermanded his instructions to the stone masons, Hill fired them and hired another Boston firm, Irving and Casson, to take over the design for the interior of the house. When it was finally finished in 1891, Hill's new home had cost an astounding $900,000.
Despite the relative simplicity of its design (compared to the splendor of the typical Chateauesque mansion), the Hill House did exactly what it was meant to do: It told the world of its owner's wealth, power, and stability. In addition to its heavy stone walls, the house embodied all the hallmarks of the high-style Richardsonian Romanesque—wide, low stone arches on the porte cochere, stone chimneys soaring above a complex roofline, and gabled stone dormers. Of course, not all Romanesque Revival buildings are as imposing as the Glessner and Hill houses. Many smaller (and less Richardsonian) Romanesque houses were built in the same period. Occasionally, party-wall houses might be grouped to form a more-or-less unified mass similar to that of a single mansion.
In addition to masonry construction, the essential element in every Romanesque building was, naturally, the round arch—an invention, you recall, of the Romans. This signature feature was not a high-pointed Gothic arch, not a wavy Tudor arch, but a broad, heavy, low masonry arch (sometimes confusingly called a Syrian arch), usually supported by short, thick masonry columns or pilasters but sometimes standing without columns. Although straight lintels were also used, entries, doors, and windows were most often distinguished by arches. Columns, pilasters, and capitals bore heavy, sinuous, organic designs carved in stone or perhaps terra cotta.
The appeal of the Romanesque Revival for residences was brief—less than two decades and far from universal. Most Americans preferred the lighter, less ponderous feeling of the Queen
Anne style, not to mention the greater economy of frame construction. By the time the 20th century came around with new building materials and design ideals, Romanesque houses seemed
like expensive reminders of a rather gloomy past.
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