“American Architecture between World's Fairs: Richardson, Sullivan, and McKim”

AboutCompares three landmark buildings raised between the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 and the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 as emblematic of an emergent, independent American architecture: Henry Hobson Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building, and Charles Follen McKim's Boston Public Library. Written to accompany a Smithsonian exhibition, the essay identifies four themes common to all three works — a compelling sense of large, equilibrated order; an aestheticism paralleling contemporary painting and mural work (Whistler, Edwin Austin Abbey, Will Low, Francis Millet); a naturalism rooted in the commonplace and the vernacular, including Sullivan's debt to Whitman and his organic ornament; and a shared "corporate dimension," in which each building's impersonal, monumental order expresses the rising power of American institutions and business elites. Jordy traces Sullivan's admiration for Richardson's Marshall Field Store into the Guaranty Building's terra-cotta skin and block-like massing, and shows how McKim's library balances Renaissance precedent (Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Alberti's San Francesco) with democratic accessibility ("Free to All"). Henry James's ambivalent praise of the library's lack of "penetralia" illuminates the tension between monumentality and popular openness running through all three buildings.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-9853%281983%2923%3A4%3C27%3AAABWFR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T