Post Civil War Architecture
Post Civil War Architecture

 
 

Superior training and increasing sophistication were particularly evident among the architects who returned from the École des Beaux-Arts with a command of more extensive planning and correct detailing in a range of styles. The first to return was Richard Morris Hunt, best known for his New York mansions for the Vanderbilt family in the style of 16th-century French châteaux. The partners of the firm of McKim, Mead, and White preferred Italian Renaissance styles for their major commissions, such as New York City's palatial Henry Villard Houses (1882-85) and the Boston Public Library (1887-95). Perhaps the greatest talent of the generation was Henry H. Richardson, whose bold sense of mass and control of detail is evident in his Trinity Church (1872-77, Boston), carried out in the Romanesque style, which became immensely popular in the U.S. during the 1880s.
 

In the late 19th century Americans led the way in two architectural forms: the country house and the skyscraper. The American shingle style was developed out of the Queen Anne revivals of the English architects Norman Shaw and William Burges. Organized in an informal, rambling fashion around a large living hall, these houses show the development of the open plan and easy transitions between indoors and outdoors that were to become hallmarks of the best modern architecture of the early 20th century. The vertical development of office buildings was made possible by the introduction of the elevator, which was put into operation in New York City office buildings in the 1850s. With the introduction of internal metal-frame construction in William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Company Building (1885, demolished 1931) in Chicago, the stage was set for the innovations of the Chicago school of skyscraper design, headed by Louis Sullivan. Sullivan's Guaranty Building (1894-95, Buffalo, New York) expresses in its cladding (sheathing) the internal structure, achieving lightness with its emphatic verticality and unity with its bold cornice.
 


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