Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

winged figures, somewhat like those known as the" Incantada" at Salonica, and a central pediment, peopled with symbolic sculpture, so disposed and grouped as to lead the eye upward to a circular podium or drum, supporting a low, spreading dome, the total effect being somewhat similar to that of the Roman Pantheon. Each buttress along the fronts is crowned with a colossal group, figurative of pastoral or agricultural life, and each of the corner pavilions is roofed with an attic or podium corresponding to that in the central pavilion, supporting a low-stepped pyramid, accompanied at its base by sculptured groups and eagles, and crowned above by a composition of figures holding aloft a globe.

The return walls on the east, toward the Lake, and on the west, toward the minor court between the Agriculture and Machinery buildings, grow without apparent effort from the conditions of the plan, as described. The corner pavilions are here made more important than those of the main front, and the central pavilion is much subordinated, while the intermediate curtain-walls are composed like those of the front, but with only one repetition of the triplearched bay on each side of the center. The west front responds to its neighbor on the opposite side of the canal with harmonious contrast, and with a certain high-bred courtesy, in which each seems to aid and to receive aid from the other.

In its various combinations, the exterior sculpture, which is the work of Mr. Philip Martiny of New York, is intended to symbolize bucolic labor: the central groups typifying human efforts in agriculture; those next the center showing the horse held in restraint by grooms; and those nearer the outward wings exhibiting the ox, urged forward, dragging the elementary beam-plow of Virgil.

The whole architectural mass may be traced rather to the Palatine Mount than to the influence of Palladio or Vignola, and it presents not only in scale and extent, but in its serious beauty, in its splendor of enrichment and refinement of detail, a model of imperial luxury and pomp, borrowed to adorn the peaceful triumph of the latest of civilizations.

THAT department of the Exposition classified as "Manufactures and the Liberal Arts" embraces so many and such varied industrial interests, that the building to accommodate it must be by far the most spacious in Jackson Park. The thirty acres which were assigned to it, though including an area much larger than that assigned to a single department in any previous Exposition, will need to be carefully husbanded to meet the requirements for space under this head. The site admitted of a building,

in exterior dimensions, 1687 feet long, north and south, and 787 feet in width. Its southern end, forming a part of the inclosure of the great court, was necessarily subjected to the same conditions regarding architectural style and scale as were agreed upon for the other structures around the quadrangle, and these conditions were extended so as to control the other façades. The interposition of an architectural wall nearly 1700 feet long, and but little over 60 feet high, between the lake and the flat district known as the lagoon would have the effect of transforming the whole aspect of the Park as viewed from any point on land or water. The importance of an adequate treatment of this vast scheme was obvious.

Mr. George B. Post of New York, the architect of the building, in considering its general plan, promptly fell upon the scheme of converting its area into a court by surrounding it with a continuous building, and of cutting this court in twain with a central circular structure; thus recalling, but on an immensely larger scale, a much admired disposition of Philibert Delorme in his first project for the palace of the Tuileries as a residence for Catherine de Médicis. But even with such subdivisions the scheme was still so heroic in dimension that no such correspondence as this could be of the slightest avail in furnishing him with types of architectural treatment. He found that he must work in regions quite removed from historical experience. With his assumed module of 25 feet, he found that he could carry around the four sides of his area of thirty acres a building composed of a nave 107 feet 9 inches wide and 114 feet high, covered with a pitched roof with clearstories, and supported on each side by twostoried aisles, or lean-tos, 45 feet wide. This arrangement of plan permitted ready illumination, easy classification, and convenient communication. It left an interior quadrangle 1237 feet long and 337 feet wide. The domical hall in the center of this space was planned to be 260 feet in clear diameter and 160 feet high, surrounded, like the other parts of the building, with two-storied aisles, or lean-tos, 45 feet wide. These circular aisles, compared with the seating space of the Roman Colosseum, would have inclosed an area largely in excess of that great arena. The two courts thus obtained Mr. Post proposed to treat as gardens with fountains and kiosks, or, if more space should be needed for exhibition purposes, to occupy them with a series of covered sheds.

But as the practical needs of this important and comprehensive part of the Exposition became more evident, it was finally concluded to abandon the central dome, and to convert the whole interior court into the largest unencumbered hall ever constructed, by covering it with

[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

GENERAL VIEW OF BUILDING FOR MANUFACTURES AND THE LIBERAL ARTS.

[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

a glazed semicircular roof without columns, supported by arched steel trusses of 387 feet clear span, 50 feet apart, and with a radius of 190 feet, giving an extreme height of 210 feet. This roof was arranged to be hipped at the ends. The much admired truss of Machinery Hall in the last Paris Exposition (the largest constructed for roofing purposes up to that time) is inferior to this in span and is 58 feet lower. It has been proposed to equip this vast hall, containing nearly 500,000 square feet of clear floor-space inside the enveloping building, with seats and a stage for the ceremonies of the inauguration, before adjusting it to its legitimate objects. It was sufficiently evident that the mountainous roof which covered the hall could not fail, from the mere power and weight of its enormous structural mass, to impose upon the scheme of the building, as a work of art, an element unknown in the precedents of monumental architecture.

In studying the most effective architectural treatment of a symmetrical building more than a third of a mile long and almost a sixth of a mile wide, with a height of cornice limited to 60 feet, the architect was confronted by conditions of composition such as perhaps had not occurred before. The natural dispositions of any extended building, which is to be adapted, not to various and different services, like a royal château, with its halls of ceremony, its wings for household convenience, its chapels and galleries, its provisions for dignity and its provisions for comfort, but to a single and well-understood purpose, must be guided by the most convenient and economical structure, and show a distinct unity of thought throughout. This unity is expressed by a mutual dependence of parts. We must at least have some feature of emphasis on the corners, against which the long fronts may stop - a period, as it were, and place of rest; and there is even

[ocr errors]

greater necessity for pavilions of sufficient importance to give dignity to the entrances. The natural place for these is in the middle of each front, where the visitors may be introduced most conveniently to the great interior space, and receive their first impressions of its grandeur. We have seen how the architects of the Agricultural Building on the opposite side of the court, where it was understood that everything must be in full dress and on parade, so to speak,-in adopting this natural treatment in their façade, found it necessary, for the sake of variety and movement, to provide between the center and the ends certain regularly disposed, intermediate accentuations, which the eye, in surveying the whole façade, could readily grasp and justify by an instinctive balancing of the masses on each side of the center line. The mind of the observer is flattered by this evidence of art.

Architecture, as compared with nature, has been called a creation of the second order; but this secondary creation must be fundamentally controlled by conditions of structure which, to a greater or less degree, must impose regularity or repetition of parts, as contrasted with the irregularity or picturesqueness which results from the infinite resources and the accidental conditions in nature. Medieval art, though often picturesque in its effects, is subject to these human conditions no less than classic art.

On the one hand the author of these almost interminable façades felt that he could not treat them picturesquely or accidentally without sacrifice of truth and dignity, and, on the other hand, that to break them with frequent pavilions, however subordinate to a preeminent central feature, would fail to procure for them all the advantages of symmetry; because, in a length so great, the mind could not readily discover and, at a glance, compare that correspondence of parts on each side of the center which is essential to effects of this sort. The rule of composition which properly governs a building 500 to 800 feet long and 60 feet high cannot be applied successfully to one two or three times as long and no higher. The architect, therefore, remembering the imposing effects of certain long porticos and aqueducts of Roman structure, had the courage, in this case, to withstand the temptations furnished by the customs of the Renaissance architects in their palaces and other public monuments, and to leave his sky-line and his frontage unbroken by any competition of pavilions save the one in the center and that on each angle of each front. By this severe measure he hoped to make the unity of his design clear to the most casual observer. The module or unit of measurement, of 25 feet, with which the architect found it convenient to lay out his plan, communicated to his

elevations a corresponding division of bays, of which 29 occur on each half of the long fronts and 11 on each half of the short fronts. These bays are treated with arches, springing from piers, and each archway embraces two stories. It was anticipated that these long, monotonous, and mechanical perspectives of equal and similar arches would affect the eye like the arcades of the Campagna, and would rather increase than diminish the apparent length of the building; for repetition, even if mechanical, is, humanly speaking, a suggestion of the infinite, and the architect who has the opportunity and self-denial to adopt it frankly, and on a scale so vast, would give even to the most thoughtless and most uncritical minds a memorable impression of architectural majesty and repose.

Now the covered ambulatory, or stoa, which is made a feature of all the court fronts, should, on account of the great length of these long façades, where there is no other natural refuge from the sun, be extended all around the building, but within its lines. The lintel course or decorated belt, which is the exterior development of the floor of the second story in each bay, is supported by an open, flat, segmental arch springing from pier to pier; behind these arches this continuous ambulatory obtains spacious shade. Frequent doors open upon it from the interior. No subordinate architectural order of columns was placed under this lintel course, as was done with singularly happy results in the Agricultural Building, because it was apparent that such an order would not have been in scale with the rest of the design, and would have introduced an element which would have complicated with unnecessary details the careful simplicity of its lines and the studied breadth of its general treatment.

The adoption of a severe classical formula for the building naturally led to the adoption of a common motif for the four central pavilions, and another, adapted to its situation, for each of the corner pavilions. These repetitions were encouraged by the fact that all the façades were of equal importance. As these pavilions must be distinctly recognized as the main porches, they must break the monotony with emphasis, or they will not be adequate. Consequently at these points there should be a sudden change in the architectural scheme of the fronts. But the strictly classic ideal does not seem to be favorable to the absolute interruption of all the horizontal lines of frontage by the pavilions; there must be some connection by continuity of lines between them.1 The Greek

1 The solution of this continuity, boldly attempted central towers, which, as we have noted, interrupt all by the architects of the Machinery Building in their

the lines, constitutes the most remarkable feature of their design. This, as we have said, is contrary to the

1

[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

PART OF GROUP ABOVE MAIN ENTRANCE OF MANUFACTURES AND LIBERAL ARTS BUILDING.

idea of a monumental entrance is a columned propylæum; that of the Romans, who better understood pomp and ceremony, is an arch. The former would be appropriate if the general architectural character of the façades were based upon an order of columns or pilasters; in the present case the latter would more naturally follow.

Thus the architect, by logical process, encountered the idea of inserting in the midst of his arcades the triple triumphal arches of Constantine or Septimius Severus, and of stopping his arcade at the corners with the single arch of Titus or Trajan, the motif in both cases being very greatly enlarged from the original in order to fit the greater scale of the building. The architectural connection of the central pavilions with the mass of the structure is established by bringing their two side arches into the same scale as those of the curtain-walls, and by causing the main cornice line to be continued across the central pavilion or pylon as a stringstrict classic idea, but in so far as this interruption does not destroy the unity of the composition, it is the suc

course over its two side arches, and as an impost, from which springs its great central arch. Over the whole is carried a horizontal entablature with a high attic, and in front of the four piers are lofty pedestaled columns, after the manner of buttresses, supporting figures against the attic, thus closely following the characteristics of the Roman prototypes. The order employed for these columns is the sumptuous Corinthian of the temple of Jupiter Stator, the columns being 65 feet high with a lower diameter of more than 6 feet. We have already intimated that the architect turned the four corners of this building with a single arch on each adjacent. face of the angles; these also are decorated with magnificent coupled Corinthian columns, as in some of the Roman examples. The width of the corner pavilions is adjusted to the width of the ambulatory which enters them on each side. The esthetic function of these boldly accentuated buttress-columns, which are clearly cessful stroke of one who dares to put his fate to the touch, "to gain or lose it all."

« AnkstesnisTęsti »