1872 – 1900

Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr.

A new and more sophisticated age opened in Buffalo when F. L. Olmstead was called in 1869 to lay out parkways and parks to the north of the city in the area toward which the residential district was rapidly expanding. These parkways, with their repeated rows of giant trees, are the finest in America, and form the setting of as handsome and varied a group of late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses as are to be found in this country.

With Olstead came H. H. Richardson, destined to be the great leader of American architecture from the seventies to the nineties. In the Dorsheimer house he was only feeling his way, on the basis of his French training and superior sense of proportion, out of the Victorian morass.

In the State Hospital, his earliest important commission, and one of his largest on which he worked for almost a decade, he really found, in the years between 1870 and 1872, his personal style. This style was much imitated here and elsewhere in the next score of years. It is interesting to follow the stages of his self discovery from the splendidly articulated plan through the awkward first facade project with its ugly detail to the final superb romantic mass of the central pavilion. The bold silhouette, the balanced proportions, and individual fusion of the Romanesque and late Gothic detail, are already almost completely mature.

Richardson’s project for Trinity Church was never executed, which is perhaps as well. The exterior was still over-picturesque, but the Byzantine space of its interior are echoed in more suave and historical form in Green and Wicks’ First Presbyterian Church. The exterior of this is an excellent, if somewhat rembling composition wholly unrelated to the interior, done in the supposedly “Revived Romanesque” style derived from Richardson’s mature work.

A project for a Y.M.C.A in Buffalo by Richardson came to nothing. The Gratwick house, however, was one of his last, if not one of his most satisfactory stone mansions. Indeed, one may well prefer two of the chief Richardsonian houses by other architects, the Hamlin House, by Martin and Burdette, and the Michael House, by A. Phillips Rinn. The same can hardly be said for the younger Eiditz’s Public Library, in which much of the mid-century turgidity remains.

The wholly remarkable quality of the Coatestworth-Pardee-Wright house in Soldier’s Place, is due to the fact that the Buffalo architect, Edward Lansing, made what is practically a line for line copy of Richardson’s finest wooden house, the Stoughton house in Cambridge.

In the nineties Richardson’s pupils, McKim, Mead and White, leaders of the reaction against his picturesque, medieval style, built several houses in Buffalo. Possibly the implication of the academic reaction with its return to formal symmetry and archeological correctness of detail are more effectively presented in the work of George Cary and in many characteristic houses of the nineties and the first quarter of the present century.

Employing Upjohn, Richardson, Eidlitz and McKim, Mead and White, and with her own architects educated in the east, Buffalo might seem to have become architecturally, in the late nineteenth century, an eastern city. She turned her back on the elevators, those great industrial monuments which continued to speak of Buffalo’s close connection with the middle west and displayed the possibilities of building for new purposes on a new scale. Yet, as a matter of fact, the two best known buildings in Buffalo of this period are by Chicago architects and serve to make plain that Buffalo was even more, around 1900, the gateway to the middle west than she had been earlier.

The Guaranty Building, now the Prudential, is not Sullivan’s first skyscraper, but many find it his best. Built in 1896 it makes use of the new skeleton construction developed in Chicago a decade previous. It was soon to revolutionize completely American building methods. A second skyscraper built in Buffalo the same year by another famous Chicago architect, was the Ellicott Square Building by Burnham. At the time it was the largest office building in the world. While Burnham attempted, like the eastern architects of the day, to clothe the new construction and the new scale of his monster building in the academic Renaissance vocabulary of masonry introduced by McKin, Mead and White, Sullivan continued with his Guaranty Building the development of a free and expressive clothing of a metal frame. He had first tried this successfully six years earlier with the Wainwright Building in St. Louis.

The grace and elegance of his design, the vertical expression so appropriate to a building rising isolated like a tower above its neighbors, are not lost in the web of rich ornamentation which Sullivan used on his terra-cotta surfaces. Sullivan was not concerned with major problems of design alone; indeed, he was more interested in the new grammar of ornament. Some of the ornamental work on this building, particularly the iron work of the elevator cage, represents perhaps, the last really great work in decorative design created in the western world.

— by Henry-Russell Hitchcock