Detroit’s Belle Isle Aquarium: An Idiosyncrasy of Identity, Style, Modernity, and

Spectacle

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Eric M. Birkle

May 2019

© 2019 Eric M. Birkle. All Rights Reserved. 2

This thesis titled

Detroit’s Belle Isle Aquarium: An Idiosyncrasy of Identity, Style, Modernity, and

Spectacle

by

ERIC M. BIRKLE

has been approved for

the School of Art + Design

and the College of Fine Arts by

Samuel T. Dodd

Lecturer of Art History

Matthew R. Shaftel

Dean, College of Fine Arts 3

Abstract

BIRKLE, ERIC M., M.A., May 2019, Art History

Detroit’s Belle Isle Aquarium: An Idiosyncrasy of Identity, Style, Modernity, and

Spectacle

Director of Thesis: Samuel T. Dodd

Inspired by the city of Detroit’s substantial redevelopment in recent years – particularly the State of Michigan’s capital investments in Belle Isle Park, the Detroit

Zoo’s proposal for a new aquarium on the downtown riverfront, and the Detroit

Riverfront Conservancy’s plans to establish West Riverfront Park – this thesis examines the cyclical civic interest in the design of public parks and the construction of communal spaces within them through the case study of the Belle Isle Aquarium, completed in 1904.

Each chapter functions as an arterial avenue within a theoretical and empirical framework which begins with a consideration of the nuanced circumstances surrounding the aquarium’s commissioning, including how design requirements set forth by the Detroit

Parks and Boulevards Commission combined with the European study of architect Albert

Kahn to produce an aesthetic which fuses grotesque, Auricular, and Mannerist elements.

Also investigated is the way in which aquatic design and international exposition culture coalesced to imbue Detroit with connections to specific histories and influenced the aquarium’s embodiment of grandiosity, mystery, beauty, and spectacle. Later, the way in which the aquarium integrates museological and educatory practices to effectively train its visitors to become more civilized, worldly, and – most indeterminately – modern, is examined, thus returning the dialog to the backdrop of the contemporary. 4

Dedication

To my grandmother Sylvia, an avid educator and a native of Detroit who cherished the

city despite its shortcomings.

5

Acknowledgments

This thesis is, for me, the thrilling result of a developmental journey through intense passion and frequent vexation. Producing it was not a wholly independent endeavor; rather, it was actuated and fostered by the network of people and institutions into which I entered via Ohio University. I envision it as a contribution to the free and collective knowledge essential to humanity and would thus like to thank my committee members (Sam Dodd, Charles Buchanan, and Marion Lee) not only for their guidance through this entire two-year process, but, more importantly, for their belief in me and the truths I aim to reveal through my research.

Especially directive was Sam’s mentorship, which I know will be impactful for years to come. To that end, I would also like to thank my art history cohort for their unwavering support and recurring distractions, particularly Sarah Grabner, Candace

Bembenick, and Rachel Harper. Never could I have imagined that the pursuance of graduate school would involve forming such incredible friendships, but they have certainly made me a better person and a more cultured art historian. Yet, for the inception of that interest I must thank my parents, Kurt and Raelene Birkle, who fostered my scholarly mentality from a young age and always encouraged engagement with the arts.

Without them I would not be here to introduce this scholarship to the world, and I only hope that it will be received with as much love as I have instilled in it.

6

Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments...... 5 List of Figures ...... 7 Preface: Promulgating Importance ...... 10 Chapter 1: Laying Foundations ...... 14 Securing a Protean Island...... 14 Forming a World-Class Park ...... 19 Commissioning an Aquarium ...... 26 Chapter 2: Ideating Thalassicism ...... 32 Conceiving a Portal ...... 32 Revering the Grotto...... 40 Chapter 3: Surveying Prototypes ...... 51 Examining Aquariums ...... 51 Looking to International Expositions...... 60 Chapter 4: Edifying Detroit ...... 70 Embodying Eclecticism and City Beautiful ...... 70 Creating a Museological Space ...... 76 Epilogue: Anticipating the Future ...... 86 Figures...... 90 Bibliography ...... 131 Appendix: Timeline of Albert Kahn’s Formative Tour of Europe, 1891 ...... 139

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List of Figures

Page

Figure 1. Jacques Nicolas Bellin, La Rivière du Détroit depuis le Lac Sainte Claire jusqu’au Lac Erie / Plan du Fort du Détroit, 1764 ...... 90 Figure 2. Frederick Law Olmstead, Diagram of Belle Isle Showing Rigolettes and “The Fair Ground” (at A), 1882 ...... 91 Figure 3. Map and Satellite Image of Belle Isle Showing a Concentration of Development at its Western End, the Location of the Belle Isle Aquarium, and Olmstead’s Rigolettes, 2019...... 92 Figure 4. Albert Kahn and George D. Mason, Main Floor Plan of the Aquarium & Horticultural Building, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1900 ...... 93 Figure 5. Giovanni Trognon, Rainwater Wellhead in the Cloister of Trinity at the Monastery of Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, Italy, ca. 1712 ...... 94 Figure 6. Albert Kahn, Well in Bologna in Court of Palazzo Bevilacqua [Ariosti], 1891, Graphite on paper, University of Michigan Museum Art ...... 95 Figure 7. Michele Sanmicheli, Palazzo Bevilacqua, Verona, Italy, 1532 ...... 96 Figure 8. R. Robertson & Co., Terra Cotta Portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium, 1901 ...... 97 Figure 9. Portion of: Albert Kahn and George D. Mason, Elevation of (Horticultural Building) Pavilion / Section Thro’ (Horticultural Building) Palm House and Aquarium / Side Elevation (of Aquarium) / North Entrance to Aquarium, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1900 ...... 98 Figure 10. Portion of: Albert Kahn and George D. Mason, Entrance & Dome of Horticultural Building, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1900 ...... 99 Figure 11. Rainwater Wellhead in the Cloister of the Church of San Lorenzo, Venice, Italy, ca. 1580 ...... 100 Figure 12. Red curtain motif adorned with dolphins and fantastical animals (from a wall to the left of the entrance in a house in the Via Stabia), ca. 79 CE ...... 101 Figure 13. Jean LePautre, design for Triumph of Neptune (from the series Classical Uprights), 1659 ...... 102 Figure 14. Unidentified artist, Grotesque Faces, 1st century CE, Fresco, Domus Aurea, Rome, Italy ...... 103 Figure 15. Roman Emperor Hadrian, Canopus and Serapeum at Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, Italy, early 2nd century CE ...... 104 Figure 16. Unidentified artist, Façade of the Grotta Grande (completed in 1593) at the Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy, ca. 1790, Hand-colored drawing, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum...... 105 8

Figure 17. Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann and Balthasar Permoser, Nymphaeum at the Zwinger Palace of Dresden, Germany, ca. 1710-1728 ...... 106 Figure 18. Interior of the Belle Isle Aquarium in 2016 ...... 107 Figure 19. Alphonse de Neuville, Frontispice for 1871 Edition of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers by Jules Verne...... 108 Figure 20. Prévost, Untitled (Interior of the Aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden, Paris), ca. 1861, Pastel and gouache on paper, Musée Carnavalet ...... 109 Figure 21. Prévost, Untitled (Exterior of the Aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden, Paris), 1860, Engraving ...... 110 Figure 22. Interior of the Aquarium at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn di Napoli in the early 21st century ...... 111 Figure 23. Exterior of the Aquarium at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn di Napoli, ca. 1872 ...... 112 Figure 24. Unidentified artist, Boston Aquarial Gardens, Bromfield Street, 1859, Lithograph and watercolor on paper ...... 113 Figure 25. Map of Woodward’s Gardens Showing Aquarium at 11, San Francisco, California, ca. 1875 ...... 114 Figure 26. Goulard-Henrionnet and Erhard R. Bonaparte, Plan du Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation du Bois de Boulogne, 1865, Hand-colored engraving...... 115 Figure 27. Exterior of the United States Fisheries Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893, Hand-colored photograph ...... 116 Figure 28. Rand, McNally & Co.’s Indexed Standard Guide Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, 1893 ...... 117 Figure 29. Louis Kamper, Exterior of Main Exhibition Hall at Detroit’s International Exposition of 1889 ...... 118 Figure 30. After a drawing by Schell and Hogan, General View of the Buildings and Grounds of the Detroit International Fair and Exposition, 1889, Hand-colored engraving on paper ...... 119 Figure 31. Orazio Scarabelli, after Bernardo Buontalenti, Naumachia in the Court of Palazzo Pitti, 1589-1592, Etching on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art ...... 120 Figure 32. Gray Lithographic Company, after a painting by Charles Graham, Bird’s-Eye View of the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1903, Chromolithograph on paper, Missouri Historical Society ...... 121 Figure 33. Edward H. Bennett and Frank Miles Day, Plan for the Center of Arts and Letters, Detroit, 1913, Detroit City Plan and Improvement Commission ...... 122 Figure 34. Casino, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1910, Hand-colored lithograph on paper (Postcard) ...... 123 9

Figure 35. Bird’s-Eye View of the Villa Comunale in Naples, Italy in the early 21st century...... 124 Figure 36. Interior of Aquarium, Belle Isle, Detroit, Mich., ca. 1910, Hand-colored lithograph on paper (Postcard) ...... 125 Figure 37. Giulio Romano, Courtyard Façade of Palazzo del Tè (1524-1534) in the early 21st century, Mantua, Italy ...... 126 Figure 38. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Plan for an Ideal Museum, 1817-1819 ...... 127 Figure 39. Ferdinand Dutert, Façade of the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy in the early 21st century, Paris, France, 1898 ...... 128 Figure 40. Aquarium, Belle Isle, Detroit, Mich., ca. 1904, Hand-colored lithograph on paper (Postcard) ...... 129 Figure 41. Interior of Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, 2000 ...... 130

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Preface: Promulgating Importance

For nearly half a century Detroit, Michigan has been perceived in popular global culture as a grim singularity of urban decay. Following the 1967 Detroit Riots and subsequent “white flight,” historians have helped to craft this notion through the repeated presentation of Detroit as the American pinnacle of crime and civic failure, and contemporary historiography has only served to cement this bias in academic circles.1 A particularly strange and concerning practice is the negation of Detroit’s crucial importance in the development of American art and architecture from the late nineteenth century – when Detroit was deemed “The Paris of the West” for its stately streets – through 1940, when it was the fourth largest city in the nation by population (above Los

Angeles).2

Following Detroit’s historic bankruptcy filing in 2013, a slew of redevelopment and revitalization has taken place both downtown and in previously destitute neighborhoods such as Midtown, Brush Park, Corktown, and Rivertown. While foundations for a new skyscraper are laid on a vacant lot where the former headquarters of Hudson’s department store once stood – long a symbol of the city’s downturn in cultural and economic integrity – an article published in the Detroit Free Press on May 1,

1 Scholarship subscribing to this narrative includes but is not limited to the following: Kyle Brooky, Abandoned Detroit, Mount Pleasant, SC: America through Time (Arcadia Publishing), 2019; Scott Martelle, Detroit: A Biography, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014; Yves Marchand, et al., The Ruins of Detroit, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2010; Philip Levine, Detroit Disassembled, Bologna: Damiani Editore, 2010; and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 2 “Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1940,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, published (online) June 15, 1998, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab17.txt 11

2018 revealed that “the Detroit Zoo is actively pushing to construct a large aquarium on the downtown Detroit riverfront — possibly on prime vacant land next to Hart Plaza.”3

But Detroit is already home to arguably one of the most singular aquariums in the world: The Belle Isle Aquarium. As its name implies, the Belle Isle Aquarium is located in Belle Isle Park – an island situated just three miles east of downtown in the center of the Detroit River. Another site of major redevelopment, Belle Isle (as it is referred to colloquially) was maintained by the City of Detroit from its purchase in 1879 until 2013.4

However, in 2013 the state of Michigan recognized the need for a multitude of improvements on the island and initiated a thirty-year lease of the park, making it

Michigan’s one-hundred-second state park as of February 2014 – one-hundred-ten years after construction of the aquarium was completed.5

Sadly, despite the Belle Isle Aquarium’s construction amidst the City Beautiful movement – a cultural and civic ideology in which Detroit was a main contender – and its integration with Belle Isle’s growing list of public attractions, the significance of its history was, over time, forgotten by the city to which it was devoted, and its identity and reputation diminished by its closure in 2005. Yet given the city of Detroit’s increased attention in the last decade, as well as the ongoing reinvestment in Belle Isle, a thorough

3 JC Reindi, “Detroit Zoo Pushing to Build Huge Aquarium in Downtown Detroit,” The Detroit Free Press, published May 1, 2018, https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2018/05/01/detroit-zoo- aquarium-downtown-detroit/569853002/ 4 Thomas Featherstone and Michael Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003), 7. 5 “Belle Isle Becomes a State Park Today, Improvements Continue,” Press Releases, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, last modified February 10, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140512214819/http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0%2C4570%2C7-153- 10371_10402-321698--%2C00.html 12 consideration of the architectural, historical, cultural, and societal magnitude of the Belle

Isle Aquarium is a project long overdue.

Indeed, as the ninth oldest aquarium in the United States and the fifth oldest still in operation, the Belle Isle Aquarium provides irreplaceable insight into the public spectacle that defined aquarium culture in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6

Far removed from the light, expansive designs of contemporary aquarial architecture, such as those proposed for the new aquarium to be constructed by the Detroit Zoo, the

Belle Isle Aquarium’s cavernous interior and grotesque façade function as a time machine in marine conceptualization, transporting visitors into murky, eerie, and briny seas.7 Yet they also stand as a testament to the centuries-old desire for immersive simulation which in nineteenth-century aquarial architecture was induced through the exacting rhetoric of Thalassicism. A term conceived by the author, Thalassicism is employed to refer to a longstanding style of architecture that merges concepts of the thalassic (that which relates to the sea or water) with classical aesthetic principles.8

As such, through the case study of the Belle Isle Aquarium, this thesis positions

Detroit not within the unilateral dialogue of rust belt blight and decrepitude, but as a city imbued with purposefully selected and carefully melded histories. Further, it reveals

Detroit as a noteworthy developer of American eclectic architecture and as an understudied player in the late nineteenth century’s proclivity for civic beautification and

6 “Oldest Aquariums in the United States,” World Atlas, last modified April 25, 2017, https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/oldest-aquariums-in-the-united-states.html 7 For a detailed explanation of the grotesque, see the first paragraph of “Revering the Grotto” in Chapter 2. 8 For a more thorough elucidation of the term “Thalassicism,” please consult Chapter 2. 13 improvement – an identity that, in the twenty-first century, by way of media bias and political agenda, much of the global public has been encouraged to forget. To that end, the chapters that follow are intended to function as theoretical and empirical avenues – each individual yet arterial – which elucidate these histories. Like the convergence of

Detroit’s radial Boulevards at Campus Martius, such avenues do not represent an exhaustive roadmap of the Belle Isle Aquarium’s influences, but form a major conceptual intersection at its site and in its architecture.

The first avenue, presented in Chapter 1, considers the Belle Isle Aquarium from the standpoint of social history by examining the ways in which its conceptualization and design were informed by Belle Isle’s tumultuous past. Constituting the lens of traditional art history, Chapter 2 provides an avenue which ruminates on the ornament of the aquarium’s portal and the aesthetic implications of its interior. Chapter 3 offers a distilled architectural history by tracing an avenue to the Belle Isle Aquarium from the origins of its edificial and spatial archetypes, and in Chapter 4 a final avenue approaches the aquarium through an analysis of its cultural and museological context.

This multidisciplinarity – designed to extricate, illuminate, and propagate the truths of the Belle Isle Aquarium, which in its one-hundred-fifteen-year history has never been the subject of substantial erudition – is intentionally antithetical. While it is the author’s expectancy that the avenues presented be singly extended in their respective fields by future scholarship, this thesis is distinctly momentous for being the first to shine a holistic light into the nebulousness of the Belle Isle Aquarium – an irreplaceable cultural gem and veritable idiosyncrasy that sits right in Detroit’s collective backyard. 14

Chapter 1: Laying Foundations

Securing a Protean Island

Among New York City residents and those who visit the Big Apple from around the globe, the name of Central Park’s landscape architect is comparatively well-known.

In the mid- to late nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmstead designed the massive – and massively expensive – green space in central Manhattan that would later come to be the most iconic of his many projects. Hoping to secure a more economical design for a similarly grand park, in 1881 the City of Detroit commissioned Olmstead to develop a

“scheme” for the hitherto problematic tract of land known as Belle Isle, which the city had purchased for $200,000 from Mrs. Richard Storrs Willis just two years prior.9

Detroit historiographer Clarence M. Burton posits that Mrs. Willis had obtained ownership of Belle Isle following the death of her first husband, John B. Campau, who in turn inherited it from his father, Barnabas Campau, upon his death in 1845.10 However, not until the very end of the elder Campau’s life would the island come to be referred to as Belle Isle. According to Burton, in a prearranged meeting of “a great number” of civilians held on the island on July 4, 1845 (a day conducively dedicated to civic pride),

Mr. E. Goodell motioned for the land upon which they stood to be henceforth hailed as

Belle Isle.11 Unanimously supported, though purportedly without the consent of Barnabas

Campau, this decision came in part as a reaction to the latest in a long line of violent

9 Clarence M. Burton and William Stocking, “Parks and Boulevards | A History of Belle Isle,” in The City of Detroit Michigan: 1701-1922, Volume I, ed. Clarence M. Burton, Gordon K. Miller, and William Stocking (Detroit: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1922), 454. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 453. 15 happenings on the island – a shootout on November 23, 1836 between Mr. Arthur Rankin and Mr. Henry Richardson.12 Some accounts also suggest naming influence from the prestigious Detroit Boat Club, which wished to associate a more positive moniker with the island to which its members often raced.13

Prior to its rebranding by concerned civilians, Belle Isle was named Isle aux

Cochons (or Hog Island) by the region’s earliest French settlers (see the second island to the left of “Lac Ste. Claire” in Figure 1).14 According to Burton, pastoral usage positioned the island as a communal space from the outset of its European colonization, which he claims is supported by the actions of Detroit’s founder, Antoine de La Mothe

Cadillac, who granted the island to the inhabitants of the village as a common.15 In 1777, fourteen years after the region which had previously been governed by New France was ceded to British rule, the Quebec Register’s office issued the deed to Hog Island to

Lieutenant George McDougall. Though McDougall had been granted permission to claim the island in 1768 by England’s King George III, he co-signed the deed with the Ojibwa and Ottawa Chiefs Okitchewanong, Couttawyin, and Ottowachkin.16 The deed was subsequently passed from the McDougall family to the McComb family prior to

Barnabas Campau’s purchase of the island from David B. McComb in 1817.17 Yet

12 Ibid. 13 Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 28. 14 Burton and Stocking, “Parks and Boulevards | A History of Belle Isle,” 441. Settlers released their hogs and other livestock on the island firstly to protect them from attacks by “wild beasts and Native Americans” and secondly to prevent them from destroying the crops grown on the ribbon farms which surrounded the then-village of Detroit. 15 Ibid., 438, 441. 16 Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 13. 17 Ibid. 16 despite years of private ownership the island continued to be perceived and treated by

Detroiters as a public space.

However, Hog Island had simultaneously garnered a reputation of barbarism and violence which came to be linked with the untamed wildness of its natural condition. One of the earliest documented instances of bloodshed involved Chief Pontiac – the principle leader of several Midwest tribes in the mid-eighteenth century, including the Ottawa.

Peaceable toward the French but resentful of the new English settlers, Pontiac led an insurgence in Detroit which, notwithstanding early success, was ultimately quashed by the arrival of additional English troops. “Upset by this defeat, Pontiac’s men went to Hog

Island and murdered the three families who were its inhabitants at the time, along with much of the community’s livestock.”18 This incident anticipated later quarrels among island visitors which at times escalated into serious physical altercations (such as that which occurred between Rankin and Richardson).

Some sources also cite complaints of rampant prostitution and adultery among the young flâneurs and flâneuses – an indirect juxtaposition of the goings-on of Hog Island /

Belle Isle with those occurring concurrently in France, as depicted by Édouard Manet in his famous 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.19 Indeed, “since the inhabitants of

Detroit, like most other new cities at the time, were Europeans (or descendants of

Europeans), their models in city planning [and arguably social behavior] were

18 Ibid., 11. 19 Burton and Stocking, “Parks and Boulevards | A History of Belle Isle,” 454. Burton cites a woman who wrote to the Jacksonian – a newspaper published in Pontiac, Michigan from 1842 to 1873 – that “Hog” was a better name for the island because so many husbands went there without their wives. 17 reminiscent of Europe’s.”20 For Detroit’s parks, Parisian models were the principal inspiration; however, despite the Francophone nature of Belle Isle’s recently acquired appellation, many people questioned the possibility of turning a marsh-like environment

– just eighteen inches above water level – into a usable, let alone beautiful park.

“An unimproved area, abounding in native forests, sloughs, swales, and very unattractive,” Belle Isle was of interest to many wealthy businessmen and politicians who wanted to industrialize it through the establishment of a switching yard, as well as a tunnel or bridge “to better perform trade with Canada.”21 But “when the city’s people and politicians looked around and saw other great cities of the young nation establishing world-class parks (especially the Great Lakes cities of Chicago and Milwaukee, which had reserved large plats of water frontage for park use), it was decided that Detroit needed the same.”22 With the City of Detroit’s Park Act of 1871 – a resolution requested in 1868 by Alderman Richard Hawley of the Common Council – a Board of Park

Commissioners was formed and tasked with investigating and securing land to be purchased and transformed into such a park.23

Despite the Board of Park Commissioners becoming defunct in 1874 after several years of inaction and legal roadblocks at both the city and state levels, the purchase of

Belle Isle moved forward in 1879 following the “thousands of signatures” and “petitions

20 Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 23. 21 Burton and Stocking, “Parks and Boulevards | A History of Belle Isle,” 461; Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 18. 22 Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 7. 23 Burton and Stocking, “Parks and Boulevards | A History of Belle Isle,” 454. 18 in abundance” sent to Lansing by dedicated philanthropists.24 The principle reasons cited for Belle Isle’s selection over other contending sites included its affordable price and the perceived impossibility of locating a more beautiful place to improve health and civilization in the city of Detroit.25 However, considerations regarding the governing body to be assigned direct oversight of the park’s development and maintenance created tensions between Common Council members and the office of the mayor, and thus remained unrectified for an entire decade. Finally, in 1889, the legislature abolished the former Board of Park Commissioners and replaced it with the Detroit Parks and

Boulevards Commission, which “was to consist of four members who were to be nominated by the mayor and appointed by the council.”26

The general ambiguity of vision and lack of political solidarity regarding Belle

Isle’s future between 1879 to 1889 was experienced by landscape architect Frederick

Law Olmstead, who wrote in his self-dispersed considerations for “the park for Detroit” that “when to the question ‘What can the city do with [Belle Isle]?’ the answer ‘Make it a park’ was accepted, [and] it must have been with varying and generally vague imaginings of what a park would be.”27 During the interim of the Board of Park Commissioners and the later Parks and Boulevards Commission, Olmstead was contracted directly by four city Commissioners to provide Detroit’s rising cultural elite with a substantial space to carry out the leisurely activities perceived as intrinsic to the sophisticated, European-

24 Ibid., 457. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 460. 27 Frederick Law Olmstead, The Park for Detroit: Being a Preliminary Consideration of Certain Prime Conditions of Economy for the Belle Isle Scheme (1882) (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 11. 19 informed persona they sought to project.28 In addition to his reputation as the leading landscape architect in the nation, Olmstead was selected on account of his firsthand exposure “to the ways in which the old, metropolitan European cities retained natural vistas; this gave him an awareness of the possibilities for the new urban terrain that was developing in a young America.”29

Forming a World-Class Park

On August 29, 1881, by ordinance of the Detroit City Council, Belle Isle’s name was officially changed to Belle Isle Park.30 Though more of a manifesto than a thoroughly detailed proposition, Olmsted’s 1882 scheme for the park was “determined by the condition of [the] element[s] of the property,” which, he posited, constituted the larger part of its value.31 These elements included the island’s naturally dense forests and surrounding river water but excluded the marshy regions, which allowed mosquitos to breed. The fear of serious disease spread by such insects resulted in Olmstead’s plan to fill the island’s depressions with land redistributed from higher territories.32 Otherwise, however, he recommended minimal intervention and was “insistent upon ‘the genius of

28 Burton and Stocking, “Parks and Boulevards | A History of Belle Isle,” 461. 29 Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 25; Olmstead’s design of New York City’s Central Park and his similarly large-scale commissions in Buffalo (the Public Parks and Parkways System) and Montreal (Mount Royal Park) are among his earliest yet most significant projects and effectively launched his career. For further reading, please see: Frederick Law Olmstead et al., eds., Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks (The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted), Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015; Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century, New York: Scribner, 2000; and S.B. Sutton, ed., Civilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Writings on City Landscapes, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1971. 30 Burton and Stocking, “Parks and Boulevards | A History of Belle Isle,” 459. 31 Olmstead, The Park for Detroit, 33. 32 Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 24. 20 the place’ – that the island’s natural beauty and untouched vistas would provide more profound pleasure than any structure man could build.”33

Olmstead’s suggestions for structural development involved only the far western part of the island (nearest the city center), and included a large ferry dock and shelter, boathouses, a marching ground, a refectory, and police stations.34 Just one roadway –

Central Avenue – was to be constructed, and the eastern portion of the island was to remain untouched, save for a system of superficial drainage channels, which would flow through the ponds too deep to infill, thus reducing stagnation.35 Olmstead believed that these channels, or rigolettes as he preferred to call them, were particularly fitting for a park where, more than any other in the United States, boating was the most popular means of recreation.36 As an appeal to several publics beyond the cultural elite, Olmstead speculated that “persons unaccustomed to boats, timid people, invalids, and children, would find boating upon these proposed shallow and sheltered park-waters very enjoyable.”37

These subtle modifications and idyllic aspirations embody the late nineteenth century’s reverence for the picturesque.38 Yet Olmstead aimed to achieve further

33 Ibid., 25. 34 Ibid. 35 Olmstead, The Park for Detroit, 40. 36 James I. Robertson, A Creole Lexicon: Architecture, Landscape, People, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 180. The term “rigolet” derives from Louisiana French Creole and refers to a strait or narrows. “Applied in the plural in reference to a pass with several branches or channels…the feminine diminutive form [“rigolette”] was [reserved for] channels of a river or bayou. 37 Olmstead, The Park for Detroit, 40. 38 For further reading on the picturesque, see: Stephen Bending, “Vile Things: William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2017): 585-607; John Conron, 21 picturesqueness on Belle Isle through the removal of dead and “badly-grown” trees – a thinning which he contended would give light and air to the ground, thus producing pasturage, “a finer class of trees,” and a certain “beauty of grouping and landscape composition” throughout the woods.39 Though widely employed by Olmstead’s time, the concept of the picturesque landscape was officially developed by the English clergyman, artist, and writer William Gilpin in his 1768 art treatise, Essay on Prints.40 Defining that which is picturesque as a mixture of the beautiful and the sublime, such a landscape, according to Gilpin, exhibits qualities of smoothness, regularity, and order, while simultaneously embracing intimations of power and vastness.

Of considerable importance to the notion of the picturesque is the idea of the aesthetic as an effect. While “the effect” does not exist independently in nature, it manifests itself in the perception of the trained observer.41 Produced by the artful arrangement of natural elements, the picturesque is less of a naturally occurring phenomenon and more of a deliberately created quality. This ambivalence is underscored in a 2002 essay entitled “The Problem of the Picturesque,” in which David Marshall contends that, from its earliest theorization at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the picturesque has valued nature simultaneously “for its avoidance of the artful or artificial and [for] its resemblance to art.”42 He further notes that “the juxtaposition of originals

American Picturesque, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000; and Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927. 39 Olmstead, The Park for Detroit, 42. 40 “A Note on the Picturesque,” Museum label for exhibition, Lochs and Follies: The Picturesque in Scotland, Saginaw, MI, Saginaw Art Museum, September 16, 2017. 41 Ibid. 42 David Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 417. 22 and copies in the representations of nature as well as the representations of the imagination creates a double landscape in which the lines between art and nature are increasingly blurred.”43

In this way, the picturesque landscape may be viewed as the successor to

Mannerist garden design, which favored material mimicry and schematic elusiveness.

Indeed, much like its late sixteenth-century predecessor, the picturesque, due in large part to its conceptual complexity and contentual nuance, achieved an elevated status in the eyes of discerning critics. As such, it was common for late nineteenth and early twentieth-century landscape architects to embrace a picturesque sensibility in their work.

For Olmstead, employing the picturesque in Belle Isle’s design reinforced the meaning of its name (in English, Belle Isle translates to “Beautiful Island”), thus validating its 1845 rebranding and – at least until the onset of the Detroit race riots of 1943 – expunging its association with amorality and tempestuousness.

However, Olmstead also stipulated that the extreme western tip of the island be set aside for future “auxiliary arrangements” – or a grouping of structures – which he referred to as “The Fair Ground.” Describing its boundaries as indefinite, Olmstead correctly predicted that a bridge would eventually connect The Fair Ground to the mainland.44 Fittingly, the first bridge to Belle Isle was known simply as the Belle Isle

Bridge – a steel-and-wood construction that stood from 1889 to 1915. After being destroyed by fire, the Belle Isle Bridge was replaced by a rickety, temporary structure

43 Ibid. 44 Olmstead, The Park for Detroit, 44. 23 from 1916 to 1922. Finally, in 1923, the MacArthur Bridge opened to the public.45 Still in use today, the MacArthur Bridge was designed by Emil Lorch and draws heavily upon the aesthetics of Paris’ Pont Neuf which, despite its name, was completed more than three hundred years earlier. Though constructed after the period predominantly considered in this thesis, the MacArthur Bridge demonstrates Detroit’s continued interest in evoking

European tradition through French-like urbanity.

It seems appropriate, then, that such a bridge would lead today’s visitors directly to the island’s unofficial fair ground, whose structures, although less densely grouped than originally intended, were manifest from Olmstead’s foresight. Not including those ultimately erected in the island’s eastern or central areas, extant “auxiliary arrangements” include the Belle Isle Aquarium, the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory, the (defunct)

Belle Isle Zoo, the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, the Belle Isle Casino, the James Scott

Memorial Fountain, the Detroit Boat Club Training Facility, the Flynn Pavilion, and the

Remick Band Shell – all completed in the early to mid-twentieth century. Though aesthetically disparate, the vicinity of these structures loosely demonstrates the philosophy of the City Beautiful movement (which will be covered in greater depth in

Chapter 4).

To that end, in his considerations for the park, Olmstead wrote that “the more all these [structures] can be kept together within reasonable limits…the less will be the discord between them and the more essential rural elements of the park.”46 He suggested

45 “Douglas MacArthur Bridge,” HistoricDetroit.org, accessed January 22, 2019, http://www.historicdetroit.org/building/douglas-macarthur-bridge/ 46 Olmstead, The Park for Detroit, 44. 24 that a large building “of the character of those used in national expositions, such as that

[in 1881] held at Atlanta, [in 1882] at Denver, and [for 1883] proposed at Boston,

Cincinnati, and The Hague” could be constructed near the periphery of The Fair

Ground.47 Regarding the increasing number and magnitude of trade conventions and expositions, Olmstead went on to write: “We have not yet seen the full development of the tendency, and it will cost Detroit nothing to keep in view the possibilities she holds with reference to it on Belle Isle. I know of no other point on the lakes, possessing advantages of comparable value for the purpose.”48

This insinuation is among the earliest connections established between Belle Isle and the culture of world’s fairs and international expositions (a concept elaborated on in

Chapter 3). Albeit indirectly, Olmstead’s vision would again come to pass. Though no such events were ever held on Belle Isle, these considerations set the stage for an entertainment and education zone within Belle Isle’s framework. This zone (The Fair

Ground) is demarcated in Olmstead’s 1882 diagram of Belle Isle (Figure 2), as is the system of rigolettes he conceived. Though strikingly akin to that which may be observed from present-day consultations of Google Maps (see Figure 3) and in-person examination, some scholars claim that “the concentration of buildings at the west end of the island was never adopted…. Nor was Olmstead’s drainage-canal system implemented. The straight allée across the island was built, but with no accompanying

47 Ibid., 53. 48 Ibid., 54. 25 canals, and the low-lying areas on the edge of the island were made into lakes.”49 This interpretation is skewed by a too-literal scrutiny of the original concept, and borders on inaccuracy. In fact, not only were Olmstead’s rigolettes positioned almost exactly where he had planned them (circulating from the eastern end of the island through the center), the network was extended through a large pond (Lake Tacoma) to drain at the island’s western tip, thus adapting to the flow of the Detroit River.

Between Olmstead’s focus on rigolettes and the public’s fascination with boating, it comes as no surprise that a love of water would soon develop into a desire for engagement with that which lay beneath its surface. Surrounded by water on all sides,

Belle Isle, it was decided, was befitting of “features” designed to call attention to its own environment. Indeed, Olmstead had advocated for sylvan stateliness in the park’s eastern end and achieved Venetian-like aquatic stateliness with his canals.50 Why, then, should the western end, already devoted to a concentrated gathering of people and buildings, not further this mission through the establishment of horticultural and aquarial stateliness?

This intellection was in keeping with the late nineteenth century’s practice of encyclopedic codification, and it was thought that such spaces could pay homage to their environment through an orderly reproduction of the vegetal and subaqueous worlds.

Moreover, this bolstering of Belle Isle was part of a larger trend at the turn of the twentieth century, when “as Robert Wiebe demonstrated in his now-classic book The

Search for Order, most Americans did not conceive their identity in national terms but

49 Charles E. Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau, Frederick Law Olmstead: Designing the American Landscape, ed. David Larkin (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), 91. 50 Ibid. 26 rather in local terms.”51 With Belle Isle becoming a world-class park, Detroit’s beautiful island deserved beautiful architecture.

Commissioning an Aquarium

For the year following his high school graduation in 1883, Detroit-native David E.

Heineman was sent by his parents to study in Europe. While in Italy he visited the Naples

Zoological Station designed by German naturalist Anton Dohrn, which, although completed in 1872, had at the time of Heineman’s visit just opened “the world’s first modern aquarium.”52 Gazing upon its undersea wonders, Heineman vowed to bring a comparable establishment to his hometown – a goal he later helped realize as a Michigan state representative by sponsoring legislative funding.53 In November of 1899, he supplied the board of the Detroit Parks and Boulevards Commission with small plans for every zoological garden in Europe and one recently opened in New York City.54 Shortly afterward it was announced that the Detroit Common Council, upon the recommendation of the Ways and Means Committee, had directed the City Controller to issue and sell

$150,000 worth of bonds to be utilized in the construction of an aquarium, horticultural, and zoological buildings on Belle Isle Park.55

51 Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 210. 52 Jospeh Cabadas, “Member Led Creation of America’s Oldest Aquarium: Belle Isle’s Masterpiece,” Detroit Athletic Club News Magazine 103, no. 11 (November 2018): 42. 53 Ibid. 54 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards: July 1, 1899–June 30, 1900 Vol. 9 (Parks and Boulevard Commission records, 1886–1921, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI 48202): 117. 55 Ibid., 122. 27

These developments resulted in suggestions for a “trip of investigation” – which would encompass Buffalo, New York, and Washington – to be taken by the committee tasked with formulating a procedure to determine the requirements for the planned structures.56 This committee also consulted with aquarists, horticulturalists, zoologists, and other park commissioners in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Baltimore, and

Chicago in December 1899, and by the end of January 1900 had visited all known aquariums in the United States. However, they were collectively advised to consider as ideal models the aquariums located in the foreign cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin,

London, Melbourne, Paris, Brighton, and, of course, Naples.57

Indeed, stipulations set forth by the funding’s legislation as well as the positioning of the aquariums in Brighton and Naples (on the lowest levels of their respective facilities) would ultimately inform the footprints of the Belle Isle Aquarium and the Anna

Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory. The investigative committee wrote in their report to the board of the Parks and Boulevards Commission that they recommended “the aquarium be built in the basement or cellar underneath the horticultural building,” thus prevising a man-made, cavern-like ambiance.58 However, this requirement was not firm, and some commissioners cited the potentially preventative height of Belle Isle’s water table.

Nevertheless, the location recommended by the committee was adopted, and received support from George D. Mason, a member of the Michigan Chapter of the American

Association of Architects appointed to work with the Parks and Boulevards Commission

56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 132, 163. 58 Ibid., 162. 28 to develop a code of competition for the plans and specifications of the proposed buildings. He believed that the hybrid building should be built on a vista, and that a site superior to the southwest side of the island could not be selected.59 By unanimous consent of the commissioners, it was agreed: the aquarium-horticultural building would face the west at Inselruhe Avenue, and the zoological building would be constructed in the immediate vicinity.

The latter part of this decision was not only based on the nineteenth century’s predilection for the integration of aquarial and zoological gardens (a concept unpacked in

Chapter 3), but was also dictated by the pre-existence of the Belle Isle Zoo, which opened on the eastern side of Inselruhe Avenue in 1895.60 Yet considerations for a zoological building became overshadowed by lengthy discussions surrounding the aquarium- horticultural building and the costs associated with the complex technologies it would require. Given the lack of detail recorded in the Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of

Parks and Boulevards regarding the erection of a zoological building, one can infer that the project was quietly – if not officially – tabled. However, the budget proposed for the aquarium-horticultural building was capped at $100,000, thus constituting only two thirds of the $150,000 total allotted for the completion of all three structures.61 This figure was conveyed to prospective architects beginning on July 31, 1900, when the commission published their official advertisement requesting “Detroit architects only” to submit

59 Ibid., 177, 184. 60 “Historical Gallery and Fun Facts,” Belle Isle Conservancy, accessed April 29, 2018, https://www.belleisleconservancy.org/historical-gallery-fun-facts 61 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 9, 194. 29

“competitive designs for a combined aquarium and horticultural building to be erected on

Belle Isle Park (which building shall not exceed in cost $100,000).”62

The code of competition to which architects were required to adhere specified many technical requirements but contained few guidelines regarding aesthetics.63 The code’s ambiguity was further exposed when on October 22, 1900, while unboxing the eight submissions, it was discovered that the firm of Nettleton & Kahn had submitted two design proposals. However, because no rule had been violated both plans were considered, and one was selected as the competition’s winner.64 Comprised of architects

George Nettleton and Albert Kahn, Nettleton & Kahn began business in Detroit in 1897

(though Kahn had founded a solo practice two years prior). Their plan for the aquarium- horticultural building, though still conceived as a joint structure, was to juxtapose two above-grade components and connect them at the center. Marble was initially proposed for the aquarium’s main entrance stairway and floors, while the foundation was to be constructed of “hard burned brick” and the roof clad in slate.65

Yet none of this would come to be. As opposed to slate, terracotta tile was used in the construction of the roof, Schillinger Bros. was contracted to pour a granolithic

(fireproof metallic concrete) floor, and Henry Carew & Co. provided rubble limestone for

62 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards: July 1, 1900–June 30, 1901 Vol. 10 (Parks and Boulevard Commission records, 1886–1921, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI 48202): 28. 63 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 9, 194-196. 64 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 10, 74-75. 65 Ibid., 97-98. 30 the foundation.66 In fact, many elements of the original design were altered at the requests of various commissioners – requests which greatly influenced the aquarium’s final floorplan (Figure 4). One of the most significant changes was to the principal point of entry, which was shifted from the east end of the building to the north.67 In the original design, the main entrance was intended to sit directly opposite the west-facing entrance of the horticultural building, thus allowing visitors to progress in a continuous fashion from one end of the joint structure to the other. Given its new placement at the end of the aquarium’s singular linear gallery, the newly appointed façade was significantly narrower than originally intended, thus lending to the portal an exceptional grandiosity and obscuring the structure’s depth.

Unfortunately, Nettleton would not see the project through to fruition due to his passing during the final weeks of 1900. As such, Kahn operated independently until

October 21, 1901, when he notified the Parks and Boulevards Commission that George

D. Mason would be joining him to form the new firm of Mason & Kahn.68 This was the same George D. Mason who assisted in developing the code of competition for the aquarium-horticultural building, and thus the Detroit architect most capable of providing services in connection with it. Prior to this new partnership however, Kahn had requested and been approved by the commission to travel with their secretary to New York City

66 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 10, 98; Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards: July 1, 1901–June 30, 1902 Vol. 11 (Parks and Boulevard Commission records, 1886–1921, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI 48202): 35, 116. 67 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 10, 117. 68 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 11, 59. 31 and Washington, D.C. – and perhaps other cities as needed – to engage with the technical and decorative “fixtures” of their aquariums.69 Functioning as a capstone to inform components of the aquarium’s interior, this excursion provided Kahn with the opportunity to perfect his knowledge of the eclectic architectural climate that defined the late nineteenth century. Indeed, while the historicized style of the Belle Isle Aquarium was borne out of period concepts, it was also a revival of the European traditions to which Kahn bore witness in the early stages of his career.

69 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 10, 140. 32

Chapter 2: Ideating Thalassicism

Conceiving a Portal

Commonly known as “the architect of Detroit,” Albert Kahn was born in

Germany on March 21, 1869 and immigrated with his family to Detroit at the age of eleven. Shortly after turning fifteen he was apprenticed at the architectural firm of Mason

& Rice – a partnership involving the same George D. Mason who joined Kahn in 1901 to form Mason & Kahn.70 In 1891 Kahn was awarded a scholarship for a one-year formative tour of Germany, Belgium, France, and Italy, which contributed significantly to his professional development and effectively launched his career. Embracing the modus operandi of early European modernist architecture, Kahn procured a stylistic formula that to this day renders his buildings easily identifiable. “His legacy spans from the Ford

Motor plants in Highland Park to the art deco Fisher Building in Detroit. He also designed many of the buildings on the University of Michigan’s central campus, including the Burton Memorial Tower [and] Hill Auditorium.”71

In nearly all instances, the identities of Kahn’s buildings are tied to industry and new material – a theme echoed in most retrospective scholarship directed at the architect and his designs, including Claire Zimmerman’s 2017 article, “Albert Kahn in the Second

Industrial Revolution.” Presenting Kahn primarily as a functionalist and organizing her essay in a reverse-chronological format, Zimmerman begins with the architect’s late work

70 “Albert Kahn (March 21, 1869 - Dec. 8, 1942),” HistoricDetroit.org, accessed January 30, 2019 http://historicdetroit.org/architect/albert-kahn/ 71 “Albert Kahn’s European Travel Drawings,” University of Michigan Museum of Art Exchange, University of Michigan, accessed January 30, 2019, https://exchange.umma.umich.edu/resources/24727# 33 and progresses toward the beginning of his career. Zimmerman claims that this method was chosen to clear away historical overburden; however, it proves difficult to follow for one interested in Kahn’s influences from the late nineteenth century.72

Unfortunately, despite discussions of Kahn’s work for Packard and the Ford

Motor Company in a section titled “1910-1890,” and a mention of his “memorable non- industrial projects like the Fisher and General Motors buildings, as well as a string of newspaper headquarters, clubs, office buildings and warehouses,” not even an allusion is made to the Belle Isle Aquarium.73 This is likely due to one of Zimmerman’s sub-theses presented in the “1910-1890” section, which asserts that “cladding style followed utilitarian decisions and conventions prevailing in North American architecture at the time. Style was operationally irrelevant, as the factories show.”74 Regarding Kahn’s travel in Europe and his discovery of Renaissance and Mannerist architecture, the author dismissively notes that his journals indicate only occasional glimpses of creative inspiration derived from these styles.

Yet both played an integral role in Kahn’s career, especially early on, as documented by his “European travel drawings” in the collection of the University of

Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA).75 His studies in France and Italy in particular provided him with a rich stylistic vocabulary to draw upon when designing the Belle Isle

72 Claire Zimmerman, “Albert Kahn in the Second Industrial Revolution,” AA Files no. 75 (2017): 30. 73 Ibid., 30. 74 Zimmerman, “Albert Kahn,” 42. 75 “Albert Kahn’s European Travel Drawings,” University of Michigan Museum of Art Exchange. Following Kahn’s death on December 8, 1942, his family donated many of his drawings to the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Michigan. In 1972 they were transferred to the collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and today may be accessed through the museum’s digital archive, UMMA Exchange. 34

Aquarium, which in conjunction with the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory is considered his first major commission. Fittingly, in early March of 1891 the first stop on

Kahn’s formative tour was Venice – a city as famous for its scintillating lagoon as its prodigious architecture. There, as he would throughout western Europe, Kahn created numerous drawings in graphite, grease, chalk, and watercolor. Of great interest to him were Venice’s rainwater wells, including one near the Basilica dei San Giovanni e Paolo, which he rendered on April 8, 1891.76

Many such wells were fashioned by repurposing Roman, Romanesque, and

Renaissance capitals; however, others were more resolutely conceived and incorporated a canopy or gateway-like covering.77 These include the well at Palazzo della Zecca (around the corner from Piazza San Marco), the well in the cloister of the church of San Lorenzo

(in the Sestiere Castello), and the well in the Cloister of Trinity at the monastery of Santa

Maria dei Frari (Figure 5). Of these, the first two were erected or rebuilt in the mid- to late sixteenth century, while the third was commissioned by Antonio Pittoni and built by

Giovanni Trognon around 1712.78 Though it is unclear whether Kahn encountered these wells specifically, they provide a context for examining his drawing (Figure 6) entitled

Well in Bologna in Court of Palazzo Bevilacqua [Ariosti], likely completed between

March and April of 1891 during his stay in northeastern Italy.79

76 Ibid. 77 “Venetian Rainwater Wells,” Venice Italy Apartment Rentals, accessed February 3, 2019, http://veniceapartmentrentals.com/venetian-wells 78 Ibid. 79 “Albert Kahn’s European Travel Drawings,” University of Michigan Museum of Art Exchange. The most plausible scenario is that Kahn visited Bologna around the same time as his excursion from Venice to Verona in late April of 1891. For a more complete listing of the cities and sites Kahn visited during his formative tour, please see the timeline in the Appendix on pages 139 and 140. 35

The drawing depicts a well-head fashioned from a Corinthian capital and its flanking pillar, which, on the side visible to the viewer is ornamented with grotesque bandwork in the style made popular by Raphael for compartmentalized components (such as pilasters) of Renaissance interiors.80 The pillar is surmounted by a gargoyle in the form of a lion, whose open mouth spews water into the uncovered well-head below – a design harkening back to the acroteria of Ancient Egypt and Greece, which often served to channel rainwater away from temple roofs. As such, Kahn’s prolific rendering of Palazzo

Bevilacqua Ariosti’s and other sixteenth-century wells not only demonstrates his fascination with Renaissance and Mannerist notions of thalassic and grotesque designs, but also the ancient sources from which they derived.

Indeed, the portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium, through its pronounced rustication and banded columns, bears a striking resemblance not only to the wells at Palazzo della

Zecca and Santa Maria dei Frari’s Cloister of Trinity, but also to the first story façade of the “other” Palazzo Bevilacqua in Verona (Figure 7). Defined as a column with drums alternately larger and smaller, alternately plainer and richer in decoration, and / or alternately protruding, banded columns were first employed in Roman antiquity but were further explored and perfected during the Renaissance.81 Rustication, or

“masonry…where the joints between the stones are deliberately emphasized by sinkings or where the stones are left rough or worked in such a way as to afford a striking textural

80 Peter Ward-Jackson, “Some Main Streams and Tributaries in European Ornament from 1500 – 1750: Part 1,” Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin 3, no. 2 (1967); For a definition of the term “bandwork,” see the first paragraph of “Revering the Grotto” in Chapter 2. 81 “Banding,” Buffalo as an Architectural Museum, Buffalo Architecture and History, accessed February 3, 2019, http://buffaloah.com/ 36 effect,” was also employed by the Romans and, to a much lesser extent, the Greeks.82 It is worth noting that the peak of popularity for rusticated masonry occurred between 41 and

68 CE – a period of “great urban development and of architectural ostentation for Rome, which had by that point asserted its role as pivotal power within the Mediterranean.”83

Vital to securing the American empire’s control of continental watersheds and a salient example of its increasing urbanization, late nineteenth-century Detroit held a position of power not dissimilar from that of mid-first-century Rome. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that rustication was incorporated into the design for the city’s new temple of water, which symbolized Detroit’s power over the aquatic world. Ironically, the term rustication was first used in the literal sense to refer to the roughness with which the stones of rural buildings were laid, as well as to their unrefined surfaces. However, antique origins were romanticized during the Renaissance, and rustication came to be associated with architecture of character, representing that which was artful, learned, and sophisticated. This contrivance was underscored by Italian Mannerist architect Sebastiano

Serlio, who described rustication as a fundamental struggle between an artificer and the forces of nature.84

In the late nineteenth century, Victorians “rediscovered Mannerist architecture as something exactly suited to themselves.”85 Kahn was among these Victorians, and in a

82 John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.Y. Press, 1963), 51; Davide Turrini, “Greek and Roman Rustication,” Journal, Architettura di Pietra, published July 6, 2011, http://www.architetturadipietra.it/wp/?p=4952 83 Turrini, “Greek and Roman Rustication.” 84 Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture, 24. 85 Ibid., 28. 37 letter dated January 7, 1901 he communicated his general idea for the treatment of the

Belle Isle Aquarium’s main (north) entrance to the Detroit Parks and Boulevards

Commission, noting that it would be accessible by “wide and easy stone steps” and the doorway itself would be “treated with stone or terra cotta trimmings, in keeping with its importance.”86 This importance may be understood as the demarcation of a contrived threshold between the terrestrial and thalassic spheres, which was achieved by carving a veritable stone baldachin – reminiscent of the elaborate Venetian wells – over the doorway (Figure 8).87 According to the finalized plans, this projection was to be surmounted by a segmental (or rounded) pediment – itself broken at the crest by a rocaille-style cartouche encircling the seal of the City of Detroit – and flanked with rusticated columns sporting an architrave on which the word “AQUARIUM” would be carved in Roman square capitals (Figure 9). The banded element of the columns would extend into the portal’s archway, whose keystone would be carved into a mascaron – possibly depicting the sea god, Neptune. Its spandrels would be filled with combattant sea monsters and the recesses of the pediment would likewise by filled with combattant, naiant dolphins.88 However, to establish a consistency with the vegetal order devised for

86 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 10, 118. 87 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 11, 50. R. Robertson & Co. was contracted as of September 30, 1901 to provide ornamental “the terra cotta work” of the portal. 88 Eldred Ælfwald, “Blazoning of Creatures,” Tripod, accessed on February 4, 2019, http://dragon_azure.tripod.com/UoA/AnimalBlazonry.html In heraldry, beasts and monsters were drawn such that their main features were easily seen and identified, and their “attitudes” conveyed through a variety of poses. Since the features of land-based beasts differ from those that dwell under water, separate attitudes were adopted for each category. Many heraldic terms come from French and the major postures reflect this origin. The word “combattant” derives from the verb 38 the horticultural building (see Figure 10), the spandrels were ultimately ornamented with trophies containing cattails, gastropod shells, and flowers such as tulips and roses (see

Figure 8).

Yet the inclusion of Neptune and combattant dolphins is directly evocative of the well in the cloister of the church of San Lorenzo in Venice (Figure 11), whose architrave is surmounted by addorsed “sea monsters” supporting Neptune’s trident.89 These motifs find their origin in antiquity, as evinced by the renderings preserved as a result of Mount

Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 CE. Indeed, Pompeiian fabric depicting a red curtain adorned with dolphins and fantastical animals was discovered in a house in the Via Stabia (Figure

12), a short distance from the city’s baths.90 While the archetypal dolphin was likely developed even earlier, it is more important to consider its application in later architectural environments which, due in part to their historical proximity and the proliferation of ornamental reproductions in print, bore a more direct influence on artists and architects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.91

One such example is Jean Lepautre’s The Triumph of Neptune – a vertical frieze created in 1659 as part of a series called Classical Uprights.92 A disengaged architectural decoration, Lepautre’s composition (Figure 13) is exceedingly similar to the ornament of

combattre and can be translated literally as “fighting.” In heraldic imagery, this concept is depicted through any two carnivorous beasts facing one another across the center line of division. “Naiant” refers to a dolphin or other sea monster swimming fesswise (horizontally) – a common posture. 89 “Venetian Rainwater Wells,” Venice Italy Apartment Rentals; Ælfwald, “Blazoning of Creatures.” In heraldry, “addorsed” refers to any two beasts arranged back to back across the center line of division. 90 David Batterham, Auguste Dupont-Auberville, and Auguste Racinet, eds., The World of Ornament (L’Ornement polychrome [1869-1888] & L’Ornement des tissus [1877]) (Cologne, Germany: Taschen GmbH, 2015), 66. 91 Some of the earliest renderings of dolphins yet discovered are in the frescos at Knossos (ca. 1500 BCE). 92 Ibid., 671. 39 the pediment in the portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium. Near the center of the work, combattant, urinant dolphins seem to float between a mascaron (below) and a figure of

Neptune (above).93 The latter stands on a gilt trophy ornamented with bands of fish scales, and his billowing drapery intertwines with the swirling acanthus leaves of the background. Likewise amalgamated with surrounding elements, a concave shell motif, which reads as a pseudo-cartouche, crowns the uppermost portion, while the bottom section is comprised of two male figures who cling to acanthus leaves erupting from the mascaron’s mouth. Their merman-esque identities are conveyed through the indistinct outlines of the laurel covering their lower bodies, as well as their overlapping legs and submergence in water.

These hybrid creatures of lore trace their roots to the Sirens of Greek mythology; however, human-fish figures appeared in earnest on Romanesque portals and were subsequently proliferated through the grotesques of the late Renaissance and Mannerist periods. France’s School of Fontainebleau – artist Niccolo dell’Abbate in particular – is credited with bringing early Renaissance decorations of this sort, developed primarily by

Raphael, to greater fruition through enamel and ceiling painting.94 Such work at the royal

Palace of Fontainebleau was given a new lease of life “under the supervision of the decorator Charles Moench, whom [King] Louis-Philippe commissioned to restore the

Guard Room or Foyer in 1834.”95 This nineteenth-century reinterest in fantastical beasts,

93 Ælfwald, “Blazoning of Creatures.” In heraldry, “urinant” refers to a dolphin or other sea monster positioned vertically with its head(s) sinking downwards, belly to sinister (facing left) – a rare posture. 94 Batterham, Dupont-Auberville, and Racinet, eds., The World of Ornament, 484. 95 Ibid., 642. 40 cartouches, the Heraldic Style, and, especially, the grotesque is climacteric in the final design for the portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium, and thus necessitates greater elucidation through a tracing of its lineage.96

Revering the Grotto

In the lexicon of art history, the term “grotesque” has since the uncovering of

Rome’s Domus Aurea in 1480 seen frequent usage to describe the fanciful and sometimes comical interweaving (even synthesis) of gods, humans, animals, foliage, and inanimate object such as urns and musical instruments with an underemphasized framing structure, typically referred to as strapwork or bandwork.97 Such compositions allude to the shared characteristics of their individual components; thus, the grotesque may be said to embody anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. This description – derived from the

Italian word “grotta,” referring to a cavern or underground chamber, and originally to the subterraneous condition of the Domus Aurea – arose in the late fifteenth century out of the need for an expanded vocabulary to reflect the style of work previously unknown or otherwise forgotten by leading Renaissance artists and scholars. However, the pure

Roman version of the grotesque was quickly appropriated by decorative artists of the late

96 Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 41-42. The Heraldic Style “consists of paired animals arranged symmetrically to either side of an intervening central element.” It can be traced to the Paleolithic era, when the art of weaving – a common form of textile production – originated. 97 Marilena Mosco, “Anthropomorphism and Zoömorphism in the ‘Medici’ Picture Frames,” Auricular Style: Frames, The Frame Blog, published December 8, 2016, https://auricularstyleframes.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/anthropomorphism-and-zoomorphism-in-the- medici-picture-frames/ 41 fifteenth century, and through the subsequent centuries continued to undergo addional change and manipulation.

Also known as (Roman Emperor) Nero’s Golden House, the Domus Aurea was a villa constructed in the mid-first century CE slightly northeast of the Roman Forum, near the Colosseum.98 Much of the structure’s interior is covered in Third Style frescoes which, rather than plausible architectural elements incorporate fantastic and stylized columns and pediments, as well as senselessly positioned human and animal figures that could only exist in the imagined space of a painted wall.99 These latent realities, wherein strapwork itself constitutes the subject matter, were “visions of the mind, [whose] situation can neither be rationally explained nor resolved.”100 This is likewise true of the

Fourth Style frescoes in Room 78 which, in a band of illusory panels between larger sections of painted swags and pier glass encircling narrative scenes, feature triads of mascarons (see Figure 14). Those located in the center are most embellished, exhibiting visages of satyrs and beards which miraculously sprout pairs of spiraling tendrils, each terminating in a cochlear design comparable to the golden spiral found in nautilus shells.

As elements of pre-modern discovery, such decoration would come to influence art and architecture of the sixteenth through early twentieth centuries. In the case of the

Belle Isle Aquarium, Kahn’s final design for the spandrels, through its incorporation of

98 Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York: G. Braziller, 1982), 10. 99 Jessica Ambler, “Roman Wall Painting Styles,” The Khan Academy, accessed February 7, 2019, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/roman/wall-painting/a/roman-wall- painting-styles 100 Sune Schéle, Cornelis Bos: A Study of the Origins of the Netherland Grotesque (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1965), 79. 42 gastropods, is in keeping with the ancient tradition of pursuing divine proportion. Further, the aquarium’s mascaron, with its equivocal mélange of Neptune’s beard and stalactite formations, is derivative of the ambiguous mascarons in Room 78 of the Domus Aurea.

In both examples there occurs a fusion of mythological beings with aberrations on real plant life (cattails comprise Neptune’s crown while the spiraling tendrils of the satyr are most likely acanthus) – a characteristic of the grotesque, and particularly of the later

Auricular style.

Certainly, grotesque décor featured prominently in the scheme of Renaissance villas, both as interior ornamentation and as well as sanctuary landscape. In keeping with the Renaissance – and ultimately the late nineteenth century’s – belief that all knowledge could be categorized in encyclopedic fashion, period theory held that “to focus on the garden grotto [was] to focus on the artificial cavern – the creation of a cosmos in miniature, a nature that [was] cultivated and controlled.”101 Additionally, grottoes came to be inextricably linked with water and water features, though this was in no way an advent of the Renaissance; rather, it was conceived of in the ancient world. From studies of Greece came the sixteenth century’s knowledge of the nymphaion – temples or shrines dedicated to the nymphs (mythological spirits inhabiting rivers and pools) – which according to Pliny appeared in conjunction with thermae and aqueducts.102

Of course, the Roman world saw the erection of numerous similar structures, the most idiosyncratic of which was Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. Specifically, the villa’s

101 Miller, Heavenly Caves, 10. 102 Ibid., 17. 43

Canopus (referring to the pool), and even more-so its Serapeum (referring to the apse-like grotto), represent a direct connection to the earlier nymphaion (see Figure 15).103 Primary figures of the Renaissance and Mannerist periods also feature prominently in the dialog of the grotesque – the Medici family being one of the most important examples with their commissions in both Florence and Paris. The most notable of these – the Grotta Grande – was designed in part by Vasari and completed by Duke Francesco I de’ Medici in 1593 in the Boboli Gardens of Florence. It exhibits a nymphaeum-like façade (Figure 16) reminiscent of such structures as the House of Neptune and Amphitrite in Herculaneum and is camouflaged by artificial stalactites and figures of painted stucco.104

Carved stalactites are also present in the frostwork of the banded columns of the late Baroque Nymphaeum at the Zwinger Palace in Dresden, Germany (Figure 17). A form of rustication, frostwork (also called glaciation) refers to masonry sculpted as imitations of stalactites or icicles, and is a “particular ornament of classical grottoes, cascade houses and some garden gateways.”105 Frequently used to emphasize entrances, niches, and archways, frostwork is not only a fitting ornament for the portal of the Belle

Isle Aquarium, its application is nearly identical to that of the Zwinger Palace

Nymphaeum. However, like the façade of the House of Neptune and Amphitrite in

Herculaneum, the Belle Isle Aquarium’s portal demarcates the enclosure of water features, rather than serving as their backdrop, as in the Zwinger Palace Nymphaeum.

103 Ibid., 25. 104 Ibid., 36-37. 105 “Rustication,” Looking at Buildings, The Pevsner Architectural Guides, accessed February 11, 2019, http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/styles/classical/features/rustication.html 44

Equally inspired by stalactites – in particular those from the shrine-like Grotta

Grande – Bernard Palissy, a self-proclaimed grotto builder and multimedia craftsman, is believed to have constructed a grotto for Catherine de’ Medici in Paris. However, the evidence offered by grotto fragments excavated in the nineteenth century is itself inconclusive.106 Regardless, Palissy’s artistic impulse for the man-made cavernous structures that appear as though entirely crafted from nature emphasizes the importance of meticulous simulation in the perceived authenticity of the grotesque. Indeed, Palissy

“wanted, above all, to give an impression of weather-beaten ruggedness to his creations,” and was simultaneously “so attached to his favorite reptiles that instead of confining them to the grotto, their natural environment, he used them to decorate his earthenware dishes…”107

These creatures of the cavern and the artificial grottoes constructed during the

Renaissance were significant influences on the Auricular style of the early seventeenth century. Developed more extensively in Northern Europe than in Italy – most notably in the Netherlands and Germany – the Auricular style was largely decorative and suitable for smaller-scale work or intimate spaces. Comparable to Palissy’s earthenware, it was applied most often to utilitarian silver and other tableware, though it was also commonly used in the designs of cartouches and fantastic compositions, specifically for works on paper. Such media is fitting, given the Auricular’s derivation from the solid, outer material of the grotto and the liquid water it typically enclosed. “[P]artly shell and partly

106 Leonard N. Amico, Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 69. 107 Peter Ward-Jackson, “Some Main Streams and Tributaries in European Ornament from 1500 – 1750: Part 3,” Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin 3, no. 2 (1967). 45 flesh, [Auricular] design illustrates both of the two main types of ornament to originate from the grotto: the hard, rough, scaly motifs drawn from rocks and shells, and the soft fleshy forms derived from snakes and lizards and other denizens of the grotto.”108

Given the intrinsic melding of animate and abiotic components in public aquariums, the incorporation of Auricular elements in the design of the Belle Isle

Aquarium is auspicious. Rather than explicitly, the interior expresses this sensibility through a subtle juxtaposition of opalite tile and plate glass tanks containing living creatures (Figure 18). Though traditionally white, Kahn chose, for its water-like sheen, a green opalite to adorn the barrel vaults. Despite the assertion by several scholars that this tile was supplied by Detroit’s revered Pewabic Pottery – famous for its blue-green ceramic glazes – it was in fact provided by a company called P. Christa & Sons – a crucial distinction given the ability of ambient light to more deeply penetrate glass

(opalescent or otherwise) than glaze applied over opaque ceramic.109 Moreover, opalite gives the aquarium visitor a veritable sense of submergence through its ability to closely mimic the translucent layers of water, thus simulating an entirely sub-aqueous environment. This notion was historically augmented by the metallic concrete floor which, through its inherent flowing and ebbing was intended to give the impression of liquidity, and by way of its tenebrosity referenced the shadowy depths of lakebeds and ocean floors.110

108 Ibid. 109 Featherstone and Rodriguez, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem, 50; Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 11, 76. 110 Originally, green opalite covered the walls surrounding the tanks, but during a renovation in 1954-55 it was replaced by a black, semi-gloss tile. The same renovation saw the granolithic floor covered in a green 46

Indeed, color would come to be the most defining characteristic of the Belle Isle

Aquarium’s interior and the key to developing its enigmatic and elusively inconstant environment. The eerie green of the opalite, for instance, is derivative of the coloring of sea creatures both real and imagined. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when underwater exploration was still in its nascent stage, fantastic conceptualizations pervaded perceptions of the unknown. The popular 1870 science fiction novel by Jules

Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: A Tour of the Underwater World, evinces this period inclination and its nefarious subtext, which had evolved only minimally since the Middle Ages (see Figure 19). In fact, the color green was first associated with the Devil in stained glass artwork of the mid-twelfth century, and “most of the green animals that appeared in the Devil’s bestiary lived in water or frequented the watery world. It is possible that green evoked not only their evil natures but also this tie to the aquatic universe. [At the time,] water was generally considered and represented as green…[and] would remain so in some cases until well into the modern period.”111

Such negative and deceitful perceptions extended not only to the grotto denizens mentioned previously, but also to other aquarium-worthy creatures such as frogs and crocodiles, as well as their imagined and mythological precedents – namely sirens and hydras.112 This conceptual abstraction of multiple beasts is in keeping with the

Auricular’s characteristic ambiguity and the highly affected symbolism of green. Visceral

tile similar in hue to the opalite tile, though markedly less luminous. Both modifications remain visible today. 111 Michel Pastoureau, Green: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 91, 97. 112 Ibid., 93-94. 47 associations also exist for the color black, which is effectively green’s only complement in the Belle Isle Aquarium. Despite the presence of four skylights, the interior spaces are dim and murky and suggest the indistinct essence of a cave. As such, notions of mystery and intrigue are amplified by reduced visibility, which in relationship to the creatures surrounding them positions visitors as psychologically vulnerable. Paradoxically, blackness – or the relative absence of light – is not only conceived as sinister, but is also linked with the creative power of dreams, nightmarish or pleasant.113

These spiritual – even religious – influences on the conceptualization of color may be extended to the grotto in its entirety. Especially important to the Renaissance understanding of the grotto was its role in biblical texts and significance in Christian mysteries, and like the grotto’s function in pagan traditions, those in the Holy Land acted as places of passage and were rooted in stories of creation. Many pagan cults, for example, most notably Mithraism, considered rock a primordial substance and contended that contact with it would manifest the magics responsible for Mithras’ divine birth. 114

Similarly, “the mystery of the Annunciation took place in the Grotto of Nazareth, not far from the well where Mary drew water. The fountain of the Virgin was deemed a source of life.”115

Likewise, the Belle Isle Aquarium not only harbors and nurtures aquatic life, but, through the carved substance which spews from below the cartouche and out of the mouths of the dolphins that adorn the pediment of its portal, reifies living water. A

113 Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 262. 114 Miller, Heavenly Caves, 30. 115 Ibid., 31-32. 48 biblical term present in both the Old and New Testaments, living water refers to Christ’s free spirit and implicates him as the source (or fountain) from which life – natural, spiritual, and eternal – flows.116 As such, living water, described as lively and vigorous and full of spiritual motion, is in its physical rendering an anthropomorphic motif.117 It simultaneously captures the capricious nature of water – an element subject to chemical and physical change – and the mercurial temperament of the divine, which accounts for the ambiguous materiality of its depiction at the Belle Isle Aquarium. This may also be understood as a nineteenth-century product of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century practice of extracting (and therefore decontextualizing) individual elements from the ornamental lexicon and fabricating histories through the incarnation of fantasy. In other words, that which is remote from reality (living water) was deemed a suitable postulation for a time when underwater life was more often fantastically imagined than rationally understood.

However, even beyond the Auricular style the grotesque has embodied secular whimsicality and ambiguity, particularly in the cartouches developed during the eighteenth century.118 Much like the Rococo variants that preceded it, the cartouche

116 Andrew Gifford, The Living Water: Or, The Work of the Spirit, as the Sanctifier and Comforter of Believers in Jesus. Being the Substance of several Discourses, at the Tuesday Evening Expository Lecture, in Eagle-Street, Holbourn (London: J. Lewis, 1746), 3-5. 117 Ibid., 5. 118 Batterham, Dupont-Auberville, and Racinet, eds., The World of Ornament, 440, 526. The cartouche is primarily a sculptural ornament which evolved from solid wood via leather cut and rolled in countless different ways until arriving at the S-shaped and foliated scrolls and Rococo rocaille of the eighteenth century. The medieval escutcheon surmounted by its helmet and mantling lies at the origin of the cartouche, though it was not until the fifteenth century that the Italians began to give this type of motif the attention it deserved. Typically, cartouches set off an inscription, a symbol, or a historical or mythological image (in the case of the Belle Isle Aquarium, the seal of the City of Detroit) and surround it with ornamentation linked to a larger composition. 49 which crowns the portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium simultaneously incorporates interlaced bandwork and a “rocaille,” which has no precedent in classical art but represents “the familiar rocky substance extracted from grottoes and fountains…fused with the bold plastic volutes that originated in [France’s] Palace of Fontainebleau.”119

Cartouches such as this confuse perceptions of space and volume through the employment of relentlessly complex patterns and obscure surfaces. Furthermore, “the oscillation between two and three dimensions – between pattern and representation – add[s] to the difficulty of grasping [the] grotesque decoration in its totality, of separating primary from secondary elements, and it intensifie[s] the beholder’s sense of wonder…”120

Certainly, a primal component of Thalassicism is the precipitation of wonderment through obscure and dynamic ornament. Though not an official term in the in glossary of art historical or architectural scholarship, Thalassicism is an observable current in the ideation of water through edificial ventures. As its name implies, it brings together the reiterated vocabulary of classicism and the cryptic lexicon of the thalassic sphere, which is manifest in Western visual culture across centuries, places, and religions. The result are structures of an uncannily familiar yet peculiar nature, which helps to explain the indeterminate fascination with Detroit’s Belle Isle Aquarium. While its character is shared with (and adapted from) countless historical precedents both structural and conceptual, its identity is a distinctive amalgamation conceived by Kahn from late

119 Ward-Jackson, “Some Main Streams and Tributaries: Part 3.” 120 Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early-Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York: Yale University Press, 1995), 125. 50 nineteenth-century marine conceptualization. As such, the Belle Isle Aquarium stands as a culmination of Thalassicism as it was expressed prior to modern submarine exploration.

Additionally, owing in part to the cognizance Kahn gained during his formative tour, as evidenced by the collection at UMMA, it confers with French and Italian exemplars, while affirming Detroit as the preeminent power in the aquatic world.

51

Chapter 3: Surveying Prototypes

Examining Aquariums

In many ways, the exterior style of the Belle Isle Aquarium is the product of a stylistic lineage propounded in a series of three articles by Peter Ward-Jackson entitled

“Some Main Streams and Tributaries in European Ornament from 1500 – 1750 [Parts I-

III].” The methodology contained therein – presenting the grotesque as a “type of ornament which flows like a broad river” through scrutiny of the inspiration and reception theories present in generations of artistic output – establishes a framework for considering the Belle Isle Aquarium as an estuary, in which the romance of the grotesque merges with functionalist design.121 However, because very little has been written about the Belle Isle Aquarium by historians of any kind, it is necessary to situate this functionalism in conversation with its predecessors, not only in the context of architectural similarities but also in the evolving concept of public space at aquarial and zoological gardens in Europe and America.

Historically, aquariums have rarely been studied in their own right, and extant research almost exclusively examines the domestic aquarium and the desire for aquatic entertainment – forged through the aquarium’s design and materiality as well as the enigma of its living contents – on the non-public scale. In order to move the discussion of the public aquarium away from the practice and toward a focus on the significance of the product, a case study on nineteenth-century paradigms is required. Those most

121 Peter Ward-Jackson, “Some Main Streams and Tributaries in European Ornament from 1500 – 1750: Part 1,” Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin 3, no. 2 (1967). 52 comparable to the Belle Isle Aquarium in spatial function and ichthyological exhibition include, as indicated in Chapter 1, l’acquario della Stazione Zoologica di Napoli (or, the aquarium at the Zoological Station in Naples, Italy) and l’aquarium du Jardin d’Acclimatation du Bois de Boulogne (or, the aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne

Botanical Garden in Paris, France). While the former still stands and has gone largely unchanged since its erection in 1872, the latter, constructed in 1860 under the direction of then-emperor Napoléon III and empress Eugénie, was described on December 30, 1871 in an article from The Illustrated London News as having been “recently destroyed.”122

This destruction may have come about during the Siege of Paris in 1870-71, thus restricting the lifespan of the aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden to a single decade. Unfortunately, as with the Belle Isle Aquarium, there is a significant lack of scholarship addressing the short-lived structure; it even goes unmentioned on the historical page of the Jardin d’Acclimatation’s website.123 Nevertheless, it was completed just seven years after the first-ever public aquarium – the Fish House at the Gardens of the London Zoological Society – and engendered the design of the gallery (or saloon) in

London’s Crystal Palace Aquarium, which opened in 1871 and was boasted theretofore as the largest aquarium ever built.124 In fact, the Crystal Palace Aquarium featured sixty tanks ranging in size from 40 to 4,000 gallons each, but admitted no more light than

122 “The Crystal Palace Aquarium,” The Illustrated London News, December 30, 1871, 637-638, quoted in “Aquarium History,” ParlourAquariums.org.uk, accessed February 12, 2019, http://www.parlouraquariums.org.uk/History/crystalPalace.html 123 “Plus de 150 ans d’histoire,” Le Jardin d’Acclimatation, accessed February 12, 2019, https://www.jardindacclimatation.fr/150-ans-histoire 124 “The Crystal Palace Aquarium,” The Illustrated London News, 637-638. 53

“necessary to enable the animals to be seen clearly and to cause the very small growth of vegetation necessary for their health.”125

Referring to the interior of the Crystal Palace Aquarium, in 1873 Edward

Newman, writer for Zoologist, declared that “the great bulk of water in the ocean being

[in] ‘dark un-fathomed caves,’ the plan of keeping it dark in an aquarium is obviously little more than a direct obedience to the teachings of Nature.”126 Albeit indirectly, this decision was imparted by the gallery design of the aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne

Botanical Garden (Figure 20), which allowed light to penetrate into the viewer’s space through “transparent glass cages.”127 These cages (tanks) lined only one side of the linear gallery and were set into the windows which spanned the symmetrical front of the building between its entrance and exit portals. As portrayed in an engraving of the exterior published in an 1860 edition of L’Illustration and confirmed in a later “Stroller’s

Guide” of the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden, the aquarium contained fourteen identically-sized tanks (Figure 21).128 These windows-tanks – preemptive of the electric backlighting utilized in spaces of soft ambience – provided the gallery’s exclusive source of illumination by filtering natural light through the refractive translucency of water.

Similarly, the original tanks in the Belle Isle Aquarium were lit via ambient light

125 Ibid. 126 Edward Newman, “Era III. – Commercial and Ambitious,” Zoologist 8, Second Series (November 1873): 3,741-3,759, quoted in “Aquarium History,” ParlourAquariums.org.uk, accessed February 12, 2019, http://www.parlouraquariums.org.uk/History/newman3.html 127 Victor Borie, “Jardin de la Société d’acclimatation,” L’Illustration: Journal Universel 36, no. 4 (October 13, 1860): 252. 128 Guide du promeneur au Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, contenant une série de notices explicatives sur tous les animaux et les végétaux qui y existent avec l’indication de leur patrie et de leurs usages (Paris: Radenez, 1865), 175; Borie, “Jardin de la Société d’acclimatation,” 252. 54 from the windows in the attendant’s passage which encircled the building between the gallery and exterior walls (see Figure 4). However, unlike the aquarium at the Bois de

Boulogne Botanical Garden, no windows – other than the aforementioned skylights – were visible from inside the Belle Isle Aquarium’s gallery. Electric lights were present in the form of pendent fixtures which lined the gallery along the apex of its barrel vaults, but their diffusion was minimal. As such, the Belle Isle Aquarium may be said to more wholly manifest the dark aquarium paragon, which in nineteenth-century aquarium culture was the well-founded plea that but little light can penetrate the ocean.129 This was also made possible in part by the rejection of the Neoclassical rigidity in the aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden, whose extensive molding and coffered ceilings called attention to the non-naturalism of the interior environment.

Though considered small by today’s standards, the Belle Isle Aquarium is also substantially larger than was the aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden. It originally housed forty-four tanks varying in width though uniform in height at three feet, six inches.130 Twenty of these were located north of the central pool, with ten on either side of the gallery, while twenty-four were located to the south, with twelve on either side of the gallery.131 This was nearly double the size of the (Anton Dohrn) aquarium at the

Zoological Station in Naples, which still preserves its original twenty-six tanks.132 Yet the

129 Newman, “Era III. – Commercial and Ambitious,” 3,741-3,759. 130 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards Vol. 11, 136. 131 Ibid. 132 “Aquarium, the History,” Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn Napoli, accessed February 15, 2019, http://www.szn.it/index.php/en/aquarium/the-history 55 interior of the Belle Isle Aquarium bears greater resemblance to that of the Anton Dohrn

Aquarium than that of the aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden. In the former, portions of the gallery are crowned by shallow barrel vaults, while others lie beneath a series of sail vaults. However, unlike the uniformly tiled interior of the Belle

Isle Aquarium, the gallery walls of the Anton Dohrn Aquarium are clad in red brick and its vaults covered in white plaster (see Figure 22). On the wall space below, long, horizontal tanks are equally partitioned by a peristyle of Tuscan columns, the color of which matches that of the brick, resulting in an atmosphere of convincing earthiness, though, ironically, unconvincing subaqueousness.

Comparable to the natural hue of red clay (or utisol), this reddish-brown color is nearly identical to the sinopia used by artists in classical antiquity and later the

Renaissance. Defined as a pigment whose color depends on its content of red ferric oxide, sinopia was typically used to decorate Etruscan tombs and temples.133 Yet “because of the materials Etruscan architects employed, usually only the foundations of their temples

[survive];” however, “archaeologists have constructed a model of a typical Archaic

Etruscan temple based on Vitruvius’s account.”134 This model, now housed at the

Institute of Etruscology and Italian Antiquities at the University of Rome, exhibits a portico with sinopia-colored, Tuscan columns in the style of the sixth-century BCE – the height of Etruscan expansion. During that time, Etruria encompassed nearly all of

133 “Sinopia,” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, Inc., accessed February 15, 2019, www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/sinopia; Jeanie Puleston Fleming, “In the Tombs of the Etruscans,” The New York Times, March 25, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/25/travel/in-the-tombs-of-the-etruscans.html 134 Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art through the Ages: A Global History, 14th ed (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013) 165. 56 present-day Italy, including the ancient Greek city of Cumae, located just twenty miles from Naples and the Anton Dohrn Aquarium.135

Though ultimately identifying Naples as the ideal place to establish an independent institution for marine research, Dohrn first attempted to realize his vision in the Sicilian city of Messina. Describing this change as being “due to the great biological richness of the Mediterranean Sea and to the opportunity to develop…research of great international importance in a city internationally oriented and large,” it is likely that knowledge of the Etruscans – gleaned through mid-nineteenth-century excavations of the

Cumae site – influenced Dohrn’s decision.136 As “highly skilled seafarers who enriched themselves through trade abroad,” the Etruscans, whose civilization was centered between Cumae and Mantua, represented civil advancement, and thus imbued the Naples region with a history of achievement.137

This link to the classical world becomes more general in the design of the

Zoological Station’s exterior, which embodies the Beaux-Arts style – a period vogue and an effective conglomeration of Italian architectural identity (see Figure 23). However, through both its stylistic intricacies examined in Chapter 2 and its modern design cloaked deceivingly under historiated yet individualistic elements, the Belle Isle Aquarium supersedes both the aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden and the Anton

Dohrn Aquarium in the categories of size, convincingly simulated environment, and

135 Ibid., 166. 136 “Who We Are, Our History,” Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn Napoli, accessed February 15, 2019, http://www.szn.it/index.php/en/who-we-are/our-history 137 Kleiner, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, 167. 57 palpable relationship to site. Yet it was the aquatic life – and the impression of a vivarium in particular – which captivated Representative David E. Heineman during his visit to the

Anton Dohrn Aquarium, and thus what he most enthusiastically wished to recreate in

Detroit.

This interest was not unique to Heineman; rather, the vivarium’s two main derivatives – aquariums and terrariums – were rampantly manifest as aquarial and zoological gardens from the mid- to late nineteenth century. “What characterized the birth of modern aquariums was a new appreciation of aquatic life, not just because it served some purpose for man, but because it was worthy of respect and interest on its own merits. With this new-found appreciation…and the means to contain and display it, the first great public aquariums began to appear in Europe in the early 1850s.”138

Following a trip to England in 1856, American showman Phineas T. Barnum is credited with importing aquarium culture to the Unites States through the opening of the Boston

Aquarial Gardens in 1859 (rebaptized the Boston Aquarial and Zoological Gardens in

1860).139

While by that time there were already aquarium attractions at such institutions as

Barnum’s “American Museum – some designed locally, others purchased in England [–] the exhibits were not part of a zoo or botanical garden, but of a collection of curiosities and freaks and pure ‘humbug.’”140 However, following Barnum’s project, exhibits of marine life were incorporated almost unanimously into the zoological-horticultural

138 Jerry Ryan, The Forgotten Aquariums of Boston, 3rd ed. (Pascoag, RI: Finley Aquatic Books, 2011), 14. 139 Ibid., 14. 17, 28. 140 Ibid., 16. 58 context as supplemental attractions, and quickly resulted in the civic craze for Aquarial and Zoological Gardens.141 An impetus ensuing from public astonishment that fish could be exhibited like birds and other terrestrial beasts (see Figure 24), “their habitats studied at pleasure and their countless varieties and peculiarities made to contribute to…information and amusement,” this craze encompassed the city of Detroit, whose domestic exemplars for aquarial-zoological-horticultural hybrids included the Boston

Aquarial and Zoological Gardens (later Barnum’s Aquarial Gardens) and Woodward’s

Gardens in San Francisco.142

The latter of these opened to the general public in 1865 under the unofficial title

“Central Park of the West,” and was described as a botanical garden-amusement park- museum-outdoor theater-and-zoo all rolled into one.143 Its grounds comprised “gravel paths that passed fountains, streams, small lakes, hillocks, even manmade grottos and caverns,” and by 1873 incorporated the West Coast’s first public aquarium and a conservatory housing rare and exotic plants (see Figure 25).144 Such park-like surroundings were intrinsic to the aquarial-zoological-horticultural trifecta, as their complexes required significant space, which in turn came to incorporate subsidiary entertainment and educational venues. This is exemplified on Belle Isle through the interconnection of the now-defunct Belle Isle Zoo, the Belle Isle Aquarium, and the Anna

141 Ibid., 14. 142 Ibid., 27. 143 Charles Lockwood, “Woodward’s Gardens, c. 1860s: Historical Essays, Part 1,” FoundSF, accessed February 16, 2019, http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Woodward%27s_Gardens,_c._1860s 144 Christopher Craig, “Woodward’s Gardens, c. 1860s: Historical Essays, Part 2,” FoundSF, accessed February 16, 2019, http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Woodward%27s_Gardens,_c._1860s 59

Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory.

However, Detroit’s complex was perhaps most substantially informed by its

Parisian counterpart, the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden. There, roughly forty years prior, the forgotten aquarium was accompanied by several zoological components including a Silkworm Pavilion, a Bird Pavilion, a Henhouse, and a small Menagerie.145

An 1865 map of the park indicates that there were also free-range spaces or pavilions to observe web-footed birds, rabbits, lamas, ostriches, and deer (Figure 26).146 While for many years Belle Isle subscribed to this concept and allowed fallow deer to roam freely, particularly in its picturesque eastern portion, both Belle Isle and the Bois de Boulogne

Botanical Garden have undergone significant change in the last century. For instance, many of the latter’s above-listed components are no longer extant, and the deer were eventually removed from Belle Isle. However, both have seen the addition of “subsidiary entertainment and educational venues,” including Belle Isle’s aforementioned Dossin

Great Lakes Museum, and the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden’s Fondation Louis

Vuitton – a modern and contemporary art museum which now sits on the site of the former aquarium.

This reintegration of exhibitionary spaces, albeit through differing modes and genres, reveals the lasting influence of aquarial and zoological gardens. Though the

Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition would not take place until 1893, it is evident that

Olmstead’s plans for Belle Isle were affected by the emergence and subsequent

145 Borie, “Jardin de la Société d’acclimatation,” 151-152. 146 Guide du promeneur au Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, 199. 60 burgeoning popularity of zoological and aquarial gardens in the mid-nineteenth century.

As such, public aquariums, embodying grandiosity, mystery, beauty, and spectacle, may be positioned within the greater scholarship conducted on the civic grandeur and monumentality sought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the international exposition culture which encouraged the strengthening of national scientific and cultural identities through the showcasing of specific achievements.

Looking to International Expositions

“World Fairs originated with the 1851 London Great Exhibition of the Works of

Industry of all Nations, better known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Its success launched a world fair movement that, by 1900, ringed much of the globe.”147 Paralleling the scheme of such contemporaneous public parks as the Bois de Boulogne Botanical

Garden, the earliest world’s fairs assembled subsidiary entertainment venues – otherwise known as sideshows – at their peripheries. Such enterprises – Phineas T. Barnum’s exemplary among them – used objects and, in the case of aquariums, living specimens to present a world of spectacle and carnival, which accentuated the unusual, the bizarre, and even the grotesque.148 However, American exposition developers of the post-Civil War era found this presentation of the world unacceptable, and “distinguished themselves from their antebellum predecessors precisely because they strove for a rational, orderly, and systematic ideal.”149

147 Robert W. Rydell, “World Fairs and Museums,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, 135-151 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 135. 148 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 8. 149 Ibid. 61

Following London’s Great Exhibition, major world’s fairs included Paris’

Exposition Universelle of 1889, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 (formally known as the Louisiana Purchase

Exposition). Each contained the popular entertainment zones which, while briefly deplored by exhibition authorities of the 1870s and early 1880s, were subsequently

“managed as planned adjuncts to the official exhibition zones and, sometimes, incorporated into the latter.”150 This was certainly the case for the Aquarium of the

United States Fish Commission at the World’s Columbian Exposition, installed inside the

Fisheries Building (Figure 27). Quite unlike any other structure on the grounds, the space allotted to the Fisheries Building was irregular in form and in what was considered an unpromising locality.151

Designed in the Spanish Romanesque Revival Style by Henry Ives Cobb of

Massachusetts, the Fisheries Building “was 365 feet long and 165 feet wide, attached on either side by arched corridors to identical polygonal annexes.”152 It was constructed of staff – a mixture of cement, plaster of Paris, and fibrous material that dries into a hard surface – which, at the time, was a commonplace substance used to sculpt and mold the exterior ornamentation of temporary buildings. Such ornamentation for the Fisheries

Building included frogs, tortoises, eels, and other aquatic creatures, which adorned

150 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi, 413-441 (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2004) 435. 151 Randy, “Picturesque World’s Fair – The Fisheries Building (p. 35),” WorldsFairChicago1893, published February 26, 2018, https://worldsfairchicago1893.com/2018/02/26/picturesque-worlds-fair-fisheries- building-p-35/# 152 Chaim M. Rosenberg, America at the Fair: Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008), 205. 62 columns and arches in symbolic indication of the contents of the structure.153 Like the fair’s other main buildings, situated around a central lagoon, the Fisheries Building was painted white – a decision which would come to link it with the esteemed White City, thus elevating the status of the public aquarium in the eyes of the American and global publics.

During its six-month run, more than 150,000 people passed through the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition each day, making it larger than all of the U.S. world’s fairs that preceded it.154 “The Fisheries [Building] proved an exceedingly popular resort for visitors, and…the [aquarium] exhibit was decidedly the most remarkable ever seen in [the United States].”155 Indeed, only the aforementioned Boston Aquarial Gardens and Woodward’s Gardens in San Francisco – as well as the National Aquarium and the

Woods Hole Science Aquarium of Massachusetts – predate the aquarium at the Fisheries

Building.156 With a total of fifty tanks it was larger than each of its American predecessors as well as London’s Crystal Palace Aquarium, which housed thirty-eight public tanks.157 All fifty of these were located inside the eastern polygonal annex, where they were arranged in two concentric circles: “an outer circle of smaller tanks with glass fronts…lighted by windows in the [exterior] wall of the building and by heavy glass in

153 Randy, “Picturesque World’s Fair – The Fisheries Building (p. 35).” 154 “World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,” Chicago Architecture Center, accessed February 17, 2019, http://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/architecture-dictionary/entry/worlds-columbian-exposition-of- 1893/ 155 Randy, “Picturesque World’s Fair – The Fisheries Building (p. 35).” 156 “Oldest Aquariums in the United States,” World Atlas. 157 “The Crystal Palace Aquarium,” The Illustrated London News. Some accounts of the Crystal Palace Aquarium place its number of tanks at sixty, though twenty-two of these were reserved for the storage of surplus animals and located in a gallery not shown to the public. 63 the roof above; and an inner circle with both outer and inner faces [of] glass…lighted only from the roof, [and separated from the outer circle] by a passageway.”158 The space between the outer circle and the exterior wall was described as an attendant’s passage.

As such, the Aquarium of the United States Fish Commission may be considered the foremost archetype in floorplan and lighting design for the Belle Isle Aquarium. At just 82 feet wide, the latter contains only an outer layer of tanks and a singular passageway for the public, yet at 266 feet long it comfortably houses just six fewer tanks than did the former (see Figure 4). The Belle Isle Aquarium’s impressive use of space is further demonstrable by its original central pool, which at 25 feet in diameter nearly matched the size of the innermost pool at the Aquarium of the United States Fish

Commission. From the summit of the faux rockwork situated in the latter, which measured 26 feet across, “water fell in cascades and trickling streams,” which complemented the aquarium’s “generalized grotto-like and other ornamental designs.”159

Given this description and the resounding success of the World’s Columbian Exposition, it is conceivable that Kahn looked to Chicago to inspire both the interior and exterior decoration for Detroit’s aquarium.160

158 S. A. Forbes, “The Aquarium of the United States Fish Commission at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Report of the Director,” in Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission: Vol. XIII, for 1893, ed. Marshall McDonald, 142-158 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), 145. 159 Forbes, “The Aquarium of the United States Fish Commission,” 145, 147. 160 “Books Owned by Albert Kahn,” 1825-1944, Oversize Volumes, Albert Kahn Associates Records: 1825-2014 (Bulk 1900-1945), Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. The contents of Kahn’s personal library evince his interest in each of the conceptual tributaries propounded in this thesis as informing the Belle Isle Aquarium’s design. Especially telling are the publications regarding International Expositions and World’s Fairs, of which two concern the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris. While these postdate both the Belle Isle Aquarium and the World’s Columbian Exposition, Kahn’s library also contains several publications on the work of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, which designed the Agricultural Building for 64

In his renowned publication, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West,

William Cronon unerringly writes that “Chicago was not alone in restructuring the environment of the mid-continent during the nineteenth century.”161 However, he falters as he goes on to claim that “hundreds of lesser places were arrayed beneath [Chicago], and a handful of places tried hard to equal it.”162 On the contrary, it would be incorrect to assume that the dialog between the architecture of Detroit and Chicago was singular in direction. In fact, in the case of the Fisheries Building, and arguably in the World’s

Columbian Exposition as a whole, it was Chicago that followed Detroit’s lead. This assertion is verifiable through a scrutiny of the architecture and landscape design at

Detroit’s International Exposition of 1889 – often referred to as “Detroit’s Forgotten

World’s Fair” – as well as a comparison of Belle Isle to Chicago’s “Wooded Island.”

Situated in the middle of the lagoon at the center of the 1893 World’s Columbian

Exposition, Wooded Island is a primary component of Olmstead’s design for the South

Park Commission site – the green space into which a majority of the exposition was installed, now known as Jackson Park. There, Olmstead “created a Venetian-inspired pleasure ground, complete with waterways and places for quiet reflection in nature that

the World’s Columbian Exposition as well as many other Renaissance Revival-style structures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Savoyard Centre (or the State Savings Bank) in Detroit in 1900. In other words, while one cannot definitively assert that Kahn visited Chicago in 1893 – though his documented interest in the World’s Fair tradition and his direct, contemporaneous connection with McKim, Mead & White make it very likely – he was certainly inspired by the aesthetic themes embodied by the White City. 161 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 265. 162 Ibid. 65 complemented the grand architecture of the fair.”163 This description recalls the rigolettes and large ponds Olmstead conceived for the Belle Isle scheme eleven years prior, as well as The Fair Ground he wished to have incorporated at its west end. Though north-south in orientation rather than east-west, Wooded Island’s contour is nearly identical to Belle

Isle’s, being wide and rounded at one end and narrow and pointed on the other. Its configuration is equally similar, with sinuous pathways that taper toward the northern tip where the island’s only two buildings were erected (see Figure 28).

In addition to Olmstead’s translation of his previous work in Detroit, Henry Ives

Cobb’s design for the Fisheries Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition was suspiciously similar to the Main Exhibit Hall at Detroit’s International Exposition (Figure

29). Built entirely of wood rather than staff and designed by the young German- immigrant architect Louis Kamper, the Main Exhibit Hall “resembled a grand European palace [and] had a frontage of nearly 500 feet, a 20-story main tower, four corner towers, almost five acres of glass, and boasted 200,000 square feet of exhibition space.”164 It was the largest such building in the world at the time and embodied the Scottish Baronial

Revival style – a nineteenth-century architectural style whose origins lie in sixteenth- century Scottish castles, but which also derives inspiration from medieval tower houses and French Renaissance châteaux. Yet despite this northern European derivation, there is a certain commonality between the Main Exhibit Hall and the Spanish Romanesque

163 “Frederick Law Olmstead,” Chicago Architecture Center, accessed February 18, 2019, http://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/architecture-dictionary/entry/frederick-law-olmsted/ 164 Richard Bak, “A Fair to Remember,” Hour Detroit, accessed February 18, 2019, http://www.hourdetroit.com/core/pagetools.php?pageid=5027&url=%2FHour-Detroit%2FFebruary- 2009%2FA-Fair-to-Remember%2F&mode=print 66

Revival style of the Fisheries Building, not least of which are the stylistic elements conglomerated across historical regions and periods, or the flamboyantly colorful bunting.

Equally noteworthy was the positioning of both buildings between natural and artificial bodies of water: in Chicago, Lake Michigan and the exposition’s central lagoon; in Detroit, the confluence of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers and a man-made basin used for sailing races.165 Indeed, located on the 14-acre islet now known as Zug Island, water served as the agency for both access and entertainment at Detroit’s International

Exposition (see Figure 30). While in 1889 “ferryboats ran daily from Port Huron, Detroit, and Canada, carrying passengers to and from the fair,” “spectacles very similar in spirit, though normally different in form” were common in sixteenth-century Italy and at

Italianate courts in France.166 Such spectacles were known as intermezzi, or interludes, and served as serendipitous amusement which punctuated the greater mode of entertainment – typically theatrical productions – into which they were contextualized.

Intermezzi “grew immediately out of secular interruptions in the miracle-plays of the fifteenth century,” and were in many ways a comprehensive manifestation of Mannerism, most notably in their unexpectedness.167 Normally of five, their sequence was disconnected in scheme, but frequently displayed nautical or aquatic themes.

A remarkable intermezzo of nautical nature occurred in 1589 in the courtyard of

165 David Lee Poremba, Detroit: 1860-1899 (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 1998), 85. 166 John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967), 111; Poremba, Detroit: 1860-1899, 82. 167 Ibid., 104. 67 the Palazzo Pitti during the banquet following the wedding of Ferdinando de’Medici and

Cristina of Lorraine. A so-called “freak” occurrence within the intermezzi tradition for its sheer splendor and drama, it embodied the naumachia form of Greek and Roman theater and subsequently came to be known as the Sea-Battle of Palazzo Pitti (Figure 31).168

Involving a literal flooding of the courtyard, the intermezzo saw twenty ships – roughly seventy-five percent of which were “Christian and the remainder “Turkish” – vie for a makeshift castle erected between Boboli Gardens (the scene’s backdrop) and the courtyard’s central grotto.169 These features, along with the rusticated masonry of the palazzo walls, lent a patently thalassic sensibility to the event which was simulated in the seventeenth century and beyond by such works as the Grand Canal in the grounds of

France’s Palace of Versailles.

While the desire to contain and control water and the tendency to enact artifice as entertainment related thereto would culminate in the public aquarium of the nineteenth century, the intermezzo was over nearly as soon as it began. Such was the case with

Detroit’s International Exposition, which ran for only ten days between September 17 and September 27. However, just as intermezzi were, by 1600, frequently elaborate spectacles that attracted more attention than the main act, the exposition’s water basin – and moreover its underpinning of Detroit’s littoral identity through water-based recreation – would remain in civic memory much longer than its buildings, of which no

168 Ibid., 104, 108, 111. 169 Ibid., 110. 68 physical traces survive.170 Though the site was only used as a fairground until 1892, it is worth underscoring that the 1889 International Exposition in Detroit – the primary municipal descendent of New France in America’s Midwest – occurred at the same time as Paris’ first Exposition Universelle.

Thus, as Chicago looked eastwardly for French directive when organizing the

World’s Columbian Exposition, it did so inevitably through the lens of Detroit which, as posited in Chapter 1, maintained a richer, more authentic historical relationship with

Francophone culture, at least until the early twentieth century. In other words, while the

1904 Belle Isle Aquarium adopted elements of its layout and ornamentation from the

1893 Fisheries Building, the latter’s counterparts in the White City looked to Parisian

Beaux-Arts precedents. Indeed, architects for the White City domesticated these styles as a way of conveying that “the United States was leading the way into the next century and the future, just as the Italian Renaissance…was a period that transformed medieval

Europe into modern Europe through advancements in art, music, literature, and science.”171

Though the Main Exhibit Hall at Detroit’s International Exposition was by no means a Beaux-Arts style structure, it drew inspiration from the purest and most exemplary forms of French Renaissance architecture – the chateaux of the Loire Valley.

As such, it may be viewed as a notable regional catalyst for the Renaissance Revival movement – otherwise known as the American Renaissance – which spurred the designs

170 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Intermezzo Music and Theatre,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, last revised January 8, 2007, https://www.britannica.com/art/intermezzo-music-and-theatre 171 Marcia Amidon Lusted, “Alabaster Cities,” Cobblestone 35, no. 6 (July / August 2014): 34-37. 69 of Chicago’s White City. In 1904, as St. Louis set out to host the Louisiana Purchase

Exposition (see Figure 32), which would showcase “the grandiose ambition of the gilded age, forming a kind of collective tribute to the nineteenth century’s international understanding of the furtherance of peace, prosperity, and progress,” Detroit, through its substantial investment in Belle Isle, would do the same. With the opening of the Belle

Isle Aquarium and adjacent horticultural building, Kahn, by way of the architectural and landscape designs at the World’s Columbian Exposition, reflected Detroit’s history and entered into a conversation of which the city was already a part – the establishment of the

City Beautiful movement.

70

Chapter 4: Edifying Detroit

Embodying Eclecticism and City Beautiful

Like Kahn, Americans who embarked on tours of Europe were overwhelmed by impressions of grandeur and worldliness and were resultingly unsatisfied with the built environments to which they returned.172 Increasing cross-Atlantic tourism kindled a missionary zeal to counteract unbridled improvisation with architectural traditions that had met the test of time.173 However, in this search for a prototypical style, debates raged over relative nuance and led to the establishment of “ideals” that were often contradictory. Multiple iterations of the classical paragon illustrate this complexity – for example, Neoclassical, Beaux-Arts, and Renaissance Revival styles – and each boasted refinement and superiority over its precursor. This held true for the dizzying array of other revival styles as well – namely the Gothic, Romanesque, and Second Empire – which were likewise employed in projects of public architecture.

Indeed, by the late nineteenth century American architecture “had entered a phase of free eclecticism” – a phenomenon considered by Richard W. Longstreth in his

Winterthur article entitled “Academic Eclecticism in American Architecture.”174 Through a consultation of essays published in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, among them Century, Harper’s Monthly, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, and Brick Build, Longstreth illuminates the era’s argument over style and summarizes the

172 W. Hawkins Ferry, The Buildings of Detroit: A History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968), 76. 173 Ibid., 207. 174 Ibid., 77. 71 positions and approaches of various period architects and critics.175 From this process

Longstreth postulates that “academic eclecticism sought to reestablish a continuity with the past, forging a new link, after the ‘natural’ development of architecture had been broken by Victorian ‘excess.’”176 In other words, he positions academic eclecticism as a viable answer to the perceived need for a new, expressed American style, rather than as a problematic or regressive approach. In fact, he writes that academic eclecticism

“focuse[d] on aim, method, and origins, not style. The movement emphasized fostering the art of design through a scholarly knowledge of the past.”177

Nevertheless, Longstreth’s harsh distinction between academic eclecticism and

Victorian styles invites confusion. That is to say, his condemnation of the nineteenth century’s multiplicity of revival styles and subsequent praise of architectural diversity weakens his argument, as both were responses to the search for an American urban identity. Felicitously, with the establishment of the White City at the 1893 World’s

Columbian Exposition, Chicago responded to this calling in a considerably broader fashion by launching the City Beautiful movement, attributed to the integration of

Olmstead’s design for Jackson Park and chief exposition architect Daniel Burnham’s vision for harmonious social order. In essence, the movement “promoted the introduction of beautiful green space in urban centers nationwide to improve residents’ morale and quality of life.”178 Moreover, Burnham contended that “‘when a citizen is made to feel

175 Richard W. Longstreth, “Academic Eclecticism in American Architecture,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring, 1982): 55. 176 Ibid., 57. 177 Longstreth, “Academic Eclecticism,” 56. 178 “Frederick Law Olmstead,” Chicago Architecture Center. 72 the beauty of nature,…when he is lifted up by her to any degree above the usual life of his thoughts and feelings, the state of which he is part is benefitted thereby.’”179

“Like civic planners elsewhere, Detroit City Beautiful proponents conservatively sought to preserve a traditional urban order and a preferred building hierarchy in the face of unprecedented growth and change.”180 Their visions were born out in the oft-discussed

Art Center, which comprised two city blocks divided by Woodward Avenue and bounded by John R. Street to the east, Cass Avenue to the West, Kirby Street to the north, and

Putnam and Farnsworth Streets to the south (Figure 33). However, only two buildings – the Detroit Public Library and the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) – conformed to the aesthetics of the original plan, which called for an evocation of the Italian Renaissance. It is worth noting however, that the “new” DIA building, which opened in 1927, was designed by Philadelphia-based architect Paul P. Cret, who was given the commission upon the recommendation of Albert Kahn.181

This is certainly unsurprising, considering that Kahn’s work in the Belle Isle

Aquarium and adjacent horticultural building fell distinctly into the City Beautiful movement, though it is concerning how little attention has been given to this context of the 1904 structure. Indeed, it laid the foundation for these later endeavors through its carefully developed architectural style, dedication to civic improvement, and positioning within the city’s most substantial green space. Further, the Beaux-Arts components of its

179 Ferry, The Buildings of Detroit, 216. 180 Daniel M. Bluestone, “Detroit’s City Beautiful and the Problem of Commerce,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47, no. 3 (September 1988): 246. 181 Ibid., 261. 73 exterior design predicated conceptualizations for its predecessors at the Art Center, and when considered in conjunction with other nearby structures such as the Belle Isle Casino

(designed by the architectural firm of Van Leyen & Schilling and opened in 1908 [see

Figure 34]), Belle Isle, as initially postulated in Chapter 1, may be appraised as Detroit’s first manifestation of City Beautiful.182

Of course, Belle Isle itself features prominently in this appraisal, given its large expanses of natural beauty. While the classicizing architecture of the Anton Dohrn

Aquarium in Naples, Italy provided inspiration for Kahn’s design of the Belle Isle

Aquarium, its position in the center of the Villa Comunale (Figure 35) – the city’s most prominent and visible public park along the Gulf of Naples – was also foretelling of

Detroit’s interest in typifying City Beautiful. With the design of Belle Isle Park largely complete by the late 1890s, the city needed only to supply the architectural components.

However, the language of City Beautiful was never given to the aquarium-horticultural building or the casino project. Rather, they were considered in terms of the largely synonymous American Renaissance – a major contender in late nineteenth-century academic eclecticism.

Unlike other revival styles, the American Renaissance lasted well into the third decade of the twentieth century, but its high (or mature) period occurred between 1887 and 1917.183 This was a period when, “not burdened by the accumulative exertions of their forebears, sons and grandsons of founders of family fortunes had more leisure to

182 Ibid., 255. 183 Richard Guy Wilson, “Architecture and the Reinterpretation of the Past in the American Renaissance.” Winterthur Portfolio 18, no. 1 (Spring, 1983), 72. 74 think about outlets for their affluence. It was the heyday of conspicuous consumption[, and] matters of taste became paramount…”184 Eager to appeal to the tastes of such clients, Detroit architect George D. Mason – Kahn’s one-time apprenticer and short-lived partner during the Belle Isle aquarium-horticultural building project – lost no time in declaring his allegiance to the new style, employing it in both public and commercial buildings.185 In fact, Kahn was first exposed to Italian Renaissance architecture while working in Mason’s office, and its “disciplined design must have appealed to his logical mind.”186

To be sure, discipline was a quality sought by the genteel tradition, or the polite, refined, and cultured society to which the American Renaissance was attached. The tradition embodied a “complex of ideas that placed great emphasis on craftsmanship, a search for the [ne plus ultra], and a belief in beauty and the ideal of striving to create a high culture that would keep the forces of barbarism at bay.”187 On December 16, 1894, this high culture was the subject of an article published in the Detroit Free Press, which asserted that the building and encouragement of museums and other such institutions was the superlative means for civilization to distinguish itself from pandemonium.188 In the same year, George Brown Goode, an American ichthyologist and museum administrator known for his devotion to the “exhibitionary complex,” postulated that it would be “‘a happy day for our country when every town and village has its public library and

184 Ferry, The Buildings of Detroit, 207. 185 Ibid., 209, 214. 186 Ibid., 214. 187 Wilson, “Architecture and the Reinterpretation of the Past,” 74. 188 Detroit Free Press, December 16, 1894. 75 museum in a commodious little building,’” and pondered whether there could be anything more conducive to good citizenship.189 To clarify that which constituted “other such institutions,” Goode later broadened his definition of the exhibitionary network to include zoos, botanical gardens, and even aquariums.190

Having only gained prominence as a stand-alone structure in the preceding two decades, in 1904 the public aquarium was still largely a new form in the realm of civic spatial engineering. As such, it was the perfect canvas for conveying the notions of cultural and scientific progress set forth by the American Renaissance. Representing recent advancements in ichthyology and oceanography, public aquariums promoted a modern identity through the convergence of traditional and new media, exhibited by the relationship of the structure to its contents. Indeed, “scientific eclecticism,” or the mechanical language with which American architects combined motifs drawn from various European sources to create a new architectural entity, is evident in both the interior and exterior design of the Belle Isle Aquarium.191 The ornament of the portal is exemplary of the late nineteenth century’s predilection for the classifying, cataloging, filing, and recording of styles, motifs, and details, and may therefore be regarded as a signifier not only of the aquarium’s specimens, but also the authority of their rigidly sequential presentation.192

Likewise, City Beautiful was an embodiment of authority through its proposed

189 Rydell, “World Fairs and Museums,” 140. 190 Ibid., 141. 191 Wilson, “Architecture and the Reinterpretation of the Past,” 84. 192 Ibid., 85. 76 urban uniformity which, like world’s fairs and museums, “sought to discipline bodies – and body politics – in industrializing nation-states.”193 Such control was commonly exerted by those wealthy enough to acquire great collections of art objects, and these individuals also possessed the “civic influence and social connections with other like- minded leaders to found cultural institutions modeled on those of Europe.”194 While fewer people amassed large, private aquariums, institutions devoted to living collections, with their stringently edificial mission, did not differ substantially from their inanimate counterparts. In fact, just as the Eiffel Tower marked the gateway to knowledge – and the power associated with that knowledge – for visitors to the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium was designed to do so for Detroit residents and visitors alike.195 In this way, the Belle Isle Aquarium exemplifies the late nineteenth- century paragon of museological function which, through a sanctified view of art and a hazy idealism of beauty, sought to quash any and all displays of uncouth behavior.

Creating a Museological Space

Typically placed at the center of cities, late nineteenth-century museums “stood as embodiments, both material and symbolic, of a power to ‘show and tell’ which, in being deployed in a newly constituted open and public space, sought rhetorically to incorporate the people within the processes of the state.”196 Often massed together, museums also functioned as Arcadian experiments “aimed at invoking the mythical virtues of classical

193 Rydell, “World Fairs and Museums,” 142. 194 Jeffrey Abt, “The Origins of the Public Museum,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, 115-134 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 130. 195 Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 436. 196 Ibid., 439. 77 antiquity – learning and civic values – in the modern metropolis.”197 Indeed, American museums were part of a larger campaign to build an urban cultural infrastructure amidst burgeoning industrialization and fervid nation-building. Such infrastructure was designed to “provide the urban public with education and recreation,” and strove “to turn what was simply and crudely urban into something urbane.”198 In this way, despite their formulation as private non-profits, American museums served state and civic interests by linking the public good to public space. Moreover, by functioning as public trusts, they established their role as guardians of civilization and champions of gentility.

By the time of the Belle Isle Aquarium’s opening in 1904, Detroiters had become accustomed to this prescriptive nature of museological space. Facilitated in large part by the DIA, whose original structure was completed in 1894, the familiarity of residents with the display of fine art was instructive to Kahn as he conceived the presentation of aquarium tanks. In fact, art museum galleries, largely standardized in the Western world by the turn of the twentieth century, provided him with a solution to the problem of spatial comprehensibility. Further, though the art museum as an institution predates public aquariums by only a century, private art collections have been amassed since antiquity, and thus became seated in collective awareness long before the nineteenth century. As such, Kahn adapted the established etiquette of art-viewing to the contemplation of aquatic life by imagining the latter as delightfully animated pictures.

197 Michaela Giebelhausen, “Museum Architecture: A Brief History” in in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, 223-244 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 229. 198 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 201. 78

The result were tanks resembling “art hanging on the wall in a gallery,”199 appositely circumscribed in bronze frames intended to simulate the elaborately carved and gilt wood frames conventionally designated for paintings (see Figure 36).200

The educational nature of this art-gallery-like space, in addition to being viewed through Tony Bennett’s lens as an instrument of public instruction, may also be considered museological for its multisensorial galvanization.201 Enkindled by an 1862 interview with James Cutting, a pivotal aquarist credited with assisting in the launch of the Boston Aquarial Gardens who envisioned public aquariums as serious institutes of natural sciences designed to edify the citizenry, water was made palpable at the Belle Isle

Aquarium through extravisual stimulation.202 Indeed, one’s auditory perception was provoked by the babbling water in the gallery’s three original pools. These pools were uncovered and thus prone to rousing one’s sense of smell via odors given off by decomposing plant matter, fish waste, and naturally-occurring bacteria. Such smells were historically combatted with air-purifying plants such as ferns, which thrived on the interior’s high moisture content (see Figure 36). A result of evaporation from the open-air pools, this moisture was experienced as dampness by visitors, therefore gently piquing their sense of touch.

199 “Belle Isle Aquarium,” Belle Isle Conservancy, accessed February 23, 2019, https://www.belleisleconservancy.org/belle-isle-aquarium 200 Detroit Parks and Boulevard Commission, Minutes of the Detroit Commissioners of Parks and Boulevards: July 1, 1902–June 30, 1903 Vol. 12 (Parks and Boulevard Commission records, 1886–1921, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI 48202): 28. The glass for the Belle Isle Aquarium’s original tanks was provided by Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, while the bronze frames were supplied by Cassidy & Son Manufacturing Company of New York City. 201 Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 263. 202 Ryan, The Forgotten Aquariums of Boston, 29. 79

In this regard, the Belle Isle Aquarium reincarnates additional facets of

Mannerism: “the concept of the work of art as an enduring virtuoso performance

(‘something stupendous’) and the concept of the ‘absolute’ work of art.”203 That is to say, the adjudged imperishableness of the structure was intended to facilitate and encapsulate

– to retroactively apply a twenty-first-century descriptor – spectacular infotainment.

While sheer novelty and scientific advancement account for the entertainment aspect of this portmanteau’s diction, the information component is derived from a nineteenth- century conviction known as object-based epistemology. This exhibitionary practice held that if properly collected, classified, and arranged, and subsequently attentively and earnestly contemplated, objects themselves could convey knowledge, meaning, and understanding.204 In the case of the Belle Isle Aquarium, such “objects” extended beyond the living creatures on display to the holistic space of which they were a part.

As in the manmade grottos of the sixteenth century, this space achieved “a delicate balance between the semblance of reality and the semblance of a work of art.”205

This included the aquarium’s architectural components which, by merging the late nineteenth century’s penchant for erudition with the convolution of Mannerist conceits, forewent the superfluous facility of being at once understood in favor of stimulating obscurity and flattering the connoisseur capable of interpreting them.206 The result was a perplexing overlapping of “illusions of reality” and “illusions of artifice” comparable to

203 Shearman, Mannerism, 44. 204 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 7. 205 Shearman, Mannerism, 130. 206 Ibid., 162. 80 the frisson of delight and simultaneous discomfort experienced by beholders to the illusorily slipping keystones in Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Tè (Figure 37).207 Such designs in museological spaces served as preparatory indications and frequent reinforcements of the exacting academic environment that was the nineteenth-century exhibit gallery – art-based or aquarial.

This rigor was equally unrelenting in Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s model for a so-called “perfect” or “ideal” museum (Figure 38). Conceived between 1817 and 1819, far in advance of the visitor-centered principles of contemporary museology, Durand’s museum was first and foremost a place to display objects and accounted for a human environment only secondarily.208 Its galleries “were designed to be walked through in a single direction or along a designated course,” requiring visitors to heed edificial sequence by studying objects carefully and chronologically.209 This reflected the

Victorian museum’s aspiration of representing the world in a microcosm and is a philosophy evident in the floorplan of the Belle Isle Aquarium. Indeed, with a single entry and exit portal and subsequent linear gallery, the ambulation for each visitor – a severely elongated ellipse – is nearly identical. Prior to the 1950s remodel, footpaths were strictly controlled by permanently affixed metal stanchions which ran down the center of the gallery. This prohibited visitors from crossing from one side of the gallery to the other, thus literally confining them to a pre-orchestrated succession.210

207 Ibid., 157. 208 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 203-204. 209 Ibid., 204-206. 210 Dan Austin, “Belle Isle Aquarium,” HistoricDetroit.org, last modified 2018, http://historicdetroit.org/building/belle-isle-aquarium/ 81

Moreover, despite the era’s inherent attention afforded to both interior and exterior decorative language, “many in the nineteenth century saw museum construction as primarily an engineering problem rather than an aesthetic one.”211 This is evinced in period documents pertaining to aquariums as well, which at the expense of elucidating spatial syntax provide detailed accounts of the aquarist’s “curatorial” duties. These included not only the caretaking of fish and plant life, but also – predicated on extensive knowledge of the novel circuitous substructures necessitated by modern aquarial institutions – the monitoring of water storage, pumping, and heating systems. While annual reports focus on the technical requirements of the aquarial edifice and sometimes corroborate the planified presentation of their specimens, seldom do they reflect on the space provided for visitors. This lack of attention given to architectural intent is a phenomenon which Bill Hillier and Kali Tzortzi attribute to “the absence of a language of space in which to formulate clear distinctions between one kind of spatial layout and another.”212

Nevertheless, perceptible schemes can be identified among late nineteenth- century museological spaces devoted to the natural sciences. For instance, the footprint of the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy at the French National Museum of Natural History, designed by French architect Ferdinand Dutert and inaugurated in

It is unclear whether the original intention for visitor ambulation was a clockwise or counter-clockwise path. Prior to 1981, a stairwell joined the aquarium and horticultural buildings and allowed visitors from one to exit through the other or, conversely, to pass back and forth between the two while remaining on a predetermined linear path. 211 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 203. 212 Bill Hillier and Kali Tzortzi, “Space Syntax: The Language of Museum Space,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald, 282-301 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 282. 82

1898 ahead of Paris’ Exposition Universelle of 1900, is preemptive of the floorplan utilized in the Belle Isle Aquarium. Indeed, each structure exhibits a pronounced horizontality commensurate with the elongated forms of many world’s fair pavilions and is capped by the hipped roofs so characteristic of Renaissance Revival architecture. As a byproduct of positioning their main entry portals at a single structural bookend, each also features an unusually narrow façade (see Figures 39 and 40) compartmentalized in the fashion of Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century Porta Pia. Ensuing both façades are antechambers which expand beyond the width of the exhibit galleries; however, to achieve symmetricity, these curiously narrow centers are bounded by an expanded rear section and are likewise demarcated at their midpoints. As such, both structures form a subtly segmented continuum into which collections are arranged, thus underscoring the austere rationality of taxonomic classification.

Though less laden with ornament than the portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium, the façade of the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy contains multiple sculptural works similarly preluding the curiosities – even monstrosities – of its contents in the Kingdom Animalia. A result of persisting fascination with the strangeness of mid- nineteenth-century freak shows, this peculiarity was sustained by the structure’s decidedly Second Empire overtones – a style which by the 1890s had begun to wane in popularity both in Europe and America as other, more pared-down styles were employed to communicate the modern societal resolve for reason and liberation. Such stylistic 83 decisions sent crucial messages to prospective visitors as museums established spaces in which visual communication held as much importance as linguistic communication.213

Equally important then, particularly to aquariums, were convincing environmental simulations. While the technological barriers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prevented designers like Kahn from producing verily submerged spaces, the opalite-tiled barrel vaults of the Belle Isle Aquarium stand as a period approximation of today’s fully subaqueous, glass-covered walkways which provide the aquarium visitor with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of underwater life di sotto in sù (Figure

41).214 In both cases, the visitor is conceived as existing within a colossal tank which, in effect, constitutes the physical space of the aquarium. In the late nineteenth century, this loosely-devised practice was referred to alternately as mimicry or verisimilitude, which implies an uncompromising allegiance to truth (or that perceived as such). At the time, leading museums were viewed as having substantiated the most veracious expressions of truth, and American cities vied for financial support from their local governments in order to contend with their cross-country counterparts.215

Indeed, the identity of American museums was linked with competition, yet in this way they also “shared a certain set of assumptions about culture and national identity,” not least of which was the idea that the United States was the natural heir to

213 Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 6. 214 “Di sotto in sù” is an Italian expression which translates to “seen from below.” In the history of art, it references Renaissance and Baroque ceiling paintings or other creations designed to be exhibited overheard. In the aquarial context, it is similarly employed to describe the positioning of visitors along a simulated ocean floor or lakebed. 215 Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 208. 84 many Western European traditions.216 One such tradition meticulously examined hitherto is the construction of a museological idiosyncrasy: the public aquarium. This “museum type” played a profound role in edifying the residents of the city of Detroit and is municipally bespoken by the Belle Isle Aquarium. An artifact of Academic Eclecticism and the City Beautiful movement, the Belle Isle Aquarium continues to educate

Detroiters not only about ichthyology, oceanography, and aquariology but also, more recently, water pollution and environmental sustainability.

Much less evident to the average visitor are the lessons the Belle Isle Aquarium offers on the protean history of Belle Isle and its subsequent development by Olmstead, which provided an informative framework into which the aquarium itself was inserted; the nuanced circumstances of its own civic commissioning, including how design requirements set forth by the Detroit Parks and Boulevards Commission combined with

Kahn’s architectural study in Europe and resulted in a fusion of the grotesque, Auricular, and Mannerist tendencies; the way in which the far-ranging sources of its late nineteenth- century aquatic design coalesced to imbue Detroit with connections to specific histories; the multiplicity of ways in which international exposition culture influenced its embodiment of grandiosity, mystery, beauty, and spectacle; and, finally, the way in which it integrates museological and educatory practices to effectively train its visitors to become more civilized, worldly, and – most indeterminately – modern.

Yet the Belle Isle Aquarium even offers a lesson in modernity. Emblazoned at the center of the cartouche in the pediment of its portal is the seal of the City of Detroit,

216 Ibid. 85 adopted in 1827. It incorporates two Latin phrases: “Speramus Meliora,” which translates to “We Hope For Better Things,” and “Resurget Cineribus,” meaning “It Shall Rise From

The Ashes.”217 Alluding to the Great Fire of 1805 which burned the city to the ground and arguably, in the context of its employment at the Belle Isle Aquarium, the undesirable and destitute conditions of obstreperous industry, “these phrases make up the city’s motto, and [capture] the spirit of Detroit – one that meets challenges and evokes images of Detroiters working and building together.” While in Detroit as in St. Louis the poetic vision of City Beautiful would never be realized beyond piecemeal implementation, the Belle Isle Aquarium is proof that the ephemeral can become perdurable if we are willing and able to “grasp the wisdom of the old and introduce it into our present way of seeing.”218

217 “The Detroit Flag and Seal,” Detroit Historical Society, accessed February 24, 2019, https://detroithistorical.org/sites/default/files/lessonPlans/DetroitFlagAndSealFINAL.pdf 218 Joseph Heathcott, “Ephemeral City: Design and Civic Meaning at the 1904 World’s Fair,” Journal of Design History 26, no. 1 (October 2012), 41; This 2003 quote by David Ruben Piqtoukun was encountered by the author in July 2018 in the form of vinyl wall lettering exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada. 86

Epilogue: Anticipating the Future

Following a seven-year closure, the Belle Isle Aquarium proffered new potential for perdurability when it was reopened in 2012 by the Belle Isle Conservancy, whose mission is to “protect, preserve, restore and enhance the natural environment, historic structures and unique character of Belle Isle as a public park for the enjoyment of all – now and forever.”219 Through stabilization and renovation, the Belle Isle Aquarium not only resumed its previous role of fostering civic admiration and thalassic education, it metamorphized into a living historical remnant – its extancy a spectacle unto itself.

Increasingly radical in the twenty-first century, its tenebrous environment and grotesque evocations contrast the contemporary conceptualization of aquariums as streamlined and lustrous. For this reason, it has become a rewarding destination for travelers seeking a sui generis experience within the framework of the familiar. In this way, like a precious relic carried from the past into the future, its own anti-contemporary idiosyncrasy has emerged as the most salient “object” in the Belle Isle Aquarium’s collection.220

The conveyance of this tenet has been the ambition of this thesis, which also affirms Detroit as a noteworthy developer of American eclectic architecture and an understudied player in the late nineteenth-century’s proclivity for municipal beautification and improvement. In addition, by tracing the predominant theoretical, historical, and empirical avenues which led to the construction of the Belle Isle

219 “Belle Isle Conservancy | Nature. People. Places. (Homepage),” Belle Isle Conservancy, accessed February 25, 2019, https://www.belleisleconservancy.org/ 220 For further reading related to this claim, please see: Michaela Giebelhausen, “The Architecture is the Museum,” in New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, ed. Janet Marstine, 37-63 (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 87

Aquarium, the confluence of site and architectural style has been demonstrated as a pivotal signifier of a building’s function. The cyclicity of this certitude is not only evident in the capricious public sentiment expressed for the Belle Isle Aquarium between its date of inauguration and today, but also through the Detroit Zoo’s current deliberation regarding the construction of a new, larger aquarium along the progressively effervescent

RiverWalk. Indeed, as a symbol of renewed civic identity and prosperity, the RiverWalk

– established, maintained, and improved by the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy – has challenged Belle Isle’s nineteenth-century expansive, formal, and affectedly picturesque greenspace.221

As with riverfront redevelopment projects in other American littoral cities, this serene urban walkway has become the voguish milieu for Detroit’s flâneurs and flâneuses, and thus, in conjunction with the planned establishment of West Riverfront

Park, the definition of a public space intended to do public good. It is therefore unsurprising that the city should consider the erection of an aquarium near this site, particularly as it passes through the heart of downtown. As Detroit’s own municipal history has shown, an aquarium can help render a city beautiful; however, the potential for a new aquarium requires a conversation regarding its prospective relationship with the

Belle Isle Aquarium. So far, the contention has been addressed by Belle Isle Conservancy

President Michelle Hodges, who stated that the conservancy sees the Belle Isle Aquarium

221 “Vision & Mission,” Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, accessed February 25, 2019, http://detroitriverfront.org/our-story/vision-mission 88 as “filling a very special niche that can’t be duplicated” and would not consider a larger- scale aquarial counterpart to be “a threat.”222

Nevertheless, it is important for the Belle Isle Aquarium to consider its path to longevity. While museological practice of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied on the power of immense, encyclopedic collections to astonish and overwhelm the visitor – a practice manifest in the aquarial endeavor to incorporate an ever-increasing number of tanks – the twentieth century’s flood of mass production and the twenty-first century’s profusion of readily accessible information and imagery have produced a contemporary public exhausted by materiality and underwhelmed by the mere act of looking. As a result, many American museum-goers have demanded “calming spaces with plenty of room to move and breathe, where authenticity and quality

(narrative, functional, or aesthetic) trump quantity.”223

Therefore, without sacrificing Kahn’s original scheme, the Belle Isle Aquarium must grapple with a space conceived at the time of its completion as unquestionably ideal for ichthyological and aquarial study. Yet such space can achieve new authenticity in the twenty-first century by supplanting content homogenization and curatorial uniformity with dialogic sustenance and international application. A sense of tranquility and empowerment may be simultaneously imbued by re-enlivening the structure’s overtly

222 Reindi, “Detroit Zoo Pushing to Build Huge Aquarium in Downtown Detroit.” 223 Rainey Tisdale, “Objects or People?” in Active Collections, 1st ed., eds. Elizabeth Wood, Rainey Tisdale, and Trevor Jones, 21-33 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 25; For additional reading which considers the impact of the created environment on exhibition attendees, please see: Regan Forrest, “Museum Atmospherics: The Role of the Exhibition Environment in the Visitor Experience,” Visitor Studies 16, no. 2 (September 2013): 201-216; Steven S. Yalowitz & Kerry Bronnenkant, “Timing and Tracking: Unlocking Visitor Behavior,” Visitor Studies 12 no. 1 (April 2009): 47-64; and Christina Goulding, “The Museum Environment and the Visitor Experience,” European Journal of Marketing 34 no. ¾ (April 2000): 261-278. 89 imaginative design and animating cultural change. While new, often technological methods for wowing the public are at the disposal of contemporary aquarists, it is in the best interest of the Belle Isle Aquarium to foster genuine inquiry and critical examination of the ever-evolving identity of Detroit and its visitors. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, active collections and thriving institutions are placing their objects in the service of people.224 If the Belle Isle Aquarium can also do so effectively, its halcyon days – and by extension those of the city of Detroit – are surely still ahead.

224 Tisdale, “Objects or People?” 32. 90

Figures

Figure 1. Jacques Nicolas Bellin, La Rivière du Détroit depuis le Lac Sainte Claire jusqu’au Lac Erie / Plan du Fort du Détroit, 1764

Lee, Ardelia. “10 Historic Detroiters You Should Know.” Daily Detroit. Published January 15, 2015. http://www.dailydetroit.com/2015/01/15/10-historic-detroiters- know/

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Figure 2. Frederick Law Olmstead, Diagram of Belle Isle Showing Rigolettes and “The Fair Ground” (at A), 1882

Olmstead, Frederick Law. The Park for Detroit: Being a Preliminary Consideration of Certain Prime Conditions of Economy for the Belle Isle Scheme (1882). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010.

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Figure 3. Map and Satellite Image of Belle Isle Showing a Concentration of Development at its Western End, the Location of the Belle Isle Aquarium, and Olmstead’s Rigolettes, 2019

Map Data. “Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan.” Google. Accessed February 26, 2019. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3424308,-82.9789937,14.72z and https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3424308,-82.9789937,2613m/data=!3m1!1e3

93

Figure 4. Albert Kahn and George D. Mason, Main Floor Plan of the Aquarium & Horticultural Building, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1900

Albert Kahn Associates. “Construction Drawings, Architectural: Belle Isle Horticultural (Conservatory) and Aquarium Building, Job No. 98, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Michigan.” 1900. Folder 6, Drawer 45. Albert Kahn Associates Records: 1825- 2014 (Bulk 1900-1945). Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.

94

Figure 5. Giovanni Trognon, Rainwater Wellhead in the Cloister of Trinity at the Monastery of Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, Italy, ca. 1712

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Figure 6. Albert Kahn, Well in Bologna in Court of Palazzo Bevilacqua [Ariosti], 1891, Graphite on paper, University of Michigan Museum of Art

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96

Figure 7. Michele Sanmicheli, Palazzo Bevilacqua, Verona, Italy, 1532

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97

Figure 8. R. Robertson & Co., Terra Cotta Portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium, 1904

Birkle, Eric. Terra Cotta Portal of the Belle Isle Aquarium. December 30, 2018. Digital photograph. Personal collection of the author, Belle Isle, Detroit, MI. 98

Figure 9. Portion of: Albert Kahn and George D. Mason, Elevation of (Horticultural Building) Pavilion / Section Thro’ (Horticultural Building) Palm House and Aquarium / Side Elevation (of Aquarium) / North Entrance to Aquarium, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1900

Albert Kahn Associates. “Construction Drawings, Architectural: Belle Isle Horticultural (Conservatory) and Aquarium Building, Job No. 98, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Michigan.” 1900. Folder 6, Drawer 45. Albert Kahn Associates Records: 1825- 2014 (Bulk 1900-1945). Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.

99

Figure 10. Portion of: Albert Kahn and George D. Mason, Entrance & Dome of Horticultural Building, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1900

Albert Kahn Associates. “Construction Drawings, Architectural: Belle Isle Horticultural (Conservatory) and Aquarium Building, Job No. 98, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Michigan.” 1900. Folder 6, Drawer 45. Albert Kahn Associates Records: 1825- 2014 (Bulk 1900-1945). Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.

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Figure 11. Rainwater Wellhead in the Cloister of the Church of San Lorenzo, Venice, Italy, ca. 1580

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Figure 12. Red curtain motif adorned with dolphins and fantastical animals (from a wall to the left of the entrance in a house in the Via Stabia), ca. 79 CE

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102

Figure 13. Jean LePautre, design for Triumph of Neptune (from the series Classical Uprights), 1659

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Figure 14. Unidentified artist, Grotesque Faces, 1st century CE, Fresco, Domus Aurea, Rome, Italy

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Figure 15. Roman Emperor Hadrian, Canopus and Serapeum at Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, Italy, early 2nd century CE

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Figure 16. Unidentified artist, Façade of the Grotta Grande (completed in 1593) at the Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy, ca. 1790, Hand-colored drawing, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

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106

Figure 17. Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann and Balthasar Permoser, Nymphaeum at the Zwinger Palace of Dresden, Germany, ca. 1710-1728

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Figure 18. Interior of the Belle Isle Aquarium in 2016

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Figure 19. Alphonse de Neuville, Frontispice for 1871 Edition of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers by Jules Verne

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Figure 20. Prévost, Untitled (Interior of the Aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden, Paris), ca. 1861, Pastel and gouache on paper, Musée Carnavalet

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Figure 21. Prévost, Untitled (Exterior of the Aquarium at the Bois de Boulogne Botanical Garden, Paris), 1860, Engraving

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Figure 22. Interior of the Aquarium at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn di Napoli in the early 21st century

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Figure 23. Exterior of the Aquarium at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn di Napoli, ca. 1872

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Figure 24. Unidentified artist, Boston Aquarial Gardens, Bromfield Street, 1859, Lithograph and watercolor on paper

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Figure 25. Map of Woodward’s Gardens Showing Aquarium at 11, San Francisco, California, ca. 1875

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Figure 26. Goulard-Henrionnet and Erhard R. Bonaparte, Plan du Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation du Bois de Boulogne, 1865, Hand-colored engraving

Guide du promeneur au Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, contenant une série de notices explicatives sur tous les animaux et les végétaux qui y existent avec l’indication de leur patrie et de leurs usages. (Paris: Radenez, 1865), 154.

116

Figure 27. Exterior of the United States Fisheries Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893, Hand-colored photograph

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Figure 28. Rand, McNally & Co.’s Indexed Standard Guide Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, 1893

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Figure 29. Louis Kamper, Exterior of Main Exhibition Hall at Detroit’s International Exposition of 1889

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119

Figure 30. After a drawing by Schell and Hogan, General View of the Buildings and Grounds of the Detroit International Fair and Exposition, 1889, Hand-colored engraving on paper

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Figure 31. Orazio Scarabelli, after Bernardo Buontalenti, Naumachia in the Court of Palazzo Pitti, 1589-1592, Etching on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Figure 32. Gray Lithographic Company, after a painting by Charles Graham, Bird’s-Eye View of the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1903, Chromolithograph on paper, Missouri Historical Society

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Figure 33. Edward H. Bennett and Frank Miles Day, Plan for the Center of Arts and Letters, Detroit, 1913, Detroit City Plan and Improvement Commission

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Figure 34. Casino, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich., 1910, Hand-colored lithograph on paper (Postcard)

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Figure 35. Bird’s-Eye View of the Villa Comunale in Naples, Italy in the early 21st century

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Figure 36. Interior of Aquarium, Belle Isle, Detroit, Mich., ca. 1910, Hand-colored lithograph on paper (Postcard)

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Figure 37. Giulio Romano, Courtyard Façade of Palazzo del Tè (1524-1534) in the early 21st century, Mantua, Italy

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Figure 38. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Plan for an Ideal Museum, 1817-1819

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Figure 39. Ferdinand Dutert, Façade of the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy in the early 21st century, Paris, France, 1898

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Figure 40. Aquarium, Belle Isle, Detroit, Mich., ca. 1904, Hand-colored lithograph on paper (Postcard)

Bradford, Michael. “Aquarium Information & History.” Friends of Belle Isle Aquarium. Accessed March 11, 2019. http://www.belleisleaquarium.com/aq_hist.html

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Figure 41. Interior of Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, 2000

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Appendix: Timeline of Albert Kahn’s Formative Tour of Europe, 1891

This listing is not comprehensive, but includes all data gleaned from object records in the following collection: “Albert Kahn’s European Travel Drawings.” University of Michigan Museum of Art Exchange. University of Michigan. Accessed January 30, 2019. https://exchange.umma.umich.edu/resources/24727#

March 3 Venice, Italy (Dodge’s Palace) 23 Venice, Italy (St. Mark’s) 25 Murano, Venice, Italy 26 Torcello, Venice, Italy (Santa Fosca) 27 Venice, Italy (Doge’s Palace) 30 Venice, Italy

April 1-2 Venice, Italy 3 Venice, Italy (San Gregorio) 8 Venice, Italy (Scuola San Marco; well near San Giovanni and Paolo) 9 Venice, Italy (San Giorgio Maggiore) 11 Venice, Italy (St. Mark’s) 13 Venice, Italy (St. Mark’s) 19-20 Verona, Italy 30 Venice, Italy

May 3 Bourges, France (La Maison de la Reine Blanche) 6 Bourges, France 12 Paris, France (Cluny Museum) 13 Paris, France (Trocadero Museum) 15 Paris, France (Trocadero Museum) 18 Paris, France (Cluny Museum) 26-27 Paris, France (Cluny Museum)

June 13 Paris, France (Trocadero Museum)

July 5 Frankfurt, Germany 6 Frankfurt, Germany 9 Nuremburg, Germany (Nurnberg Museum) 13 Nuremburg, Germany (Tetzelhof) 15 Munich, Germany (Munich Museum) 140

July cont’d… 21 Munich, Germany 27 Braunschweig, Germany (Alte Wage) 29 Braunschweig, Germany 30 Hildesheim, Germany

August 11 Antwerp, Belgium 18 Brussels, Belgium (Hôtel de Ville) 22 Bruges, Belgium 25-26 Audenarde, Belgium

September 8 Chartres, France 13 Orléans, France 23 Chaumont-sur-Loire, France (Chateau de Chaumont); Amboise, France (Hôtel de Ville) 25 Azay-le-rideau (near Tours), France 27 Tours, France 29 Chênehutte-Trèves-Cunault, France (L’église prieurale Notre Dame de Cunault) 30 Angers, France

October 4 Laval, France 5 Vitré, France 11 Lamballe, France; Saint-Brieuc, France 12 Dinan, France 14 Mont Saint-Michel, France 16 Saint-Lô, France 18-19 Caen, France 20 Caen, France (Saint Pierre) 23 Évreux, France; Bernay, France (Sainte-Croix) 28 Rouen, France ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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