REVIVAL MEMORIES, IDENTITIES, UTOPIAS EDITED BY AY L A LE PINE MATT LODDER ROSALIND MCKEVER Revival. Memories, Identities, Utopias Edited by Ayla Lepine, Matt Lodder, and Rosalind McKever With contributions by: Deborah Cherry Whitney Davis John Harvey Alison Hokanson Martin Horácek Phil Jacks Michelle Jackson Ayla Lepine Matt Lodder Jonathan Mekinda Alan Powers Nathaniel Walker Alyson Wharton Series Editor: Alixe Bovey Courtauld Books Online is published by the Research Forum of The Courtauld Institute of Art Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN © 2015, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. ISBN: 978-1-907485-04-6 Courtauld Books Online Advisory Board: Paul Binski (University of Cambridge) Thomas Crow (Institute of Fine Arts) Michael Ann Holly (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) Courtauld Books Online is a series of scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. The series includes research publications that emerge from Courtauld Research Forum events and Courtauld projects involving an array of outstanding scholars from art history and conservation across the world. It is an open-access series, freely available to readers to read online and to download without charge. The series has been developed in the context of research priorities of The Courtauld which emphasise the extension of knowledge in the fields of art history and conservation, and the development of new patterns of explanation. For more information contact [email protected] All chapters of this book are available for download at courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of images reproduced in this publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way or form or my any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. Designed by Jack Hartnell Cover Image: Henri De Braekeleer, The Man in the Chair, 1876 (detail). Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 cm, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. CONTENTS List of Illustrations 5 Notes on Contributors 9 Acknowledgements 11 Foreword: The Interval of Revival 12 WHITNEY DAVIS Introduction 17 AYLA LEPINE, MATT LODDER, ROSALIND MCKEVER I. MEMORIES ‘Nostalgia’, Matt Lodder 27 The Ghost Begins by Coming Back. Revenants And Returns 29 In Maud Sulter’s Photomontages DEBORAH CHERRY 1937 and Victorian Revivalism 45 ALAN POWERS The Retrieval of Revival: Recollecting and Revising 67 the Evan Roberts Wax Cylinder JOHN HARVEY The Problem of Expiration of Style 86 and the Historiography of Architecture MARTIN HORÁČEK II. IDENTITIES ‘Historicism’, Ayla Lepine 101 The New Old Style: Tradition, Archetype and Rhetoric 103 in Contemporary Western Tattooing MATT LODDER Longing for Past and Future: Cultural Identity and Central 120 European Revivalist Glassware Designs MICHELLE JACKSON Henri De Braekeleer and Belgium’s 135 Nineteenth-Century Revivalist Movement ALISON HOKANSON Armenian Architects and ‘Other’ Revivalism 150 ALYSON WHARTON III. UTOPIAS ‘Anachronism’, Rosalind McKever 169 Ferro-concrete and the Search for Style 171 in the ‘American Renaissance’ PHIL JACKS Echoes of Manhattan in Parliament Square: 188 Transatlantic Medievalism for the Twentieth Century AYLA LEPINE Modernism and Revivalism in Italian Architecture 205 and Design, 1935-1955 JONATHAN MEKINDA Babylon Electrified: Orientalist Hybridity as Futurism 222 in Victorian Utopian Architecture NATHANIEL WALKER Photograph Credits 239 171 CHAPTER 9 FERRO-CONCRETE AND THE SEARCH FOR STYLE IN THE ‘AMERICAN RENAISSANCE’: THE CASE OF FRANKLIN WEBSTER SMITH PHIL JACKS Revivalism in America, long before its manifestation in architectural taste, had its roots 9.1 Franklin Webster in the religious communities of New England and in the sermons of Methodist and Baptist Smith, Villa Zorayda, St. preachers. A.W.N. Pugin, and to a lesser extent John Ruskin, laced their predilection for Augustine, FL, United States of America, Gothic style with moralistic underpinnings, and this added to the appeal of their publica- 1882–3. Stereoscopic tions across the Atlantic. The difference was that unlike their European counterparts, photograph c. 1895, Courtesy: Robert N. architectural critics in the United States could not point toward any indigenous traditions Dennis Collection, New as a style worthy of revival. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the prominent architect York Public Library. and educator Russell Sturgis, singled out as: some of the most thoughtful buildings … those inspired by the semi-Spanish style … the missions of California and New Mexico. Inspired by those bless- ings of a temperate region, a steady warmth, a brilliant sun, they are most PHIL JACKS | FERRO-CONCRETE AND THE SEARCH FOR STYLE 172 assuredly: and yet there is originality, so much as to cause the student almost to forget the origin of their design in such work of the not very famous past. Such buildings are the hotels built in Saint Augustine about 1885 — the Ponce de Leon, in which the architecture of old Spain has been studied more carefully, the Alcazar, where the simpler appliances of Western America are more in evidence.1 That this should have been considered as the first glimmer of originality in American architecture is remarkable in itself. And it is hardly incidental that the figure who had in- directly set in motion this ‘renaissance’, Franklin Webster Smith, was a fellow Bostonian aesthete and close associate of Sturgis. His extraordinary career, which at various mo- ments drew national attention, is today all but obscure. Indeed, his legacy is measured less by the few buildings to his credit than by his ambitious vision for the cultural efflorescence of America at the dawn of the modern era. Born in 1826 to affluent parents in Beacon Hill and the great-grandson of a president of Harvard College, Smith soon abandoned his Brahmin upbringing.2 Indeed, it could be said that his professional career began with one plea and ended with another. The first, a plea of ‘not guilty,’ took place in front of a military tribunal in the closing months of the Civil War. Although a civilian, Smith held lucrative contracts as a marine hardware supplier to the U.S. Navy, for which he had been convicted on charges of corruption and sentenced to court martial in June 1864. A delegation of influential friends in the Mas- sachusetts congress, Charles Sumner chief among them, came to his defence and appealed directly to Abraham Lincoln. Throwing out the charges summarily, the president vowed to seek retribution on those who had perpetrated the inquest.3 Ironically, less than a month later it was Smith himself, as one of the organizers of the Republican party in Boston, who delivered an empassioned eulogy for the slain president on the steps of Tremont Baptist Church, where he served as superintendent of the Sunday school.4 So began Smith’s long and beleaguered encounters with the federal government. The second plea occurred on the floor of the U. S. Senate thirty-five years later. There, in 1900, Smith presented—more accurately, re-presented—his project for a complex of ‘National Galleries of History and Art’ to be built in Washington overlooking the Potomac. Smith had debuted the Design and Prospectus nine years earlier. After four trips to Europe and a second tour of Egypt in the intervening decade, he had considerably amplified the scale of the original programme. Nonetheless, on this occasion Smith’s petition was quietly dismissed. His visionary plans never got beyond the drawing board, despite a tireless schedule of public lecturing around the country to drum up support. Smith died in poverty on a New Hampshire farm eleven years later. Only one small part of his grand scheme for Washington ever materialized, but that, too, met the wrecking ball in 1926. The story of PHIL JACKS | FERRO-CONCRETE AND THE SEARCH FOR STYLE 173 Smith’s appeal for the ‘aggrandizement’ of the nation’s capital has always been regarded as a curious interlude on the eve of the McMillan Commission and the City Beautiful move- ment. Likewise, his accomplishments as an early abolitionist and founder of the YMCA in Massachusetts have been largely eclipsed by the folly of his last years. Short of rescuing Smith’s place in history, my interest here is to offer a different view of this architectural autodidact within the broader context of his time. On the one hand, Smith regarded the lessons of history almost as a moral imperative, one guided by the nostalgia of revivalism. On the other, his views as a social progressive and the desire to push the limits of conven- tional building technology were two sides of the same coin. These coincided at a critical moment, as the new material of concrete would soon change fundamentally the language of architectural form. It was a tour through Europe in 1851, highlighted by a visit to Paxton’s Crystal Palace in Kensington, that first kindled Smith’s passion for architecture. ‘Returning home,’ he writes, ‘impressions of places and objects revived with covetous yearnings for their more substantial resemblance than poor pictures of the time’.5 So he set to making wooden models ‘in the intervals of leisure from mercantile life’. It would be another thirty years before that hobby turned to full-scale buildings. Self-trained, Smith saw himself more as a reformer than revivalist. One underlying goal drove all his efforts—to bring America on par with Europe in cultural and economic terms. It was a propitious moment: by the late 1880s the fashion for Gothic Revival and Richardsonian Romanesque had reached its crest. American architecture was beginning to sink into a stylistic pluralism, or what Richard Longstreth has called an ‘academic eclecticism’.6 At turn of the century, innovations in building technology were largely the purview of engineering journals and technical manuals.