The American Architect and Building News.
VOL. XXXII.
Copyright, 1891, by Ticknor & Company, Boston, Mass.
No. 803.
Entered at the Post-Office at Boston as second-class matter.
May 16, 1891.
Summary: —
Strikes and Lockouts in the Building Trades. — Death of Mr. H. R. Best, Architect. — Prizes for the School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania. — Suggestions as to Wood-carving. — A German-hating Frenchman excited by Gothic Work. — Interesting Result of a Competition for an Elevator-car Design. — Architecture in the Argentine Republic. — The Number and Distribution of Pupils in the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. — France and the World’s Fair..................... 93 French Architecture. —VI...................................................................95 A Run through Spain. — XI..................................................................98 Equestrian Monuments. — XXXVIII.................................................100 Sketches of British India....................................................................................105 Clocks of all Times.............................................................................................. 105 Societies...............................................................................................................................106 Illustrations: —
House at Washington, D. C. — Grand Central Depot, Kansas City, Mo. —The Plaza Largo, Naples, and the Statues of Ferdinand IV and Charles III. — A Country House near Boston, Mass. — Cast-iron Spire of St. Philomena’s R. C. Church, Pittsburgh, Pa. — Sketch for a Towne Tower. — House at St. Louis, Mo.
Additional: Entrance to the Williams Building, Omaha, Neb. — Magdalen College, Oxford, Eng. — St. Wilfred’s, Hickelton, Eng. — Proposed Screen, Stirling High School. — Mausolée de St. Rémy, Tarascon. — The New Raadzaal,
Bloemfontein, Orange Free State, Sonth Africa.......................106
Communications: —
A Curious Party-wall Question. —The Proposed Public Baths
in New York..................................................................................... 107 Notes and Clippings...................................................................................................107 Trade Surveys.................................................................................................................108
THE opening of the building season is, as usual, marked by desperate struggles on the part of the artful managers who
live on other people’s distress to throw business into confusion. So far, these struggles have not met with much result. The costly uncertainties with which the walking-delegates have succeeded in surrounding the business of building have driven capital into other investments, and the prospect appears to be that building labor will be insufficiently employed for the next year or two. This does not prevent the people who hold the power to create disturbances from using it, and the close dependence of the different branches of building work upon each other makes it easy for those who control a single small trade to spread misery among many thousand homes. Some time ago, the men employed in the New York lumber-yards demanded to be put on eight hours’ time on the first of May. Their employers refused the request of the men to work the shortest hours in the busiest season, and the latter then modified their desires to an addition to their pay for overtime work, and a slight increase in drivers’ wages. These requests were reasonable and proper enough, and there seemed to be a prospect that the employers would accede, when an order was issued for the whole force of building workmen to “ support ” the lumber-handlers. The result, which was probably foreseen and intended, was to unite the dealers in defence of their right to manage their own business, and deal with their own men, without consulting the walking-delegates, and the latter promptly seized the opportunity to declare a boycott against the sixtyeight lumber-dealing firms, and to prohibit ail persons belonging to the Central Labor Union, which includes nearly all the building workmen in New York and Brooklyn, from doing work of any sort in any building where lumber sold by one of the sixty-eight excommunicated firms was used. As the lumberdealers are quite sure that no houses will be built without the use of their goods, they can afford to view the situation serenely, while the promulgation of the boycotting decree will throw out of employment about a hundred and fifty thousand men. It is not a new observation that it is delightful to be a general, and to make war, when some one else pays the bills, but one would think that it must occur to the unfortunate privates before long that an “industrial contest” in which a hundred and fifty thousand men voluntarily deprive themselves of nearly half a million dollars a day in wages, for the sake of inducing, by this spectacle, a small body of lumber-dealers to add, in the aggregate, a few hundred dollars a day to the wages of their men, is not brilliantly planned in a financial aspect.
WE regret very much to hear of the death of Mr. Herbert Reynolds Best, of the firm of Walker and Best, who died
at Omaha, April 25. Mr. Best was born in England in 1862, and was trained at the Royal Academy, and in the office of Edward Burgess at London. He went into business on his own account in London, in partnership with Mr. Pease, but in 1885 came to this country, and, three years later, formed a partnership with Mr. C. Howard Walker, of Boston. The firm of Walker and Best found a place ready for it among the most highly esteemed members of the younger generation of architects, and its beautiful work, in Boston and in Omaha, is well known to the profession. Mr. Best was a man of very amiable disposition, and his decease, at an age even earlier than that at which so many of our most promising young architects succumb to the overwork and anxiety of their trying profession, will cause sincere regret.
THE School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania appears to he rather the pet of the profession in
Philadelphia. Not only is it managed mainly by some of the most distinguished Philadelphia architects, but outside architects take a great, and apparently judicious interest in it. Quite recently, the well-known T-square Club decided to establish two prize memberships, to be awarded annually to the students in the School of Architecture who should show the greatest proficiency in their regular designing work, in the opinion of a jury of members of the Club. The prize membership admits the holder, so long as he remains in the School of Architecture, to all the privileges of active membership in the Club, without the payment of any entrance-fee, dues or expenses. How the officers of the University look upon this intimate connection of their school with the profession outside, we are not informed, but it is to be inferred that they favor it, and the experiment is certainly an interesting one. For many reasons, architecture, which is less compactly organized than any other profession, would gain most by such organization, and one of the best ways of promoting, not only a good mutual understanding among architects, but the judicious training of those who will become architects later, is to encourage the reciprocal interest of students and practitioners.
M
R. W. AUMONIER, in a lecture before the Society of Architects, reported in the British Architect of April 24, gives
some suggestions about wood-carving which are well worth remembering. In the first place, he attacks the timehonored fallacy that wood-carving, to be good, ought to be made from plaster models. We all remember the familiar clause in specifications, which stipulates that “ full-size models for all carved work shall be furnished and approved by the architect”; but Mr. Aumonier says, as we think truly, that the process of modelling is so entirely different from that of carving in wood that it is often unnecessarily difficult and expensive to follow a model, while the work, which becomes, to the carver, uninteresting and mechanical copying, is apt to be lifeless. The other extreme, of allowing the carver to chop and cut a given block of wood in any way he likes, he thinks also objectionable; and says that, in general, the best and most spirited wood-carving is done from full-size charcoal drawings, carefully shaded, so as to show the relief of the various parts. With such a drawing before him, the carver begins by excavating, so to speak, the deepest shadows, to the full depth. After the work is thus blocked out, he finds where, according to the drawing, the points of highest relief are to be, and cuts from them, gradually bringing the carving work into shape and detail, without sacrificing the point of paramount importance, the relative relief of the great masses. The ground, at completion, should never, as is usually done, be levelled to a plane surface, and still less should it be cross-hatched, or stamped with little x’s all over, to “give relief” to the carving. Such treatment always makes the carving look as if it had been cut separately and glued to the ground, as, indeed, is very frequently the case, and imparts a cheap, poverty-stricken air even to the most careful work. Instead of this, the texture of the ground should not differ from that of the relief work, and it should be varied in surface, so as to bring the ground and the work as much together as possible, getting relief by deep shadows, and not by contrast of texture. Changing the texture for relief seems to have been originally a trick for making
VOL. XXXII.
Copyright, 1891, by Ticknor & Company, Boston, Mass.
No. 803.
Entered at the Post-Office at Boston as second-class matter.
May 16, 1891.
Summary: —
Strikes and Lockouts in the Building Trades. — Death of Mr. H. R. Best, Architect. — Prizes for the School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania. — Suggestions as to Wood-carving. — A German-hating Frenchman excited by Gothic Work. — Interesting Result of a Competition for an Elevator-car Design. — Architecture in the Argentine Republic. — The Number and Distribution of Pupils in the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. — France and the World’s Fair..................... 93 French Architecture. —VI...................................................................95 A Run through Spain. — XI..................................................................98 Equestrian Monuments. — XXXVIII.................................................100 Sketches of British India....................................................................................105 Clocks of all Times.............................................................................................. 105 Societies...............................................................................................................................106 Illustrations: —
House at Washington, D. C. — Grand Central Depot, Kansas City, Mo. —The Plaza Largo, Naples, and the Statues of Ferdinand IV and Charles III. — A Country House near Boston, Mass. — Cast-iron Spire of St. Philomena’s R. C. Church, Pittsburgh, Pa. — Sketch for a Towne Tower. — House at St. Louis, Mo.
Additional: Entrance to the Williams Building, Omaha, Neb. — Magdalen College, Oxford, Eng. — St. Wilfred’s, Hickelton, Eng. — Proposed Screen, Stirling High School. — Mausolée de St. Rémy, Tarascon. — The New Raadzaal,
Bloemfontein, Orange Free State, Sonth Africa.......................106
Communications: —
A Curious Party-wall Question. —The Proposed Public Baths
in New York..................................................................................... 107 Notes and Clippings...................................................................................................107 Trade Surveys.................................................................................................................108
THE opening of the building season is, as usual, marked by desperate struggles on the part of the artful managers who
live on other people’s distress to throw business into confusion. So far, these struggles have not met with much result. The costly uncertainties with which the walking-delegates have succeeded in surrounding the business of building have driven capital into other investments, and the prospect appears to be that building labor will be insufficiently employed for the next year or two. This does not prevent the people who hold the power to create disturbances from using it, and the close dependence of the different branches of building work upon each other makes it easy for those who control a single small trade to spread misery among many thousand homes. Some time ago, the men employed in the New York lumber-yards demanded to be put on eight hours’ time on the first of May. Their employers refused the request of the men to work the shortest hours in the busiest season, and the latter then modified their desires to an addition to their pay for overtime work, and a slight increase in drivers’ wages. These requests were reasonable and proper enough, and there seemed to be a prospect that the employers would accede, when an order was issued for the whole force of building workmen to “ support ” the lumber-handlers. The result, which was probably foreseen and intended, was to unite the dealers in defence of their right to manage their own business, and deal with their own men, without consulting the walking-delegates, and the latter promptly seized the opportunity to declare a boycott against the sixtyeight lumber-dealing firms, and to prohibit ail persons belonging to the Central Labor Union, which includes nearly all the building workmen in New York and Brooklyn, from doing work of any sort in any building where lumber sold by one of the sixty-eight excommunicated firms was used. As the lumberdealers are quite sure that no houses will be built without the use of their goods, they can afford to view the situation serenely, while the promulgation of the boycotting decree will throw out of employment about a hundred and fifty thousand men. It is not a new observation that it is delightful to be a general, and to make war, when some one else pays the bills, but one would think that it must occur to the unfortunate privates before long that an “industrial contest” in which a hundred and fifty thousand men voluntarily deprive themselves of nearly half a million dollars a day in wages, for the sake of inducing, by this spectacle, a small body of lumber-dealers to add, in the aggregate, a few hundred dollars a day to the wages of their men, is not brilliantly planned in a financial aspect.
WE regret very much to hear of the death of Mr. Herbert Reynolds Best, of the firm of Walker and Best, who died
at Omaha, April 25. Mr. Best was born in England in 1862, and was trained at the Royal Academy, and in the office of Edward Burgess at London. He went into business on his own account in London, in partnership with Mr. Pease, but in 1885 came to this country, and, three years later, formed a partnership with Mr. C. Howard Walker, of Boston. The firm of Walker and Best found a place ready for it among the most highly esteemed members of the younger generation of architects, and its beautiful work, in Boston and in Omaha, is well known to the profession. Mr. Best was a man of very amiable disposition, and his decease, at an age even earlier than that at which so many of our most promising young architects succumb to the overwork and anxiety of their trying profession, will cause sincere regret.
THE School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania appears to he rather the pet of the profession in
Philadelphia. Not only is it managed mainly by some of the most distinguished Philadelphia architects, but outside architects take a great, and apparently judicious interest in it. Quite recently, the well-known T-square Club decided to establish two prize memberships, to be awarded annually to the students in the School of Architecture who should show the greatest proficiency in their regular designing work, in the opinion of a jury of members of the Club. The prize membership admits the holder, so long as he remains in the School of Architecture, to all the privileges of active membership in the Club, without the payment of any entrance-fee, dues or expenses. How the officers of the University look upon this intimate connection of their school with the profession outside, we are not informed, but it is to be inferred that they favor it, and the experiment is certainly an interesting one. For many reasons, architecture, which is less compactly organized than any other profession, would gain most by such organization, and one of the best ways of promoting, not only a good mutual understanding among architects, but the judicious training of those who will become architects later, is to encourage the reciprocal interest of students and practitioners.
M
R. W. AUMONIER, in a lecture before the Society of Architects, reported in the British Architect of April 24, gives
some suggestions about wood-carving which are well worth remembering. In the first place, he attacks the timehonored fallacy that wood-carving, to be good, ought to be made from plaster models. We all remember the familiar clause in specifications, which stipulates that “ full-size models for all carved work shall be furnished and approved by the architect”; but Mr. Aumonier says, as we think truly, that the process of modelling is so entirely different from that of carving in wood that it is often unnecessarily difficult and expensive to follow a model, while the work, which becomes, to the carver, uninteresting and mechanical copying, is apt to be lifeless. The other extreme, of allowing the carver to chop and cut a given block of wood in any way he likes, he thinks also objectionable; and says that, in general, the best and most spirited wood-carving is done from full-size charcoal drawings, carefully shaded, so as to show the relief of the various parts. With such a drawing before him, the carver begins by excavating, so to speak, the deepest shadows, to the full depth. After the work is thus blocked out, he finds where, according to the drawing, the points of highest relief are to be, and cuts from them, gradually bringing the carving work into shape and detail, without sacrificing the point of paramount importance, the relative relief of the great masses. The ground, at completion, should never, as is usually done, be levelled to a plane surface, and still less should it be cross-hatched, or stamped with little x’s all over, to “give relief” to the carving. Such treatment always makes the carving look as if it had been cut separately and glued to the ground, as, indeed, is very frequently the case, and imparts a cheap, poverty-stricken air even to the most careful work. Instead of this, the texture of the ground should not differ from that of the relief work, and it should be varied in surface, so as to bring the ground and the work as much together as possible, getting relief by deep shadows, and not by contrast of texture. Changing the texture for relief seems to have been originally a trick for making