Architecture After Richardson.

By Margaret Henderson Floyd. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Architecture after Richardson is an enticing title. It conjures up a shift in gear, as Americans shunned nineteenth-century historicism and hared in all sorts of architectural directions. Aqer Richardson, according to the old way of thinking, come Sullivan and Wright. Who to remember in between? McKim, Mead and White we all know about, also Daniel Burnham. But as the years go by and the monographs proliferate, the depth of architectural talent and opportunity in almost every American city, eastern, western and mid-western, between 1880 and 1914 begins to resurface. It becomes absurd to believe, as self-pitying Sullivan would have had us do, that the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 ushered in an era of chilly Classical sterility.

Yet still we have no national synthesis of the period. Architecture after Richardson, unfortunately, is not that, but it is as full and meticulous a monograph as one could wish, this time on the Boston and Pittsburgh firm of Longfellow, Alden and Harlow. Like Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, who inherited the Richardson practice when the great man died in harness, Longfellow and Alden were chips from the Richardson block, lads who had skiwied, enthused and detailed in the `coops' at Brookline before taking offon their own. A. W. Longfellow, the nephew of the poet, had a privileged background encompassing Harvard, the Beaux-Arts and a multiplicity of connections in Boston society. Frank Alden supervised Richardson's masterpiece, the Allegheny County Buildings at Pittsburgh, which led naturally on to other things; Harlow, from the McKim, Mead and White office, completed the trio, coming more into his own after Alden's death in 1908. The practice prospered. Brattle Street, Cambridge, has trim Longfellow houses for cousins and cronies on every hand, and his delicate Agassiz House in Radcliffe Yard hard by. He also had a line in holiday homes in Maine, one (untypically but appropriately minimal) for a certain Buckminster Fuller senior. In Pittsburgh the firm enjoyed Carnegie patronage. They built the enormous, two-stage Carnegie Institute, libraries and banks galore, and countless suburban houses for steelmen and steel-women.

Margaret Floyd documents all this with exactitude, insight and a profound knowledge of American architecture. There is however an element of boosterism in her reading of the practice. On the strength of what she shows, Longfellow, Alden and Harlow appear to have been very able and refined but not fundamentally inventive talents happy to work within the broad parameters of contemporary American style and context, from the portentous Classicism of the Carnegie Institute to the rough-and-ready finishes of seaside Maine. Perhaps life came too easy and jobs too thick and fast for them; there seems a palpable lack of tension and intellection even in their early buildings, compared to those of Richardson. They are not quite strong enough pegs to hang a thesis about `anti-Modernism' upon, as the author attempts. Instead, their and her work offers excellent material prima for the rich and diversified picture of historic American architecture that is slowly coming into focus. The book, it must be added, is produced to the very best technical standards.