Straight-edge and Compass Design

13 June 2013.  301 Napoleon Street, Beauregard Town, Baton Rouge.  The house of Governor  Fuqua

Greek Revival in Baton Rouge: the Fuqua House

On June 13, 2013, my friend Denise and I, armed with two Nikons, the one-piece 8800, as good as one-piece digitals get, and the newer Nikon 1 v2, a digital camera with changeable lenses but also not a reflex. In a post on May 25 I already had compared the house with the Brumby House in Marietta Georgia and posted an archival photo of the Fuqua House, and on May 1 had used a winter image of it to head a general, speculative essay.
I still do not know on what grounds some on-line sources date the Fuqua house to c. 1834 (though the Brumby in Marietta is dated, with documents, to c. 1851, and the one plantation house that is equally real Greek Revival, Madewood near Donaldsonville, is securely dated in the 1840s).  I'll just repeat that the resemblance of the Marietta and Baton Rouge houses cannot be accidental, and I suspect (since I have no idea whether any architect's name is recorded, and they might not be extremely close in date) that both may be based on the same, presumed, publication.  I did not mean to entertain any possibility of the Fuqua house actually being by Henry Howard, Madewood's architect, only that Greek Revival of such intent character is rare in this region.  Also, though I want to measure the Fuqua house, even the fine frontal view (in Flickr) permits no more than the possibility that the gables are as high as the Order and that the width of the façade is about 5:4 in ratio to the height of the complete Order, with entablature and foundation (in lieu of podium).
I should repeat that the house first appears on the Sanborn maps only between 1911 and 1916, and I have not found report of its previous location.

First, to establish what I can of its ground-floor plan:

Using the Nikon 8800, dp photographed two flights of the main staircase, which should come out near  at the back of the gable that contains the enclosed 'balcony'.  The second photo shows the hall continuing  through the center of the house, W to E.

In the Picasa Album for 13 June, assembled for blogs on the large upper Beauregard houses, the views of 301 Napoleon, the Fuqua house, by dp come first, those by pl third, with the views of 201 St Charles, the Roumain house, intervening.  Since the presumed kitchen extends farther E on the N side, I suppose that the domestic rooms on the ground floor are those on N side, with perhaps a study or library at the front on the S side.  Nothing about this house suggests that it doubled as a home office.  It seems to be unfurnished now, but evidently during restoration surviving family furnishings would have been removed.

The NE (rear) corner of the Fuqua house is without (as they say) a Style, but the sequence of full-size windows on the N flank, though without continuation of the Greek entablature, is aligned with the full-length windows that open onto the porch.

There are plenty of front views in the linked album.  A shift lens would be ideal, but the Nikon 8800 was preferable here to the general lens (the longer one had been left at home), and it read the interior of the sheltered 'balcony' better, too.

Painting contractors hereabouts have been painting porch ceilings sky blue, too, but it is especially apt for this 'balcony'.  On the Marietta house the smaller order, proportioned very much like the smaller upper order in the cella of a temple, has windows.  I know of no other gable sitting room (for that is what it looks like, though it faces West) like this one.  Balconies are, almost by definition, built onto the façade above the porch, as on the red house on Royal Street.

Lovely subtle color choices are being given to to the moldings and wall, to set off the white of the Order on the Fuqua house.  Assuming that Stuart & Revett's had been studied with the usual reverence, its example of the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates (vol. I, Ch. IV, pls. III and IV) of Pentelic for white and for the reliefs and Hymettan to give the (purely pictorial—what if Alberti had seen that!)  illusion of white columns standing as in a full-size tholos temple, as they do at Dellphi or Epidaurus.  Strict Greek Revival does not preclude pictorial illusion.  But the tints chosen here are far from garish.  For some they will have their effect without even being noticed as such.  

The south side of the Fuqua House looked splotchy from a distance last June, and if I can I'll add a new photo to the Album, when the painting has been finished with the chosen palette (the tests needing a few months of sunlight and rain for the lasting effect to be appreciated and final decisions to be made).  Meanwhile you can consider what the restoration architect was considering.  Also you can see, on this side as on the north side, how the ordinary house design, with finely spaced windows (the upper ones spaced both with regard to their place in the gable and to the principal windows below), is related to the columnar Order on the façade.  For, in discussing a house, no matter how thoroughly designed, we must not forget that it is neither a temple nor a civic building.

The brick pillars seem to use bricks of the same size and solidity as for the houses of c. 1912 where on the Boehringer house, for example, they are original.  They may date from when the Fuqua House was brought to this site, or they may be more recent; it doesn't matter, since they are right.  It looks as if that sealant that now covers the Gottlieb House on Drehr and Oleander, rather than simply cream-color paint, has been applied, recently, to the brick foundation pillars here.

Whichever camera was used across the porch, it distorted it.  Needless to say, the leaning is purely a matter of optics.  It is plain that a good Greek Ionic column like those in Stuart & Revett rather than those in Serlio has been the model for the columns, except for their Tuscan Doric capitals (one suspects that carving proper Corinthian in wood was too challenging; the Brumby House in Marietta uses real Greek Doric) but here the bases, the proportions, and the entablature all are deliberate and sensitive Greek Ionic.

Bibliography and Summary

After I had reassembled all the basic reading that had mattered to me in my twenties, I had to re-read it. Scott was really very youthful.  Blunt was good but a bit generalized.  The really great one, I realized, that had most formed my ideas, alongside Kenneth Clark's Leonardo da Vinci, since they both dealt with Alberti, was Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism.  Like Alberti himself, Wittkower worked through all the Pythagorean principles that were concerned with harmonious ratios.  It was wonderful re-reading Wittkower now that I actually had enough general education to read it easily—except that the font is not so good and neither are my eyes, so that I am very careful to avoid eyestrain.

•• Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism.  London, Tiranti, 1952.  This had been vol. 19 in the Studies of the Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1949.  This is the book with the two appendices, one translating Francesco di Giorgio's Memorandum explaining the plan of a church and the "Vitruvian Man", in conjunction, and the second providing Bibliographical Notes on the Theory of Proportions.  It is Wittkower that wrote so well on the central-plan church embodying Renaissance neo-Platonism, Wittkower who read Alberti closely enough to understand why he called Columns part of the decoration rather than of the essential Beauty of a Building (pp.29–32): Alberti knew Classical architecture from Rome, Wittkower who explained the Mean Proportionals and illustrated Alberti's 'Generation' of ratios (pp. 100–103), which may be where our simple house and the Parthenon understand each other.  A couple of years ago I tried to explain why the numbers in a Gothic cathedral were quite different from the numbers (but they aren't numerals but ratios!) in Renaissance architecture.  Renaissance thought musing over Pythagoras (and working on the area of the circle, too) is quite different from the number-symbolology taken from the description of the Temple in the Old Testament!  Alberti knew he was being Greek, not what we would call Medieval, but he didn't know Greece; it would be the generation of the Dilettanti Society that propagated measured drawings of real buildings in Greece.

One thing we need to remember constantly is that the Renaissance theory (barring Palladio's villas) is largely of church design.  The Malatestas poured all their grandiose ideals into S. Francesco at Rimini, with Alberti realizing it for them; they died in it, but they didn't live in it.  Somewhere I got the bon mot that all I had learned about Roman Imperial sea trade in Sunday School was that it was provided for the transportation of Apostles.  Apparently, too, Renaissance noblemen did not want living arrangements governed by ratios (even Palladio...a villa is not the same thing as a palazzo).

•• With an Introduction and Notes by Frank Salmon, Princeton in 1971 published, beautifully printed, the three volumes of Stuart & Revett's Antiquities of Athens (not quite so expensive as you might fear and affordable by any college or university library).  Thomas Jefferson is documented as owning vol. I, but I should think that by the time that he died, and certainly in the second quarter of the 19th century, most important architects and certainly universities that had great schools of architecture, owned the whole set.  After all, the Acropolis buildings are all in vol. II.  If you can get access to the original (large folios), by all means study them, but the Princeton edition, printed in China, is a beautiful book in its own right.

•• If you can't get to that, go to John Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens, Thames & Hudson, 1971, very fine, printed in Germany.  By then almost all the books that today, after nearly half a century, have not yellowed at all were printed overseas.

The Choregic Monument of Lysikrates (s.v., Lysikrates) is illustrated, though not fully, in Travlos.  In Stuart & Revett, it is Vol. I, Ch. IV, Pls. II—IX.  You really cannot improve on this, although, as Salmon says, the draftsmen were so convinced of the beauty and precision of Greek measurements (not realizing that ancient Greeks had no place-marker and no annotation for advanced arithmetic, which is also why they generated beautiful ratios—and were about to have Euclid's compendium to work from) that some of their numbers are impossibly accurate.  That tells us something about how the Greek Revival felt; their devotion to meeting the Pythagorean, or at least the Vitruvian, standard is their kind of romanticism.

I was going to use Edna St. Vincent Millay's euphonious sonnet line (she was just out of college and not, I think, really mathematical) as a catchy heading for this post, but it won't do!

Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare

Alone?  He's not Thales!  What is the point of looking at beauty bare, whatever that may mean?  Is there some keener thrill in bare beauty?  Is that mental porn?

That leaves us with the stunning effect that Greek Revival has on some of us.  Why?  Is it that as we grew up we were exposed to all sorts of stimuli that prepared us to respond to a house façade that is (as near as makes no difference) Width:Height=9:4?  That prepared us to enjoy alignments and the like?

The Fuqua family said that their house had been built for a Methodist minister, and the governor, for his part, was Episcopalian (St. James Church, right down town).  I have been taught to cringe with shame if I suppose that there is such a thing as Protestant vs Catholic taste.  That would be hogwash.  Are circles, then, Unitarian?

Be that as it may, except perhaps for the Boehringer house (or Mrs. Borck's if it still had its south porch), I invite you to share my pleasure in Governor Fuqua's house.  Perhaps someday I may even see the inside of it.

By the way, what that gable-balcony reminded me of was the unfinished front of S. Francesco in Rimini, but the resemblance is, of course, specious.

Here are photos in color showing the pictorial use of colored marble, but only Athenian marble, to create an illusion of a wall in shadow behind white columns; Hymettian marble is naturally pale bluish gray.  Pentelic is white, but it contains some iron, which exposure brings out.  Add to these that the architect has, I think, made allusion to earth, on which a tholos would stand, by making the pedestal of poros limestone.  I like to think of Alberti knowing of this, as he couldn't, since it was tucked into a dark corner of the courtyard of a monastery.  I think (as I recall) it was Stuart and Revett who first crawled in and measured and drew it.  It isn't the only example of Greek pictorial architecture (the Romans had to inherit it from somewhere, after all), but it's the only one I have digital color images for.

Houses with semi-cylindrical foundations for wrap-around porches-I

I. The Roumain House at 201 St. Charles Street

This house must date to about the time of Mr. Roumain's 6-story skyscraper on 3rd Street.  Its more than semi-cylindrical porch on its NW corner  has marble hexagonal tiles (and the steps are marble, just as almost all the steps to houses in Athens, Greece are, though they are exceptional here), but the columns, to my surprise, are built of wood.  The foundations are of that lovely dark red brick, just like the 1912 foundations of the Boehringer house and the Reiley-Reeves house.

The red tile roof also is noteworthy, but more remarkable is the use of custom-curved glass  for the round corner (not a round porch here) of the room that begins just behind the column at right.  These columns are more or less Tuscan Doric with adorning motifs added (as also wherever space allows on the balustrade above and on the face of the upper story.

The front doors are better than stained glass; they are heavily leaded glass in fine hardwood frames.  In this photo you can see, also, the marble tiling of the whole porch floor.

The fireplace in the small front room, perfectly preserved and with its imported marble hearth intact, though the  elaborately framed mirror (reflecting an oriental rug) has been removed and all of the period furniture.  (Note also the recent decision to make the inner frame pale; when a fireplace was used for fire with wood or coal, the black finish on the metal fire box would be functional).

Suitably, the young couple's Going Away picture, so close to the front door, was taken in front of this fireplace; you see the identical veining in the marble hearth.  The photos are more than a half century apart.  Not only the hearth is unaffected by time: the fake logs in the gas fire also are identically the same.  Everything suggests that the YWCA  occupancy of the house was on condition of good care.  From a built-in bench (is the foyer a waiting room?) one turns to go up a couple of steps to a first landing.

The rest of the stairway to the upper rooms (not accessible and seemingly not used)  shows us the Ionic capitals  (shiny and dark in 1954) and the young Mrs. Kidd tossing her bouquet to the bridesmaids.  The older persons in the background seem to be standing just inside the leaded glass front door.

The stairs lead up to undamaged, high quality stained glass  (for details, see the Album), and  also you see  both of the Ionic capitals that do duty to dignify the posts.  One is shown below.

None of the woodwork seems to have been scuffed up (though one assumes that recently it has been cleaned and oiled).  The rosettes and pendant palmettes  have nothing to do with an Ionic order and may have been applied rather than carved in the wood (?).

Today you can see that these capitals, if not gessoed wood, must be plaster.   The mixture of expensive materials and less expensive work is one of the interesting things about this house.  I have failed to find a thesis or an article on this house (and perhaps its comparison with Mayor Irvine's house that, less than a decade old (built in 1904-5), which was destroyed by the 1912 Bayou Sara flood).   The house that Mayor Irvine built to replace it was not so splendid and did not have a semi-cylindrical porch element.
But round-foundation wrap-around porches (which I think must be truncated turrets, as Mayor Irvine's certainly was turreted) are not the whole story of style.

Just outside Beauregard Town, but facing north on Government St., and just east of WAFB-TV, 982 Government Street, given over to divorce lawyers, has a little dormer for air in the attic and very elaborated Craftwman-like brackets, quite comparable with those on the Roumain House up at 201 St. Charles.  I strongly suspect that it has been rescued from the attempt at a mall downtown and brought here, where it lords it over its neighbors.  To me, it has "c. 1912" (or so) written all over it and, very substantial but not adorned with marbles, it could easily be by the same (unknown) architect as the Roumain House.
*****

The satellite view of the Romain house in Google Earth (zoom to max) is very surprising.  It shows a building quite unlike the squarish houses with a bay of windows at each side with, or without, wrap-around porches.
The Romain House is quite unlike any other that I know, and, now that I know that the YWCA already had it in 1954, there is no reason why it should not be quite alike in 2013 and 1954.  The question, therefore, is whether it ever was occupied by a family, domestically. or what it looked like inside then.  Friends of my friend, jbk, whose parents appear above, know ladies who went to teas there, at the YWCA, over the years.  I think of the Women's City Club in Berkeley...

The Farmhouse is a Genre, Greek Revival a Style

See at end of this post.  This is a 1960s photo of Gov. Fuqua's house at 301 Napoleon Street.  A new photo is at the head of my post here for May 1, 2013.    This photo is in the Baton Rouge collection of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, Ernest Gueymard Coll., ID Gue089. 

 An Inquiry into Greek Revival in houses down the River Road

I dedicate this post to Wood Grigsby, one of my oldest friends and a native to Southern LaFourche parish, for introducing me to these houses, now nearly 30 years ago, so that some of the Kodachrome shows deterioration, but we took views for the architecture, not for publicity.  I dedicate it also to an even older friend, Pershing Jung, a friend for 60 years now, who in 1990 hunted down a copy of J. Frazer Snith's White Pillars (1941) and sent it to me.
I also must thank J. Michael Desmond, John Sykes, H. Parrott Bacot, George Weaver, and Ervin Dunham for all sorts of help, though none of them knew what I intended to do here!

Another view of the house that Wood Grigsby was personally interested in.

Farther south, in St. Charles Parish as Wood recalls, we saw a much larger Creole farmhouse, yet formally like the one above; its sides are gabled, it is a single story, and it may have a dog-trot hall down the center.  One of the secondary houses at Madewood is quite similar to this one.

That brings us to the wonderful house, Madewood itself, at any rate the one that most impressed me on the day we saw half a dozen.  It is the work of Henry Howard (1818—1884), his earliest known work, since the acquisitions of Thomas Pugh himself date it in the 1840s.  Now, I wouldn't call Henry Howard "forgotten", though J. Frazer Smith, perceptive architect that he was, providing perhaps the best description and appreciation of Madewood, while he knows all the history, does not mention the architect, and the Wikipedia has no biographical entry for Howard.  It is earlier than Woodlawn (demolishd), much earlier than his Belle Grove (burned in 1952 but not before Clarence Laughlin photographed it), while Nottoway (1859) is Italianate rather than Greek Revival in style.  Plainly, Howard's style reveals his early training at the Mechanics Institute in Cork, where he was born, and his being a builder's son.  And he designed Madewood while still in his twenties.

(See Ferguson, John C. "Henry Howard."  In KnowLA, Encyclopedia of Louisiana.  Ed., David Johnson, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 29 Jul. 2011.  Web. 23 May 2013.  The National Park Service article on Madewood itself is also excellent)

The above photographs show that Madewood is truly Greek Revival of a distinctively intense kind (comparison with Spiro Kostov, A History of Architecture, OUP, 1985, fig. 22.21a suggests that the young Howard may even have doted on Robert Adam's masterpieces).  It is unlike Louisiana plantation houses, which usually have colonnades on all four sides, a type well established by Robert Adam's own generation in the mid-18th century (see Parlange in Pointe Coupee parish, though built by a Frenchman: Kostov, fig. 24.5a).  Whatever the date of Rienzi Plantation, down by Thibodaux, with its lovely oak trees, or Vacherie's "Oak Alley" (which they called beau séjour), Kostov, fig. 24.27—two other family houses at Vacherie are St. Joseph's and Laura), Rienzi, too, has columns on all four sides.  Yet it is hardly that Madewood is any less prestigious a plantation house than they are.  It simply unites, very deftly, exceptional Greek Revival with the traditional Creole form.

Howard's urban designs in New Orleans are different, so I won't discuss them here.

Pure Greek Revival in Baton Rouge and Marietta Georgia

After heading a general essay with Governor Fuqua's house at 301 Napoleon Street in Beauregard Town, I found one house (and still only one) that is exactly like it, Colonel Brumby's of 1851 in Marietta, GA.  It is tucked away in the plates of the McAlesters' Field Guide, looking quite unlike the other Greek Revival houses there.

The Marietta house (or hall, as they call it), is available on line in an article in MariettaPatch and on several other promotional pages.  Its emphasis on geometrical clarity and on vertical alignment are just like Governor Fuqua's house, despite being Doric (Greek Doric without any column bases, too).  Now, as Erv Dunham pointed out to me, the Fuqua house does not appear on the Sanborn property-insurance maps for 1911 and earlier; they show a house of a very different shape.  On the 1916 map a house rendered as a square with six columns facing Napoleon Street and built close to the northern property line does appear and, evidently, is the Fuqua house still there today.  Now Henry Fuqua's Hardware Company has been in business since 1883.  Then, from 1916 he was also Warden of Angola Prison, where he seems to have made it the rather exceptional institution that it is even now.  He was governor, though an important and estimable one, only for the last two years of his life.  For more, see the Wikipedia, s.v., Henry L. Fuqua and references listed there.  But it is the house that concerns me here.  Erv Dunham suggests that it must have been moved to its present site, as many were.  John Sykes confirms the practice of moving houses, when everything that went into a house made it more economical than the present habit of demolition and rebuilding, and not least in Baton Rouge.  As to the date of the Fuqua house, its very striking resemblance to Colonel Brumby's of 1851 lends credence to what Gov. Fuqua's widow told John Sykes in 1954, that the house was then already a century old.  That is not a document,  of course, and I have seen it dated c. 1835.  

What, finally, is the chance that when Henry Howard went to Georgia he left his mark there, even though during the War he was working for the Confederate war effort?  

Fact is, that thinking of our visiting the River Road plantations in the early 1980s (probably 1983 or 1984), I kept thinking of seeing such pediments there.  When I went to my scanned files I found that indeed it was Madewood that had made me like the Governor's house at sight.

Of course, building in wood the houses in Marietta and Baton Rouge are lighter (and smaller, too).

What makes Greek Revival style so difficult is their working from those wonderful big books, from Thomas Jefferson's using the actually tiny Temple of Athena Nike on the SW bastion of the Athens Acropolis (or was it the not much larger Maison Carrée at Nîmes?), all laid out for him in beautiful engravings, for the Virginia Capitol, just as Robert Adam had used earlier folios of Rome and Pompeii.  One would think that Henry Howard was steeped even as a boy in such books.  His formation is in fact, I think, more Jeffersonian than of Latrobe's kind.  But I can't find pictures of houses by Latrobe.  

I forget who it was who pointed out that the history of architecture is strongly conditioned by the cost of important buildings and building projects and their involving great private wealth when they didn't in fact involve public monies.

So I have spent a lot of time speculating and trying to ground speculation in whatever else I could find. For example: what was going on in Baton Rouge just before war broke out in Europe?  Why are so many things datable c. 1912: the three most prestigious houses in Roseland Terrace (for which we have Mr. Cazadessous' photographs), the eight-story skyscrapter of Mr. Roumain on 3rd Street and his very opulent house at 201 St. Charles in Beauregard Town?  Has it anything to do with the Bayou Sara flood at St. Francisville in 1912?  Could a house be moved the 25 miles, more or less, to Baton Rouge from the Felicianas?  Well, perhaps that's too fanciful.  Was Henry Fuqua's Hardware Company profitable enough (but in 1912 he was 47, the prime of life) to enable him to move such a house from wherever it had been?