BEAUX-ARTS RESIDENCES
ARCHITECTURE AND OPULENCE OF THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, 1885–1930.
architects The style of the name late 19th comes century from the trained, ƒcole including des Beaux-Arts Richard in Morris Paris, where Hunt, leading H.H. Richardson, American and Charles McKim. (Another name for Beaux Arts is Academic Classicism.) The school taught an exuberant, highly ornamental style with classical underpinnings. Inspiration came from the study of grand French and Italian buildings of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, as well as, occasionally, English Georgian (i.e., Renaissance-derived) buildings. In any case, most Beaux-Arts buildings were creative interpretations of the prototypes. Unlike picturesque Victorian styles,
Beaux Arts was logical, symmetrical, sophisticated, and proportion-obsessed.
The style most often was rendered in masonry: limestone, marble, or cast stone (a stone and cement composite), and sometimes brick. Decorative elements were not necessarily carved; they might be made of terra cotta or even pressed tin. Its inherent grandiosity meant that Beaux Arts was favored for civic buildings such as libraries, courthouses, banks … Grand Central Terminal and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Nevertheless, a few architects and their pre-income tax clients embraced the idea in the design of homes. From Newport to San Francisco, ostentatious Beaux-Arts houses can be found in planned neighborhoods built around boulevards and parks—very French. Richard Morris Hunt, a graduate of the ƒcole, designed Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport mansion The Breakers in the style in 1892.
Beaux Arts was widely introduced in Daniel Burnham’s elegant, neoclassical White City at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. But it was Washington, D.C., that was transformed by Beaux-Arts thinking. Its old red brick and brownstone buildings were superseded by pale, neoclassical structures laid out on broad avenues—the culmination, a century later, of Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for the nation’s capital.
The curriculum and the style were based on European classicism, especially Italian and French palaces and estates of the 16th to 18th centuries. Beaux Arts embraces an eclectic use of historic architectural themes and elements.
By 1930 and the Depression, Beaux Arts had lost its appeal. Within just one generation, the buildings and homes were considered gaudy and excessive.