Western Architecture: 1876 to 1888

The William Watts Sherman House, a notable house in Newport, Rhode Island, designed by American architect H. H. Richardson and built in 1875-1876, with later interiors by Stanford White, is generally acknowledged as one of Richardson's masterpieces, and the prototype for what later will become known as the Shingle Style in American architecture.

The house is two and a half stories in height and basically rectangular, about fifty-three feet by eighty-one feet in dimensions, with a porte-cochere on the east facade, and two principal entrances on the west.

Its first story is faced in pink granite ashlar, with higher stories of brick, shingle, and half-timbered stucco, diamond-panel windows grouped in long, horizontal bands, and five massive red brick chimneys.

Trim materials include reddish sandstone and brownstone.

The roof is steeply gabled, with a broad single gable in front and multiple sharp gables to the rear, all originally shingled in wood.

Its interior organizes clusters of rooms about a spacious central stair hall.

Manchester Town Hall, a Victorian, Neo-gothic municipal building in Manchester, England, designed by architect Alfred Waterhouse as the ceremonial headquarters of Manchester City Council, is completed in 1877.

The rapid growth and accompanying pollution in Victorian cities has caused great problems for architects including denial of light, overcrowding, awkward sites, noise, accessibility and visibility of buildings, and air pollution.

Provision for "the sufficiency of window light supplied throughout the building" has been addressed by the use of architectural devices: suspended first floor rooms, made possible by the use of iron-framed construction, skylights, extra windows and dormers, "borrowed lights" for interior spaces and glazed white bricks in conjunction with mosaic marble paving in areas where the light was "less strong".

Clear glass was used in important rooms, with light-colored tints for colored glazing, as "the sky of Manchester does not favour the employment of deeply stained glass." (Bowler, Catherine; Brinblecombe, Peter (2000), "Environmental Pressures on Building Design and Manchester's John Rylands Library", Journal of Design and History (The Design History Society) 13 (3): 175–191)

Despite its medieval styling, the building has been designed to support modern practical technologies.

It has gas lighting, and a warm-air heating system, which provides fresh air drawn through ornamental stone air inlets placed below the windows and admitted behind the hot water pipes and 'coils' of rooms.

Warmed, fresh air is fed into the stairwells and through hollow shafts within the spiral staircases to ventilate the corridors.

The pipes that supply gas for lighting are ingeniously concealed underneath the banister rails of the spiral staircases.

Waterhouse has designed the building structure to be fireproof, using a combination of concrete and wrought-iron beams.

Boston's current Trinity Church complex—its former site on Summer Street having burned in the Great Boston Fire of 1872—is erected under the direction of Rector Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), one of the best-known and most charismatic preachers of his time.

The church and parish house have been designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and construction has taken place from 1872 to 1877, when the complex is consecrated.

Situated on Copley Square in Back Bay, Trinity Church is the building that establishes Richardson's reputation and is the birthplace and archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by a clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches, and a massive tower.

This style will soon be adopted for a number of public buildings across the United States.

The Maria Pia Bridge and the Work of Gustave Eiffel (1876–1877)

Onsite construction of the Maria Pia Bridge in Porto began in January 1876 and was completed by October 1877. The bridge was ceremonially opened on November 4, 1877, by King Luís I and Queen Maria Pia, after whom the structure was named.

The Maria Pia Bridge, designed by French engineer Gustave Eiffel, was a groundbreaking achievement in railway bridge engineering. The project was awarded to Eiffel et Cie, a firm founded in 1868 by Eiffel in partnership with Théophile Seyrig, another graduate of the École Centrale.

Eiffel’s Winning Design for the Douro Bridge

The construction of a railway bridge over the Douro River posed significant engineering challenges:

• The river was fast-flowing, with depths of up to 20 meters (66 feet).
• The riverbed consisted of deep gravel, making the construction of traditional piers impossible.
• The bridge required a central span of 160 meters (520 feet)—longer than any arch span built at the time.

Eiffel’s innovative design featured a deck supported by five iron piers, with the abutments on the riverbanks supporting a central arch. His bid of 965,000 francs was far lower than his competitors’, securing him the contract. However, given the relative inexperience of Eiffel et Cie in comparison to rival firms, the Portuguese authorities appointed an expert committee—including Jean-Baptiste Krantz, Henri Dion, and Léon Molinos—to evaluate the firm's capabilities. Their favorable report ultimately confirmed Eiffel’s suitability, allowing the project to proceed.

Eiffel’s Parallel Work in Budapest

Around the same time, Eiffel et Cie also won a contract for a new railway terminus in Budapest, part of the Vienna-Budapest railway. Unlike traditional railway station designs, where the metal structure was concealed behind elaborate façades, Eiffel's Budapest station used the metal framework as the centerpiece, flanked by conventional stone and brick structures housing administrative offices.

A Milestone in Eiffel’s Career

The Maria Pia Bridge was a major milestone in Eiffel’s career, showcasing his pioneering use of iron in large-scale structures. The success of the project helped cement his reputation as one of the leading engineers of the era and paved the way for later achievements, including the Garabit Viaduct (1884) and ultimately the Eiffel Tower (1889).

Richard Norman Shaw designs Bedford Park, London’s first garden suburb, in 1878.

An associate of William Morris, Shaw had trained in the London office of William Burn with George Edmund Street and attended the Royal Academy classes, receiving a thorough grounding in classicism, and had met William Eden Nesfield, with whom he was briefly in partnership., an associate of William Morris,

He had traveled with a Royal Academy scholarship in 1854—1856,  collecting sketches that were published as Architectural Sketches from the Continent, in 1858.

In 1863, after sixteen years of training, he had opened a practice for a short time with Nesfield.

Shaw had been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1872.

He works, among others, for the artists John Callcott Horsley and George Henry Boughton, and the industrialist Lord Armstrong.

He has designed large houses such as Cragside and Grim's Dyke, as well as a series of commercial buildings in a wide range of styles.

Shaw had been elected to the Royal Academy in 1877.

The Exposition Universelle in Paris, which celebrates the recovery of France after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and opens on May 1, 1878, firmly establishes Gustave Eiffel’s reputation as one of the leading engineers of the time.

As well as exhibiting models and drawings of work undertaken by the company, Eiffel is also responsible for the construction of several of the exhibition buildings.

One of these, a pavilion for the Paris Gas Company, is Eiffel's first collaboration with Stephen Sauvestre, who is later to become the head of the company's architectural office.

Eiffel’s company is renamed the Compagnie des Establissments Eiffel in 1879 after the partnership with Seyrig is dissolved.

The same year, the company is given the contract for the Garabit viaduct, a railway bridge near Ruynes en Margeride in the Cantal département.

Like the Douro bridge, the project involves a lengthy viaduct crossing the river valley as well as the river crossing, and Eiffel is given the job without any process of competitive tendering due to his success with the bridge over the Douro.

To assist him in the work he takes on several people who are to play important roles in the design and construction of the Eiffel Tower, including Maurice Koechlin, a young graduate of the Zurich Polytechnikum, who is engaged to undertake calculations and make drawings, and Emile Nouguier, who had previously worked for Eiffel on the construction of the Douro bridge.

The same year, Eiffel starts work on a system of standardized prefabricated bridges, an idea that was the result of a conversation with the governor of Cochin-China.

These use a small number of standard components, all small enough to be readily transportable in areas with poor or nonexistent roads, and are joined together using bolts rather than rivets, reducing the need for skilled labor on site.

A number of different types are produced, ranging from footbridges to standard-gauge railway bridges.

The completion of Germany's largest cathedral is celebrated as a national event on August 14, 1880, six hundred and thirty-two years after construction had begun.

The celebration is attended by Emperor Wilhelm I.

Construction of Cologne Cathedral had commenced in 1248 and was halted in 1473, leaving it unfinished.

Work had restarted in 1842 and is completed, to the original design of the surviving medieval plans and drawings, but utilizing more modern construction techniques, including iron roof girders, in 1880.

The nave has been completed and the towers added; the bells were installed in the 1870s.

It is one hundred and forty-four point five meters (four hundred and seventy-four feet) long, eighty-six point five meters (two hundred and eighty-four feet) wide and its towers are approximately one hundred anf fifty-seven meter (five hundred and fifteen feet) tall.

The cathedral is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe and has the second-tallest spires and largest facade of any church in the world.

The choir has the largest height to width ratio, 3.6:1, of any medieval church.

Dankmar Adler had hired Louis Sullivan in 1879; he had become a partner in the firm a year later, marking the beginning of Sullivan's most productive years.

Adler is the firm’s engineering designer and administrator, and Sullivan is the planner and artist.

It is at this firm that Sullivan will deeply influence a young designer named Frank Lloyd Wright, who will come to embrace Sullivan's designs and principles as the inspiration for his own work

Louis Henry Sullivan was born to an Irish-born father, Patrick Sullivan, and a Swiss-born mother, née Andrienne List, both of whom had immigrated to the United States in the late 1840s.

He had grown up living with his grandmother, Anna Mattheus List, in South Reading (now Wakefield), Massachusetts.

Louis had spent most of his childhood learning about nature at his grandparent’s farm.

In the later years of his primary education, his experiences varied quite a bit.

He would spend a lot of time by himself wandering around Boston exploring every street and looking at the surrounding buildings.

Around this time, he had developed his fascination with buildings and he decided he would one day become a structural engineer/architect.

While attending high school, Sullivan had met Moses Woolson, whose teachings had made a lasting impression on him, and will nurture him until his death.

After graduating from high school, Sullivan had studied architecture briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Learning that he could both graduate from high school a year early and pass up the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations, Sullivan had entered MIT at the age of sixteen.

After one year of study, he had moved to Philadelphia and talked himself into a job with architect Frank Furness.

The Depression of 1873 had dried up much of Furness’s work, and he was forced to let Sullivan go.

At that point, Sullivan had moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and had worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect often credited with erecting the first steel-frame building.

After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan had moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for a year.

Renaissance art inspires Sullivan’s mind, and he is influenced to direct his architecture to emulating Michelangelo's spirit of creation rather than replicating the styles of earlier periods.

Returning to Chicago, he had begun work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman.

Johnston & Edleman had been commissioned for the design of the Moody Tabernacle, with the interior decorative "fresco secco" stencils (stencil technique applied on dry plaster) designed by Sullivan.

Antoni Gaudí’s first projects were the lampposts he had designed for the Plaça Reial in Barcelona, the unfinished Girossi newsstands, and the Cooperativa Obrera Mataronense (Workers' Cooperative of Mataró) building.

He had gained wider recognition for his first important commission, the Casa Vicens, and had subsequently received more significant proposals.

At the Paris World's Fair of 1878, Gaudí had displayed a showcase he had produced for the glove manufacturer Comella.

Its functional and aesthetic modernista design had impressed Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell, who had then commissioned some of Gaudí’s most outstanding work: the Güell wine cellars, the Güell pavilions, the Palau Güell (Güell palace), the Park Güell (Güell park) and the crypt of the church of the Colònia Güell.

Gaudí has also become a friend of the marquis of Comillas, the father-in-law of Count Güell, for whom he designed "El Capricho" in Comillas.

In 1883, Gaudí had been put in charge of the recently initiated project to build a Barcelona cathedral called Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family, or Sagrada Família).

Gaudí has completely changed the initial design and imbued it with his own distinctive style.

From 1915 until his death he will devote himself entirely to this project.

Given the number of commissions he begins receiving, he has to rely on his team to work on multiple projects simultaneously.

His team consists of professionals from all fields of construction.

Several of the architects who work under him will later become prominent in the field, such as Josep Maria Jujol, Joan Rubió, Cèsar Martinell, Francesc Folguera and Josep Francesc Ràfols.

Gaudí moves to rural Sant Feliu de Codines in 1885 to escape the cholera epidemic that is ravaging Barcelona.

He lives in Francesc Ullar’s house, for whom he design sa dinner table as a sign of his gratitude.