Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue

Background

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was born on April 28, 1869, of prosperous old New England stock, at the family homestead in Pomfret, Connecticut. He was the son of Charles Wells Goodhue and Helen Grosvenor (Eldredge) Goodhue.

Education

From his mother, who sketched and painted, Goodhue derived a love of drawing and a precocious ability. From her, also, he first learned the stories of St. Augustine and St. Francis, which probably gave the original stimulus to his love and knowledge of the Middle Ages. He had little formal schooling, but read and sketched insatiably.

Career

At fifteen, Goodhue went to New York to enter the office of Renwick, Aspinwall & Russell. James Renwick had designed Grace Church and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral; his office was doubtless the best place in America to learn Gothic detail. While still in Renwick’s office, at twenty-one, Goodhue entered several of the open competitions then in vogue, including that for designs for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and even won the competition for a cathedral in Dallas. This was the occasion for a new alliance.

In Boston, Ralph Adams Cram and Charles Francis Wentworth, a few years Goodhue’s senior, had begun the practice of architecture in 1880, devoting themselves chiefly to churches. To the young firm of Cram & Wentworth, he brought the Texas commission, destined to prove illusory, and entered its employ at the close of 1889 as head draftsman of the little office. Later, he was taken into the partnership.

On the death of Wentworth, the firm became, as it remained for many years, Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson. The influences under which their style was formed were from the contemporary phase of the Gothic revival in England as represented particularly in the work of Sedding, from High Church ritualism, and from the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris and Walter Crane, concerned with the revival of handicraft in the sympathetic and functional use of materials.

Essentially all these tendencies were phases of a romanticism which expressed itself characteristically in an evanescent magazine, the Knight Errant, for which Goodhue designed the cover, in Morris’s tradition, in 1891. This is but one of many examples of Goodhue’s work in book design, in which he was active at that period. It led him to design two fonts of Roman type, the Merrymount and the well-known Cheltenham.

Many of his page borders, title-pages, and book-plates, much prized by collectors, reveal the influence of Morris, although, as time went on, Goodhue’s virtuosity led him to experiment also in other styles. With the literary activity and fervor of Cram, appealing for a return to beauty and sacrifice in the church, with the magical draftsmanship in which Goodhue clothed his Gothic fantasy in design, their firm flourished and took the lead in ecclesiastical architecture.

Their first success was won in alliance with the High Churchmen. They took up the ritual arrangements and the traditional forms of the English church as they had been cut off by Henry VIII. All Saints’, Ashmont (Boston), their earliest triumph, built in 1892, shows a free use of the forms of this last phase of English Gothic, with walls of brown, seam-faced granite, and windows of rich clear glass, heavily leaded in contrast to the naturalistic opalescent windows of John La Farge.

Other striking works of the early period were St. Stephen’s, Cohasset, Massachusets, romantically situated on its bold ledges, and St. Stephen’s, Fall River, with its deep western arch divided by great canopied mullions.

Goodhue could now satisfy his romantic urge to travel. He was drawn by the picturesque to Quebec, to Mexico, to Germany, to Persia, to China.

Half-fanciful recollections of his journeys, in text and drawings sometimes published in current magazines, are some of his most characteristic creations the dream cities which rose so magically under his pen: Traumberg and Monteventoso and Xanadu, cities of domes and towers, rising on lofty rocks or cliffs washed by the sea.

Their forms like their names were chosen for romantic appeal: the Gothic of the North, with its chivalry and mysticism, feudal Italy, the mysterious East. Some such dream cities Goodhue was to build at West Point and at San Diego. The first period of his work culminated in the buildings at West Point won in competition in 1903. The precipitous site favored the victory of Gothic, castellated design.

In the development of the plans, the chapel fell particularly to Goodhue, who mantled it with superb ruggedness. The motive of the front of St. Stephen’s was there effectively developed. The group gave a powerful impetus to the adoption of Gothic forms in collegiate work generally.

The execution of the work at West Point led to Goodhue’s establishment in New York. There many churches now came to the firm, of which the two offices became increasingly independent until the final dissolution of the partnership in 1913. Thus Goodhue had the major responsibility in the detail of St. Thomas’s on Fifth Avenue, and the later New York churches are to be assigned entirely to him.

In St. Thomas’s Goodhue achieved a measure of romance even on a prosaic street corner. The plan of the church, in which Cram still had a part, is designed with extreme skill to produce a rich variety of effects of mass and space within the constricted rectangle of the site.

The front, unsymmetrical with a bold tower on the outer corner, is suggestive of the French flamboyant churches, but freely conceived. The great carved reredos rising the full height of the tall nave, with tier upon tier of saints in their canopied niches, is of inspiring beauty and grandeur.

Goodhue’s work must be regarded as representing not a transition but a tardy compromise.

He was cut off in the prime of his energies, at fifty-five, by his death on April 23, 1924.

Achievements

• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue is known as an architect of the West Point Chapel, Los Angeles Public Library, National Academy of Sciences Building and the Nebraska State Capitol among many others.
  
  He is credited with creating a distinctive Spanish Colonial architecture into the Spanish Colonial Revival Style as a dominant Californian regional vernacular. He also influenced the dominance of the Spanish Colonial Revival style in major public and private architecture of 1920s Hawaii.
  
  Goodhue also popularized the art deco style in America, as in his design for the Nebraska State Capitol building.
  
  Goodhue's correspondence, architectural drawings, and professional papers is held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A book of architectural and decorative drawings

    (Pictorial drawings of architectural subjects actually bui...)

  • Mexican Memories: The Record Of A Slight Sojourn Below The Yellow Rio Grande...

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

Views

Goodhue was at his best, as the romanticist and felt free to be himself. In the South Church, the Chapel of the Intercession, and St. Vincent Ferrer in New York, Goodhue repeated and varied his now characteristic formulae for the high-shouldered urban church.

In the last, a new influence, that of Sir Gilbert Scott’s work at Liverpool Cathedral, is apparent. After his first sight of this, Goodhue redesigned completely his proposed Cathedral of Maryland in Baltimore, with bolder scale and less traditional details.

The designs for the chapel for the University of Chicago, Byzantine elements mingled with the Gothic; in St. Bartholomew’s in New York, in which Stanford White’s round-arched portal was to be incorporated, Goodhue played freely with Romanesque and Byzantine forms. These were but the first steps in a development which was to carry him away from historical forms, into a struggle for freedom of expression which was to occupy the last years of his life.

From the early days, although classic form repelled him as a fait accompli, he had occasionally worked in it admirably, especially in its romantic Spanish phases - in that baroque so akin to Gothic.

Soon after the American occupation of Cuba, he did Trinity Church in Havana (1905), and other little Spanish churches there, the forerunners of his California houses and of the exposition of 1915 in San Diego. There he threw a great arched causeway across a deep ravine and piled up at the end picturesque masses of dome and tower. The front of the Gillespie house at Montecito, most truly classic of his works, is a calm proscenium, backing the terraced garden.

As Goodhue grew older, he became dissatisfied with his romanticism. Even within the Gothic, he came to appreciate, “the essence of the French cathedral plan is logic”.

He grew dissatisfied with his medievalism. The daily experience convinced him that “Mediaeval Gothic is now impossible, and the Gothic we do today if it is to be vital, and beautiful, and true, and good must be of our own times. ”

At first, he did not mean “that we must abandon any of the old materials. ” “Steel-framing and reinforced concrete are good enough things in their way but just because we have such materials is no reason why we should throw away stone and oak”.

By 1918, however, at least he had come to a different emphasis, holding, in a letter to Paul Cret, that while architecture should represent a decent reverence for the historic past of the art, they should only ignore their rightful heritage for the most compelling reasons. One of these compelling reasons was the invention of the steel frame, or reinforced-concrete construction, which to his mind did “abrogate practically all known forms. ”

Thus, though realizing himself “too conservative wholly to abandon the language of ornament” to which he was accustomed, he moved toward the camp of the logicians and modernists. Paradoxically, yet naturally enough, as Goodhue moved toward “modernism, ” he moved also toward classicism - the classicism of calm and ordered masses and spaces.

The force of late - Victorian rationalistic theory overbore romanticism in his thought; the force of the classic spirit in the great body of contemporary American work overbore romanticism in his practice. When he commenced to do government buildings he had to make concessions, and he approached the task with a heavy heart.

At least, he would criticize the fait accompli, he would rationalize the classic. Unconsciously he would Gothicize it as well. In the competition for the great war memorial in Kansas City, his design, like the winning design of H. Van Buren Magonigle, was of vast block-like masses, colonnades reduced to lowest terms, in which the suggestion and the proportions only were classical, the general disposition picturesque.

The chief element was a background for colossal sculptured figures, recalling somewhat the massive German monuments of the imperial period. Among his executed works of the last period, the most significant are the Nebraska Capitol and the National Academy of Sciences. The capitol is a composition of gaunt and simple masses, the broad base, marked by continuous horizontal lines, contrasting sharply with the lofty tower of multiplied and unbroken verticals.

The logic for which the designer strove is, to be sure, mostly apologetics. In the general disposition, the practical functions of the tower are an afterthought. In spite of Goodhue’s eagerness that his buttresses should really butt, they only seem to do so. Mass and line are the essentials of the building, and its impressive merits are in these, not in structural truth.

Details of “style, ” however, largely occupied the designer. It is, as Goodhue said, “a sort of Classic” although the elimination of many horizontal cornices from the competitive design makes it also a sort of Gothic or Byzantine. Especially in the interior, the effect is sometimes not vitally unified in form.

The same expurgated classicism prevails in the building of the American Academy of Sciences in Washington. Downcast at first at the requirement of conformity to the established character of the surroundings, he strove to vitalize old formulae by the elimination of columnar elements, by refinements of profiling and restraint of sculptured ornament.

Beautiful in material and detail, the building yet suffers from the broken rhythm of its short facade. The forms, but hardly the spirit, of the classic, are there. Once he had accepted steel, Goodhue dreamed of a skyscraper which, by office rental, would bear the cross far above the city. Essentially his tower for the site of the old Madison Square Garden was the tower of the Nebraska Capitol on a still vaster scale.

It was a scheme of soaring lines, and of vast corner buttresses, which tended to destroy the rental on which the whole was predicated. It was a glorious vision of form, based on a contradiction in terms. The vision has remained. It gleams often in Hugh Ferriss’s paper-cities of the future and is palely reflected in more than one executed building.

Essentially he was a belated romanticist and eclectic.

The Gothic revival abroad had pretty well run its course of a century and a half before his advent. Augustus Welby Pugin, whom he admired, and whom he resembled in the facility, preceded him by two generations. Even in America, powerful Gothic work had been done a half-century earlier by John Haviland, Richard Upjohn, and Renwick.

Supremely impressionable, Goodhue veered, in his middle years, with every wind that blew, from Spain, from Byzantium, from Persia. His turn to the logic of function, his attempt to express modern material, came to a generation after that of Louis H. Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Otto Wagner, themselves not so much pioneers as consummators of a half-century of speculation and experiment.

Quotations: “Art pre-exists in Nature, and Nature is reproduced in Art. ”

Personality

Goodhue was no ordinary office boy. Reading and drawing at night, he soon gained a reputation among the draftsmen not only for his independence of thought but for his fabulous facility - in spite of his left-handedness - with pen and ink.

Slight, blond, blue-eyed, red-cheeked and debonair, he was ambitious to excel, even in the boyish consumption of been A “whimsical, humorous, baffling quality wove a veil of mockery and persiflage over a real and powerful sincerity”.

In the final estimate of Goodhue’s work there must be taken into account, besides the intrinsic quality of his works, the question of leadership. It must be recognized that in the great movements on the stage of the world he made but a dilatory entrance and that his steps were halting and uncertain.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Goethe was Goodhue's God.

Connections

Goodhue was married to Lydia. T. Bryant of Boston.

Father:

Charles Wells Goodhue

Mother:

Helen Grosvenor (Eldredge) Goodhue

Wife:

Lydia. T. Bryant

employer:

Ralph Adams Cram

References

• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (Architectural History Foundation Book)
• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue: Architect and master of many arts
• Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (Da Capo Press series in architecture and decorative art)
• Bertram Goodhue: His Life And Residential Architecture