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Reviews
| Distant Corner: Seattle Architects and the Legacy of H. H. Richardson. By Jeffrey Karl Ochsner and Dennis Alan Andersen. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2003. xii+409 pp., illus., maps, diags., appendix, notes, index. $60 hb (ISBN 0-295-98238-1).
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Seattle's fire of 1889 destroyed much of the urban center of Seattle, providing residents with the opportunity to rebuild from scratch. At the time of the fire, the frontier city was staged for rebirth, prepared to become a modern city, and ready to meet the challenges of dramatic growth. Distant Corner is a study of Seattle's architecture before and after the fire, with particular attention paid to the new architectural designs adopted by western architects. The authors, Jeffrey Ochsner and Dennis Andersen, set out with several ambitious goals, meeting those goals through detailed text and pertinent photographs. The authors study the architects and architecture of postfire Seattle 1889–95, review American architecture at the time and how Seattle architects understood and used Romanesque Revival building styles, show the compromises adopted between new urban development and new technology and architectural styles, and create an interpretive framework to better understand the people designing buildings.
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Distant Corner is not for leisure reading, although some knowledge of architecture will ease the task. Each of the book's chapters focuses on a particular topic, for example commercial buildings or construction technology. Each chapter progresses from general to specific, beginning with a summary of the contents; several of these summaries are overly long. The text of each chapter is very detailed, sometimes overly so, for the authors occasionally include small facts that do not have any direct bearing on the information in the body of the text and that would have been better placed in footnotes. The illustrations are numerous and extremely helpful, for Ochsner and Andersen provide detailed captions for the photographs and use the photos to clarify points made in the text.
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After an opening chapter that discusses Seattle's history and the architectural styles used there in the 19th century, the authors turn to the fire of 1889 and its aftermath, emphasizing the influence of the fire on architectural design. This is followed by a chapter devoted to the emergence and diffusion of Richardson's Romanesque Revival architecture and individual chapters devoted to specific types of architecture in postfire Seattle: commercial, residential, and public.
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H. H. Richardson initiated the Romanesque Revival through two decades of work, gradually receiving recognition from an assortment of professional publications. By the late-19th century, Romanesque Revival had become the nation's leading architectural style, spanning the country from Boston to Seattle. The journals and magazines that covered the style provided a primary means by which Seattle architects gained exposure to the new style. Ochsner and Andersen provide copious visual and descriptive examples of how Seattle architects imitated the Romanesque Revival architectural style while they simultaneously incorporated elements of their own, for example, to meet the new fireproofing laws enacted by the city.
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Although Seattle's designers were initially overwhelmed with opportunities to implement popular architectural styles in Seattle during the building boom of 1889–90, rebuilding efforts encountered financial difficulties in the early 1890s, putting construction on hold until money became available. This led to the emigration of architects to cities with better prospects. Some construction continued but at a snail's pace compared to the quantity and quickness of erection during the boom years.
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One of the book's best chapters focuses on public buildings. One architect, Willis Ritchie, built many of the city's new civic buildings. The chapter contains a long, informative biography of Ritchie, which chronicles his rise and success in securing public architectural contracts in competition with other leading Seattle architects.
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The book concludes with a discussion of the general influence of Richardson's Romanesque Revival architecture and Seattle's reaction to the financial collapse of 1893.
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Because archival information from Seattle in the 1890s was scarce, the authors made heavy use of contemporary publications, journals, and newspapers. In particular, they drew heavily on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for information on the erection of buildings. The volume has endnotes that often include supplementary information.
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The book's excellent appendix provides a wealth of information on buildings designed by Seattle's postfire architects. Organized by architect, the appendix includes each building designed, its date, location, and whether it was built, not built, or destroyed.
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| Distant Corner best serves industrial archaeologists and preservationists through its descriptions of the styles, materials, and techniques used in late-19th-century western building. It also offers useful insights into how architectural design (Romanesque Revival) interacts with specific technologies (fireproofing) and with economic, political, and cultural factors (cost of materials, new legal requirements, aesthetics). The authors succeed in their goals for the book, providing a well-researched and detailed study of the architectural history of Seattle in the late-19th century. |
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