Eidlitz’s blazingly colorful ceiling for the 1879 Assembly Chamber at New York’s Capitol developed cracks in the 1880s and was dismantled. This watercolor by Peter Ferber shows how the room originally looked.

Leopold Eidlitz specialized in polychrome religious buildings with asymmetrical massing and arched fenestration. This 1874 Episcopal church in Manhattan, NY, (demolished) had steep towers reminiscent of Eidlitz’s hometown, Prague.

In the 1870s, Eidlitz completed the Tweed Courthouse in Manhattan, NY; construction, based on 1860s plans by the original architect, John Kellum, had bogged down due to corrupt contractors. In the rotunda, Eidlitz’s Romanesque brick archways in geometric motifs contrast with Kellum’s flowery ground-floor pilasters and moldings.

book review

Romanesque Reinventions

Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age
by Kathryn E. Holliday
W. W. Norton, New York, NY, 2008
176 pp; hardcover, 150 b&w and 8 color photos; $55
ISBN 978-0-393-73239-9

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

During one heady three-year span from 1843 to 1846, a Czech Jewish shopkeeper’s son named Leopold Eidlitz moved to New York, apprenticed to renowned architect Richard Upjohn, married an Episcopalian blueblood, and set up a small architecture practice. He specialized in Gothic and Romanesque religious and civic buildings, applying biomorphic motifs that were avant-garde in his day. He had virtually no professional training beyond technical high school, and was only aged 20 when he reached America. How did he reinvent himself so unrecognizably?

We don’t really know, partly due to “the absence of Eidlitz’s papers, drawings, or other office records,” reports Kathryn E. Holliday, an architectural historian at the University of Texas at Arlington. She has spent years gamely, tirelessly seeking Eidlitziana, poring through some three dozen archives around the U.S. and in Vienna, Stuttgart and Prague. She has tracked down Eidlitz’s two dozen surviving works, some as prominent as Albany’s Capitol and Manhattan’s Tweed Courthouse, and also discovered that about 35 Eidlitz buildings have been razed, a number of them during his lifetime. In this pioneering, hard-won monograph, she fleshes out a strange portrait of a difficult curmudgeon – she calls him “condescending and acerbic,” as well as “blunt and heavy-handed” – who nonetheless wanted most of all to uplift the masses with ennobling architecture.

Holliday makes a fairly convincing case that, despite his 20th-century “descent into obscurity,” Leopold Eidlitz (1823-1908) ranks as “perhaps the most intellectually driven architect of nineteenth-century America.” He kept structural elements exposed long before the Modernists insisted that form must follow function, and he based ornament on nature before that sinuous practice made Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright famous. Eidlitz’s designs must be reconsidered, Holliday writes, in light of their “interesting organic and proto-functionalist aspects.”

She attributes his lifelong reformist, maverick zeal to the democratic winds that swept Central Europe during his childhood. The Hapsburgs were trying to placate their subjects and boost regional economies and budding industries by setting up public polytechnic schools. Eidlitz attended one in Prague, probably on scholarship. “Lectures ranged from topics in the natural sciences and geology to mathematics to drawing and foreign languages,” Holliday explains. Just before emigrating, he took a few college-level business courses in Vienna, but doesn’t seem to have mastered more than “how to write business letters,” according to Austrian university archives. We don’t know how he prepared to thrive in America – did he somehow find jobs in English-speaking offices? Alas, World War II destroyed Vienna’s 1830s apprenticeship records, and Eidlitz revealed little to friends in the U.S. about his training.

Rather than resort to the kind of “he must have felt” speculations that mar so many diary-deprived biographies, Holliday sticks to the certainties. She luckily had one goldmine of information about his mindset: he often published architectural theories and rants. While running a Manhattan office of, at most, half a dozen staffers, juggling commissions around the region, he wrote dozens of articles for magazines including Architectural Record and Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide. He published three rambling, ponderous, argumentative books as well. The topics are a bizarre mixture of job advice for construction workers, speculations on the speed of light, and scoldings for architects who disguised building materials rather than insure that all features “express more clearly the function of parts in performing their assigned mechanical work.”

His buildings are more fun to read than his prose, and Holliday lovingly describes their asymmetrical massing, foresighted cantilevered balconies on cast-iron brackets and breathtaking palettes of primary, unmixed colors. Here’s a typical Holliday analysis, explaining how much action Eidlitz packed into the façade of a five-story Manhattan commercial building in 1870: “The play of scale, from the broad doorway at the first level to the miniscule dormers in the mansard roof, is heightened by the use of alternating light and dark voussoirs that contrast with the darker brick surface of the wall. The building reads as a skeleton of white arches outlining the large voids of windows.”

This structure, though a little tour de force, was demolished in the 1890s, when Eidlitz was well into disgruntled semi-retirement. He spent his days making tirades about the profession’s shallowness, warning of the conviction-less practitioner who “aspires to be the fashionable architect” and “follows adroitly in the wake of public opinion.” (Eidlitz’s own son Cyrus became just that kind of fashionable architect, socializing in the Hamptons and designing tamely Classical telephone-company offices.) Critics dismissed his work as passé, even disposable.

Holliday is frank about the epithets that were tossed around, including “mongrel architecture” and “rank Romanesque.” One of his brightly-colored, geometric-patterned Manhattan churches was nicknamed “The Church of the Homely Oilcloth.”

This book would have done still more to rebuild Eidlitz’s reputation if more color photos had been funded, and some insights given into how his wife Harriet raised their six children while tolerating his bad-temperedness. Aside from those minute lapses, Holliday’s effort seems like the best tale that could yet have been woven from meager archival threads scattered around the world. TB

Discuss this article in Talk