OCTOBER 2009 » book review

The Orientalist of New Haven

Henry Austin: In Every Variety of Architectural Style
by James F. O'Gorman
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT; 2009
229 pp; 32 color and 100 b&w illustrations; $35
ISBN 978-0-8195-6896-0

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

You may never read a humbler preface than James F. O'Gorman's opener to this monograph about Connecticut architect Henry Austin (1804-1891). The author warns that the "brief chapters" amount to only a "preliminary gathering of information," and perhaps a "stimulus and guide to further research." But his stepping stone to future Austin studies is a helpfully tall one. He has gleaned impressive data from archives as obscure as a Victorian stone dealership's invoices and back issues of the New Haven Daily Palladium.

No historian has attempted a thorough Austin study before, mainly because the known records are "incomplete and often fuzzy or contradictory," writes O'Gorman, an emeritus art history professor at Wellesley College. Austin, he adds, "never wrote about himself, his work, or the state of architecture." Only one photo of the architect, taken when he was 84, has turned up; he sported an improbably dark-brown hairpiece "above a handsome face etched by the long years," O'Gorman notes. The historian sensibly avoids hypothesizing any psycho-biography for Austin, and never speculates on his private life. (We do know Austin had six children, including four sons who reached adulthood, and was widowed in his 30s with three children to raise.) The book nonetheless offers an absorbing plot. O'Gorman chronicles the evolution of Austin's residential, civic, institutional, commercial and ecclesiastical works, concentrated in southern Connecticut but also scattered as far afield as Maine and Michigan.

No one has yet determined where he trained before setting up a New Haven-based solo practice in 1837 (he also briefly ran a Hartford branch office). An 1843 article in a New England quarterly called him "a self-taught man." O'Gorman can prove, however, that Austin had at least one famous architectural mentor: Ithiel Town, the New Haven-based Greek Revival pioneer. In Town's archive, a letter to fellow architect A. J. Davis praises Austin's "tastes and talents" and recommends that Davis show the latest office drawings to the budding practitioner.

Journalists also enthused about Austin early in his career. By the 1840s, raves had been published about his "neat and beautiful" villas "designed with great taste." Soon after illustrations of his work appeared in print, other builders copied them – "the highest accolade possible," O'Gorman observes dryly.

Residential buildings, which were commissioned by professors and upper-middle-class industrialists, dominated Austin's first two decades in business. And they seem to be O'Gorman's favorite topics. He devotes a quarter of the book to pointing out the houses' basic similarities – cupolas, porticos, service ells – yet eclectically varied ornament. Austin would happily scallop the ceiling of a stairwell, let porch column capitals droop, or run Rococo reliefs over doorways, based on precedents as exotic as "the rock-cut caves at Ellora in India."

A single mansion in Maine, O'Gorman writes, is stocked with "Tuscan forms, Grecian Ionic capitals, Second Empire parlor, Gothic library, Turkish smoking room, Pompeian bathroom, and Bedouin tent painted on the ceiling of the belvedere." Austin would win over clients to these schemes by showing images from his substantial library: he bought British, American and German tomes about the latest architectural fashions. (Yale University now owns much of his collection, on subjects ranging from gardening to tomb design.)

Austin's church schemes had some spice too, whether in Gothic or Federalist mode. He pierced their asymmetrical towers with quatrefoils, and draped gables with icicle moldings. His work on banks, museums (the Wadsworth Atheneum), campuses (a Yale library), and civic buildings is somewhat more staid, although he did lay stripes of purplish and beige stone across New Haven's City Hall. And of the dozens of Austin structures that have been demolished, the boldest and most lamented may be New Haven's train station (which burned in 1894). Flanking its central pagoda-like cupola was a 140-ft. clock tower that has been compared to a minaret and campanile, and a stubbier second tower often likened to an Indian stupa.

Austin lived to see the railroad company abandon the station in 1874, and by that point, O'Gorman writes, the office's output had suffered a "gradual leveling off of individuality." Late works are competent and often mansard-topped. His son Frederick Austin, who took over after Henry's death, ended up "specializing in moderate-cost houses for the expanding New Haven suburbs." Only a handful of historians, mostly Connecticut regional specialists, have paid any attention to what O'Gorman calls "a career that is woefully under recorded."

This book, despite the author's apologies for its shortcomings, will go a long way toward establishing Henry Austin's place in the pantheon of early-19th-century architectural innovators. In fact, staying out of the limelight – writing nothing of consequence, not joining professional associations – seems to have done Austin some good. "His relative isolation from the mainstream left him free to explore his own tendencies," O'Gorman concludes. That is, would the architect have had as much fun with asymmetry and Orientalism if he had been lecturing at universities, penning dogmatic position papers, or sitting through AIA meetings?TB

«BACK TO OCTOBER 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed