Chloe Tucker & Jai Agrawal
CITY 207
Fall 2004
THE BULLETS – Final Project

Athenaeum of Philadelphia
o AGP: Italianate palazzo, private library, inspired by London Athenaeum
Club, brownstone
o TBW: [Remarks same as AGP]
o 3C: London antecedents “stripped of columns and pilasters in favor of the
articulated windows and bold cornices of the Italian Renaissance.”
o 3C: Notman’s planned marble façade changed at last minute to lessexpensive red sandstone, a newly fashionable material.

Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul
o AGP: Antebellum Roman Catholic Cathedral supporting new Irish
immigrant population, one of the nation’s first cathedral, devised by parish
priests, reworked by Notman, brownstone
o TBW: Palladian façade and dome evolved by Notman in association with
John T. Mahoney.
o TBW: “One of the grandest nineteenth-century statements in the
vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance.
o TBW: Lebrun supervised construction of interior.

St. Mark’s Church
o AGP: Ecclesiological Gothic, asymmetric plan (tower to one side) High
Church
o TBW: “One of the most successful examples of the archaeological phase
of the Gothic Revival in this country…”
o TBW: Notman continues his Brownstone trend.

Jayne Building
o TBW: First proto-skyscraper in America. Ten-story granite building with
terminal tower, probably designed by T.U. Walter.
o 3C: Also noteworthy for a successful use of Gothic styling in such a
vertical context. Large, functional show windows form a visual base,
veriticals emphasized by recessed spandrels and resolved by Gothic
arches, occuli, and quatrefoils.

Academy of Music
o AGP: Modeled after Milan’s Teatro della Scala opera house “acoustically
felicitous"
o TBW: “Plain brick exterior ornamented principally by a series of shallow
arches and which exhibits a very free use of classical forms…”
o TBW: Interior regarded as very early example of Neo-Baroque preferred
by the French architect LeBrun.
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
West Arch Street Presbyterian Church
o 3C: Tatum: “Most elaborate example of Italianate Revivals in
Philadelphia.” Dome and eclecticism grounds for critical praise.
o 3C: Bears striking resemblance to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
o PP: “Congregation bought most elegant/imposing architecture it could
find…”

Smythe Building
o AGP: Commercial building, notable cast-iron front

Maxwell Mansion
o PP: “Excellent example of a picturesque eclectic suburban villa…” All
interior elements ordered from a catalog, entire garden copied from an
1859 gardening journal.
o AGP: High Victorian Gallimaufry. High tower, high chimneys, Flemish
gables, mansards, Gothic arches.

Episcopal Hospital
o TBW: “Norman Style,” example of C19 practice of “hanging the obvious
externals of a historical style upon a plan dictated by a Renaissance
balance and regularity.”
o TBW: Design drawn from Hopital Lariboisiere in Paris.

Masonic Temple
o AGP: Romanesque Revival, notable interiors
o TBW: Commissioned to Windrim, a “Brother Mason.”

Union League Clubhouse
o AGP: “Curious brown clubhouse…as distinctive a building as its decade
can show in America.”
o TBW: Curving exterior stairway, tower, and mansard roof a good example
of French Renaissance.

PSFS
o TBW: Romanesque.
o AFF: Confusing lineage: “[Furness, Evans and Co.] work of 1897-98 was
an addition to Addison Hutton’s original building of 1868, which Hutton
had extended in 1883-86. George Howe in turn remodeled the bank in
1930.” Hutton designed “extension” in 1883-86, Furness designed
“addition,” Howe remodeled. Difference between extension and addition?

UPenn College Hall
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o AGP: High Victorian Gothic: contrasting materials, finials, pointed arches,
sloping roofs, gabled dormers, Penn’s first West Philadelphia building.
o TBW: Distinctive green stone from local quarry.
o TBW: Each professor to have office next to their own classroom.
Probably best-planned university building in the country at the time.

Entrance Pavillion: Philadelphia Zoo
o TBW: “Red-brick with half-timber, slate roofs.

Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Building
o TBW: Divided entry theoretically separates entrance from exit. Materials
have strong color contrasts, copious iron work.

Hockley House
o AGP: Steep mansard roof, gables, jutting bay on second story, pointed
arches; embodies Victorian Eclecticism with relish
o PP: “Variations of colors and textures accented by the sculptural plasticity
of carved brownstone and corbelled brick.” Also of note are the chimney
brickwork and carved tympana.

Horticultural Hall
o TBW: Saracenic architecture, once gaily polychromatic, now rusted.
o 3C: “A gigantic greenhouse, enlivened by polychromatic Moorish arches,
chosen more for their picturesqueness than for content.”

Centennial Exhibition Memorial Hall
o TBW: In the modern Renaissance style; granite, glass, and iron.

Library Company of Philadelphia
o TBW: Oldest circulating library in America.

Broad Street Station
o TBW: Remarkably flowing plan, modern, showed no symmetry.
Planning was purely functional.

Widener Mansion
o 3C: Hale’s construction, much influenced by Frank Furness, exemplifies
the Victorian penchant for adornment as well as the general friendly
capitalist competition amongst Philadelphia architects of the time. This
large city house, with its conical-roofed towers and continuous curving
walls, expresses Victorian wealth, individualism, and success.

UPenn College Library (Fisher Fine Arts Building)
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o AGP: Studiously asymmetrical design, the original library for the entire
university, notable use of color, sense of weight, and emphasis on natural
elements. One of Philly’s most notable buildings.

Germantown Cricket Club
o TBW: “Finest equipped cricket grounds in this country…” In the idiom
of McKim specifically.

Reading Terminal exterior & train shed
o AGP (on the exterior): “Ineffably grand”; heavily and beautifully worked
exterior mix of terra cotta and brick coursework. Notable “arcaded loggia
with paired, banded, colonettes,” balustrades throughout.
o PP (on the train shed): Sole surviving single span train shed in America,
although it was smaller than the Broad street station’s train shed. A feat of
engineering.
o 3C (on the exterior): “…broad, severe Renaissance scheme with a heavily
rusticated base, above which rose pink brick walls decorated with creamcolored terra-cotta…capped by a heavy copper cornice…”

UPenn University Museum
o AGP: Eyre, Day, and Cope & Stewardson all united their ideas and styles
to make this building. Eyre’s design based on Northern Italian
Romanesque forms, heavily landscaped courtyard, Japanese gate, tiled
roof, mosaic panels, rough brick with marble accents throughout
o TBW: Lombard Romanesque, textured walls, well-placed sculpture,
interesting colored marble inlaid ornament.
o 3C: “Inspired by the architecture of north Italy of the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries, Eyre, Day, Cope, and Stewardson sketched simple
walls of rough brick with wide mortar joints, coarsely textured and
forceful. There could be no more direct expression of the unconventional
collection of artifacts…than this strikingly unclassical desin.”
o 3C: “…architects relied on fenestration to establish rhythm of solid and
void that is usually impossible in museum building…result is a
conventional mural architecture, humanly scaled…”

Harrison Building
o TBW: Francois Premier style. Graceful roof. Steel frame construction.

Horticultural Hall
o TBW: “A graceful Florentine façade in Pompeian brick, with frescoes in
color under the eaves.”

UPenn Dorms, “the Quad”
o AGP: “Jacobethan” (Jacobean + Elizabethan, or to put it another way, a
collaboration of medieval and classical forms.) “Stylistic eccentricities
seem to foreshadow postmodernism”
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
Drexel Institute
o AGP: “Renaissance block similar in its articulation of masses and in some
of its details to Schwarzmann’s Memorial Hall…”
o AGP: Lavish terra-cotta, enormous arched entrance, central court as main
feature: “It is a soaring, four-story high, sixty-five-foot-square, galleried
and arcaded, light-filled space elaborately ornamented in red tile, white
brick, and pink marble with wrought-iron balustrades.”

Rodef Shalom Synagogue
o TBW: Synagogues mentioned as problematic type: “The nearest approach
to [the synagogue problem] is in Rodef Shalom…with a bulbous dome, a
study by Mr. Hewitt from the Arabic, particularly the style of the Calif’s
Tombs outside Cairo.”
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