Beaux Arts Style – popular 1885‑1930
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Photo: Marble House, ca. 1890, Beaux Arts style mansion at 596 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, RI. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt for Alva and William Vanderbilt. Photographed by User:Daderot (own work), 2005, [cc-by-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons, accessed September, 2019.
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The Beaux Arts [1] is a classical style with the full range of Greco-Roman elements: the column, arch, vault and dome. It is the showy, almost operatic, manner in which these elements are composed that gives the style its characteristic flavor. General character-defining elements include:
- Symmetrical articulation
- Lavish and intensive surface decoration
- A single architectural element set as a grand gesture – often an over-scaled archway, triple archway or short but dramatic colonnade as the center of the composition
- Coupled columns
- Facades composed around advancing and receding wall planes. The transition from one plane to another is often highlighted with multiple corner elements.
- Entablatures that advance and recede to mark the locations of columns below
- An active roofline (for a classical style) with dramatic roof-top figure sculpture
- Fully and boldly formed ornamental sculpture employed elsewhere on the facades (as opposed to more subtle bas relief)
- Monumental (sometimes multiple) runs of steps approaching a building’s entrance
- Floor plans that culminate in a single grand room
- Axial floor plans that establish vistas through different spaces
Beaux Arts [2, 3], translated from French to "fine arts," was conceived more as a design theory than an architectural style; it was taught in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts method, or "School of Fine Arts," in Paris. In France, architectural study was included with the study of other fine arts, in the belief that painting and sculpture were integral to architecture.
What is considered a Beaux Arts style in America has its origins in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which "had an unrivaled reputation among schools of architecture." Among the Americans to attend were Richard Morris Hunt, Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Bernard Maybeck. The school had a competition for the Grand Prix de Rome, which assured the winner of many public commissions. The projects that won the prize were of grandiose nature and had elevation drawings "with plenty to look at in them." The style includes the design conventions recognized in that competition: balance and symmetry in architectural massing, Greek and Roman elements, combinations of columns and arches, grand stairways, paired columns, monumental attics, pronounced cornices, elaborate moldings and statuary. As the style matured in America, it became more "sedate." Following its origin, the Beaux Arts style is usually associated with larger buildings, often monumental public buildings.
[1] The Beaux Arts Style, www.crt.state.la.us, accessed June, 2021.
[2] C. Merrill Moter, III, Joseph and Joseph, architects, W. K. Stewart Bookstore, Jefferson County, KY, nomination document, 2002, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Washington, D.C.
[3] Peggy Albee, Molly Berger, H. Eliot Foulds, Nina Gray, Pamela Herrick, Vanderbilt Mansion: A Guilded-Age Country Place, 2008, National Park Service, www.nps.gov, accessed September, 2013.