On the afternoon of 6 June 1889, a fire in a cabinet shop in
downtown Seattle spread to destroy more than thirty downtown blocks
covering 116 acres. Disaster soon became opportunity as Seattle's
citizens turned their full energies to rebuilding: widening and
regrading streets, laying new water pipes and sewer lines,
promulgating a new building ordinance requiring construction in the
commercial core, and creating a new professional fire department. A
remarkable number of buildings, most located in Seattle's
present-day Pioneer Square Historic District, were permitted within
a few months and constructed within a few years of the Great
Seattle Fire. As a result, the post-fire rebuilding of Seattle
offers an extraordinarily focused case study of
late-nineteenth-century American urban architecture.
Seattle's architects seeking design solutions that would meet
the new requirements most often found them in the Romanesque
Revival mode of the country's most famous architect, Henry Hobson
Richardson. In October 1889, Elmer Fisher, Seattle's most prolific
post-fire architect, specifically cited the example of H. H.
Richardson in describing the city's new buildings. In contrast to
Victorian Gothic, Second Empire, and other mid-nineteenth-century
architectural styles, Richardson's Romanesque Revival vocabulary of
relatively unadorned stone and brick with round-arched openings
conveyed strength and stability without elaborate decorative
treatment. For Seattle's fire-conscious architects it offered a
clear architectural system that could be applied to a variety of
building types - including office blocks, warehouses, and hotels -
and ensure a safer, progressive, and more visually coherent
metropolitan center.
"Distant Corner" examines the brief but powerful influence of H.
H. Richardson on the building of America's cities, and his specific
influence on the architects charged with rebuilding the post-fire
city of Seattle. Chapters on the pre-fire city and its
architecture, the technologies and tools available to designers and
builders, and the rise of Richardson and his role in defining a new
American architecture provide a context for examining the work of
the city's architects. Seattle's leading pre- and post-fire
architects - William Boone, Elmer Fisher, John Parkinson, Charles
Saunders and Edwin Houghton, Willis Ritchie, Emil DeNeuf, Warren
Skillings, and Arthur Chamberlin - are profiled. "Distant Corner"
describes the new post-fire commercial core and the emerging
network of schools, firehouses, and other public institutions that
helped define Seattle's neighborhoods. It closes with the sudden
collapse of Seattle's economy in the Panic of 1893 and the ensuing
depression that halted the city's building boom, saw the closing of
a number of architects' offices, and forever ended the dominance of
Romanesque Revival in American architecture.
With more than 200 illustrations, detailed endnotes, and an
appendix listing the major works of the city's leading architects,
"Distant Corner" offers an analysis of both local and national
influences that shaped the architecture of the city in the 1880s
and 1890s. It has much to offer those interested in Seattle's early
history, the building of the city, and the preservation of its
architecture. Because this period of American architecture has
received only limited study, it is also of importance for those
interested in the influence of Boston-based H. H. Richardson and
his contemporaries on American architecture at the end of the
nineteenth century.
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner is professor of architecture at the
University of Washington; among his previous publications is "H. H.
Richardson: Complete Architectural Works." Dennis Alan Andersen,
formerly in charge of photographs and architectural drawings in the
Special Collections Division of the University of Washington
Libraries, is a longtime historic preservation advocate and
currently a Lutheran pastor. Both are authors in "Shaping Seattle
Architecture: A Historical Guide to the Architects."
"This book makes a significant contribution to the history of
American architecture by studying carefully a major American city
at a time when architecture and cities in this country were
entering the modern era. Moreover, this book is a fine piece of
local history that rests on solid scholarship." - Francis R.
Kowsky, Buffalo State College
"An important contribution to the field of American
architectural history." - Kenneth A. Breisch, University of
Southern California
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