Preserving and promoting Baltimore's historic buildings and neighborhoods.
Category: Education
Our education programs include technical assistance to property owners, heritage education around the Civil War Sequicentennial and the Bi-Centennial of the War of 1812, and our ongoing Race and Place in Baltimore Neighborhoods project.
The Baltimore Building of the Week arrives on Mount Royal Avenue and the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art for a feature on their 1908 Main Building designed by New York architects Pell & Corbett following a design competition sponsored by the New York Association of Independent Architects.
Image courtesy Jack Breihan
The Beaux-Arts movement in architecture used up-to-date technology clothed in various historical styles. Penn Station (featured last week) employed French Neoclassical elements; MICA’s Main Building revives the Italian Renaissance style. Renaissance palazzos were considered most appropriate for art galleries – the Walters Art Museum is another example.
This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week for Dr. John Breihan includes a great photo of the historic Penn Station prior to the installation of the controversial Man/Woman sculpture–
Image courtesy Jack Breihan
Louis Sullivan’s skyscraper style (as seen in Baltimore’s Equitable Bank Building featured last week) made full use of modern steel-framed construction and electrical appliances like elevators. But in the 1890s it was superseded by a style with equally advanced technology but not based on Sullivan’s famous pronouncement that “Form follows function.” Inspired by – and named after – the great French architecture school, the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, this new style combined modern steel-framed construction with historical European styles. Penn Station, completed in 1911, is a good example. Planned to handle several streams of travel on several different levels, it nevertheless presents a serene classical façade to viewers approaching up Charles Street – balustrade roofline, modillioned cornice, paired Roman columns, rusticated stone base. The equally classical interior has undergone several restorations since the 1970s. In the 1990s a connection to Baltimore’s new light rail system was added. As it approaches its 100th birthday Penn Station shows how old buildings, well maintained can continue to serve the community.
This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week returns to Charles Village to highlight the characteristic porch-front rowhouses,
Image courtesy Jack Breihan
The same sort of exuberant, uniquely American designs that appeared in the late 19th century reached a high point early in the 20th. The so-called Queen Anne Style had nothing to do with Britain’s last Stuart monarch, but instead mixed various architectural details into a happy pastiche. Here in Charles Village row houses boasted Flemish gables, Italianate brackets and arched windows, classical columns and pediments. Deep front porches offered some relief from the city’s heat as well as sociable contact with neighbors. Lately they have been acquiring vivid redecoration that highlights their architectural features.
This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week is our first introduction to Baltimore’s tremendous historic skyscrapers, such as the 1891 Equitable Bank Building that survived the Great Baltimore Fire,
Image courtesy Jack Breihan
Another uniquely American style of the late 19th century originated in Chicago, where Louis Sullivan gave the new steel-framed “skyscrapers” unified facades of multistory arches. The former headquarters of Equitable Bank (shown here before exterior restoration) is Baltimore’s best version of the Sullivan/skyscraper style. Designed by Joseph Evans Sperry in 1891, it was gutted in the Great Baltimore Fire, but the frame and façade survived. After nearly a century’s service as an office building, it has been converted to residential use.
This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan is St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church representing the many Baltimore buildings designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque Style,
Image courtesy Jack Breihan
Still another distinctively American architectural style of the late 19th century was named for the most prominent architect of the day, Henry Hobson Richardson. “Richardsonian Romanesque” was even more robust than the blocky, polychrome Romanesque style that grew up alongside Victorian Gothic in England. Richardson favored very heavy masonry walls punctuated with enormous round arches springing directly from the ground. The best-known Richardsonian Romanesque building in Baltimore is Lovely Lane Methodist Church, designed by Stanford White in his youthful Richardsonian period. Most of the old Goucher College buildings that line St. Paul Street just north of Lovely Lane are also in the Richardsonian style. My featured building is also not far away on St. Paul. It is St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, designed in 1877 by the socially prominent Baltimore architect James Bosley Noel Wyatt. Wyatt attended Harvard and the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris about a decade after Richardson, and was clearly influenced by his style.
