The American Dream Houses of Andrew Jackson Downing

THE AMERICAN DREAM HOUSES OF ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING John Conron The books of Andrew Jackson Downing have fared better than his houses and gardens, and it is the books which allow us-now that modernist fervor against a 'literary' architecture has abated-not only to reconstruct his work, but also to read it. Downing's books imbue American picturesque architecture with a multiplicity of meanings and nest it in a multiplicity of nineteenth-century contexts. One of the principal contexts, surely, is ideational. Like the essays of Downing and Poe, Downing's books (Rural Essays particularly) are reflections of the Second Great Awakening, that ubiquitous trope of social and cultural as well as moral reform. Tbe voice of Rural Essays is Jeremaic, repeatedly denouncing the 'sins' of American culture and pointing the way toward a millenium to be achieved by art. It denounces with special fervor two sins visited on the American landscape. One sin was the "marriage of utility and deformity" which had made domesticated landscapes barren, drab and slatternly. "The especial theme of our lamentation,'' Downing declared, was a' 'general neglect and inattention'' to country villages, the nurseries of American civilization. The scale and degree of the disorder was unprecedented in the history of the New World. West of New England, where by contrast "a millenium of country towns" had already begun, they were '' sties crowded and befouled with pigs and geese'' (RE, 237, 304-5). 1 They were deserts, dusty as the dusty hearts of their 10 John Conron prosperous inhabitants. They were Sodoms, with "rude and uncouth streets" roasting in the summer heat and glare, ''with scarcely a leaf to break the painful monotony.'' Public architecture too suffered from the sin of neglect. The new public schools were hovels--dingy and dilapidated, surrounded by bare earth and broken fences (RE, 266). The "ugliest church architecture in Christendom,'' Downing declared, ''is at this moment to be found in the country towns and villages of the United States" (RE, 261). And country houses remained mere "manifestations of the grosser wants" of sheltered space to work, eat and sleep. The problems were not immediately visible, Downing quoted a colleague (RE, 399-403). From a distance, one was struck (as Crevecoeur and Dwight had been) by the massiveness of the transformation in the landscape from forest culture to agriculture. The fields were neat, fruitful, prosperous. A nearer view, however, revealed the ugliness of the spaces abutting the fieldsspaces fitter for contemplation than for crops. Roadsides were ruinous with thistles; garden fences, heaped with ''unsightly thickets'' of sumac and chokecherry ; and the gardens, choked with nettles. Unplanted yards had "an air of barrenness and desolation." And in the houses, "every blind [was] shut closed as a miser's fist" against the environing landscape. Every wall, painted white to separate it from the landscape, was "glaring and ghastly as a pyramid of bones in the desert.'' Misguided attempts to civilize the rural house with styles drawn from urban architecture had created simply another order of deformation in the landscape. That, indeed, was for Downing the second national sin: a "diseased" taste. The assemblages of the so-called composite order of architecture-"a mixed jumble of discordant forms, materials, ornaments, and decorations ... without a leading character or expression of any sort'' to give them congruity-were "rural bedlams" (T, 63). In the disease of Greek Revivalism which had broken out in the 1830s, houses were made to masquerade as temples. And a misconceived Gothic ''frenzy'' was now smothering cottages in ''flimsy verge-boards," "unmeaning gables" and other gimcrackeries (RE, 246). Downing's intended audience was not pioneers but farmers and townspeople who had evolved beyond the pioneering stage, who were subject neither to ''poverty or want of intelligence,'' who could both imagine and afford a beautiful landscape in place of their rural desert and who understood that any reformation must involve public as well as private spaces. That reformation must begin with their conversion to "the true rural faith": that it is immoral and uncivilized to live [willingiy] in mean and uncouth villages; that there is nothing laudable in having a piano-forte and mahogany chairs in the parlor, where the streets outside...