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Chapter VII. The Architectural Library of Henry A. Sims
- University of Massachusetts Press
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V I I T H E A R C H I T E C T U R A L L I B R A R Y O F H E N R Y A . S I M S Michael J. Lewis Two charges used to be made against Victorian architects, and both cannot be true: it was said that they copied their designs from books and that they made them up out of their heads. But if someone cannot simultaneously be a shameless copyist and a capricious fantasist, he may combine aspects of each. The peculiar mixture of bookishness and originality is perhaps the most distinctive trait of the High Victorian era. It is not always clear, however, what the extent of this bookishness was, for although we know in copious detail what books architects had at their fingertips,in many cases we know shockingly little about when they were used, or how. Which books were routinely consulted for reference,or folded flat so that a detail might be traced, or merely browsed for inspiration? Or were they used at all? The study lined with bound journals and folios was itself an object of prestige, bespeaking sophistication and refinement. Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root had themselves photographed in their library,whereas H.H.Richardson had his photographed for its own sake, letting the books serve as surrogate for the man. The library of Henry A. Sims (1832–1875) offers an unusual case study. Although now obscure, Sims was prominent in his day, a passionate Gothic Revivalist who practiced in Canada and Philadelphia before his untimely death by a stroke. His is not the only Philadelphia architectural library known from the era—there are fairly good inventories of the architectural libraries of T. P. Chandler, James H. Windrim, 174 michael j. lewis and Joseph Koecker—but it is the only one cut short by sudden death,so that there is none of the pruning and updating that most working libraries undergo. The timing is propitious,for it depicts an intelligent and quirky library on the eve of the American centennial, when so much changed so quickly in American architecture: the enthusiasm for Queen Anne and Old English, the rediscovery of the colonial, the first Japanese currents—all of which displaced the High Victorian. Sims came to architecture belatedly, after a detour as a civil engineer. Born in Philadelphia, he moved to Canada in 1851 and served four years on the staff of the Bytown and Prescott railroad; he spent another year in Brunswick, Georgia, as an engineer for the Brunswick and Florida Railroad. In 1858, after some false starts, he permanently renounced engineering for architecture, practicing first in Prescott, Ontario, and then in Ottawa. He returned to Philadelphia in 1866, after the Civil War, where he hoped his prominent family might throw commissions his way. From the first, Sims was “a warm admirer of the Gothic styles.” So he declared in a public lecture of 1860, liberally peppered with extracts from the writings of John Ruskin and John Henry Parker. His earliest churches were archaeologically fastidious affairs, so much so that upon his arrival in Philadelphia he was dismayed by the low quality of its medievalism. “I am the only architect here making any pretensions to a knowledge of Gothic,” he confided to his diary in early 1867. This was not quite true. Charles M. Burns (1838–1922), George Hewitt (1840– 1916), and Frank Furness (1839–1912) were all Philadelphia architects and capable medievalists, as Sims must have known; in short order he was on intimate terms with each of them. But Sims was understandably defensive, for his “pretensions” to Gothic proficiency were exactly that. He had not seen Europe and never would; his conception of medieval architecture remained secondhand and bookish. Still, his scholarliness seems to have impressed itself on his colleagues. After he joined the American Institute of Architects in 1869, helping to establish its Philadelphia chapter, he became the organization’s first foreign correspondent. (Evidently, having lived in Canada made one sufficiently international.) Sims worked primarily for Episcopalian clients, who were sympathetic to High Church ritual and symbolism, yet ironically, his most important church with his richest iconographic program was built for a fashionable Presbyterian congregation . This was Philadelphia’s Second Presbyterian Church (planned 1867–68; built 1869–72). A vibrant High Victorian performance,it took the form of a basilica with transepts and a polygonal apse, overawed by an emphatic...