Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 24

Second Empire Style in Canadian Architecture

by Christina Cameron and Janet Wright

Second Empire and the United States

For more than a decade, the Second Empire style enjoyed widespread popularity in the United States before disappearing as suddenly as it had emerged. During its popularity its presence was felt with equal force in both the public sector and the private domain.

The earliest significant public building to be designed in this style was Boston City Hall (Fig. 6), begun in 1862. The Committee on Public Buildings strove consciously to imitate French prototypes, even if such a move were controversial.

The style in which this building has been erected is so great an innovation on the character of our previously existing public structures as to have excited considerable attention, and to have called forth more or less of criticism and remark. It may be described as the Italian Renaissance, modified and elaborated by the taste of the French architects of the last thirty years.¹

Though Boston City Hall was the first public building in this style in North America, the meteoric rise of Second Empire in the public domain was the result of its association with the central government in the reconstruction era following the Civil War; it became the official style of General Grant's administration (1869-77). Indeed, the style has been referred to in the United States as the "General Grant" style.² These flamboyant mansarded designs, incidentally, stood out in sharp contrast to earlier American public buildings of an austere classicizing style. Leading the government designers was Alfred B. Mullett (1834-90) who, in his role as supervising architect of the Treasury Department, was instrumental in popularizing the Second Empire style through the host of structures erected across the country by the new central administration.³ One of his major extant works is the State, War and Navy Department Office Building in Washington (Fig. 7). For the public, Mullett's Second Empire structures came to symbolize the strength and power of the new central government.

Influence of the Second Empire style also reached the domestic scene where the introduction of the French or mansard roof stemmed from practical rather than symbolic considerations. The waxing and waning of the mansard roof's popularity in domestic buildings can be pinpointed through the so-called pattern books. They consisted of collections of house designs, with architectural details and plans, aimed at the growing middle class which wanted to erect well-designed homes but was unable to afford the luxury of custom-made architectural designs. Pattern books offered a range of sizes and styles to meet a variety of budgets. The wide distribution of these pattern books was instrumental in establishing and disseminating canons of taste to the general public.

Designs for French-roofed cottages and residences began to appear in the pattern books in the early 1860s, peaked in the 1870s and disappeared by the early 1880s, The first ones took pains to underline the practical advantages of this new roof form. Writing in 1857, Calvert Vaux advised that "curved roofs especially deserve to be introduced more frequently than has hitherto been the practice here."⁴ Remarking on the utility of mansard roofs, he noted,

Many to whom I have explained the principle of arrangement by an actual visit to executed houses, have expressed their surprise at finding a large, nearly level space, on the top of a house that showed no sign of any thing of the sort to a passer-by⁵ (Fig. 8).

A few years later, another pattern book encouraged the use of the mansard roof also on practical grounds.

The French chateau roof, which we have adopted, gives ample space for servants' apartments and other necessary rooms in the attic, and, by the flat on top, furnishes a means of collecting water for the tank, and provides a place on which to walk, surrounded as it is, with an iron railing for protection⁶

Besides the practical considerations, the question of fashion arises and the role that women played in the acceptance of mansarded designs. An American publication like Godey's Lady's Book, which presented a model cottage or villain each issue, claimed a readership of 500,000 in 1869.⁷ Between 1868 and 1875, the majority of house designs illustrated in this periodical drew on the Second Empire style (Fig. 9). The architect responsible for most of the designs in Godey's Lady's Book, Isaac Hobbs, republished them in a pattern book of 1873 in which at least half the designs have French roofs. Recognizing the influence of women in matters of architectural taste, Hobbs dedicated his volume "to the many ladies throughout the United States who have for years aided us by their suggestions in preparing many of the most practicable and beautiful ground plans found in this volume."⁸

While authors of pattern books usually offered a choice of styles, such as Italianate or Gothic, some deserve to be singled out as strong supporters of Second Empire designs; Gilbert B. Croft, Marcus F. Cummings, Isaac Hobbs and George E. Woodward.⁹ By 1880, however, American pattern books shifted focus and even these writers virtually eliminated mansard-roofed designs from their repertoire.

Both public and domestic architecture in the United States reflected a strong Second Empire influence in the third quarter of the 19th century. The economic and cultural interaction between the United States and Canada at this time was such that the impact of this influence on Canadian architecture cannot be underestimated.