367 - The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan

The Almighty Wall:
The Architecture of Henry Vaughan
By William Morgan
New York, Architectural History Foundation and Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 210 pp. 1983. $30.00.

This is an illustrated and critical study of the works of Henry Vaughan (1845-1917), a gifted English architect who came to America as a "missionary," determined to bring pure English Gothic to the American branch of the Anglican Church and who found many Episcopal leaders receptive, with the result that he went on to incredible heights of success. After an apprenticeship with George Frederick Bodley, who was thought by many, to be the greatest English architect of his day, young Vaughan came to Boston in 1881 to design a chapel for the Sisters of St. Margaret in Louisburg Square and stayed in America for the remaining thirty-six years of his life. In spite of his withdrawn nature-he avoided publicity and never gave a public address- Vaughan achieved more spectacular results than his extraverted competitors. In his quiet way, he made major contributions to the Gothic Revival and left dozens of churches, chapels, and schools that have been cherished ever since. In New England, especially, a "Vaughan church" became the standard by, which to measure other Gothic churches. He also designed three chapels at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and crowned his career by designing one of the largest ecclesiastical structures of the twentieth century, the Washington Cathedral. Among his lesser claims to fame is that he was the first to introduce the revival of Elizabethan half-timbering in America.

Despite the fact that he was universally revered by his profession and despite his notable achievements which certainly constitute a landmark of the late and most dramatic phase of the neo-Gothic style, Vaughan was soon forgotten by the public and denigrated by articulate modernists as a mere revivalist and therefore unworthy of praise. But the intrinsic virtues of his works, as well as those of Cram and other neo-Gothicists, were rediscovered in the 1970s just as the influence of the modernists waned. This full-length study, of his career is a result of America's sober, second thought after half a century of brainwashing by the anti-revivalists.

Morgan, a professor of art at the University of Louisville and

368 - The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan

associated with the Allen B. Hite Art Institute, has done his job well. He has gathered what little is available about Vaughan the man, relating his work to that of Bodley and others, tracing medieval structures that inspired his designs, and conjecturing plausibly about his congenial relationships with Bishop Lawrence and Edward Searles. He has probed even more deeply into the enigma of Vaughan and has concluded that faith was the well-spring of both his personality and his career. For Vaughan, who was a devout Anglo-Catholic attending daily mass at St. John the Evangelist in Boston, religion and architecture were as inseparable as two sides of a coin. His rapid ascent to the apex of his profession was due. in part at least, to the fact that just as he arrived in America the Episcopal Church was enjoying a wave of prosperity and an urge to build-especially in New England-and that English Gothic architecture was deemed to be the most expressive of the Anglican ethos, as opposed to the classic of the Congregationalists and the foreign affinities of American Roman Catholics. Indeed, English Gothic and Anglo-Catholicism were a matched pair, and Vaughan soon became the acknowledged master designer of Episcopal churches.

Modest, intensely private, the celebrated architect rejoiced to give attention to even the most minute details of his designs rather than assign them to subordinates. Vaughan's life was almost completely wrapped up in his art, and he was an influence rather than a personality in American architecture. But he expressed himself and his faith so clearly and effectively through his designs that a remark of Bishop Lawrence when dedicating a Vaughan church might be an appropriate epitaph for the great Christian architect himself: "While religious faith is revealed in life and creed, it also is expressed through our churches."

Arthur Pierce Middleton
Episcopal Commission
Religious Art and Architecture
Annapolis, Maryland