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“The two great truths in the world are the Bible and Grecian architecture.”
– Nicholas Biddle (1786 , 1844), president of the Second Bank of the United States
Among some historians of furniture and architecture there is a line in the sand where everything built before 1830 was great and everything built after that was on the downhill slide to McMansions filled with Value City pressboard termite-barf.
Jonathan Hale, the author of “The Old Way of Seeing” (one of my favorite books), explores this idea in a thoughtful way. Before 1830, carpenters and woodworkers viewed geometry as a world of secrets that teaches us to “trace the chain” of truths. After 1830, geometry became a set of rigid rules that a builder should follow to produce a design that was correct.
In Hale’s view, the early builder chose harmony over symmetry. The modern builder reversed that relationship.
What happened in 1830? That’s when the Greek Revival style of architecture swept the nation , this country’s first national building style. Suddenly, new buildings (even humble ones) had Greek porticos with massive columns. Architecture had become a performance, according to Hale.
American society was also going through enormous changes. Clothing was becoming more prudish, as were attitudes toward sex and alcohol. Though America was still rural, the country was beginning to become urban and industrialized.
The same changes applied to furniture, according to Wallace Nutting, the author of the three-volume “Furniture Treasury.” He challenged anyone to show him a piece of well-designed furniture built after 1840. For any piece of furniture since then, Nutting said he could produce one that was both better and older.
“Is it likely that anyone can think of anything new and good?” Nutting wrote. “It may be new, but it looks as if born in the infernal regions to plague the glimpses of the moon. Nobody in a hundred years has brought forth anything new except monstrosities, or at least inelegancies, weak shapes, or mongrels.”
Here at Woodworking Magazine, we have been investigating this tumultuous time in the history of furniture, architecture and society. And though you’re probably reading this and thinking “What does this have to do with me and my workshop?” I hope you will bear with us.
– Christopher Schwarz
Illustration at top: A stand 1690-1720 from “Furniture Treasury”
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