First Presbyterian Church
by Warren Roberts
First Presbyterian Church, built in 1883 (Josiah
Cleaveland Cady, architect), belongs stylistically to the
Romanesque revival, a phase of American architecture initiated by
Henry Hobson Richardson. After traveling in France in the 1860's,
Richardson built Trinity Church in Boston in 1871, the key building
in the Romanesque revival. It so happened when Richardson was
designing Trinity Church he was in the fortunate position of being
able to enlist the help of John LaFarge, 
who at this very time was making a breakthrough in the design and
manufacture of stained glass windows. Some of LaFarge's finest
windows are in Trinity Church.
That Richardson saw fit to give such prominence to LaFarge's windows
is evidence of one of the important forces at work not only in the
chemistry of his own artistic imagination but in American historicist
architecture in general.
When Richardson designed Trinity Church, architects were increasingly
willing to abandon the correctness that had been one of the features
of the Gothic revival in its earlier stages. For Richardson, the
Romanesque provided a vocabulary, so to speak, that he employed
freely and imaginatively in buildings that at once looked to the past
and drew from the forms and techniques of the present. And so it was
when he collaborated with LaFarge in Trinity Church, for not only
were the windows in the church brilliantly modern, but also they were
stylistically anomalous.
The fact is that stained glass windows belonged not to the Age of
Romanesque but rather to the Age of Gothic. This did not bother
Richardson, for what he wanted was a building that answered the
imperatives of his own taste and interests. So plastic were those
imperatives that including stained glass windows in a Romanesque
style building presented no difficulties whatever. He wanted the
color and brilliance that LaFarge's windows were able to provide, and
they are among the finest ornaments of this building.
The above discussion of Trinity Church explains much about First
Presbyterian Church in Albany. This building is unmistakably
Romanesque in the massed volumes of rusticated masonry that enrich
the exterior, as well as in the use of round arches and the abstract
stone carvings above the entrance portals. Yet when one enters the
interior there is nothing except the round arches that suggests the
Romanesque style, and those arches are done so freely and
imaginatively that they have almost severed ties with the past. The
interior (unlike Trinity Church in Boston) does not have walls of
masonry, a medieval material, but rather walls of plaster, a modern
material. Those walls are surmounted by round arches that only in the
most residual way do obeisance to the Romanesque. The interior of the
church is open, spacious, brilliantly lit interiors of Romanesque
churches from the medieval period.
The church as we see it today is different than when Cady designed
it. The now permanent wall with stained glass windows on the west
side of the building was originally a sliding wall that, when raised,
opened onto the adjacent meeting room. Cady did not try to be
archeologically correct in designing a church in the Romanesque style
but rather created a modern, suburban type church whose flexibility
was appropriate for the uses of the congregation. The permanent wall
took away that flexibility. At the same time that change was made,
the 1930's, other innovations were also introduced.
Originally, a full set of organ pipes ran along the south wall,
inside the chancel. Where the reredos screen now stands. Finally, the
colors 
are different now than in the original building, in every possible
respect. The walls, now grey, were originally white, with the
exception of woodwork since painted over, and the windows were
completely different.
The clerestory windows, originally a light color, were changed to
dark blue and red, then restored to clear glass. The windows on the
east (State Street) side of the building as well as the north
(Willett Street) side were once lighter in color. Those windows, in
all of their expansiveness, in all of the area occupied by glass,
reveal the same principle that was already in Richardson's Trinity
Church: not only is stained glass an integral part of the design but
it is used on a scale that not even Richardson employed in his
landmark church in Boston. It is as if the logic of freely adding new
and anomalous elements of design to an historicist building was
pursued more radically than had been the case in the previous decade.
The windows of First Presbyterian Church are the glories of the
building: they are among the finest artistic treasures of Albany; and
they are of national and indeed international importance. They are
not the original windows, and herein lies a story of real interest.
Old photographs show that the original windows were of geometric
design. The current windows are richly pictorial. In the central part
of the church, the sanctuary, there are three sets of windows, two of
them being identical in size. These are the large window ensembles
that face State and Willett Streets. Those facing Willett Street were
done by the Lamb Studio and those facing State Street
(including the smaller windows adjacent to the large group) were done
by the Louis Tiffany studio.
Tiffany also did three windows in the adjoining assembly room. The
tour de force is the large Armstrong window, a brilliant evocation of
the Sea of Galilee, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives.
What is remarkable about this ensemble is that it is incorporated
into the same openings as the Lamb window on the next wall. In both
cases there were five panels in which windows were placed, but how
Tiffany and Lamb designed the panels led to results that made for a
fascinating comparison. Few people would believe that the windows by
the different studios filled identical openings, but this is
assuredly the case.
What Tiffany did was to design one scene that he fit into all of the
openings, thereby creating a fully integrated tableau, whereas Lamb
designed different scenes for each window. The contrast is stunning.
As fine as the Lamb windows are, those of Tiffany are simply
brilliant. When the windows left the Tiffany studios in 1915 his
workers said to have commented that they were the finest nature
windows that Tiffany ever designed. To say this is to say that they
are the finest windows anywhere from that great age of stained glass
windows, the period 1870-1920. All of Tiffany's virtuosity has been
lavished on these windows - the plated glass, the etched glass, the
drapery glass, the confetti glass, techniques that he took decades to
perfect. 
Interestingly, it was John LaFarge, Richardson's collaborator in
Trinity Church in Boston, who led the way in developing the
techniques that were essential to the brilliant stained glass
achievements of the period 1870-1920. He and Tiffany were rivals and
fierce competitors, and it was Tiffany in the end who got the most
important commissions and set the stamp of his genius most firmly on
the period as a whole.
The First Presbyterian Church has some of his finest windows, done
towards the end of a famous career, creates a nice counterpoint
between it and the church in Boston that launched the Romanesque
revival style of architecture. Richardson saw fit to use stained
glass windows freely in Trinity Church, and did so with the superb
help of LaFarge. When Cady designed First Presbyterian Church in
Albany, he opened up two walls to stained glass windows, a daring use
of Richardson's own approach. Little did he know that some three
decades later LaFarge's old rival, Louis Tiffany, would fill the
spaces of those windows with stained glass as fine as anywhere in America.
Click here for a closer look at First
Presbyterian's stained glass windows. |
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