Arch

History

Arch had three distinct, yet interrelated meanings or applications in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American landscape design. The first, which is the most heavily documented, is the use of arches in association with commemorative celebrations, as specified by Ephraim Chambers in 1741 and reiterated by Noah Webster in 1828. The antecedents to this practice include the use of ancient Roman arches: large-scale, inverted U-shaped structures, erected to memorialize military victories. In North America, the building of such celebratory arches occurred most frequently in the immediate post-Revolutionary period. For specific festivities, arches were often made of impermanent materials, as in the case of the temporary arch Charles Willson Peale created for Philadelphia to mark the declaration of peace on December 2, 1783. General George Washington’s arrival in cities in the early federalist period was frequently marked by the erection of processional arches, such as the arch of cut laurel and evergreen branches erected at Gray’s Ferry in Philadelphia in 1789 [Fig. 1]. The arch, with its classical referents, was also the symbol of choice for permanent monuments to President Washington in the early nineteenth century. The designs of Joseph Jacques Ramée in Baltimore and of George Bridport in Philadelphia [Figs. 2 and 3] not only commemorated Washington’s achievements but also marked the entrance as a space set aside for public use.

These examples point to a second, closely related function of arches as spatial dividers or gates, which also relies upon antique precedents of monumental arches marking entrances to cities or towns. This practice was translated to the American context with shifts in scale and message. Eliza Southgate’s description (1802) of the garden at Elias Hasket Derby Farm, for example, indicates that arches were used to mark three subdivisions of the landscape and to direct the visitor from the lower to the upper garden.

The third use of the term stemmed from its most basic meaning, summed up by Webster in 1828 as “a segment of part of a circle,” translated in architecture into “a concave or hollow structure of stone or brick.” Peale’s description of the stone arch that he created over the stream in his garden exemplifies this definition of arch. Neither celebratory in nature nor necessarily acting as a spatial divider, the arch created a small cave-like space that Peale tried unsuccessfully to use as a root cellar.

The design or style of the arch varied by context: Celebratory arches were typically classical in inspiration, but other styles, such as the Gothic and Chinese, were used for arches erected in gardens. The high, arching spandrels of the Gothic form allowed the erection of covered shelters without walls (with the open arches supporting the weight of the roof), as in Alexander Jackson Davis’s garden arch for Montgomery Place on the Hudson [Fig. 4]. J. C. Loudon illustrated several rustic arches in his publications that were made of rockwork [Fig. 5] or rough hewn tree trunks [Fig. 6].

-- Anne L. Helmreich