Harker Hall

The Building
Nathan Clifford Ricker designed a state of the art science facility for the University of Illinois in 1878. I mean, this place was top notch for the 1870s, the premier science lab in the country. Building next to the old University Hall, he designed his Chemistry Laboratory in the Second Empire style.

University Hall has since been demolished and replaced by the Illini Union. Since The Elephant and University Hall no longer exist, the Chemistry Laboratory, now called Harker Hall, is the oldest surviving university building. The oldest surviving structure on campus is the Mumford House next to the McFarland Bell Tower. It was built as a residence in 1870 and the campus sort of oozed around it.

The Style
Many of the architectural styles we see around town are revival styles: Romanesque, Tudor, Colonial, Gothic. Each style's popularity stemmed from the fact that it borrowed heavily from a historical style. The trend developed to revive a style that spoke to the values or aesthetics of a previous historical period. They were vintage. They were retro. They were built to look old-timey. Styles like Italianate and Second Empire, in contrast, represented the cutting edge of architectural ideals. They were the hottest new thing at the time. Like Art Deco in the 1930s. The Second Empire style saw its heyday from the 1860s to the 1890s.

How you know it's Second Empire:

• Symmetrical Facade
• Square or Rectangular Floor Plan
• Mansard Roof (ZOMG!)
• Small Tower or Cupola (This is where poeple confuse Second Empire with Italianate. Harker Hall does have a little tower, but you can't see it from the ground. If you zoom in on Google Maps, you can see it.)
• Dormer Windows (These are the windows that poke out through the Mansard Roof like creepy eyes.)
• Small Entry Porch
• Patterns on Roof

The Roof
Francois Mansart revived the popularity of a double-pitched roof in France in the early 1600s. The double-pitched roof appeared as an element in French Rennaissance architecture, but Mansart brought it back as a way of creating living quarters in attics. The roof kept his name when it saw another revival during the French Second Empire.

This is my favorite type of roof. The Mansard roof is synonymous with Second Empire. If it has a Mansard, it's Second Empire. If it's Second Empire, it has a Mansard. The capitol at Springfield is considered a NeoClassical/Second Empire mix due the Mansard roofs on the wings.

Your standard pitched or gabled roof meets in the middle and slopes down two sides like a pup tent. The two ends form gables.

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A double-pitched roof breaks mid-slope. The top tends to have a shallower pitch and the bottom a steeper pitch. You're probably familiar with the Gambrel roof, commonly seen on barns.

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Both of these examples have two sloping sides and two gabled sides. If you take a pitch roof and give it four sloping sides, it becomes a hipped roof. A hipped roof has no gables.

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A Mansard is a double-pitched hipped roof.

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You'll see other types of roofs, a flat roof for instance, but 90% of the time, you'll see a combination between these four elements: single-pitched, double-pitched, gabled, and hipped.

The Empire
Now to the question I know you've all been asking: qu'est-ce que c'est le Second Empire? I'll tell you.

You've all heard of Napoleon the Great. He shot the Sphinx, got lost in Russia, broke all his own rules at Waterloo. He had a nephew who wasn't so great, Napoleon III. Elected the last president of the French Republic, he decided he liked the job and would hang around for a while. He declared himself Emperor in 1851. Victor Hugo went into exile out of protest. Exile must have suited him, though. He wrote Les Miserables while living in Guernsey.

In declaring himself emperor, Napoleon III dissolved the Second French Republic (le Deuxieme Republique) and created the Second French Empire (le Second Empire), the first being his uncle's empire. Before you ask, I don't know why the French use deuxieme for one and second for the other. The French don't even know.

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Napoleon III allied himself with the British against the Russians during the Crimean War. You know the Crimean War from the famous charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava ("it was not theirs to reason why, it was theirs to do and die"). Also, he built lots of buildings with Mansard Roofs. Post Civil War Americans thought the style pretty spiffy and started building Second Empire structures all over the place. Napoleon III also had a set of aluminum tableware he saved for special guests. Everyone else had to use gold forks and spoons. At the time, the refining process for aluminum was so time-consuming and costly, it was the most expensive and prized metal. Gold and platinum were rusty copper by comparison. For this reason, the Washington Monument is capped with an aluminum pyramid.

That's all super duper, but none of it, not even the fabulous Mansard roof, is Napoleon III's most well known and lasting legacy. French people don't like Germans. So, like his uncle before him, Napoleon III attacked Prussia in a bid to expand his empire to the brat munchers. The two armies met at the Battle of Sedan in 1870, the first battle in history in which an army tactically deployed machine guns.

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The Prussians surrounded the French and wiped the floor with them in a fast, decisive victory. As part of the reparation package, the French were forced to transfer control of Alsace-Lorraine to the Prussians. The territory swap, French bitterness, and Prussian insecurity in the aftermath of Sedan created the conditions for the outbreak of World War I. In the first month of the first world war, before they started digging trenches, the armies were attempting to force a quick, decisive victory. Generals on both sides acknowledged they were trying to create a Second Sedan.