Softened formalities and artful enterprise

In the public sphere, in institutional and commercial buildings, Eyre's architecture consistently deflated stately protocols. He would often compromise the grand rhetoric of symmetry and polished surfaces, employing more casual geometries or a thinned classical ordonnance with delicate linear forms. He frequently cast such buildings in domestic guises, introducing gabled fronts and unexpectedly rustic surfaces, or otherwise emphasizing the materiality of elements. An urban office building took the form of an inflated townhouse, a more distant office became a villa, a club became a rathskeller.

Eyre did design some places meant specifically to strike more polite, formal tones. He would employ familiar cues of high station, but rendered with an artful delicacy or choice of colors rather than blanched, academically correct forms. Later in his career he preferred to isolate passages of elaboration against sparer, textured foils.

Eyre seemed most comfortable creating intimate spaces, but on a few occasions, most notably at The University Museum, he was called on to create monumentality. The wonder of the Museum, designed in association with Cope & Stewardson and Frank Miles Day & Bro., is the intimacy amid that monumentality. Rendered in warm tones and surfaces, it has axial spaces that invite only the most relaxed progression, and displays an heroic overall ordering that nonetheless allows ornamental variety and prominence to craft. The Museum's monumentality is not constrained to a single, imperial language, usual in designs of such scope and purpose; the harmony of the whole belies the remarkable range of eclecticism and invention that make it up.