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Title: Some architectural problems of to-day
Author: Reilly, C. H.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Some architectural problems of to-day" ***
OF TO-DAY ***
Some Architectural Problems
of
To-Day
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some
Architectural Problems
of To-day
BY
C. H. REILLY
(O.B.E., M.A., F.R.I.B.A.)
_Professor of Architecture in the University of Liverpool_
[Illustration]
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF LIVERPOOL LIMITED
HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED, LONDON
1924
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Made and Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & CO., LTD.,
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool,
and at London and Prescot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
JOHN MACLEAY, FRIEND AND MENTOR, EDITOR
OF THE LIVERPOOL POST AND MERCURY, WHO
WAS THE FIRST TO OPEN THE COLUMNS OF A
DAILY PAPER TO CURRENT ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Contents_
NO. PAGE
I. THE CHARACTER OF OUR CIVIC 1
BUILDINGS
II. OUR RECENT GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS 7
III. THE OFFICE BLOCK 13
IV. BANK BUILDINGS IN ENGLAND AND 19
AMERICA
V. THE SMALL SUBURBAN HOUSE 25
VI. OUR BIG RAILWAY STATIONS 31
VII. RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS OF TO-DAY 37
VIII. THE USE OF THE COLUMN 43
IX. THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW STYLE 50
X. WHO DESTROYED OUR TOWNS? 57
XI. ARCHITECTURE AND YOUTH 63
XII. COLOUR IN STREET ARCHITECTURE 71
XIII. EVERYDAY ARCHITECTURE 77
XIV. MODERN AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 83
XV. THE CHOICE OF A SMALL COUNTRY HOUSE 100
XVI. WREN AS A BAROQUE ARCHITECT 115
XVII. THE ANTI-SOCIAL CONTRACT 125
XVIII. AN INDICTMENT OF COAL SMOKE 131
XIX. THE BUSH BUILDINGS OF NEW YORK AND 138
LONDON
XX. BATH OR BOURNEMOUTH? 150
XXI. REGENT STREET, OLD AND NEW 166
XXII. FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 175
XXIII. LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL 184
XXIV. DUBLIN IN 1924 201
AUTHOR’S NOTE 206
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I.
THE CHARACTER OF OUR CIVIC BUILDINGS.
IN civic architecture the clothes are the man. We can judge other
people’s buildings only by their appearance. From the depth of the
window jambs and door reveals we may gather something of the apparent
thickness of the walls; and from the point of view of appearance it is
the apparent thickness, in spite of Mr. Ruskin, which counts.
As citizens we are interested only in the exterior of the vast majority
of buildings. We want them built of sound materials, which will last and
weather pleasantly, because we do not want to see our towns look shoddy.
These towns are the most self-revealing things we make, because they are
to a very large extent the unconscious expression of ourselves in the
mass. There is very little conscious direction in the matter, even since
the passing of the Town Planning Acts. Each person within the limits of
certain rules laid down for public safety and health builds as his fancy
dictates. Only one town in England so far insists on the elevations of
all new buildings on its streets being submitted beforehand for approval
by the public authority, and in that town—Liverpool—the authority has
not yet taken steps to secure that it is better advised in matters of
taste than it was before it had these powers.
There is every reason, therefore, that the public should take as keen an
interest in its new buildings as it does in its new books and plays—more
reason, indeed, because the latter need not be seen, and the buildings
must. No man builds to himself alone. His building is there, if in
London, for some ninety years or more. It may even descend to our
great-great-grandchildren to show them what sort of animals we were. The
unveiling of a great building when the scaffold first comes down should
be an important event, much more so than the unveiling of the ordinary
statue.
For instance, very shortly Sir Edwin Lutyens’ great building in
Finsbury-circus and Moorgate for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company will be
exposed to view. Here is the first great modern block of offices being
built by one of our leading architects. Will Sir Edwin, who has been so
successful in giving suitable character and individuality to a vast
number of country houses, be equally sucessful in imparting the
impersonal dignity and reticence required for the due expression of a
solid commercial undertaking? From the drawing in last year’s Royal
Academy one is pretty sure that he will, and that by this building he
will set a new standard for the city. But one may safely say it will be
some time before the general public discovers the building, and perhaps
a hundred years before it takes any genuine interest in it. We are
apparently just waking up to the beauties of the Bank of England, built
about 100 years ago, now that it is threatened.
Architecture, then, for some obscure reason, although she is the ancient
mother of the plastic arts, and the one from whose embraces none of us
can escape, herself escapes criticism. No one writes to the papers to
say what a vulgar and pretentious building the new War Office is, or how
badly Mr. Selfridge’s great block is behaving both to its neighbours
and, indeed, to the whole town by its arrogant bearing. You would think
from looking at its vast ornate colonnade that shopkeeping was really
the height of our ideals, and that there was something after all in
Napoleon’s gibe.
In these days, when in the Arts, at any rate, national feeling is dying
down—have we not recently gone so far as to erect a monument inspired by
German art to Nurse Cavell?—and when the ages of faith are past, and
there is no great wave of enthusiasm for any particular form of
expression, such as existed as late as the Gothic Revival of last
century—a time, and one remembers it with gratitude at least for its
seriousness, when architects’ offices were opened with morning prayer—it
is all the more necessary to make sure that the character of our town
buildings conforms to some standard of public decency.
In clothes we all feel the necessity of this. We have a code of urban
manners in dress and a code of country ones. The town code unfortunately
of late years shows some signs of weakening. Men in “plus fours” have
been seen in our best streets, but buildings in similar garments are
there always. A great insurance company has built itself a new building
in the Strand, and roofed it with the split stones of a Gloucester farm
house. Why not thatch our banks straightaway?
We often hear of the damage the town is doing to the country, but do we
so often realise the far more serious damage the country is doing to the
town? Think of its inroads in every direction, town houses masquerading
as country ones and suburban ones as village ones. There was a time when
suburbs were proud of their connection with the town, and showed it by
their architecture, and even by the carefully selected trees in their
gardens—the pendant acacias and laburnums, the rounded weeping ashes,
which consorted well with the classical buildings. Now suburbs are only
too anxious to turn their backs to the town, and pretend they belong to
the country—a thoroughly snobbish and suburban proceeding, when but for
the town they would not exist.
In the eighteenth century most people lived in terraces of houses, in
which externally each individual house did not differ materially from
its neighbours. This was a fine sign of urbanity, a tribute to the
community, just as much as the black coats most people affect in London
to-day. Any excessive expression of individuality or of personal
importance in a building was considered bad manners, just as it is in
dress, only with this important difference, that bad manners in dress
soon disappear, while bad manners in architecture remain.
In the real country things are different. The spaces between buildings
are wider, and there is little bond of corporate union to be expressed.
In the depths of his own domain every Englishman feels he can do what he
likes, though in other matters he is even there a sufficient stickler
for good form. “Good form” in every sense of the term is what is needed
more than anything else to-day in civic building. The old words, “civil
architecture,” express exactly what is desirable. Our town buildings
should pay a conscious tribute to our civilisation instead of being
merely an unconscious revelation of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II.
OUR RECENT GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS.
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT once caused considerable irritation, especially
amongst architects, by applying some words of Byron’s to New Scotland
Yard and calling it the most recent, but the least decent, of our public
buildings. Immediately a great number of architects began writing to the
papers to say that Mr. Norman Shaw was a great man and by inference his
Scotland Yard was a great building.
It certainly was, and is, in many ways, and yet I think Sir William
Harcourt was quite justified. Scotland Yard departed from our national
tradition in public buildings. Till then we had not taken as a
prototype, even for a super-police station, a German _Schloss_ or a
French _Château_. Scotland Yard is that clever and impossible thing, a
compromise between the two—a sort of reparations settlement with England
left out. One is inclined, therefore, to call such a compromise
indecent.
Now one assuredly does not want to stress too highly national character
in architecture, but if it is to show anywhere it should be in the
national buildings. In these since the Renaissance (and it is not much
good going back earlier, though we did it to our cost in the Houses of
Parliament) the established custom, amounting to a tradition, has been a
Portland stone building in the palatial Palladian manner. Somerset House
is the great example. It is thoroughly English, yet dignified without
being dull or pretentious. Great columns are used sparingly, as accented
syllables, to emphasise certain portions of the façades. It is obviously
related by cousinship of design to a number of the larger private
mansions throughout the country, but in a British Government office one
must expect that. Looking at it from all sides, from the Embankment,
Wellington Street, and the Strand, it is not only of sufficient height
and mass to be impressive, without being overwhelming, but it has the
right London scale. Its parts are neither too big, like Selfridge’s, nor
too little, like the Savoy Hotel’s. No doubt when the water washed into
its magnificent rusticated arches and it stood reflected in a clear
Thames it must have been finer still. But there it is to-day, setting an
unsurpassed standard to all the newer work. In the pearly beauty of its
Portland stone it seems to be calmly rebuking both the provincial note
of red brick in Scotland Yard and the domestic note, which the great
red-tiled roof gives to that offspring of Scotland Yard on the opposite
side of the river—the London County Hall.
If, then, with the memory of Somerset House in our minds, we walk down
Whitehall we shall have a standard by which to judge the great new
Government buildings. There are three of them, the upright rectangular
block of the Woods and Forests building, the great colonnaded block of
the War Office, with its two corner domed turrets, and the large Home
Office block at the bottom on the right hand, which goes on endlessly
with more and more towers and projections, as a palace should, down
Great George Street. If we cannot quite retain the quality of Somerset
House in our minds we can refer to another genuine antique, as we do in
our furniture, for a standard—Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. Any
building which can live up to that in scale, repose and refinement,
though it was the first of its type, will survive for all times.
At first you think the Woods and Forests building is rather good. It is
big and bold and strong. It is well made, its composition is
satisfactory, and it is weathering to a beautiful colour. But it has no
distinction. It is better than Joe Beckett, but not as good as
Carpentier. Its columns are the ordinary unfluted columns of commerce,
while its entrance porch might be the entrance to a new Whitehall
hotel—in Bloomsbury. However, one must not say too much against it or
there will be no epithets left for the War Office.
The War Office is another of these buildings which at first glance is
deceptive. A great Liberal peer once announced in reference to it,
“There’s a model of what public building should be!” If he had made his
money since the war, or because of it, I could have better understood
him. I think what takes the public fancy in the War Office is its
silhouette coming up and down Whitehall. It stands out very prominently
at a break in the street. Its great range of independent columns in
perspective is very effective. So are its two cupola-covered turrets at
either end of the façade. Its composition is an obvious one, easy to
grasp. It is such a good advertising front that Messrs. Robinson and
Cleaver have made a caricature of it for their new premises in Regent
Street. But when you have glanced at it from the top of a passing
omnibus you have seen it all. It will not bear looking into. If the
Woods and Forests building has no real distinction of manner the great
pile of the War Office bears itself like some tired Titan. No
consideration or feeling has been given to the detail. The same
meaningless blocked columns appear endlessly to every window and door.
Cast your mind back to Somerset House or look further down the road to
the Banqueting Hall, or across it to the Horse Guards, and you see that
another race built these things. It is sad, but it is true. Otherwise
how is it that an eighteenth-century building is as seldom wrong as a
modern one is right?
The one that is nearest right of our three great new offices is the
last, and that it must be confessed is because it is nearest to the
eighteenth century. Mr. Brydon, the architect, worked in Bath. Now in
Bath you cannot escape the eighteenth century unless you are an
extraordinary person like the designer of the Empire Hotel in that town.
Mr. Brydon did not try. He absorbed as much of it as he could digest.
Yet his big Home Office block is no mere “as you were” building. It is
not an eighteenth-century copy, but it is sufficiently eighteenth
century not to be vulgar. I will not say it is great architecture, like
the Banqueting Hall, yet it has a certain amount of dignity and
distinction. The great columns, for instance, have been fluted, but the
delicacy of the fluting does not reappear in the rest of the building as
it does in the old Treasury block close by. That is all of one piece and
at a high level. Rarely do we achieve that nowadays, and certainly not
in a great public building. When we do we have to go to an artist like
the late E. A. Rickards or to Sir Edwin Lutyens, men whose personalities
and taste are both sufficiently vivid and strong to fuse the diverse
elements of modern work into a consistent whole.
If I were asked to name the best modern public building in London I
should unhesitatingly say E. A. Rickards’s Town Hall at Deptford. But
that is some way from Whitehall.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III.
THE OFFICE BLOCK.
BUSINESS and busy-ness are not the same thing. One does not necessarily
imply the other. The designers of our modern blocks of offices,
especially in the City of London, do not seem as a class to have grasped
this. Had they done so the City, where a greater amount of new building
has been done in recent years than anywhere else, would not look so
trifling and unconvincing as it does. The buildings have not the same
serious air as have the lower portions of those in Wall Street and the
end of Broadway—one takes no notice of the upper portions when close at
hand.
No one from its recent architecture would realise that the city is
still, in spite of the war and unheard-of debts, the centre of the
world’s money market. The new buildings, for instance, which now line
King William Street, compared to an old building, like the Sun Life
building in Threadneedle Street, or to the modern American banks and
Trust buildings, are skittish and flamboyant. In spite of the size and
apparent wealth of these King William Street ones, you would expect
exaggerations in any prospectuses issuing from them. They have that
air—an unfortunate one—of over-emphasis.
In Lombard Street, which I suppose is more expensive still, so expensive
indeed that only concerns of the highest financial standing in the world
can afford to exist beside its narrow road-way, there are even worse
examples. In so narrow a thoroughfare every canon of good taste would
call for flat reserved façades, yet instead we have in the newer
structures, buildings of the strongest modelling and the highest
ornateness. In one case a great group of colossal half-naked women is
leaning out over the street from the pediment of the main entrance, and
in so commanding a way that you are tempted from it to make a guess at
the purpose of the building. Is it a slave market, or something worse?
No; it is only a highly respectable insurance company of the very finest
status and credit.
Even in Kingsway, where a much higher standard of taste prevails than
among the average city buildings, we find great new blocks of an
extraordinarily complicated architecture. Pelion is not only piled on
Ossa, but is interpenetrated with it. We find the buildings like this
till we come suddenly to the great new American building which closes
the vista—Bush House. Here is a clean-looking structure with regularly
spaced windows, all of the same size, devoted to ordinary office
purposes. Even in its present unfinished state, with only about
one-fifth built, anyone can see that it is a strong and effective mass,
with no fuss anywhere to interfere with its outlines. Riding down the
Strand on an omnibus one carries away from it, in one’s mind, a definite
impression which one certainly does not of its be-whiskered neighbours.
One remembers its clear-cut appearance and the interesting detail about
its arched entrances. It is an impression of dignity and character
obtained without any obvious struggle. No complication of columns decks
its façade in the false pretence that it is a palace or to be used for
palatial purposes.
In this respect compare Bush House with the Assurance Office on the
opposite side of the Strand, which combines a farmhouse roof of split
stones with an order of giant columns, and below these a disorder of
large ladies leaning out above the ground-floor windows in considerable
déshabille to watch the traffic. Nevertheless, in spite of, or rather
because of all the extra excitement, one forgets it. It leaves no image
on the mind. By overdressing, in place of the simplicity of a good cut,
the building has become ineffective.
The Bush building, by a good cut and little ornament sparingly used, is
highly effective. Its great entrance on the Aldwych front must be judged
in connection with the great plain wings yet to be built on either side
and the tower to crown the group. This front is, of course, designed as
a terminal feature to Kingsway, and a magnificent one it will make when
complete. The building will have, I imagine, a very great effect on all
subsequent office blocks. In such matters it introduces, not only
American efficiency with its well-lit and easily divisible floor space,
but American economy of expression. We have, in reality, always taken
business seriously in this country. Perhaps, at last, we shall appear to
do so.
I trace a good deal of the flamboyance which has spoilt our business
buildings in recent years not only to the flamboyant and rather vulgar
architectural period from which we are just emerging, but also to the
narrow frontages on which so many of our business premises have in the
past been built. The building owner is anxious that his new building
shall be distinctive, shall possess what his estate agent calls “a good
advertising front.” As the site is a narrow one something extraordinary
has to be committed on the façade to mark it from its neighbours. The
extraordinary things demanded have been forthcoming, and our streets
have, in consequence, become the haphazard muddle, not unpicturesque in
general effect, of which Fleet Street and New Bond Street are good
examples. Economic reasons, however, are now bringing about bigger
buildings. To develop economically one site, another is added to it. The
same battery of lifts, for instance, which the greater number of stories
calls for, can serve both. With this increase in size the composition of
the buildings is an easier matter. They can have breadth, in both senses
of the term. They often stretch now from side street to side street, or
at any rate have one flank showing. The total mass, therefore, is not
only big enough, but has an opportunity of telling, and the architect is
no longer so tempted to strive for his effect with extravagant ornament
and eccentric forms to his smaller features.
Sir John Burnet is building a fine stark structure, called Adelaide
House, at the foot of London Bridge. It rises sheer from the water to a
height of some 120 feet. It has little ornament, yet the building is
going to be one of the most powerful in London. It will tell like the
Bush building by its general shape and mass, and like it, too, its
detail is free from all ostentation.
The square sites provided by the gridiron plan of American cities are
one of the reasons for the simpler shapes of American buildings. We
shall never reach the monotony of such a plan, and we may be thankful
for it; but with the bigger buildings which are now coming into
existence we, too, may have the advantage of more island sites, and of
buildings therefore, which rely on solidity for their effect, and not on
narrow faces, ugly or not, as the case may be, but always trying very
hard to catch one’s attention.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV.
BANK BUILDINGS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA.
WHY does a New York, a Montreal, or a Toronto bank differ so much in the
character and quality of its architecture from a London or Liverpool
one? All appear to the average man to serve the same needs. Money may be
more powerful on the other side of the Atlantic than it is with us, but
it is hardly more respected. Yet there the banks provide temples for
their customers while we provide saloon bars, mahogany partitions and
all.
The modern American or Canadian bank consists of a great dignified hall,
so large and lofty that the counters and such few screens as there are
appear, in relative size, like the furniture in a ducal drawing-room.
This hall is not generally of ornate architecture, neither are
multi-coloured marbles used. It is usually a well-proportioned, lofty
apartment of simple rectangular shape, free from intermediate columns,
not unlike the best rooms in the British Museum. If a polished stone or
marble is used it is generally Roman travertine, with its quiet, warm
texture. It is difficult to generalise, but one might state with some
degree of accuracy that the architectural scheme is mostly one of large
flat pilasters, with a Roman coffered ceiling. That is to say, it is one
of architecture reduced to very simple elements. Nothing is allowed to
interfere with the great impression of dignity, even of solemnity, which
awaits you directly you pass through the revolving doors. You are
impressed almost in the same way and to the same degree as you are when
you first pass into a cathedral. The service may be going on—it is all
the while in the bank—but it is the building which holds you.
When you come to examine it in detail you see about the base of the big
pilasters, and evenly spread over the floor of the larger part of the
cella—one cannot get away from the temple feeling—a number of small
human beings busily at work. These humans are protected by low stone
enclosure walls, surmounted in some places by the most delicate and
beautiful small bronze grills and screens, or marble ones with bronze
in-filling.
I noticed with interest in the National City Bank, New York—the Bank, I
was informed, of the Standard Oil magnates—that these screens were of
delightful Early Christian detail. I did not complain of any
inappropriateness. I admired them intensely. They provided a charming
foil to the great Roman interior, with its detail derived from the
Pantheon. They may have been at the same time some private tribute to
early martyrs in the cause of oil, but that did not matter.
Across this expanse of heads you see, or think you see, the presidents
and vice-presidents of the institution. There seems to be no concealment
in private rooms. Everyone is there to be shot at when the hold-up
comes, and not merely a few cashiers. Architecturally, the result is
magnificent. The most insignificant depositor can walk up and down the
great hall and either enjoy the architecture or watch the machine
working, according to his taste. If he wants to talk to the head of a
department he is not taken away to a small room, but to a low armchair
placed beside that official’s desk. So great is the floor area that
there is perfect privacy by the mere space between the desks.
Think what all this means to the architect designing the bank. Apart
from vaults below, his work consists in giving dignified expression,
externally and internally, to one great hall. The finest materials and
workmanship are at his disposal. Was there any problem like it, at once
so simple and so splendid, since the days of the Greek temples?
Instead, what do we do? Firstly, we very rarely consider a bank worthy
of being an independent building. It generally has other offices over
it. The only one I remember which expresses the banking hall as a single
unit is the fine National Provincial Bank, in Bishopsgate, which was
built some time in the ’seventies by John Gibson, and still remains
externally our finest bank building. But one would not mind the offices
over—they have sometimes to have them in America—if the banking hall
itself were realised by the bankers and their architects as the splendid
opportunity it is for noble architecture.
It is difficult to think that we really believe in banking, as the solid
serious profession we talk about, when our banks are not only nearly as
numerous, but very like our public-houses. Both are more often than not
glorified corner shops. There is the public bar and the private bar in
each. The public bar is of any shape so long as there is sufficient
counter space, and the private bar or manager’s room has the same
mahogany and frosted glass. Externally, each shows, too, a nice taste in
pink, polished granite.
In the smaller country towns, however, there is a good deal to be said
for the more domestic character of our banks, though, as the greatest
builders in the country at the present time, the five big banks have not
a very distinguished record even there for good and suitable work. One
does not want in a Cotswold village the Ionic temple of Main Street. In
the Metropolis or the big provincial cities, however, it is clear to
anyone who has crossed the Atlantic that our banks have not yet risen to
their architectural opportunities. It is not that they have not spent
enough money. It is that their buildings have not been fine and austere
enough. They have, in short, not treated their banking business
sufficiently seriously.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V.
THE SMALL SUBURBAN HOUSE.
NOT only at election times, but always under modern conditions, the very
small house is the most important unit in our towns. As long as the
mechanic, the small tradesman, and the black-coated poor prefer to live
in separate dwellings under separate roofs, each thinking of his little
box of bricks as an Englishman’s castle, their little houses will occupy
a larger space than any other type of building. Even the escaping
motorist, leaving his responsibilities and his smell behind him, cannot
be entirely unaware of the miles of dreary side streets down which he
glances for an oncoming bicycle or milk cart before he reaches the open
country. Those who travel by train, omnibus, or tram car, are even more
conscious of them, the former seeing not only their little grinning
faces, as alike as a row of Mr. Studdy’s puppies, but also their untidy
Mary Ann backs, with their strips of desolate garden or yard, each
decorated with a pole for wireless or for washing.
What stale, vulgar mind or minds brought about this desert of mean
streets, all potential if not actual slums, which is one of the most
distinctively English features of our towns? As far as I can see, the
minds which were ultimately responsible for them were minds replete with
the very best intentions engaged in drawing up model by-laws in
Whitehall.
Beauty and by-laws do not at any time live very happily side by side.
The few towns like Chester which have none, may have slums, though not
very many, but they still retain some of the beauty which a good
building tradition alone can give. Model by-laws destroy tradition,
destroy independent design, and for all small town property put
architects out of work. Let us see how this comes about.
Following the Public Health Acts of 1875, which at any rate gave us
water-tight or approximately water-tight drains, most municipalities,
instigated by Whitehall, thought they could apply to buildings with
equal success the same sort of rules they had applied to drains. They
began, therefore, to lay down the minimum thickness of all walls, the
minimum strength of all floors, indeed, the minimum size of practically
everything. We were not to be allowed to fall through our bedroom floors
even if we wanted to.
So far so good. But what was the result? At once the minimum became a
maximum, but that alone would not have mattered very much. More
happened. Anyone could now build to satisfy the authority, because
everyone was told how. Hence arose the standard minimum little house and
the jerry builder who dealt in them as others dealt in peas or potatoes.
Why go to an architect, why have any thoughtful design at all? Copy the
model by-laws, and all will be well. Your plans are bound to be passed.
They were, and the result is what we see—minimum roads, minimum houses,
maximum repetition, and maximum vulgarity.
You may ask why the latter? The answer is because the jerry builder was
not wholly a bad man. It would have been much better if he had been. He
had just a little conscience, and that was represented by the decorated
bay window, and the stained glass over the front door. I use the past
tense, for he has practically gone, clever man that he was in many
respects, and has retired probably to a multiple edition of his own
residences, all gables and conceit, at Bournemouth, or some similar
place. But before he went he left his indelible mark on all our towns
where there is a belt of his work, one to six miles wide, as a permanent
memorial to his pre-war faith in model by-laws.
The position has altered because the margin of profit on which the jerry
builder worked does not now exist in the case of the smallest houses,
and because the model by-laws have been remodelled. The speculative
builder—we will no longer call him by his sobriquet, for we are all very
anxious he should start work again, if not quite on the same lines—has
now to confine himself to slightly larger houses which he can sell.
There is a chance, therefore, that he will have to consider the external
design a little more carefully, and perhaps even employ an architect,
though the newest little houses in places like Bournemouth have all the
same old flapper-like features, the same ostentation and desire to make
an immediate impression, while at the same time turning a cold shoulder
to the neighbouring house. These are the marks of an uncivil, unurbane,
suburban mind, in the modern and worst sense of that term.
The hope is in the smaller houses, which are too expensive for the
speculative builder at the rents that can be charged. These are
therefore being erected everywhere, though not nearly fast enough, by
the municipalities under the various Government schemes. Everyone must
have been impressed by the general improvement in design which has come
about. The loosening of the by-laws has meant the employment of
competent architects both for the lay-out of the roads and for the
houses themselves. Instead of long narrow roads of closely packed
minimum houses we have now groups of three and four houses of simple
shape, which being simple can combine into some sort of unity.
The fault in the present housing schemes, good as they in general are,
is, I fancy, that the units are too dissociated. We have gone too far in
the opposite direction. We want, I think, more terraces, of anything up
to a dozen houses, lineable with the road. We want more of the effect of
a village that has grown, rather than of a lot of little model houses
squeezed out of the same mould and dotted about on the landscape. But
the change has been wonderful, and the chief step towards that change
has been the un-modelling of the model by-laws.
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VI.
OUR BIG RAILWAY STATIONS.
ONE reads in the daily papers that one of our biggest railways has
commissioned a set of posters from most of the painter-members of the
Royal Academy. Whether the R.A.s are equal to this effort in design
remains to be seen, but one may take the action of the London, Midland
and Scottish Railway as a sign of grace—if not exactly a death-bed
repentance. After the spirited and successful deeds of the London
Underground in this respect, the bigger railways had to do something.
Being big, they naturally thought of the Academy; from a great combine
one cannot expect any very tiring effort in clear thinking.
But what has all this to do with the big railway stations? I think it
lies very near their heart. It gives at any rate a clue to the strange
mystery of their shapelessness. The big railway termini in America have
no posters, but are in themselves fine architectural schemes. The big
termini in this country, especially the recent ones, like Victoria, have
no architectural scheme, but plenty of posters. One can imagine the
English director saying, “It does not matter about the shape of our
stations if we plaster them with these,” and then, more touchingly, “If
we go to the Royal Academy for the plasters, all will indeed be well.”
This state of mind, of course, exhibits a fundamental error of the most
primitive kind. Our railway companies to-day seem to have as little
faith in their own enterprises as do our banks. If railway transport is
the great and important thing a great many people, not even excluding
all railway directors, think it to be, the thing in itself is worthy of
fine expression.
The terminal station is the gateway of the town, but a gateway through
which people are brought from the uttermost parts or through which they
set out on illimitable journeys. What structure in the whole of our
civilisation should make a finer appeal to the imagination? Yet if we
think of our London termini, only King’s Cross and Euston express in any
sense this gateway idea, and in the latter an hotel belonging to the
railway has been allowed to impinge upon and spoil the great gateway
symbol—the Doric Propylea—which Hardwick, the architect, invented for
this very purpose.
For the rest, our main railway stations are big railway sheds, leaning
up against hotels or blocks of railway offices, the details of which are
necessarily entirely out of scale with the spans of the train-shed roof.
Sometimes this roof, as at St. Pancras, is in itself a fine thing;
sometimes, as at Waterloo, it is, in the words of Mr. Roger Fry, a
series of hen-roosts. In no case in England in recent years has the real
dignity and importance of the railway as a railway been allowed or given
anything like full expression.
In New York the problem has been approached quite differently. There the
town has seen in the first place that the railway tracks are below the
ground level, and that no steam engine enters the town to befoul it with
its smoke. At the Great Central Station there are two tiers of tracks,
one for main line and one for suburban traffic, one above the other and
both below the surface. With us, especially in the southern lines, the
reverse seems to be the general rule. Our railway companies, regardless
of all amenity, carry their tracks high in the air, thereby cutting off
large districts by embankments and generally deforming the town.
With the sunk railway tracks in New York the structure above ground is
left free, and the station problem resolves itself, on the practical
side, into gathering together the passengers in the most comfortable way
and sending them down to or up from the right railway track at the right
time. On the architectural side, the American method has meant that an
architect of repute has been called in to express above ground the
majesty of the particular railway, while using, of course, the plan
forms most convenient to passengers. When he has done that and has
thereby made the finest possible advertisement of that particular
railway, no other kind of advertisement, either of the railway itself or
of anything else, is permitted within the station.
I remember well a New Yorker’s first view of one of our own termini. He
turned to me and said “Say, man, it’s a vaudeville show.” And he was
right. Compared with the great halls of the American stations, our
Waterloos and Victorias are comic opera inside and out. Theirs are
monumental structures, through which pour with ease vastly greater
crowds than we deal with, for New York, with practically the same
population as London has only two great terminal stations.
The fact is our stations take any shape left over by the engineers. No
architect of the first rank has been employed since Hardwick at Euston,
on any great terminal station, whereas Charles Follen McKim—the
Christopher Wren of America—conceived and designed the Pennsylvania
Station, and two slightly lesser men had almost more success with the
Central Station. Our railway companies are generally content to give the
engineer an architectural assistant or to keep in their employ a tame
architect, who works for no one else, which is in itself but another
confession that they consider the shape and form of their stations a
question of very secondary importance.
Such a view is, of course, at once vastly unpatriotic, an insult to the
intelligence of the community, but also a mistake, one would think, on
purely commercial grounds. No American walks through the immense
concourse hall, lined with Roman travertine, of the Great Central
Station in New York or penetrates the series of halls, like some vaster
Baths of Caracalla, of the Pennsylvania Station, without a sense of
pride in the two great railway companies who have given the country such
noble monuments. The average New Yorker feels to these two stations as
the average English schoolboy does to express engines. He takes you to
see them. Who takes anyone to see Waterloo or Victoria? Who is impressed
by their combined red brick and stone cinema-architecture? But no one
fails to be impressed by the vast, simple Roman architecture of the New
York stations or the great triple arched façade of the Union Station at
Washington.
The Americans believe in architecture; they know its value at its best
as both the most abstract and at the same time the most powerful form of
human expression, and their railway magnates have the sense to make use
of it. Instead, ours go to the Royal Academy for pretty pictures with
which to cover up their disgrace.
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VII.
RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS OF TO-DAY.
NO one could call ours a temple building era. Yet more, and more truly,
religious buildings seem to me to have been built during the last twenty
or thirty years than in any equal space of time since the dissolution of
the monasteries.
This may seem a strange statement when we look back on the fervours of
the Tractarian movement and the endless Gothic churches it produced—and
one might almost add the endless Gothic cathedrals it destroyed. Looking
at that handiwork one begins to wonder whether the medieval movement of
last century was after all really a religious movement based on any real
feeling or just a sentimentally romantic one.
How is it that this so-called irreligious age in which we live, and this
certainly a vulgar one if we are to judge it by its civic buildings, has
produced ecclesiastical buildings which are living and vital things,
while that Victorian age, in spite of its hymns and its prayer meetings,
its battles of the styles and its religious arguments, produced mainly,
if not entirely, dead copies, or rather travesties, of worn out past
architecture?
It is a strange paradox and one which I think can be explained only by
the fact that under the mass of neglect and indifference with which
religion struggles to-day, a few enthusiastic artists are able to work
with a freedom which was denied to their fellows in the second half of
the nineteenth century, when every layman was an ecclesiologist and
every parson had some half-baked theory of medieval art of his own,
which he felt it his duty to run. What chance had the poor architect
when his style was dictated to him and confined to some fifty years of a
century itself five centuries old? Yet that was everywhere the common
practice. Archæology reigned supreme, the only difficulty being that the
exact fifty years for imitation and revival changed from time to time.
It was a case of the dead not only burying the dead, but burying the
living too.
To my thinking it was the interior of Bentley’s great Catholic Cathedral
at Westminster which finally broke the idea that Gothic, in one of its
many past manifestations, was the only religious style. That grave and
vast interior proved indeed that the requisite conditions for solemn
building lay really in the opposite direction. It showed that lofty
plain wall surfaces, even of common stock brick, were more important in
giving the idea of remoteness and seclusion from the world than the
richest clustered Gothic columns. One felt after first seeing the
Westminster Cathedral that even the Abbey nave, probably the most
perfect piece of Gothic in England, if it were new to-day and fresh and
unhallowed by endless associations, would not have the same power over
the mind, the same humbling yet inspiring effect that this vast dimly
lit hall of plain brickwork and concrete possessed. The very simplicity
of its round arches, its sheer unbroken walls and piers, its plain
sedate domes gave it a solemnity which richer and more articulate
structures like correct Gothic ones could not from their nature possess.
That it was, however, foreign and to a certain extent therefore esoteric
in its appeal, while it made it no doubt very convenient to its
particular purpose, rendered its style difficult if not unsuitable to
general adaptation to ordinary and smaller churches.
The effect of Bentley’s work, however, was none the less pronounced. It
showed the Gothic architects of our churches, or certain of them who
were open to new inspiration, that there were very impressive qualities
to be obtained in church building which a strict adherence to past forms
of Gothic could not give.
Gothic is essentially a linear style in which the eye travels along the
well-marked lines of deeply indented piers, arches, and vaulting ribs.
The interior of the Westminster Cathedral, on the other hand, especially
before its decoration was attempted, had all the Byzantine feeling for
large and finely modulated surfaces. Of strongly drawn moulded lines
there were few. The world, we know, was shut out by high walls and
another world suggested by the broad arches and domes, and by the very
blueing of the atmosphere which their great height enabled them to bring
about. How to get some of the strength and solidity of those walls and
domes into ordinary church building was the new problem.
The solution was found in a new and free Gothic in which walls and solid
piers took the place of Gothic columns and plain vaulting that of
ribbed, in which the coloured stone lantern to which the old Gothic
church approximated gave way to some form of massive interior lit by an
occasional rich window. The new churches which I have in mind are
buildings which look in on themselves rather than out on to the world.
To the outside world they present a plain and often uncompromising
exterior. They are in the world, but not of it—perhaps that, too, is
symbolical of our time.
If it was Sir Gilbert Scott to whom we owe so much of the harder and
less pleasing Gothic of Victorian times, as well as much destructive
restoration of our Cathedrals, it is to his grandson, Sir Giles Gilbert
Scott, to whom we owe to-day some of the best of these new free Gothic
churches as well as, at Liverpool, the one great new Gothic cathedral of
our age. If anyone ever made good the sins of his grandfather, this
architect certainly has. Though still a young man he has already built
sufficient work to mark our era and to start a new renaissance in church
building. It is a veritable renaissance in that the spirit of adventure
necessary to a renaissance is there. His work, even the smallest, such
as his church of the Annunciation at Bournemouth, has qualities of
imagination and scale which place it in an entirely new category. While
using Gothic detail for decoration he builds with the solid bigness of
the Romans. It is too early yet to speak of his great cathedral, when
but a third of a structure second only in size to St. Peter’s, Rome,
among Christian structures, has yet been completed, but there is already
enough to be seen (especially now that a portion of the building is
enclosed) for us to feel that at last we are to have a building which in
the grandeur of its scale and the daring of its design will represent a
greater individual effort of the imagination than that called forth by
any cathedral yet erected in these islands.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII.
THE USE OF THE COLUMN.
THE classical column, together with its entablature of architrave,
frieze, and cornice, commonly called the order, is one of the most
abused features in modern architecture. It has, of course, come down to
us, full of meaning and character, from Greek and Roman times by way of
the Renaissance, each age, as it were, having laid its own deposit upon
it. It has always, however, in the course of its long journey, retained
something of its pristine importance and glory.
Coming to maturity, if not born, in temple, palace, and forum, the
column has signified, even in pilaster form as in a wall decoration,
something apart from and superior to the common daily activities of
eating, sleeping and trading. It has been used on great churches and
cathedrals, on palaces—though the Italians, unlike the French and
English, seem on the whole to have preferred the latter with plain,
cliff-like walls—on the fronts of town halls, theatres, and opera
houses. It has come to mean, therefore, especially when of great size,
something public and monumental or, in Georgian times, aristocratic.
This feeling persisted even into the nineteenth century. We see in
Regent’s Park and the London squares terraces of houses with some
columned or pilastered feature in the centre, or it may be the whole
block is so treated. I suppose it was felt that what would be
ostentatious in a single house was still permissible to a group. Where
no one owned all the columns all could partake of their reflected glory
and share it between them. In that way the order was not oppressive.
With a duke, of course, it is different. He can have a columned house
all to himself, but, then, both he and such a house are in themselves
anachronisms.
So it was with the club. The Carlton might have columns—it had them
galore, and still retains them—but the more austere clubs, like the
Reform and the Athenæum, are above even a communal display of Corinthian
glory. That they gain by their restraint all will admit. The order in
these buildings is implicit, but not shown; as if the members of the
club said, “We are, of course, as good as the Conservatives and the
Guards; indeed, we are really such superior people that we have no need
to advertise the fact, as they have to do, poor things!”
What, now, is the modern English use of the great order? The answer is,
everywhere for every purpose. Where do we find its most conspicuous
example? In a great drapery store in Oxford Street. The particular store
I have in my mind consists of nothing else—a great range of over-ornate
columns, with a metal screen of windows between them. There is, of
course, an imperial simplicity about such architecture. It might have
been designed by a Roman Emperor in his cups. But he, at any rate, would
have kept it for some Imperial purpose, if only as a house for his
menagerie or his gladiators. Here, however, it is in the main an
advertisement for “soft goods.”
I maintain that that is all wrong, however well the columns and their
accessories might be designed. If we use up our finest symbols on such
structures, what have we left for really national buildings? The front
of this Oxford Street store, when completed, will be more imposing, and
in a way more effective, than that of Buckingham Palace.
Something is wrong here in our sense of civic values. Perhaps one need
not mind very much about the front of Buckingham Palace being
overshadowed (as long as the garden front remains untouched), but what
are we to say to the British Museum? That is really important, and has
of late years had a magnificent range of Ionic columns added in Montague
Place by Sir John Burnet, who is, it is ironical to remember, the very
same architect who is increasing the range of giant columns in Oxford
Street. Having erected the one, he was probably considered the right
person to erect the other. No doubt, too, he was, if the thing were
right at all. That is the rub. I maintain it was not.
In the same way every lesser commercial building, except the few really
great ones, like Bush House, at the bottom of Kingsway, ape the palace.
Immediately opposite the Athenæum Club, on the other side of Pall Mall,
is a new bank building, which is covered on every side with the
commonest kind of unfluted Corinthian columns—the sort of columns a
first-year architectural student draws because he can draw no others.
Not content with adding large ones to the building as a whole and lesser
ones to the attic, the designer here, whoever he may be, has added baby
columns to the doors and windows.
Well, there it is, and you can contrast this early twentieth-century
bank, aping royalty and achieving clownishness, with the early
nineteenth-century club, refusing all such symbols (except in a small
porticoed entrance, where the columns, serving a definite practical
purpose, have another meaning) and achieving a nobility which seems
almost past our dreaming about to-day. Yet Decimus Burton, when he
designed the Athenæum, was only twenty-seven years of age. I am
beginning to think we shall not again get architecture in England
approaching his till we go to the young men of to-day of twenty-seven
and there-abouts who can not only dream dreams, but, like Burton, have
received a complete training in the meaning of the symbols they use.
Columns having, then, a special meaning and significance, have, of all
architectural detail, to be used with the greatest care. In Bush House,
on the Aldwych front, they are used with great boldness, where they
symbolise a great gateway at the end of Kingsway to what was designed as
a great exhibition building, and with great reserve on the Strand front,
where they chiefly announce the entrance to the office of the insurance
company or bank which is to use, or uses, the ground floor. In an
ordinary drawing-room we know what distinction they can give if
introduced discreetly, and, on the other hand, what vulgarity if
flamboyantly.
There is, however, a use of columns which has come down to us from
classical times to which we do not, I think, sufficiently resort. It is
the rostral column, independent and free-standing. Sir Reginald
Blomfield has put one up in St. Paul’s Churchyard and adapted it well to
the architecture of the Cathedral. The Cunard Company in Liverpool have
put up another as a war memorial in front of their magnificent block of
offices on the river front, and have, appropriately enough in this case,
completed it with ships’ prows and a beautiful figure by Pegram. A free
standing column, crowned with a figure, is a form of memorial which is
always effective and rarely vulgar. The column in Waterloo Place to an
obscure royal duke, called the Duke of York’s Column, is perhaps, and
especially in its setting, the finest memorial in London. If Liverpool
ever decides to erect a war memorial it could not do better than repeat
at the other end of St. George’s Hall the fine column a better age put
up to Wellington, so that the greatest post-classical building in Europe
would lie evenly between the two.
Such single columns unattached to buildings necessarily take the
severest conventional form. That is their safeguard, and that is why the
Doric is better for this purpose than the Corinthian, why the Duke of
York’s Column is to be preferred so much to Nelson’s.
Columns, however, that belong to a building at once assume, as well as
partly dictate, the character of that building. Within limits,
therefore, while belonging to the great traditional groups, they vary
from building to building and age to age, but that is another and a very
long story. At the present time I am convinced it would be a wise, if a
self-denying, thing for architects to eschew all columns on the outside
of their buildings, except for minor purposes, or in the rare event of
some great national or municipal structure being entrusted to them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX.
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW STYLE.
FOLK are wont to complain that there is no modern style in architecture;
nothing but reproductions of past styles. Superficially there is
something in this complaint which in itself is a very old one. The
Victorian historians were accustomed to call all Renaissance and
post-Renaissance architecture imitative, though what in the ancient
world the Renaissance palace and the Baroque church—its two most
distinctive products—imitated it would be difficult to say. The Italian
giants themselves, like Alberti and Palladio, while boasting that they
were building in the true Roman manner made quite sure that they were
not, relying, I suppose, on the ignorance of their contemporaries as to
what that manner really was.
So it is with a great deal of modern work. The architect’s client may
think he is getting correct Tudor, but he is certainly getting nothing
of the kind. His very conditions as to content and arrangement probably
preclude even the possibility of it. Still, one must admit with the
greater knowledge of past styles, and especially of the Georgian ones,
which exists to-day, a certain amount of clever “as you were”
architecture is being built. For country and suburban houses it probably
produces a better result than any “as you really are” architecture would
do.
Where then is the new work and what is the new style that is as
expressive of to-day as the Georgian work and style were expressive of
the eighteenth century? Does the new style really exist? I think it
does, or rather I think it is emerging out of the new conditions and the
attempt to solve new problems. If so, it must be something more than a
fashion, for a fashion is not a style. One may walk through a town
to-day and date the buildings of every decade of the nineteenth century,
and yet, after the first half of that century, there was no real
development of style. The changes that took place from Classic to Gothic
and back again with every impossible compromise between were at the
dictates of fashion, but without any underlying need in the problems to
be solved.
At last such a commanding need has arisen, and it is a new need. It is a
need, too, which corresponds to a spiritual state, to an attitude of
mind, to a way of looking at life. This being so, it is likely, in my
opinion, to bring about a permanent epoch in design. It has already
brought about in architecture a rough correspondence to the new forms of
expression and to the simplification which has taken place in the other
arts, showing thereby that it is part of a widespread movement. It was
there before the war, but it has been affected and strengthened by the
war.
I can best describe the new style, which I think is emerging, by saying
that it is a style which relies on volume and mass for its effects
rather than on surface modelling. It is seen at its best in great new
buildings like the Bush Building in the Strand, in similar ones in New
York and in Berlin and in Hamburg. France, if she cannot dictate to the
world, remains a law to herself. Its main quality is its starkness. It
is a lean style, expressive at once of economy, efficiency, and steel
construction. Economy is shown in the small scale of parts, in spite of
the largeness of the mass, and efficiency appears in the simplicity of
the planning.
Buildings in this style rise sheer from the street, with cliff-like
walls in which the windows are spaced evenly, corresponding to the
ant-like use of the building by a great number of different tenants.
Columns and pilasters are disappearing, except as decoration to minor
portions of the structure, such as to a few doorways, or to give a
frieze effect under the main cornice or roof. They no longer decorate
the building as a whole as they did in Georgian times. The Georgian
pretence that every building or group of buildings was a palace gives
place to the modern feeling that every building is a hive of industry.
Such blocks as I am trying to describe may be blocks of offices or
flats, of factories or warehouses. They express modern forms of communal
existence, and arise out of the high cost of building and the need for
economy in structure and in space. They satisfy us spiritually because
of the directness of their expression. In contrast to Victorian and
Edwardian grossness, they are clean, lean, and ascetic. Such ornament as
they have is in low relief and of the utmost delicacy and refinement.
The carving on the Strand front of the Bush Building is again a good
example. The winning design for the great Holt Line building at
Liverpool—an office building to cost £1,000,000—is in the new manner,
remotely Florentine, but really modern and post-war.
Anyone who has been to America recently must have felt, apart altogether
from the high buildings, that its eastern towns express in their recent
structures a new and sober, if rather ruthless, outlook on life. With
the extinction of the individual owner and occupier, individual modes of
expression are disappearing too. Buildings there are becoming elegant,
efficient machines for multiple use by a vast number of persons. They
are becoming almost as similar one to the other as the various makes of
motor cars. Like the cars, too, they vary chiefly in size. That is their
chief defect, their varying heights—soon, however, to be corrected by
the zoning law—make for discontinuity. In shape, owing to the gridiron
city plan, they can vary but slightly. The total result, however, is not
monotony, but a new sense of beauty and power. The isolated rectangular
blocks, each catching the sun on one face, stand out as so many sentinel
towers. With our continuous streets we shall never reach quite this
effect, but steel construction, with its girders all at right angles to
one another, and economy, calling for as much floor space combined with
as little cubic space as possible, are together driving us in the same
direction.
Our post-war desire for clean, honest, direct expression in all we do,
with no secret diplomacy of construction or fallals of design, makes
this new stark architecture something we can respect and understand. It
must be remembered that starkness is in itself no bad quality. It is a
quality to be found in Greek temples, in Florentine palaces, and in
early Gothic naves. After the luscious, over-ripe architecture of the
last twenty years, let us rather rejoice that it is again appearing in
our buildings. These buildings may not represent a final stage in their
own growth—they probably do not—but they do represent a very healthy
reaction.
The small scale of the modern room in flat or office, with its low
ceiling, compared to the large scale of the Georgian one, certainly
represents a decline in value. Let us hope it is a temporary one, which
will disappear in a generation or less, together with the present
stringency. Spacious apartments mean spacious lives and spacious
thoughts. But, at the same time, let us hope that our new cleanliness,
our new freedom from worn-out shibboleths of detail and ornament, may
remain, and the directness and simplicity we have won become a permanent
asset of our architecture.
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X.
WHO DESTROYED OUR TOWNS?
SOME may think the obvious answer to this question is “those who covered
our towns with soot.” But this is a superficial view. Wash the soot away
and the shapes remain the same. My own view is that the fell deed was
done unconsciously and from the highest motives by certain amiable
gentlemen in the last century.
If any one wants to get some measure of the harm the Gothic Revival did
and still does to our towns and villages let him visit the cities of
northern Italy. There he will see how the classical tradition of simple
rectangular buildings, with regularly spaced windows and low-pitched
roofs, still controls all vernacular building. He will see everywhere
dwelling-houses, farm-houses, factories, both new and old, which in
their unaffected dignity, simplicity and repose might be the work of our
own Sir Edwin Lutyens in his latest manner. Motoring across the Lombardy
Plain or in the train through the hills of Tuscany one is always coming
across another Lutyens house. One continually sees the buildings of
Smith Square surrounded by vineyards, solid square blocks with widely
and evenly spaced windows and plenty of plain wall surface. Americans in
Italy must similarly have found numerous examples of the work of their
great domestic architect Charles A. Platt.
Now in the eighteenth century we in England were building in the same
Italian way. The square Queen Anne and Georgian houses with their
regular windows and low roofs, which line the high streets of our
country towns or stand as independent units surrounded with their walled
gardens, are the exact counterpart of similar Italian buildings,
allowing for differences in materials, such as universal stucco and
pantiles in Italy and brick and generally slate or plain tiles with us,
though sometimes, particularly in London, we used pantiles, too. These
simple buildings, whether large or small, as one can see in Italy,
always composed satisfactorily one with the other. Such buildings never
jar with one another or with the landscape.
Outside Milan, a town which in size and business life compares with
Manchester or Leeds, there is no rash of ugly little squiff-eyed villas
with perky roofs, irregular windows and ugly projections in front and
rear. Everywhere there are these simple cubical structures with regular
windows, plastered and roofed as has been the tradition for centuries.
Even in the centre of Milan, after walking about the town for a week, I
could find only one irregular aggressive modern structure. I certainly
did not find many good modern buildings, but—and this is much more
important to the town as a whole—the masses of bad ones which we seem in
England to take for granted were not there.
Now if the Gothic Revival had not broken up the classical tradition with
us, should we still be building in town, suburb and country in the same
simple way? I venture to think we should. It is appalling therefore to
imagine the infinite damage that that movement of earnest but
archæologically-minded men has done for us and our inheritance. We pride
ourselves as a nation on our strong conservatism and common sense, but
in truth we are more sentimental, more easily swept away by romantic
highfalutin than any other race except the purely Teutonic ones. Ruskin
simply turned us, or rather our houses, upside down. The quiet dignified
old England of Rowlandson’s drawings—I refer to the houses not to the
people—was changed to the speckled red and white, the pink and blue
irregularly strewn crumbs of any awkward pointed shape of which
Bournemouth, wholly built in Ruskinian and post-Ruskinian times,
provides the supreme example.
We may laugh at modern Italian painting or cry when we compare it with
the old, we may sneer at the dexterity which produces endless alabaster
figures of girls in tight-fitting bathing costumes or of sentimental
cupids, though we should remember that they are mostly made for the
English market; but we cannot afford to look down on ordinary modern
Italian building, free as it is from all eccentricity and strong as it
is in its traditional way. Noticing the same good shapes and proportions
everywhere in town and country alike, we see it is a real vernacular
form of expression. It must be the work of folk who do it largely, if
not entirely, instinctively. I doubt whether in most cases architects
are employed at all. If they are, they must be almost celestial
architects who are willing for the public good to sink their
personalities and eccentricities in a way unknown to us.
To my argument that it was the Gothic Revival that did the damage and
set us all on the wrong track, some may reply that Italian towns like
Siena are full of real Gothic palaces, and yet they compose perfectly
and their streets provide more beautiful scenes than any others. To this
I would answer that the Italian Gothic palaces may have been built
during the Gothic period, and are indeed full of Gothic detail, but they
are not Gothic in spirit. They are rectangular in shape without any
excrescences, bay windows and pointed roofs which show, just as the
Gothic Towers of St. Gemignano are all rectangular. Gothic in Italy was
never more than skin deep and was never revived as a semi-religious,
semi-sociological exercise. When Italy wanted to let off steam and be
romantic and exciting, as all live folk do every now and then, she
invented the baroque, and a very splendid invention it was for the
purpose. How much better to swagger and pose a little with some
invention of your own than to fiddle about with monkish ideas five
centuries old and standing for a completely different outlook on life.
Anyhow the baroque never interfered with the peasants’ or citizens’
dwellings, never turned the house of the clerk from a quietly beautiful
cottage into the little suburban English villa as did our own revived
Gothic.
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XI.
ARCHITECTURE AND YOUTH.
THE technique of building is too complicated to allow a young man of
genius to plunge into it with success unless he is specially placed to
receive expert assistance. When to the technique of mere building one
adds, as one must, the technique of some form of architectural
expression, Classic, Gothic, Renaissance, or whatever it may be as the
formula on which to base his method of design, one realises that the
young architect has a long way to go before he can find himself, apart
altogether from the question of obtaining commissions. The period of
five years’ training laid down in the recognized Schools of Architecture
as a minimum, barely suffices to give him freedom from these technical
difficulties. If he is an articled pupil, content to work in the manner
of his master, he may no doubt achieve an imitation of that manner in a
shorter time. The building and the architectural technique, however,
which he will have learnt will be merely that of his master’s particular
type of building and design. If he means so to limit his range that may
suffice, though with changing materials and new conditions of building
something wider is obviously desirable. In the days of a settled
tradition or style, part of the problem was already solved for the young
designer. In no way else can one explain how a young man like John Wood
could have come down from the wilds of Yorkshire and at twenty-one have
designed and carried out his first, yet thoroughly mature, terraces of
houses at Bath. The orders of architecture were to his hand as well as a
recognised method of planning and composition, and he, like most of the
18th century architects, appears to have had little or none of the
modern desire for individual expression. His originality consisted in
the breadth and boldness of his schemes for his adopted city rather than
in a personal outlook on his art.
The great example of the apparently untrained architect, who immediately
succeeded, is Sir John Vanbrugh who built Blenheim Palace, Castle
Howard, and a dozen other great mansions, and eventually almost rivalled
Sir Christopher Wren himself in the extent of his practice. He appears
at first sight to jump into the profession of architect from that of
dramatist without any preparation at all. Here, too, was a man with a
very distinct individuality, whose buildings show it at every turn. The
conditions under which 18th century architects worked, however, were
very different from those of to-day. Vanbrugh, in connection with his
own plays, may have made rough drafts for the scenery. It was hardly
more than such that he needed to make for his buildings in the first
instance. The complicated and exact modern working drawings, sufficient
to form the basis of a contract which will stand in law, were unknown in
his days. Tradesmen were accustomed to tender on very slight indications
on paper of what was required. The general style of the time would be
known. A gentleman’s mansion was built in such and such a way, with such
and such thicknesses of walls and finishings. However, this is not
enough to explain Vanbrugh. The explanation in his case is the devoted
assistant architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor. Wren’s scholar and friend not
only carried out many of Wren’s own buildings for him, but was regularly
employed by Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh was the man about town, who obtained the
commissions and provided first schemes, and later on, no doubt, some of
the detail drawings; but Hawksmoor was the man who surmounted the
constructional difficulties and saw the work to completion, supplying a
great many details himself.
So it is to-day. If a man of genius like Sir Giles Gilbert Scott wins at
the age of twenty-one a competition for a great cathedral, as at
Liverpool, it is because he has already at his command, through family
atmosphere and association as well as through his apprenticeship to a
Gothic architect, the technique of Gothic architecture. Being a man of
genius he can, during the slow building of the cathedral, not only learn
building technique but develop his own form of Gothic expression. How
great a development Scott has made in this way during the twenty years
Liverpool Cathedral has been in course of erection, everyone who has
seen it knows. How little experience he had of actual building when he
obtained the prize, we know from his own words. When asked by a
Liverpool newspaper reporter what he had built, he says he could only
think of a pipe rack for which he had made a drawing, and even that was
carried out by his sister with a fretsaw. His competition drawings,
however, show that, from his master and from his study of Gothic work,
he had already a very fair idea of the size of piers and buttresses he
should use both for appearance and for strength. The rest he must have
learnt as he went along—a good deal no doubt on the construction side
from his first five years’ collaboration with Mr. Bodley.
Scott, though, is an exceptional case. It would be very foolish for the
aspiring young architect to feel he could do with as little training,
even if he has been brought up in the atmosphere of a style as Scott
was. Besides, to-day he would probably have but little desire to build
in any exact tradition. He would rightly be ambitious, like Scott, to
give a modern meaning to his work. To do this successfully, however,
does not mean that the young architect need not know and study the old
work. Rather he must study it all the more to see what is essential in
it, and what merely transient and belonging to its own era. In any case
he cannot do without an alphabet. Certain things he will have to use to
gain any expression at all, that is, unless he desires to erect but a
purely engineering structure. He is sure to wish that his building
should make not only an emphatic appeal to the imagination, but should
have certain delicacies and refinements, that it should conjure up in
the beholder certain associated ideas. To obtain such things however in
a non-copying, non-traditional way implies more knowledge of the past,
not less. It means much measuring of old work, much studying of
proportions, both in plan and section as well as in elevation.
If, however, the young architect, to equip himself, must go through many
years of strenuous training, when that has been accomplished, a glorious
field of effort faces him. He will have learnt the rudiments of an art
in which any work, however small, is delightful labour. To design a
cottage successfully is a very happy exercise. Every piece of work which
comes to hand gives scope for thought and feeling. Thought alone is not
enough. That is the great charm of architecture. By thought an engineer
works, an architect by thought and feeling combined. An architect may
not become a rich man—he very seldom does—but, if he has the roots of
the matter in him, he can never become a dull one.
Then there is always the gamble of the great competition. In no other
profession can youth jump so readily to the great opportunity if he
cares to try. Admittedly it is a gamble, for assessors and judges are
very imperfect human beings, especially when working singly with no
opposing idiosyncrasies to cancel one another. Still the great gamble
sometimes comes off. E. A. Rickards was only twenty when, working with
his partners, his design won the great Town Hall and Law Courts
buildings at Cardiff, which for twenty-five years or more have proved
themselves good and beautiful buildings as well as a winning design—not
by any means, or even generally, the same thing. At twenty-eight Mr.
Ralph Knott won the competition for the great London County Hall. But I
do not want to dwell on the winning of competitions as the end or
beginning of an architect’s career. They are the spectacular successes,
but it must be confessed that very few of them have fallen to the
architects who are by consent the leading artists in their profession.
No, the pleasures of architecture must be the end in themselves, and to
the young man who, having the right equipment, seeks them earnestly as
his life’s work, there is no limit to the pleasure and interest his life
will afford him.
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XII.
COLOUR IN STREET ARCHITECTURE.
THE question is always being asked why cannot we have more colour in our
town buildings, and the makers of glazed tiles and terra-cotta are
always replying than we can if only we would. The people, however, who
seem most ready to accept definitely the invitation are the owners of
kinemas and public-houses. Here, then, is a mystery; on the one hand a
sincere desire for a brighter and richer architecture, and on the other
the chief response from those whose business it is to satisfy only the
very simplest desires and emotions.
The first question to answer is, What do we mean and hope by the word
“colour”? Do we mean by it masses of elementary reds, greens, blues, and
yellows, or do we mean the rich and varied tones of broken colour? If we
mean the latter, and some would find in it more “colour” than in the
former, the broken surface of old brickwork, the pearly greys, the rich
browns and yellows of stone provide it in abundance. But if by colour we
mean large solid surfaces of strong primary colours, we ought at once to
pay tribute to the efforts of the publicans who, wittingly or otherwise,
have in this matter been pioneers, unsung if not entirely unrewarded.
Before we proceed, however, to spread, as with a palette knife,
stretches of primary colours on our street fronts, let us look at the
whole canvas before us. A good third of the surface in any street scene,
and more at the intersections of streets, must be given up to sky. What
is its tone? Three days out of four a dull grey, and on the fourth at
most a pale blue. Our masses of solid colour have, then, to be seen
against a low-toned background. That is the really important factor. It
is in this that our street scene differs from one in Monte Carlo,
ancient Athens, or Thebes. In the brightness of the Mediterranean sun a
white building, even a stone or marble one, dazzles the eye so that its
form cannot be read. Colour is, therefore, necessary and agreeable, and,
as everyone knows, it was used in classical times in all its primary
strength. The famous frieze of low relief carving of the Parthenon was
not only coloured but placed under the shadow of the deep peristyle
behind a row of columns so that it might be read by light reflected from
the ground. This was the only way in which its full value could be
appreciated. Hence, too, the enrichment of the underside of cornices
rather than of their face. When a Liverpool or Manchester sky throws
down so little direct light, how much rises from a Liverpool or
Manchester street? The problem, therefore, in our northern greyer
latitude, of what is the happy tone of colour for our buildings (apart
from the aggravation of dirt and smoke, as the country town witnesses)
is altogether different. Masses of solid colour, which under a bright
sky look gay and happy, with us become heavy and crude. One has only to
recall the dismal entrances to the Tube railway stations in London to
see that solid colours, far from having a refreshing effect, have with
us just the reverse. It may be argued that the crudity would go, or at
any rate be less, if the whole street were in bright primary hues. At
present, among ordinary stone and brick buildings, the brightly glazed
coloured building is like an enamelled iron sign on an old wall. If the
whole wall were enamelled, however, there would still be the contrast
with the surface of the street, unless that were enamelled too, and with
the sky, which no form of sky-writing has yet been able to turn into
Prussian blue and vermilion.
The quality of the colour which the ancients used on their buildings,
when it was applied colour and not that of the natural material, marble,
brick, or stone, was not the quality we are invited to use to-day. As
far as can be judged from fragments, the quality of the colour on a
Greek building was more like that of thin water-colour than thick oil
colour, whereas the glazed materials of to-day are far more treacly than
oil paint. Look at the glazed portions of the Midland Hotel, Manchester.
They have a solid glueyness, a thick, uniform viscosity which is the
very negation of life and colour. Natural materials, though they may
very quickly become darker and duller in Manchester air, never become so
dead as these artificial ones. The latter may indeed be washed—unwashed
they hold the dirt in streaks and patches in a much less pleasant way
than natural ones,—but they cannot be brought back to life, for they
have never really lived. They were cast in moulds from the start, and
were repeated endlessly. In the baking, too, they twisted not a little,
so that there is always an uneven puffiness of surface and line. They
have not the clean-cut look of stone from the chisel, or even of
brickwork truly laid. It is a case of cast material in place of wrought,
and of a cast material which does not cast well. This, of course, only
applies to glazed and unglazed terra-cotta when used structurally to
take the place of brick or stone. It is quite another thing when it is
used decoratively, as the Delia Robbias used it, inset in brick, stone,
or plaster. Its very irregularities then increase its decorative value.
These objections, too, would not, in my mind, apply with quite the same
force to a purely surface material like tiles or mosaic. The difficulty
of the bright colouring against the dull sky would, of course, be there,
but from the multiplicity of joints and surfaces the colour would be
less solid, more broken in fact. In Portugal there are houses faced with
coloured tiles which give a pleasant effect, but there again the
latitude and atmosphere are different. We have yet to see a satisfactory
external use of glazed materials in this country. When it does come,
about which I am very doubtful, it must for good neighbourly reasons be
applied to a whole street or district at once. Isolated patches like
public-house fronts and Tube railway stations do the same sort of
violence to adjacent buildings in natural materials that an enamelled
iron sign does to a country lane when set up in a field alongside.
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XIII.
EVERYDAY ARCHITECTURE.
IF we were all fortunate enough to live in the few unspoilt English
villages or country towns that are left, or if we occupied an apartment
in Park-avenue or Fifth avenue, New York, or in the central part of
Paris, not to mention rooms in a palace in one of the hill towns of
Italy, we would understand without more ado that architecture is an
everyday affair. As it is, living in Liverpool or Manchester or in a
London suburb, we think of architecture, if we think of it at all, as an
affair of big buildings, town halls and cathedrals, and probably now and
then of banks and insurance offices. Even so, it is a mystery which a
few highbrow people know all about and no one else can understand. This,
of course, does not prevent us from enjoying the old villages and towns
we motor through. We have long learnt, indeed, that they provide the
chief interest in motoring. But that they are architecture, and that
each of the little buildings we see nestling together has been
consciously designed by someone, even if that someone did not call
himself an architect, never occurs to us. And perhaps rightly. We are so
accustomed to connect the word architecture and the man architect with
our ugly over-emphasised town buildings that these modest little country
ones are obviously something else. We assume that, like the trees or
like Topsy, they just grew.
Herein lies a complete fallacy, which is nothing less than a tragedy.
The cottages and little shops we have liked so much in our country
visits, without quite knowing why, have all been the cousins, once or
twice removed, of the squire’s mansion. The little village church has
borne the same relationship to the cathedral in the neighbouring town.
Now we know that the cathedral and the mansion house are architecture. I
am afraid, therefore, that we must admit that the others are
architecture too. If so, we shall come to this strange conclusion, that
in the days when things were beautiful they were all architecture.
Architecture indeed was an everyday thing. We might even go further and
say when it ceased to be an everyday thing, when it was reserved for
some theatrical make-believe, and became thereby divorced from life, it
ceased to be architecture. That is why the architect should be one of
the most important persons in the State, why he should be trained as for
a priesthood, and when trained why he should be trusted, why indeed the
whole external form of the material side of our civilisation should be
moulded by him. He, and he alone, if he is properly endowed and properly
trusted, has the means to make our towns beautiful again.
If our architects, however, are to be trained as priests, standing
between God and the people, the life they interpret in brick and stone
must be something very different from the sordid materialistic life
which has followed the industrial revolution. These old villages and
towns we liked were all antecedent to that revolution, and the life they
interpreted, to which they still bear witness, was something very
different from Victorian self-righteousness or Edwardian money-making.
These latter showed themselves very plainly in the architecture they
brought about. I suppose there has been no such vulgar period in our
whole architectural history as the last fifty years. Individualism ran
riot; restraint of every kind gave way, and our town buildings became
the be-columned and be-swagged, the overdressed and under-mannered
structures we know so well. Our suburbs became either the endless rows
of little grinning puppy-like villas of the poor or the be-gabled
flaunting sham half-timbered pressed-brick houses of the rich. And the
richer we got the worse our buildings became.
Now, thank God, we are all poor again, and what do we find? Everywhere
arising a leaner and cleaner architecture. The Government housing
schemes, whatever they have cost (and it is only fair to say that in the
majority of cases the excessive cost has not been inherent in the
design), show once more the simple cottage buildings of our travels, or
rather ones which exhibit an obvious relation to them. Everyone must
have been struck with the new everyday architecture which has grown up
on the outskirts of all our towns. Architecture and architects have been
brought back to the workman’s cottage. As the workman suffered most by
her neglect in the past, so rightly he is first to welcome her return. I
have not yet noticed that architecture has spread to any great extent to
the £1,500-£2,000 house, except in a few favoured spots. But the owner
of such a house can demand her services if he wants them. He may, of
course, still belong to the pre-war years of vulgar display. Some folk
never learn, even by a European war. The new, lean, straightforward
architecture of our own day, with no fly-blown philacteries of dead
ornament, is growing nevertheless. It is to be seen already in several
of our bigger new buildings. There was a beginning of it in the
cliff-like walls of the Adelphi and Cunard buildings, in Liverpool,
before the war. The great plain wall surfaces of the Bush building in
the Strand, with their even distribution of windows, giving expression
to the building’s total mass rather than to any individual feature, are
in the new manner. So is the fine stark massive block the Ministry of
Pensions has put up at Acton. So will be the new Holt building,
Liverpool, when erected. All these, like the new Government cottages, so
similar to one another in shape, express the increasingly communal
aspect of modern life. Strict economy and steel construction in the case
of the big buildings, strict economy and an appreciation of the value of
light and air in the case of the small buildings, have together led to
simpler, cleaner, more direct structures than our wealthy late Victorian
and Edwardian predecessors could dream of, much less desire. May the
demand for the new architecture continue to grow, and may the Schools of
Architecture prove worthy of the great mission which lies before them!
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XIV.
MODERN AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.
IN the series of delightful letters Rupert Brooke sent from the States
to the old _Westminster Gazette_ before the war, he placed among
America’s five great achievements her modern architecture. Anyone who
has visited America recently will realise that if magnificent modern
architecture eight or ten years ago was one of the five finest things
she had produced, this architecture has now probably reached the first
place. It is very doubtful whether anything like this could be said of
any other country, and certainly not of our own. With us, the last fifty
years have hardly formed a great architectural epoch. This period may
have been distinguished in literature, both in prose and poetry, but
certainly not in the plastic arts, and least so in architecture. The
last twenty have no doubt seen an advance and the last ten a
proportionately greater one. The revived interest, first in old
furniture and then in old buildings, which has been so remarkable a
feature of these years has begun to react on our new buildings. Clients,
again, have taste and are beginning to exact it from their architects in
even greater measure. But any advance we have made has been nothing to
that made by our so-called transatlantic cousins. Their advance in the
oldest and noblest of the arts has not only been relatively greater than
ours, but their absolute achievement has been immeasurably greater too.
Starting with less good old work at their side—they had little more than
their wooden colonial houses—they have far outstripped us in the general
quality of their new. I say the general quality, for, of course, we have
not been entirely without our modern architects, who as artists have
upheld our ancient faculty of building beautifully, but unfortunately
such artists have been the exception. No one who walks through the City
of London, or along Oxford Street or New Regent Street, could maintain
that the mass of our modern town buildings compares with the few old
ones like Somerset House, or such of Nash’s plaster palaces as still
remain to serve as a standard. On the other hand, anyone who walks down
Fifth Avenue from, say, 30th Street to 70th Street passes block after
block of buildings all modern and mostly built during the last twenty
years, a great number of which are comparable in charm with the Italian
and French palaces which have distantly inspired them. They have the
same dignity and reserve which seems to be a distinguishing
characteristic of most eras but our own. They are scholarly buildings
too, in that there is little detail in them to worry the connoisseur in
the way in which some sudden break in the line of a modern piece of
furniture worries those who know the old. If the general idea of a
Florentine palace is used for the façades of a modern building, as in
University Club, it is used thoroughly and with knowledge; the small
refinements of contrasting textures and mouldings, the massive bulk and
cliff-like walls which go to make up the charm of the original finding
their echo in the modern building. The building is not Florentine in the
basement, Milanese in the middle stories, and Venetian at the top. I
should say that the distinguishing note of modern American architecture
is its scholarship. Thirty years ago some of these new buildings
appeared to the general public to be almost copies of famous European
ones, and the great American architect, McKim, justified this by saying
that as their continent lacked the foundation of fine old buildings,
such as we have got, on which to found their new, he was ready to import
them. But in so saying he did himself an injustice, for his buildings,
such as Tiffany’s, which are nearest to being copies of palaces in the
old world, are really very far from it; while his last and those of his
successors are faithful only to the spirit of the style in which they
are built and not to the letter. Have not some of our own best modern
buildings been produced in this way, such as the Reform Club in Pall
Mall, which is based quite obviously on the Farnese Palace in Rome, but
with a smaller scale to suit the smaller scale of our streets and
buildings?
Apart from this question of inspiration, what are the things in American
buildings in general which strike the Englishman when he first sees New
York, Washington, or any of the larger Eastern Cities? I think the very
first thing is their apparent solidity and simplicity. They seem made up
of a few large parts rather than infinite numbers of small parts. If
columns are used they are used boldly as in the Lincoln Memorial or the
Temple of the Scottish rite at Washington, and are, as they should be,
dominating features. If we look, too, at the general mass of an American
building, we see that it is usually of some simple shape such as a
rectangular mass crowned by another rectangular mass or a cube crowned
by a truncated pyramid. Towers, gables, small domes, such as those with
which we are accustomed to ornament so many of our buildings, are
largely absent. The dome, when it is used, is used nobly to express some
great central civic or governmental building like the Capitol of the
State; indeed, in America the dome raised on a drum has almost come to
signify this and nothing else, just as in Italy and France it was
chiefly used to express the cathedral or cathedral-like church. This
simplicity of mass which is so necessary, if a building is to make a
strong impact on the imagination when first seen, is no doubt helped by
the rectangular sites on which most American buildings are built. The
scheme of cutting up the town area into rectangles by streets and
avenues crossing one another at right angles, while it often leads to
monotonous streets which appear to go on endlessly and have no proper
beginning or end, means, however, that most buildings of any size either
occupy a whole town block or have a return face on the cross street.
This at once gives them a solidity of appearance which buildings with
only one front to a street can never have. You notice this particularly
when you first arrive in New York at the Great Central Station, itself a
terminus on a scale of which we have not yet dreamt. You step out into
42nd Street and are surrounded on all sides by great creamy grey masses
of building which are shooting up into the sky all round you. They are
the great new hotels and apartment houses, a fresh one of which arises
every few months in this district. They seem like great solid cliffs of
stone and brick which have been cut with a knife into huge, simple
rectangular blocks. If they were of any fussy shape or covered with
turrets and gables they would be a nightmare. As it is, when once one
has got over the strangeness of their size, one finds them very
dignified. The streets which form the spaces between the blocks are
sufficiently wide for the sun to light up one face, leaving the other in
shadow, so that the full effect of their volume, as the cubist painter
would say, is felt. In these cases, all the architect has to do is to
emphasize their shape by decorating a group of storeys at the ground
floor level to form a base to his wall, and another group at the top to
form a coping leaving the middle portion plain and allowing the endless
windows in it to give texture very much as the bricks with their mortar
joints when properly built do with us. These hotel blocks, though, are
perhaps an extreme example of simple masses. The best high buildings,
however, follow the same scheme, only in this case the rectangle is
stretched upwards till it becomes a square tower or campanile. When so
treated and when it is well separated from other high buildings, the
so-called skyscraper is a thing of great beauty. As an isolated shaft of
white marble running up four or five hundred feet into the air and
crowned at the top with marble balconies and pyramidical roof, like the
campanile of St. Mark’s at Venice, it becomes a thing of intense and
delicate beauty. Such a marble tower is that of the office of the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Madison Square, which alike by
day and night, for it is lit up at night with floods of electric light,
is a romantic and wonderful object to all the central up-town district.
The high buildings at the foot of the island, while they form, as seen
from the river, one of the most thrillingly romantic sights in the
world, outdoing anything Albert Dürer ever imagined, spoil each other
when you see them close at hand by their proximity to one another. They
become a confused mass of buildings, very much in the way a series of
office façades do in the City of London, only here they add to the
tangle a variety of heights. The obvious lesson is that if we are to
adopt in England the high building, which has spread now to many other
towns in America besides New York, and to some in Canada too, we should
insist that where once one high building has been built no other shall
be built within a radius of, say, a quarter of a mile. In this way our
modern business towns would be enlivened with a series of towers which
would catch the eye in all directions, closing vistas and displacing
monotony with romance, while light and air would still circulate.
Washington is a city which is not burdened with the complete square
gridiron plan of other American cities. It is built on the fine scheme
of a French 18th century architect and engineer, named L’Enfant, and has
a number of diagonal streets radiating from the Capitol and other
important points. The result is that in addition to the square blocks
facing the main streets it has many terminal sites on which great public
buildings have been placed, where they can be seen dominating and
closing one or more vistas. Its streets therefore do not wander on
endlessly and aimlessly, but lead from the Capitol to White House or to
the Congressional Library—one of the worst buildings in America—or to
the Great Union Railway Station into which, by a modern improvement, all
railway lines converge. It has, too, the famous Mall, a stretch of grass
and trees many hundred feet wide and a couple of miles long, leading
from the Capitol past the great stark obelisk to Washington—the finest
and simplest monument in the world—to the Greek Doric Hall recently
erected in memory of Lincoln, in which the refinements of Greek marble
architecture live again. Washington, however, is a special city and its
buildings are largely Governmental buildings. In that sense it is not so
typical of American architecture as New York, Chicago, or half a dozen
other places. One may confess that one gets a little tired of its
colonnaded splendours, though it contains one or two of the most
striking modern classical buildings in the world, such as John Russell
Pope’s great and dramatic pile for the Masons of the Scottish rite, and
Paul Cret’s delicate jewel-like building for the South American
Republics.
The same note of simplicity and directness, which is the general
characteristic of the best American buildings in mass and exterior, is
also to be seen in their interiors. A great bank or commercial house
does not have for its accommodation, as so often in England, a series of
small rooms more or less cut off from one another with what is little
more than a waiting space for the public. Instead there is a great open
hall in which is apparently carried on the whole business of the
company. Across a sea of clerks’ heads you can make out in the distance,
only separated from the herd, if at all, by low glass partitions, the
president, the vice-presidents, and the managers of departments. The
result is that a banking hall, for such it is now called, becomes a
great architectural opportunity, which the leading American architects
have been eager to seize upon. But here again the architecture is
reserved and simple if of costly materials. As in their great railway
termini, where no advertisement posters are allowed, the bankers and the
business men generally have realised that a fine and dignified building
is in itself the best advertisement. We are still too content in
England, I think, to carry out our day’s work in office-rooms to which
we would not condemn our servants in our own homes. Perhaps it is some
relic of Puritanism, though I fancy it has more to do with Victorian
self-righteousness, that we seem to take a pride as a nation in working
in uncomfortable conditions. The American on the other hand will live in
a wooden shack or a tiny apartment, but will expect the office, where he
carries out his life’s work and spends most of his waking hours, to
express in some way the dignity of his labour. There is a good deal,
obviously, to be said for his point of view. At any rate, it is one
which appeals to his architect, with the result that we do not find in
America the architectural profession divided into artists who build
houses and surveyors who build offices, as it might roughly be said to
be divided in England. The American architect feels, as no doubt his
English confrère does, that all good building is within his province;
but he differs in this, that over there the best men seem to get the
best of every kind of work to do whether it be ecclesiastical,
commercial or domestic, and by their training, when they get it, seem
equal to carrying it out.
After all, however, it is not the opportunities either of site or money
which make great architecture, but the men who design it. How is it that
the men who create the buildings of America are, on the whole, more
successful in their bigger creations than the men over here? No one can
say of the heterogeneous mass of undigested nationalities, which at
present makes up the great United States, that, like the Greeks of old,
they are a race of artists. Neither in literature nor in painting have
they had the success they have gained in architecture and are beginning
to gain in sculpture. The explanation can only be in the organisation of
their work, and in that term I would include both their methods of
attacking problems as well as their methods of training. Let us take
their methods of attack first. The designing of buildings in America
like most things on that continent seems to gain in efficiency when done
on a large scale. The office of an American architect, when in fair
practice, is a very different affair to the office of a similarly placed
English architect. Fifty to a hundred assistants are no rare thing,
while in most of the big designing groups there are anything up to half
a dozen partners, or, if not so many partners, there are fully fledged
architects who have seats in the office using the office machine, and in
return giving their criticism and assistance when called upon. This and
the fact that in the end everything down to the position of a bell-push
has to be shown on American working drawings, owing to the absence of
the subsidiary profession of quantity surveyors which we have in England
with their strange skill in measuring alterations from the original
drawings, leads to a much greater preliminary study of the building both
as a whole and in detail than is possible to the English architect often
working single-handed or with a couple of assistants. Contrary to what
one might imagine the American architect by his training does not allow
himself to be hustled by his client into making up his mind prematurely,
neither does he in his turn hustle his assistants. He insists on keeping
his design in a fluid state, where everything can be altered, till he is
thoroughly satisfied that he has obtained the right solution to the
problem. To assist him in this he has not only the criticism of his
partners and assistants, but such a library of the world’s architecture
as can rarely be seen in a reference library in England. Where the
English architect, till recently, was content with a few photographs and
plates from illustrated papers, relying on his invention for everything
else, the American architect is sufficiently a scholar in his art to
desire to know before he starts his drawings the best solutions to his
particular problem the world has to offer. In fact, he feels as an
American architect he is the rightful heir to the world’s architecture,
and in his work he expresses this. When he wants to be stately and
imposing, as in his great railway stations, he is Roman in his
architecture; when he wants to express scholarship and refinement, as in
his art galleries and museums, he is Greek or Italian; and when it is
merely the domestic virtues or comforts he is dealing with, he turns for
inspiration to Italian, Spanish, or Georgian prototypes. This may not be
the way to produce great architecture—it obviously is not—but it
produces buildings which, if inoffensive and polite as individuals, in
the mass make suave and elegant cities.
In his training, too, the American architect’s methods have, till the
last fifteen years, equally differed from our own. Firstly, I suppose,
because the profession is a much more lucrative one in America with its
larger commissions and more expensive buildings than it is with us, the
American architect has been willing to spend more money on his
specialised education. More than twenty years ago he gave up the method
of apprenticeship which has come down to us from medieval times and
still lingers among us. Instead he has followed the French in their
system of architectural schools. These schools are now attached to all
the leading Universities, with four-year courses supplemented in many
cases with other scholastic work in Paris and Rome. In England some of
our Universities have started schools of architecture too. There is also
the school in London founded by the younger professional body of
architects, but so far these schools have not had time to influence
current architecture to the extent that the American ones have done. The
mass of practising English architects are still office-trained men with
the specialised and sometimes narrow outlook on their art, which they
have gained from the master under whom they served their apprenticeship.
The result is often charming individual work, especially in domestic
building where the problems to be faced are not of so generalised a
character. But the slightly eccentric and original solution, which may
be pleasant enough in a small country house, becomes an absurdity in a
bank or a municipal building. In such work the general restraint which
knowledge brings is more valuable than the happy inventions of the
individual designer. In our town architecture we have long suffered from
an excess of originality. In the days when there was a generally
accepted tradition, faith in that tradition prevented such blunders. The
days of faith in architecture are past. Unless we are to be content with
ignorance in our buildings knowledge must take its place. In the great
complexity of detailed knowledge required to make a large modern
building the minds of many men must be united. In that direction lies
efficiency in its broadest sense, and in that sense efficiency is
beauty. It therefore seems to me likely that in future we shall revert
again to something like the conditions under which the great Gothic
Cathedrals were built, when the architect, as an individual, was content
to sink himself in the greatness of his work. He lost his soul to find
it in his building. Perhaps the root explanation is that in England our
architects have been a little too anxious about their souls and the
expression due to them, while in America their architects have been
thinking mainly of the greatness of the work they are called on to carry
out.
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XV.
THE CHOICE OF A SMALL COUNTRY HOUSE.
CHOOSING a small country house by the man of average means who can
afford one at all is like choosing a wife. You may lay down beforehand
all kinds of rules you mean to follow—that the lady of your choice will
be blonde and fair, with a placid, broad outlook on life, and you will
almost certainly marry a sparkling brunette, quick, lively and
sympathetic. So with a house. You may think your ideal is some rambling
converted or convertible farmhouse, some picturesque Elizabethan or
Jacobean manor house, and you will end with the primmest of Georgian
proprieties, facing a village green or country high street, but with a
large walled garden behind, where you can be as private and irregular as
you like. You may think open raftered rooms with bare brick
chimneypieces, where you can stalk about in rough country clothes, the
thing you are in search of, and then you, or more probably your wife,
will fall to some set of spacious, sunlit, white-panelled Queen Anne or
Georgian chambers, looking out over trim lawns and well kept hedges. Or
you may find something that does not fall into either category,
picturesque or formal, but by a combination of both absolutely bewitches
you and drives all preconceived ideas to the winds; indeed, a house of
this kind generally does unless you are an absolute formalist and
pedant. There is something so very lovable in the marks of time, not
only the minor ones, such as floors slightly out of level, cornices
softened with the colour-washes of generations, but the major ones which
represent distinct past eras. The Jacobean house which has had parts of
it Georgianised carries with it the same history with which we ourselves
have been built up. It has, perhaps, its central hall with stone floor
and oak beams and great chimney-piece with rude carving over it,
answering to the rougher barbaric instincts which are deep in all of us;
and it has its Georgian rooms with their refined cornices and fireplaces
and long elegant windows calling for curtains of brocade or other fine
material. In these latter we can cast aside our thick boots and tweeds
and become civilised, urbane and even slightly cynical. In such a house,
therefore, we have rooms for various moods, corresponding not only to
the strata of our external civilisation but to the strata within us. In
some modern houses such things have been consciously attempted, but
their failure is generally complete. You may wear fancy dress for a
night, but you cannot, if you are an ordinary mortal, endure it for a
week. Affected age in a modern house is something of that sort, and it
becomes worse when it is an affectation not of one age, but of several.
No, a modern house needs unity; our grandchildren are the only people
who can break that unity successfully, because they will break in answer
to some new and real need not yet experienced by us.
Let us assume in this search for a small country house that it is no
marriage of convenience we desire. We are not tied, that is to say, to a
railway station, but with the help of a small car can reach a convenient
line when we want to go to town or to fetch our friends. Obviously, the
advent of the motor car has enormously increased the area of our choice.
We can now live in real country even if we have to go to town four or
five times a week. If London is our centre, we can get as far afield as
the Cotswolds, South Downs or the remoter parts of Essex. We can
therefore let our choice of a house range over modelled stone houses,
warm brick ones or those of wood and plaster. We may even, if we are
particularly interested in refined proportions, restraint and elegance
of detail, consider Regency and early Victorian stucco. In this latter
case, however, we must be prepared for a quinquennial paint bill, but we
shall have other compensations, not least in the original price, for
such houses are not yet popular. It will be noticed that I am ruling out
of our purview all absolutely modern houses, say, those of the last
sixty years or so. The reason is that you cannot generalise about such
buildings. You may find one to fit your individual taste just as well as
if you had instructed your architect to design it. But the chances are
against it for many reasons, chief among which is that the last
half-century has been a time of excessive individualism. To find,
therefore, an entirely satisfactory modern house that will not only fit
your material needs, but satisfy your spiritual ones too,—which is a
much more difficult but far more important matter for real happiness—is
highly improbable. I do not mean to say that there are not hundreds of
beautiful modern houses by Lutyens, Newton, Norman Shaw and their
followers, but each was designed for a particular client and in a
particular way, which older houses, as far as we can tell, were not. In
the days of a solid architectural tradition there were certain methods
of planning, certain methods of decoration from which no one thought of
departing. After the entire break-up of such traditions in the middle of
last century even the best architects and their clients sought for
individual solutions to problems and individual methods of expression.
Those who did not went on building the coarse Victorian houses we see in
all our suburbs. Obviously, these are out of the question. One would
sooner not live in the country at all than live in a suburban country
house, thereby preserving a blot on the countryside. But to return to
the good modern country house built by a good architect. You may say,
Why not buy that? What could be better? The construction is probably
sound, the drains and water supply all good, and the roof not likely to
be a source of expense for upkeep. I can only reply by comparing such a
house with other people’s clothes. You might find a suit of someone
else’s, or a ready-made one, which absolutely fitted you. It is
unlikely; but, even if you did, you would be wearing borrowed plumes.
Your distinction—and with a modern house, built for someone else, you
could not escape a certain prominence—would be that someone else’s. With
an old house, however modernised in its unessentials—unessential except
from the housewife’s point of view—you make no pretence that you are
more than a life tenant. You are merely the custodian and preserver of a
beautiful thing you intend to hand on in the same or in a better state
than you received it. Build a beautiful modern house by all means, and
by so doing add to the real wealth of the nation. That is a very
different proposition. Do it, though, with humility, as a man chooses a
suit, not as a woman chooses a dress. Make it something reserved and
quiet, answering not only to your special needs, but to the general ones
of our time. Make it fit the landscape and adhere to the type of
building traditional to the countryside. Do not introduce brick and
tiles into a stone and slate neighbourhood, or _vice versa_. If you do,
you will probably have to pay for your rashness in hard cash. I know a
neighbourhood in Essex where in the heat of the summer all the modern
brick buildings on the shrinking clay soil crack, whereas the old wood
and plaster ones float on the moving ground like ships and remain
intact.
If you are about to buy an old house, however, there are certain points,
rather obvious perhaps, which may be worth recalling.
First there is the question of the site, and in this, of course, one has
not the same freedom of choice as in a new house. For one thing, our
ancestors especially those who lived before the romantic movement, had
not the desire for extensive views from their windows that is
characteristic of to-day. The sites they chose were usually sheltered
ones, often in positive hollows. No doubt, access to roads, themselves
less numerous than now, had something to do with this, but it was a
question of temperament too. In Georgian times for the smaller houses
they seemed to prefer seclusion and privacy on one side of the house
even when they made a bold front to the road or village green on the
other. I suppose if they wanted a view they climbed a neighbouring hill
to get it. There is something, I think, to be said for this, especially
if the view is over the sea or a wide estuary. Such a view continually
before the eyes is apt to be depressing. A wide view is all very well in
a holiday resort as a contrast to the shelter of one’s walled garden at
home. To live on the mountain tops all the time, however, is too
strenuous for most mortals. We are not all poets and seers who can look
eternity in the face every hour of the day. There may, therefore, have
been a certain wisdom in the builders of old houses in sheltered
situations, an intuitive knowledge of psychology if not of hygiene. This
being so, it is all the more necessary to make sure, not only that the
house is dry or can be made so, but that the site itself does not exhale
vapours. It is not pleasant when November comes to find each night and
morning the chimneys of one’s house poking out of a cloud of mist while
the rising ground on either side is free. Such mists, however, are not
generally to be found above a chalk or gravel soil unless they come from
the sea. With clay and loam the matter is different, and it is well,
then, to make further enquiries if the house of one’s desire happens to
be in a hollow.
The dryness of the structure is a different matter. Most old houses were
built without damp-proof courses—I think an early nineteenth-century
invention. These are layers of slates and cement or asphalt or other
impervious material placed in the walls just above ground level to
prevent the damp from the ground rising through the foundations into the
walls above. Such things can be inserted yard by yard at a time, but it
is an expensive proceeding. If damp courses do not exist and are too
costly to put in, it is all the more necessary to see that the subsoil
is a dry one, such as gravel, sand or rock. A flagged basement assists
in keeping a house dry if it is dry in itself. If, however, it acts as a
sump or drain-pit for the surrounding soil, it, of course, makes matters
worse confounded, because it ensures damp even in dry weather. Some of
the driest houses are the old timber-constructed ones; if such had been
damp their timbers would have rotted away long ago. They, however, if
not damp are rather apt to be cold in winter and warm in summer, in
spite of the cavity in their walls. The inner and outer coats of lath
and plaster or weather-boarding are not really sufficiently thick for
comfort. Such houses, therefore, need more heating than those with
substantial brick or stone walls.
Let us now consider the walls a little. In most old houses they are
strong and substantial. They may, however, have been neglected.
Rain-pipes may have been left unrepaired, and frost may have entered and
disintegrated the mortar. This, however, is not a very serious matter. A
little re-pointing will set it right if it has not gone far. What is
more necessary is to look at the state of timbers built into the walls.
In most old houses these are plentiful both as wall plates and ties.
There are two chief dangers connected with them—worm and dry rot. Either
will turn them to powder or to a frail semblance of themselves about to
fall to powder. In both cases there is nothing to be done but to replace
them. Dry rot, however, is not a usual complaint of old houses. It is
much more often found in new. It comes not so much from damp as from bad
ventilation. A wood floor laid on concrete which has had linoleum on top
of it so that the wood is effectually smothered both above and below is
the sort of place where it starts. Unfortunately, once it starts it
spreads very quickly. Old houses by their age, therefore, generally show
themselves proof against it. Worm in the timbers is the reverse. This
works more slowly, and is to be found in the hard woods of old houses as
well as the softer ones of new. As in chairs, a little dust like sawdust
is the proof of its presence. Palliatives may be tried, but for the sake
of one’s furniture, if for nothing else, it is better to take the
timbers out.
The roof, however, is generally a more important matter, as regards
maintenance, than the walls. Roughly speaking, the order of covering
materials in cost of upkeep would be thatch, most expensive of all, and
only suitable to quite small houses, then stone-slates, tiles and, last
of all, slates. But more important than the material covering is the
construction. Look to see whether there are internal valleys and flats
where snow and leaves can collect and check the flow of water till it
penetrates. The less of such gutters and flats the better. When they
exist they should be of lead, as indeed, they usually are in any decent
house. Repairs, however, in these hard times may have been done in zinc,
and zinc has a very short life in our climate. If the roof is of tiles,
it should have been boarded over the rafters and under the tiles.
Generally speaking, the steeper the roof, except in a very exposed
situation, where the wind can blow the covering off, the sounder it is
likely to be, for, of course, the water runs off more quickly. The
slope, however is determined by the style of the house, and the
materials by the slope. Slate, for instance, is quite safely laid at a
much less steep slope than tiles, thatch or split stones. Being a truer
material it lies closer. An over-all roof in two or four plain slopes
with no breaks in it is, whatever the material, the safest form. The
water is then shot everywhere into gutters clear of the walls or into a
simple lead trough behind a parapet. There are then no internal and
half-hidden gutters to leak and pour water down the centre of the house.
Indeed, it may be laid down as a general axiom that simplicity of mass
and form, given equally good construction, means cheapness of upkeep. A
simple cube or rectangular mass with a plain roof hipped all round with
no gables or dormers would be the most compact and cheapest of shapes,
not only to build, but to maintain. Such things, however, are obvious.
Let us now consider the internal arrangements.
The first question in these semi-servantless days is whether the old
house of one’s choice can be adapted to the restricted post-war service
which is all that most of us can afford. It behoves one, therefore, to
see whether the rooms can be so rearranged, without expensive
alterations, that the kitchen is not only reduced to a reasonable size,
but is sufficiently near the dining-room. Generally the spacious old
kitchen, with its flagged floor, its stretch of cooking apparatus down
one whole side, with open range, hot plates, ovens and boilers, had
better be abandoned. Sometimes it will make a billiard-room later and
sometimes even a garage. Perhaps the old pantry or scullery can be
turned into a modern kitchen. The point is that in any case you will
need new cooking apparatus on a reduced scale, but with greater
efficiency. The expense is when you have to build a new room for it.
See, therefore, whether you can avoid doing this by a readjustment of
function in the various rooms. The ideal arrangement, both in a new and
old house, is a small pantry between the dining-room and the kitchen
with the service through it. The pantry so placed acts as a buffer to
noise and smell from the kitchen, and yet is handy for setting things
down. However do not spoil a vista or some real architectural feature by
giving up a good sitting-room to a modern kitchen. If you love the
beauties of your house you can often pay too dearly for conveniences.
The same remark applies to baths. You will probably have to find extra
space for them, but it is obviously a sacrifice to give up to one a good
bedroom on the main front. With modern plumbing, in which the bath water
is at once taken outside the house and discharged in the open into a
rainwater-head, there is, in my opinion, no objection to a small bath in
each bedroom provided a suitable recess or space can be found for it.
The small American deep tub bath in which one can sit with the water
over one’s shoulders, but not lie full length, takes little space and
gets over many difficulties of placing. The safe general rule on all
these questions of adapting an old house to the conditions of to-day is
to see whether for kitchen, motor car or baths one can install the new
requirements without rebuilding or serious additions. On every ground
that is the safe proceeding, whether to preserve character, to avoid the
clash of old work with new, or merely to save outlay.
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XVI.
WREN AS A BAROQUE ARCHITECT.
WHAT is the quality in Wren’s work which gives it the very human appeal
it undoubtedly possesses? How is it different in this respect to the
work of Inigo Jones? Why do we all in our hearts love any of the façades
of St. Paul’s better than that of the Banqueting Hall, or, if that is to
compare things that are incommensurable, what is the quality in Trinity
Library, Cambridge, which endears it to us, while, as we pass down
Whitehall, we view the Inigo Jones building with respect and admiration,
but hardly with any sense of deep affection? We may even breathe a sigh
of thankfulness that we did not have the mile or two more of it Jones
intended.
It is an interesting problem, and one I think worth a little
consideration. Twenty years ago, when Belcher and Macartney’s “Later
Renaissance” was issued, Wren’s work appeared the final word in
architecture. No one challenged it except the Gothicists. Gradually,
however, the younger architects discovered architecture had not stood
still since the 17th century. Each of us pushed our enthusiasm a little
further, some pinned their faith to Chambers, some to Robert Adam. Some
even went as far as measuring Cockerell and Elmes and the later Greek
work. Finally there appeared Professor Richardson’s “Monumental
classical Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland,” and at last we
thought we saw the whole thing in perspective. All the time, however,
there were very vital folk like Sir Edwin Lutyens and E. A. Rickards who
stuck to Wren. The former is even reported to have said that the English
Renaissance ought to have been spelt the English Wren-naissance. So
to-day, especially with Wren bicentenary just past, we are all beginning
to cast our eyes back to the great 17th century master and find that,
incorrect as a great deal of his work was according to all the rules of
the game—coarse as a great deal of his detail undoubtedly is, with
faults of taste and inconsistencies of scale—there was something very
rotund, full-blooded, almost Falstaffian, in the mass of his work, which
makes us give him an affection we give no other. In comparison the work
of the later men, especially of the Neo-Grec ones, seems hard, even
spikey. It is all very well for the historians to tell us of Wren’s
mathematical genius and the consequent sublimity of his conceptions.
That, I beg leave to say as regards his architecture, with the possible
exception of Greenwich, is what is vulgarly called ‘eye-wash.’ The dome
of St. Paul’s is a paltry affair compared to the dome of St. Peter’s and
only insular prejudice would say otherwise. Its tricks of construction
are no doubt evidence of mechanical ability, but such are not
architecture. Internally with its muddle of unequal supporting arches or
externally with its tight unmodelled surface it is very inferior to its
great prototype. Yet the lovable quality of the work remains especially
in that nearer the eye. Think of the Dean’s doorway under the great
recessed arch of the window on the side of the North tower, or that
other lovable doorway, with its oval window and fat cherubs also under a
recessed arch in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow. What comfortable happy
invention! What richly curved surfaces; what cheery display, designed,
one may be sure, with sheer enjoyment.
In a very obvious sense all Wren’s architecture is civil architecture,
his cathedral and churches not less than the rest. He built in an age of
humanism, when paganism was no longer feared. As Miss Milman has wisely
said in her life of Wren, a church with him “would differ from a court
of kings only in being more full of splendour.” This was the renaissance
spirit, but it was the spirit more particularly of the baroque period
when, freed from the rules, though remaining masters of them, men built
for sheer swagger. It was in this spirit the Jesuit Churches of the
counter-Reformation were built. Knowing human nature, those wise men
chose a style for their sacred edifices full of dramatic human appeal.
So did Wren, as far as he knew and could. I venture to suggest that it
was because he had in himself a large share of this baroque spirit, this
happy posturing, and not because he was a scholar and a
mathematician—rather because he broke the rules instead of following
them, because in essence he was not a Palladian like the majority of
English architects—that he is loved to-day not only by architects, but
by the great mass of the people as no other architect has ever been. I
realise that in attaching the term “baroque” to Wren I am running the
risk of libelling him in the minds of many. That is because of the
unfortunate ill-odour which nowadays hangs to the word. The baroque is
synonymous with decadence we are generally told. Indeed the ordinary
text-books, like Anderson’s “Italian Renaissance,” either treat the
great parent baroque work in Italy with a few contemptuous remarks, or
leave it alone entirely. Yet one can hardly label as decadent a style
which covered Italy with the most vigorous buildings it possesses, which
gave the colonnade and baldacchino to St. Peter’s, which planted the
superb mass of Santa Maria della Salute at the end of the great sweep of
the Grand Canal—to mention but two examples.
What is the real function and intent of baroque architecture? Geoffrey
Scott defines it very well—“to give the picturesque its grandest scope
and yet to subdue it to architectural law.” “The baroque is not afraid
to startle and arrest.” “It enlarged the classic formula by developing
within it the principle of movement. But the movement is logical; it is
logical as an æsthetic construction, even when it most neglects the
logic of material construction. It insisted on coherent purpose, and its
greatest extravagances of design were neither unconsidered nor
inconsistent. It intellectualised the picturesque.” Baroque buildings,
he goes on to say in effect, may do all the above, “yet their last and
permanent impression is of a broad serenity; for they have that baroque
assurance which even baroque convulsion cannot rob of its repose. They
are fit for permanence: for they have that massive finality of thought,
which, when we live beside them, we do not question, but accept.”
Now I do not want to suggest that the full baroque spirit is to be found
in Wren’s work. It is obviously much too staid and too English for that.
But I do think that there is more of it there than we have been
accustomed to realise and that it is because it is there, giving
vitality and humanity to his architecture, we return with more affection
to his work than we do to that of either Inigo Jones, his more academic
predecessor, or to any of his Palladian successors. To my mind it was
very fortunate that instead of going to Vicenza, as Jones did, Wren
escaped not only the plague by going to Paris, but went there at the
very time the great Bernini visited that city. One can imagine that
these two men, both so energetic, vigorous and long-lived, both to
accomplish a prodigious amount of work in their lives, would be very
much of the same kidney. The influence of the elder, at the height of
his fame and treated as a prince by the French, on the young Englishman,
who till then had built but one or two small structures, who came
seeking information in every direction, was very likely immense. If one
looks for similarities of thought in design in Wren’s later work with
that of Bernini, they are not difficult to find. The great doorways of
the Chigi Palace are echoed in those of the river front of Trinity
Library, while the altar-piece of the Chapel of Chelsea Hospital might
have been designed by Bernini himself. It has the same sumptuousness,
the same great scale, and the same use of coupled columns. In the All
Souls’ collection of Wren drawings there is, too, a design for a
monument, with twisted columns covered with garlands, a sun-burst,
gesticulating angels and fat descending cupids—all in the best baroque
manner. This latter however is an extreme example, only quoted to show
Wren’s knowledge of baroque detail. It is when Wren is most like Bernini
in his decoration and less like the contemporary French artists, with
their insistence on free foliage and asymmetrical ornament, that he is
most satisfactory. The altar-piece at Chelsea is infinitely superior to
the more often quoted one at Trinity College, Oxford, where indeed the
baroque may almost be said to sink into the rococo.
“To give the picturesque its grandest scope and yet subdue it to
architectural law”—what better description could we have of Wren’s
towers? “The baroque is not afraid to startle and arrest.” Think of the
sturdy chapel of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, swaggering with its big
Corinthian order, its boldly broken pediment and its upstanding cupola,
among the timidities of Tudor Gothic. “It enlarged the classic formula
by developing within it the principle of movement.” Think of the barrel
vaults and saucer domes in the chapels and aisles of St. Paul’s or the
gay little Temple Bar neatly striding across the Strand. “Baroque
buildings are fit for permanence. They have a massive finality of
thought.” Trinity Library has just this quality in supreme degree. Its
last and permanent impression is indeed of a broad serenity, which the
back elevation to the river possesses in an even greater extent than the
courtyard front. But other buildings can be serene beside baroque ones.
The point is that this building of Wren’s has the rich modelling, the
warm vital spirit which in classical architecture is the peculiar
quality of the baroque and the baroque alone. All we know of the man
himself bears out this view of his architecture. In a pedantic age he
was no pedant. He had the enquiring mind so characteristic of the 17th
century, which sought new knowledge in every direction, leaving it to be
tabulated and scheduled by the colder and more precise 18th century. We
have preserved in the Parentalia several of his exuberant letters,
including one charming love-letter to the lady who was his first wife.
We know that like Michael Angelo he worked till he was nearly ninety,
compressing an immense amount of labour into his later years, and that
like him, too, his fiery spirit could not brook opposition. The list of
his executed works compares to-day in extent with that of a great
American architect, but to superintend that work he had to travel many
dreary days on horse back. He must have been a man of magnificent
physique and we know that he had a gay happy spirit. All who met him
delighted in his wit. His friends were legion. He knew everyone worth
knowing and had achieved fame in other walks in life before he began his
proper work. He was an honorary doctor both of Oxford and Cambridge
before he became an architect. It is difficult to imagine such a man
blindly following Vitruvius Palladio, Serlio, or any other theorist. He
might, and no doubt did, confound the ignorant by quoting them; but in
his own practice I feel confident he relied on his own innate genius for
expressive form, and that genius led him towards those self-confident
happy, almost swaggering, shapes we now in their fulness call baroque.
It is in his combination of such forms with the more sober methods of
English buildings that the great lovableness of his work lies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVII.
THE ANTI-SOCIAL CONTRACT.
ONE of the troubles in obtaining good buildings to-day, as everyone who
has tried in the capacity either as owner, architect or builder must
realise, lies firstly in the system of asking for competing tenders from
builders, and secondly in tying down the lowest tenderer to carry out
the work under a strict and binding legal contract. We look on the
builder as a contractor and call him such. His chief function in modern
eyes is to undertake to do a carefully specified piece of building for a
fixed sum. His profit is not specified and he is free to make as much as
he likes out of his operations as long as he carries out the specified
work in the specified way. The real difficulty is that by no manner of
means yet devised can the work be specified beforehand with absolute
accuracy, nor has any means yet been discovered by which, in all the
multifarious processes of building, it can be ascertained whether what
has been specified has been actually carried out. We may make drawings
as complete and thorough as is humanly possible; we may write long
specifications and have the number of bricks, and the amount of all
other material and labour to be used, assessed beforehand by a quantity
surveyor, yet quality of material and workmanship enters so largely into
every stage that no one can definitely say at the end that the contract
has been carried out to the letter. Further, we may appoint
clerks-of-work and other watch-dogs to follow the contractor at every
step on the building itself, or rather to attempt it, and yet we may be
fooled by work made off the site and brought to it, or by work done on
the job and covered up before the architect or any of his agents,
including the clerk-of-works, can see it.
The contract system of building means that directly the contract is
signed, the architect, representing the interests of his client, and the
contractor are there watching one another like rival detectives in a
divorce case. The contractor to obtain the contract has probably put in
too low a price. Everywhere in material and labour he is anxious to save
except where he can find, as in practice he always can, excuse in the
specifications and drawings for extras, when he is equally anxious to
spend unnecessary money. I do not want to suggest that the majority of
builders are not honest. Without any dishonesty in carrying out a
contract, which he knows will be strictly enforced against him, the
builder uses his wits to make the best living he can. If he has done a
good deal of work for the same architect he may take a long view and say
“I had better not do such and such a thing, because if discovered this
particular architect will not ask me to tender for his work again.” I
admit this often happens and to a certain extent the rigours of the
contract system are thereby tempered. But who, outside a lunatic asylum,
under such a system and under modern conditions, would expect good
craftsmanship to flourish and good sound building to arise? That it does
flourish now and then, and that good sound buildings are put up
occasionally is a miracle, which I, as an architect, can only put down
to some strange innate goodness in the breasts of many builders. I am
afraid this goodness is chiefly to be found in those who are styled
old-fashioned, in firms that have a tradition and in craftsmen who love
their work, whatever they may in a monetary sense make from it.
But why should this state of affairs exist? Why should the builder be on
one side and the architect on the other? Why should they not be
colleagues from first to last, each helping the other with his
experience? The answer is that this happy state of affairs can only take
place to the benefit of everyone concerned, and particularly of the
building owner, if the ordinary contract based on cut-throat tendering
is abolished. By far the most satisfactory work it has been my lot to
carry out, as well as the most enjoyable, has been that done under a
different system—a system of actual cost plus a fixed profit. In this,
to begin with, a careful estimate is made by independent quantity
surveyors of the cost of the proposed work, and both the builder and the
architect’s remuneration is fixed from the outset. If the building costs
more than the estimate, neither profits by the excess. Of course the
architect’s commission of six per cent. is so small that it cannot be
considered any temptation to him to increase the cost of the building
for the sake of it. Still it is more satisfactory, as an example to
everyone, and more pleasant for the owner, to know exactly what he is
going to pay each person.
What is the result? Everyone starts on the building operations as
friends and helpers. In place of antagonistic individual effort you have
team work. The larger experience of materials, which the average builder
who works for many architects possesses, is placed at the architect’s
and consequently at the client’s disposal. If he suggests red deal
instead of yellow for a certain piece of work the architect has no
reason to suppose he has some hidden motive behind his suggestion. Under
the present system the architect is wont to jump to the conclusion that
the yellow must be the better, because the builder has suggested the
red, and, if the yellow is in the contract, he will insist on it till
all is blue, and if the contractor makes a loss, he will take care to
make it good elsewhere. And after all, the red might have been better
for the particular position. We all know, however, even as free-traders,
that the desire to buy in the cheapest market has many qualifications.
Among them is human nature, and there is a great deal of human nature in
building, and especially in good building. If when we set out to build
we want real value for our money, as well as buildings which will be of
real value to the country when we have done with them, the sooner we
abolish the ordinary form of building contract the better. That is why I
have called it the Anti-Social Contract.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVIII.
AN INDICTMENT OF COAL SMOKE.
A LARGE northern city without smoke, or indeed any English town where
human beings for business reasons have to live in close proximity, is a
little difficult to conceive. If it came about suddenly we who live in
such places might feel not a little naked and awkward, so accustomed are
we to our own dirt. We are apt, indeed, to think that dirt and dignity
go hand in hand. A poet friend of mine, who had gone to live in Leeds,
told me that one day on visiting his bank in that city, instead of
finding it the massive gloomy black pile he expected, it stood out
before him as a trifling white building in glazed terra-cotta lately
washed. All its dignity and half its financial credit in his eyes had
gone. Such it is to be suddenly clean in black surroundings; where
before the crudeness of the architecture had been decently covered in
soot it now stood forth unashamed in all its absurdity. It was a test
the Leeds bank building could not stand, and it is one very few of our
more modern classical buildings could. To them the smoke deposit is a
grateful one, softening their crudities.
Manchester, however, has lately been cleaning, with the aid of a
sandblast, some of her older classical buildings dating from a pre-smoke
era, and these have stood the test nobly. The Theatre Royal is a good
example. From this one might argue, and I think with some fairness, that
as the pall over our towns has become heavier so our architecture has
deteriorated. I think it is really a case of cause and effect, though
admittedly other things aided in the decline. What is the use of Greek
delicacy and refinement in mouldings and ornament when an oily black
deposit will very quickly obliterate them and, as has been proved time
after time, in a few short decades crumble them away? The good architect
is likely to give up hope, and devote himself to clean buildings in the
country, where not only mouldings but even texture counts. So we have in
our smoky English towns our heavy over-ornamented buildings trying by
over-emphasis in every direction to force their way through the grime,
and in a clean smokeless town, like New York, light gay buildings with
clean line and surface and delicate ornament leaping up to the light and
trusting to their general shape and mass for their main effect. The
sunny city brings about bright clean-shaven buildings, the smoky one
be-whiskered coalheavers grinning at us in their oily facetiousness.
What Manchester or Leeds would be like in a few years’ time for an
architect to work in if the tons of tarry acids and soot from their
domestic chimneys—the chief offenders—went down the sewers, as such
refuse should as long as it remains refuse, instead of falling on our
heads and our buildings, is difficult to imagine. They would, one may be
sure, be towns of peculiar beauty, a beauty, too, very different to that
of the sunny towns of the Mediterranean. Instead of the bright colours
belonging to a lower latitude we should have the far more beautiful
half-tones and pearly greys belonging to our northern climate. Our
buildings to correspond would have to be more delicately modelled, with
less strongly marked shadows. Deep porticoes would rarely be used save
to mark points of special importance. The architect, instead of being a
man accustomed to think in black lines, would become sensitive, not only
to every shade of colour, but to every modulation of surface and
texture. No longer could we tolerate the hard, bright, cheery reds of
our machine-made pressed bricks. The black joints, too, in which we set
our brickwork, grinding cinders into our mortar where the south uses
sand, would seem to be what they are, so many dirty lines drawn across
the fair faces of our buildings, and thereby adding most unnecessarily
to the gloom. A vulgar moulding too, an over-emphasized piece of
ornament, would become so conspicuous in proper daylight, when all the
surroundings would be clean, that the author of it would begin to be cut
by his fellow-architects, and even his lay friends as a man of bad and
flamboyant taste. For it must be remembered we have already reached the
stage where a sin against taste, when realised, is far worse than one
against morals. Indeed, the reactions of clean air and the beautifully
tempered sunlight which really belongs to Lancashire would be infinite.
With the coating of soot removed from our lungs as well as the black
from our buildings we should probably all talk with the sprightliness of
the Athenians of old. An architectural public opinion would be one of
the first things to form, and woe betide the architect and client who
spoilt with his coarse work our modern Athens. An effect which old
Athens lacked we could have in abundance. The foliage of beautiful
feathery yet rounded trees suited to a town, which grow in our climate
but not in hers, might make the foil to the buildings of our main
streets which the London plane trees do to the painted buildings of the
London squares. Our parks, too, would become clean. They might then
cease to be the dreary recreation grounds, with asphalt paths and a
weedy sprinkling of grass, we now assume, unrightly I think, to be all
that is possible in the heart of a city.
All this I realise may be thought fanciful, though it is fancy based on
fact. Here, then, are solid facts no one can dispute. Sir Frank Baines,
chief architect to the Office of Works, than whom no one has more
experience of the upkeep of buildings, stated in his evidence before the
Committee on Smoke Abatement that the cost of the upkeep of a building
would be reduced by at least half if a smoke-free atmosphere obtained.
The material damage to Manchester by its own smoke has been calculated
at £1,000,000 a year. But more important even than these figures is the
disrepute and disregard into which its soot has brought such towns.
There is the story, probably apocryphal and certainly unwarranted,
though useful enough in pointing a moral, of the Cabinet Minister who
had a speaking engagement, and not feeling very well went to see a
leading consultant, and asked whether he was fit to keep his engagement,
which happened to be in Manchester. “Manchester?” said the consultant,
“certainly not. Nobody is well enough to go to Manchester.”
Owing to their smoke and dirt, no one now lives in our northern
manufacturing towns who can afford to live outside them. They have
become mere workshops, and, with the Englishman’s disregard for the
surroundings in which he works, they are yearly losing what little
amenities are left. When the eighteenth-century merchant lived in his
square dignified Georgian mansion, with its touch of Dutch brightness
and cleanliness, and walked to his equally dignified counting-house, the
appearance of the city he walked through was a thing of some
consideration to him. Now, when he motors into it for a few hours in the
middle of the week and is landed at his office door with hardly time to
see the buildings he passes, having his attention directed chiefly to
the traffic and the policemen, not only his interest in his town but his
knowledge of it is infinitely less. The place he makes money in is not
worthy of his thoughts except for that purpose. With the more
influential classes feeling like this, it is no wonder that the others
feel even less interest and responsibility as they hurry away in their
tram-cars to their distant suburbs. So the rot, started by the smoke,
spreads until the town becomes the black, formless, slightly smelling
abomination we begin to believe it must be. Yet all the time there are
Paris, Vienna, New York, Düsseldorf, and Cologne, indeed almost any town
but one of our own, to show that in reality the town is and may be
something very different—the highest and finest expression of communal
life, the place where service and work and the consequent enjoyment of
them can alone be carried to the highest pitch.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XIX.
THE BUSH BUILDINGS OF NEW YORK AND LONDON.
NOTHING could illustrate better the versatility of the leading American
architects or the eclectic character of modern American architecture
than the Bush Buildings in New York and London. If we wanted to go
further we could illustrate this thesis from two other almost equally
important works by the same architects, Messrs. Hemle and Corbett. There
is their great and splendid Italian basilican church at Brooklyn and
their Washington Memorial Masonic Temple, a vast and powerful monumental
building in what we should call in England Neo-Grec architecture. These
four great structures, either of which is sufficiently striking and
competent in every implication of the word, to make the fame of an
ordinary English architect, are therefore at the four poles of
architectural expression, if we exclude modern attempts at futuristic
design. In the England of the end of last century we should have
explained this phenomenon easily enough, or at any rate the younger men
would, on the simple hypothesis of ghostly designers. But that will not
do in this case or in the similar cases of other American firms like
Messrs. York and Sawyer, or McKim, Mead and White, which show the same
universality in their work. In Mr. Corbett’s case, for his partnership
is frankly and openly that of a designer and a business man, from
experience of his office I happen to know that all this diverse yet
splendid achievement is the work of one man, Mr. Corbett himself. Yet
this does not measure his output of creative energy. Apart from his
lesser architectural work, like apartment houses and the four great
buildings mentioned, all erected or in the course of erection within the
span of a few years—for he is still a young man as measured by the heads
of the architectural profession in this country—Mr. Corbett finds time
to carry on the most successful design atelier in Columbia University.
Two nights a week he criticises the _projets_ of some 25-30 young
architects, making the constructive suggestions every teacher worth his
salt has to make. I met him late one night when he told me he had that
evening sketched fifteen different solutions to the same problem on as
many student drawing boards. How does this extreme competence, combined
with almost absolute freedom from a predilection for any particular form
of expression, arise? Obviously it is an intellectual phenomenon
divorced from faith in any particular tradition. The only answer I can
find to it, and I think it is a satisfactory answer, is that it lies in
a combination of the extremely logical Beaux Arts system of education
with the alertness of the quick-moving American mind, always open to
fresh ideas. Mr. Corbett was trained in Paris, and after that had the
usual period of assistantship in great offices like Mr. Cass Gilbert’s
and Messrs. McKim, Mead and White’s. In his own case he has never
believed in nor possessed a great office staff as measured by American
standards. He once told me that he felt fifteen draughtsmen were as many
as any man could feed with ideas. After that they began to feed you. It
seems a rational limit though one knows it is one often exceeded even in
England.
With these preliminary remarks let us consider his two great Bush
Buildings both designed to answer the same programme—a permanent
exhibition of travellers’ samples—and both converted or partially
converted to office purposes, as foreseen would be the case, while the
idea of such an exhibition gradually obtained acceptance. The programme
from the outset therefore obviously divides itself into two aspects,
that of providing large unencumbered exhibition floor space capable of
temporary sub-division into offices, and that of giving the total
building in each case the commanding appearance, which will make it a
prominent feature in a great city. We know how well Mr. Corbett, even in
the small section of his total scheme which has been built already, has
solved this two-sided problem in London. His New York building, perhaps,
is less well know. Let us therefore start with that.
In New York Mr. Bush had chosen a site for his venture in 42nd Street, a
street which seems to me roughly to correspond to the Strand. That is to
say it is a street half way between the City and the West End, near to
the great commercial hotels, most of which are indeed in it. It is in a
growing neighbourhood too, into which important industrial concerns are
continually moving from the crowded down-town area. Hence under American
conditions the surrounding buildings are continually getting larger and
higher. The site Mr. Bush was able to buy was a very narrow one, some
fifty feet wide, in the centre of a city block. It would only get light,
therefore, back and front. Further any buildings rising above its
fellows must be prepared in such circumstances for the blank return
walls, which are one of the ugliest features of American building
conditions. If the site was a narrow restricted one it was however 200
feet deep, and compares therefore, in total area to about two-thirds of
that occupied by the central block of the London building. To develop
fully such a site it is obvious that only a portion of the building
could rise to any height, because only a portion of the total depth
could be lit from either end. Mr. Corbett chose to take up the front
portion using some 90 feet of depth for the purpose. We, in England,
with our duller climate, would consider 90 feet a great depth to be lit
from either end, or from a small enclave in one side, which might some
day be built up. To get his exhibition floor area then, and to give the
striking character his building demanded, this area of 90 by 50 feet was
made into a tower, and a very lofty one at that. It is 450 feet
high—higher, that is to say, than the cross on St. Paul’s. To build a
great tower on so narrow a base was in itself no small engineering
undertaking, especially as the large exhibition rooms on each floor made
cross bracing against wind pressure a difficulty. To make an oblong
tower with the two longer walls not only blank, but devoid of all
projections, however slight, for adjacent owners in America do not grant
accommodation of that kind, a beautiful and graceful object was an
architectural undertaking which it required no small ability to
accomplish. The choice of Gothic as the form of expression to be used
was probably dictated by the simple fact that Gothic lines would
emphasize the height of the tower—its main characteristic—and any other
style would diminish it. One can at any rate imagine the architect
trained in logical French methods arguing in that way. The difficulty of
the blank returns was overcome very ingeniously by imitation details of
long mullion-like lines in three coloured bricks, black ones being used
for the darkest shadows, which are made to correspond to the natural
average angle of the sun, while white bricks are used for the high
lights. The very thought of this would make Ruskin turn in his grave.
Yet the result is undeniably effective, and one cannot see how so good a
result on an absolutely plain face could be otherwise obtained. But the
tower, of course, does not really rely to any great extent on this
successful architectural camouflage. It relies on its undoubted grace,
which is largely due to the very beautiful double lantern or 8 or 9
stories which surmounts it. This lantern by being set in from the main
wall faces is freed from restrictions. The upper portion of it sets in
again and the architects have here their own office with all New York
from river to river and mountain range to mountain range at their feet.
At night the lantern top is illuminated by flood lighting, and floats
high in the sky, a golden casket of extraordinary and romantic beauty.
The building is Gothic throughout, with elaborate bank and club rooms on
the lower floors, but one must frankly admit that while it is far better
Gothic than that of the Woolworth Building, it is like the interior of
our own Houses of Parliament, Gothic without the touch of the Gothic
craftsman, and the variety and interest of Gothic designers. My own
feeling is that no human being can design Gothic detail on paper in the
quantity which these great buildings require and give it the real
interest and spontaneity of the old work. Sir Giles Scott has got nearer
it than anyone in his Liverpool Cathedral by departing very largely from
precedent. Mr. Corbett has departed from precedent too, but his thirty
odd floors, like the endless corridors of the House of Commons, call for
a greater output of ability in Gothic designing and craftsmanship than
the whole world possesses at the present time, and it must be remembered
as stated above, Mr. Corbett is his own designer.
Let us turn now to his London building. It is so well known and so much
has been written about it that it is not necessary to describe it in any
detail. One may notice, however, how the dual aspect of the problem has
here too been solved. The great doorway with its giant columns and
semi-dome facing down Kingsway, with the crowning tower above, emphasize
the semi-public character of the proposed commercial exhibition or
museum. The great mass of plain stone face showing everywhere in
cliff-like walls, among its complicated neighbours, all piers columns
and architectural trappings of every sort, marks the London Bush
building as being as distinctive a unit in London as is the graceful
tower piercing the sky in New York. If it ever fulfils its owners’
conception and becomes a great depository of current articles of
commerce, it will stand out to the world as such a depository. The man
in the street will easily recognise it as such. There is rightly more
than a touch of the warehouse character in it. The architect seems to
me, therefore, to have solved that side of the problem better even in
London than he has in New York. The New York building is a more obvious
advertisement. Its tower is simply a beckoning finger. No one would
expect a graceful Gothic tower to be a storehouse of samples. The other
half of the problem is equally well solved by the London building. The
great floors, admirably and evenly lit by the evenly spaced windows,
make excellent exhibition galleries. In the meantime they make almost
equally good office floors. The regular spacing of the windows, which
allows them to be smaller than is usual in London and thereby gives the
greater wall spaces we all desire, makes each floor readily divisible to
suit tenants. The practical conditions of the problem seem therefore to
have been solved as admirably as the more spiritual ones.
The measure of success which this central block only of the whole London
conception has achieved is extraordinary, when one remembers that a
great deal of it will not be seen when the two big wing blocks are
built, and was so designed. There is a baldness about the flanks as at
present exposed, which will be very suited to the two garden courts,
when they are completed, but which is not so happy now. The fact, too,
that the main central block is not axial with Kingsway will not then be
so apparent. It is not axial because its axis is a necessary compromise
between the centre of Kingsway and the centre of the curve on the Strand
front. This deflection of the axis of the central block was, in my
opinion, very much to be preferred to a break in the back of the block
itself—the only alternative.
The clean lean character of the exterior, relying for its final effect
on the mass of the building rather than on any excitement of detail,
appears to me to fit with our current post-war ideas in a way which is
little short of marvellous, when one remembers that the building was
designed before the war. One may ask what has the war got to do with
architectural styles? I think that the answer is that the war with its
consequent economies is enforcing a healthy movement, which had already
started, towards buildings, which answered their programmes more
directly and without unnecessary fallals. The Adelphi Hotel and the
Cunard Buildings at Liverpool, both pre-war, are early examples of the
same trend. The main impulse, however, came from America, where
commercial buildings had become so large that columnar orders could no
longer be fitted to them, while the windows had become so small in
comparison to the structures as to be mere texture to the wall surface.
Buildings like the Port of London Building are already _demodé_. They
mark the end of an era. The young men now coming from the Schools of
Architecture are coming forth with very different ideas. To them the
London Bush Building is a welcome advance in logical expression, which
they themselves hope to carry still further. Its discreet detail is
based indeed on tradition, but is no thoughtless copy of old dead
things. It combines reserve with boldness, logical character with great
taste and knowledge. No better background for large sculptured figures
standing clear could be imagined than the great rich semi-dome to
Kingsway. This portico marks the public entrance to the whole building
as appropriately as does the smaller one in the Strand the entrance to
the bank or insurance office to occupy the Strand portion of the ground
floor. Fitness in expression seems to me as much inherent in the detail
as in the general conception. It is because of this logical fitness and
efficiency throughout that the Bush Building holds out hope for the
future. It has not been born dead as are so large a proportion of our
modern town-structures. Viewed from this standpoint, it seems to me far
more alive and valuable than the corresponding New York tower. The
idealism and hopefulness, which all who have met him know to be so
leading and interesting a characteristic of Mr. Bush himself, has,
thanks to his architect, found expression in his London building. Here
is honesty, simplicity, faith in and hope for the future. It is no small
gift he and Mr. Corbett between them have made to London, especially at
the present time. May they soon complete it as planned!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XX.
BATH OR BOURNEMOUTH?
BATH is our one architectural city. Sufficient of it, that is to say,
has been built on an harmonious plan and with harmonious architecture to
give it a unity no other town in Great Britain or Ireland possesses.
Dublin, before the recent fighting, was nearest to it in this respect.
When the fighting is really finished and rebuilding starts in earnest,
it will probably fall a little further behind, for to-day there is
nowhere any canon of taste sufficiently strong to force any sort of
uniformity on new buildings. That is where we differ most strongly from
the 18th century. Bath was not built by one architect, though one was
responsible for most of the lay-out as must always be the case where
there is any plan at all. The actual buildings of Bath were built by a
group of architects no more closely connected, except in general ideas
and taste, than are modern architects. Yet how different the result!
Think of Bath with its stately procession of noble streets, squares,
circuses, crescents and other architectural forms and the modern town
which most nearly answers to the same requirements—Bournemouth. The
contrast could not be greater and in itself is a good measure of the
difference in ideals which separates the builders of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries from those of the latter half of the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In the place of a dignified
neighbourliness and sense of solidarity which led folk to live in
terraces of houses, which externally did not differ from one another, we
have, as exhibited in Bournemouth, or in any other modern recreational
town for the matter of that, the evidence of a desire to live as far
removed as possible from one’s neighbours in a house which differs in
shape as much as possible from theirs. In Bath in the eighteenth century
one did not show one’s superiority by any outward display. The greatest
in the land were ready to live cheek by jowl with the least famous. A
circus or crescent might house for the time being, at any rate, great
ministers of state, dignitaries of the Church, members of the
aristocracy and retired tradesmen in houses whose exteriors were
identical. We often pride ourselves a little superficially on the
superior democratic tendencies of the age in which we live, yet if
architecture is used as a test we see at once how much more really
democratic a city layed out on the lines of Bath is to one on the lines,
or rather one like Bournemouth, for the latter has no lines at all in an
architectural sense. I do not want to say that the garden city idea of
which Bournemouth is an early, if unconscious example, has not beauties
of its own. I only desire to point out what a very different ideal of
beauty the two towns and the two centuries they stand for exhibit.
Another difference, which is really involved and implied in the two
different conceptions of what a town for rest and recuperation should
be, is to be noted in the way each town approaches the country. The
modern town has always its indefinite region surrounding it, which is
neither town nor country, but an ugly and generally an untidy
overlapping of each. The whole of a town of the type of Bournemouth is
suburban. That is involved in its idea, but there are parts of it on its
outskirts where its suburban qualities lapse into meanness. In
eighteenth century Bath there was nothing of the sort. The town and
country did not mix and consequently neither spoilt the other. There was
perfect town and perfect country co-existing side by side. The proof of
this is still to be seen to-day in Great Pulternay Street,—the most
dignified and perfect town street I know. As you walk down it you feel
that you are, at any rate for the time being, a citizen of no mean city.
Its urban flavour is of the most refined and exquisite kind. It has its
proper climax in Sydney House, and there are no loose ends to distract
the view in any direction. It might be a street in Paris, but devoid of
Parisian noise and push and with statelier architecture. Yet a hundred
yards to the right, through New Sydney Place, you have to-day open
fields and completely unspoilt country. On the opposite side is the
modern suburb of Bathwick, and you can note the difference. When
Pulternay Street was built, however, it ran straight out into the open
country, and its four-storied town houses must have backed on to the
fields. Portland Place and the Bloomsbury Squares must have been very
much the same when they were first laid out. The creeping of the modern
town by means of inferior houses growing up higgledy-piggledy or in long
dull streets leading nowhere, with all the squalor and discomfort to
everyone such a condition implies, is, I am afraid, a modern conception,
or rather the absence of any conception at all. When in the eighteenth
century, owing to its sudden rise in fashion, Bath burst its medieval
walls, as did so many English towns, it did it deliberately according to
an architectural plan. The result was, instead of the area of muddle
through which one drives as quickly as possible in approaching a modern
town, no muddle at all, but fine trees and stately country adjacent to
fine houses and stately streets, each enhancing the other. Let us
consider a little more closely this method of town building and town
planning as exemplified in Bath.
The man who transformed Bath from a small medieval town surrounded by
its walls and with its two main, though irregular, streets running
roughly at right angles towards its four gates, after the pattern of a
Roman camp on which, no doubt in this case, it was based, was a young
Yorkshireman of twenty-one years of age, named John Wood. He was born in
1704 and employed as a surveyor of roads in his native county. He
appears to have been introduced to Bath by Ralph Allen, the post-boy who
rose to be the great merchant prince of the town, owner and developer of
the quarries of the famous Bath Stone on Coombe Down from which the town
is built. In “An Essay towards a Description of Bath,” which Wood
published in 1742, he says “In 1724 a subscription was opened by a deal
merchant of Bristol for carrying the navigation of the river into
execution, so that when I found the work was likely to go on I began to
turn my thoughts towards the improvements of the City of Bath by
building, and for the purpose I procured a plan of the town, which was
sent me into Yorkshire in the summer of the year 1725, where I, at my
leisure hours, formed one design for the ground at the north-west corner
of the city and another at the north-east side of the town and river.”
This latter was afterwards laid out by Thomas Baldwin, and includes
Pulternay Street and part of the Bathwich estate. “After my return to
London,” Wood continues, “I imparted my first design to Mr. Gay, an
eminent surgeon in Hatton Garden and proprietor of the land, and our
first conference was upon the last day of December, 1725.” Wood must
obviously have been an extraordinary young man, not only to have
conceived at the age of twenty-one in his leisure hours, a plan for
developing a strange town on what were then very novel lines, but to
have had the energy and capacity to convince the owners of the land and
push the major part of it through to completion. “On the 31st of March
following” he says, “I communicated my second design to the Earl of
Essex, to whom the land on which it was proposed to be executed then
belonged, and in each design I proposed to make a grand plan of assembly
to be called the Royal Forum of Bath; another place no less magnificent
for the exhibition of sports, to be called the Grand Circus; and a third
place of equal state with either of the former, for the practice of
medicinal exercises, to be called the Imperial Gymnasium of the City.”
In the November of the same year Wood fixed his preliminary articles
with Mr. Gay, who then empowered him to engage anyone that he could
bring into the scheme for the building of a street, 1025 feet long north
and south by fifty feet wide east and west, for an approach to the grand
part of the design. In this way Gay Street, leading to the Circus, was
eventually formed and Wood launched on his numerous schemes for the
betterment of Bath, which even included a canal from Bristol to that
city. For the canal he obtained men from the Chelsea waterworks, and he
says “till that time the real use of the spade was unknown in and about
the city.” “I likewise provided,” he adds, “masons in Yorkshire,
carpenters, joiners and plasterers in London and other places, and from
time to time sent such as were necessary down to Bath to carry on the
building that I had undertaken”; for this astonishing young man was not
only an architect and town planner but his own contractor as well. “It
was not till then,” he goes on to say, “that the lever, the pulley, and
the windlass were introduced among the artificers in the upper part of
Somersetshire, before which time the masons made use of no other method
to hoist up their heavy stones than that of dragging them up with small
ropes against the side of a ladder.” There may be some exaggeration in
this statement of Wood’s—there probably is—but it is sufficient evidence
of the primitive state of affairs in the city when Wood found it, and it
makes more remarkable still the work which this young genius achieved.
Not only, apparently, did he transform a medieval town into one of
metropolitan and even Roman dignity, but he displaced medieval methods
of handling materials and workmanship with modern ones.[1]
Footnote 1:
For the above facts and dates concerning Wood and his work, as well as
for much else, I am indebted to Mr. Mowbray Green’s excellent volume
entitled “The Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath” which will be
found a mine of information as to architects and owners of most of the
18th century work in the city.
Let us now take a walk through the formal portion of Bath, which Wood
laid out, and on which he and his son built their famous groups of
houses. Starting at the top of Barton Street we enter Queen Square, the
first of Wood’s formal conceptions of a group of houses to be actually
carried out. Queen Square was designed by Wood in 1728, and is roughly a
hundred yards either way. It consists of four blocks of seven large
houses on each side, combined into four architectural compositions. Wood
claimed that he was the first architect in England to unite into one
design a number of separate houses, but Inigo Jones had forestalled him
in Covent Garden and other places. However, Wood was clearly the first
to do it on this scale, and what is more important, first to combine one
fine shape, like Queen Square, with other fine shapes like the Circus
and Royal Crescent, and in this way to present the idea of an
architecturally conceived town. The north side of the Square consists of
a Corinthian composition with a central pediment over six columns and
two square end projections with four columns and flat Corinthian
pilasters in the links between. The order stands on a finely rusticated
basement with moulded heads to the piers between the windows. The whole
is strong Roman work but not lacking in refinement. The east and west
sides of the square are conceived as the wings of a palace of which the
north side is the main front. In the centre house of this north side
under the pediment, Wood lived for a time, and died there in 1754, king
of the domain he had created. The east side of the square was completed
in accordance with Wood’s design and has richly moulded and curiously
carved doorways. In one of these houses, Dr. Oliver, of biscuit fame,
lived. The west side, however, had to be altered to meet the difficulty
of securing building owners and was not finished till after Wood’s
death. The central block, with an Ionic Order in the Neo-Grec style, was
added about 1830. All the houses of Wood’s have fine interiors and well
shaped and finished rooms and rich staircases with turned or twisted
balusters and panelled dado. The staircase of No. 15 is perhaps the
finest in Bath. Its alternate twisted and fluted balusters and handrail
are all in Spanish mahogany. Above is some baroque plaster work very
much like similar Italian work in the Georgian houses of Dublin.
Of the Square garden, Wood says the ground was enclosed with a low stone
wall bearing a balustrade with a wide gate and gate piers on the centre
of each side. In the middle was a basin forty feet in diameter supplied
by a spring, and the four quarters of the garden were enclosed with
espaliered elm and lime trees, though, as Wood adds, these must have
somewhat obstructed the view of the houses opposite. The interesting
thing to note is that all this careful finish was added to a scheme
essentially speculative in character. The same remark applies to the
houses themselves which Wood built here and in the Circus. Though the
work was speculative there was nothing jerry about it. Wood used the
best materials, especially in stone, the proof of which is to be seen in
the state of the houses to-day. With the prospect of wealthy clients
taking up his leases, he was content and indeed too much of an artist in
his work not to build well, in addition to designing well. There is
something therefore to be said, unprofessional as it sounds to-day, for
this combination in one person of architect, builder and owner, which is
to be seen too in the case of the brothers Adam, who so closely followed
Wood and his son at Bath and elsewhere.
Passing up Gay Street, named after Wood’s first Bath client, which has a
number of the good houses in it, Bath accustoms us to, but nothing
remarkable, unless it be the interior of No. 41 with its circular ended
rooms, where John Wood, Jnr. lived, and “The Carved House,” No. 8 on the
opposite side, we come to the Circus, which is the finest of all the
elder Wood’s conceptions. The diameter of the Circus is about 100 yards
and the height of the houses 42 feet. It is laid out with only three
streets entering it and not four cross roads as at Oxford Circus or any
of the other London ones. This at once gives it more solidity and a
greater sense of enclosure as a circular court. It also enabled Wood to
place opposite you as you pass up the gentle slope of Gay Street, a
large unbroken segment of the curved façade, so providing an
architectural finish to that street. In the Circus, Wood has departed
from the strict Palladian manner as understood in England and, instead
of great columns stretching over two stories and standing on a plain
basement, he has provided a range of smaller coupled columns to each
storey. Each of these rows of columns carries its full architrave,
frieze and cornice and the top one a balustrade as well crowned with
pine-apples. There is, therefore, a great profusion of strong horizontal
lines which emphasize the curve in whichever direction the eye is cast,
while the rounded surfaces of the numberless columns give a sense of
richness and fine modelling, impressive in the way that the exterior of
the Colosseum or any great Roman Amphitheatre was. Indeed, walking round
the Circus, you cannot help feeling that you are in the Court of Honour
of some magnificent palace, yet by the absolute similarity of treatment
to each house there is no individual ostentation or vulgarity. The Court
is to-day splendidly enhanced by the magnificent group of trees which
rise from the lawn in the centre. No wonder rulers of Empires like Lord
Chatham (No. 7) and Lord Clive (at No. 14) and artists like Thomas
Gainsborough (at No. 24) once took houses in it, while to-day it is
almost entirely inhabited by members of the medical profession who have
a knack of settling in the best houses in any provincial town. This
Circus took fifteen years to erect, and was therefore completed by
Wood’s son, whose work was always in sympathy with that of his father.
The exterior was, of course, determined once and for all with the first
house built, but the interiors of the houses differ considerably and
were probably designed to suit the requirements of the intending
tenants.
From the Circus one passes by Brock Street, built by the younger Wood,
to the Royal Crescent, another bold and magnificent conception on an
even larger scale. It was commenced in 1767 and finished eight years
later. Though the work of the son, it is in perfect keeping with the
ideas of the father. It consists, too, of one continuous range of
buildings with unbroken roof, forming in this case, a semi-ellipse, 538
feet long. Including the two terminal blocks, it contains a range of 114
great Ionic columns, here combining in the Palladian manner the first
and second floors and standing on a plain base of the ground floor
storey. The whole crescent, with its noble stretch of grass in front of
it, looks south across the valley now containing the Victoria Gardens
and has therefore, as it breasts the hill, one of the pleasantest
outlooks in Bath. So successful was it in combining stately architecture
with a fine prospect that it has been copied further up the hillside in
other crescents, such as Lansdown and Camden Crescents. The individual
houses in the Royal Crescent, being later than those in the Circus,
depend more on plaster decoration for their interior finish, while the
main doors are generally of veneered instead of solid mahogany. The
ceilings of the chief rooms are particularly beautiful in a similar but
rather stronger manner than that one is accustomed to connect with the
name of Adam. It is again very like similar work in Dublin, and has like
it in addition to the ordinary classical _motifs_ an occasional touch of
very effective naturalistic ornament, such as one finds in contemporary
French work. The marble chimney pieces in the chief rooms are of the
various eighteenth century types but with fine simplicity and restraint.
Everything indeed was done to make these houses, while identical on the
exterior, full of interest and refinement within. In this way they
satisfied the ideals of the eighteenth century gentleman for whom they
were designed.
All these houses indeed of the two Wood’s and the fine shapes into which
they combined them seem to show that in times of good taste in the world
it is almost as impossible to do wrong in architecture as in times of
bad taste it is to do right. How otherwise, except by a general
atmosphere of right feeling in such matters and the general acceptance
of a canon such as the Palladian one, are we to explain the fact that
John Wood, hardly more than a boy and an untravelled one at that, came
down from the wilds of Yorkshire and was able not only to change the
whole character of a city, but to make it a model of fine urban housing
for all time?
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XXI.
REGENT STREET, OLD AND NEW
IT is so easy, especially in middle age, to be for ever decrying the
works of our contemporaries and praising those of our predecessors. This
is particularly the case in an art like architecture, where old forms by
continued use retain their meaning for centuries, and the significance
of new ones is difficult to grasp. The temptation to condemn the new at
once as upstart and vulgar is obvious. In comparing therefore the new
Regent Street with the old, let us try to keep an open mind. What is it
we have lost and what is it we have gained? Let us consider the former
first.
Old Regent Street was our one definitely metropolitan street. By that I
mean that not only had it a unity, although the individual buildings
were by diverse hands, that no other street in London possessed, but it
had a superior and welcoming urbanity. It was a smiling sunlit
thoroughfare with restful architecture in large and dignified units.
Being built in stucco, it could be repainted every spring, and
consequently in pre-war days always looked bright and clean. The height
of the buildings in relation to the width of the street was such that
the sun could reach the façades and be reflected in the bright plaster.
There were fine broad wall spaces, particularly in the curved walls of
the Quadrant, in the Circuses, and in many of the blocks, which seemed
designed to catch the play of passing light and shadow which is a
characteristic charm of our climate. But better even than these general
factors in the design was the courteous attitude of one building to the
other. None were overpowering in height and outline; each deferred to
the other by giving some echo of its neighbour in its scale, detail, or
composition. The idiom used was of the utmost delicacy, suitable to the
material, yet the ideas expressed were masculine and powerful. Each
block was conceived like a palace stretching from side street to side
street, broad and big in its parts and to a larger scale than any of the
new buildings in the new street, however much taller the latter may be.
It was the aristocratic qualities of restraint and dignity, combined
with a very urbane good-nature reflected from the brightness of the
street and the easy flow of the buildings one after the other which made
old Regent Street the happy, lovable place it was not only to London but
to the whole Empire. Everyone remembered delightful walks there. To
country cousins it was the very essence of the West End. For them it set
the note and gave value to all that part of the town. It was, therefore,
in every sense of the term, metropolitan. No other capital in Europe had
anything like it. The uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli or even of the
Avenue de l’Opera was dull and mechanical in comparison. Starting at the
base court of Waterloo Place, we saw that Nash had created a magnificent
procession of fine shapes, rectangular places, recessed courts, avenues,
circuses, the Quadrant and further avenues and vistas, and had lined
them himself, and with the help of his architect friends, with a series
of stately yet thoroughly English and lovable buildings—a unique
achievement in the history of architecture. To the Regent, accustomed to
the dark brick buildings which formed the mass of the London of his day,
when he first drove down his friend’s street it must have seemed as if
Nash had possessed Aladdin’s lamp and with it had created a new and
glistening fairyland. To us who remember it before it was broken into,
or its plaster and paint allowed to deteriorate, it seems to-day a
lovely but almost equally unreal dream: so far has it already receded
into the past.
Let us now turn to the new Regent Street which has taken the place of
this unique and beautiful possession. Let us remember first that the
conditions of control have remained the same. By this I mean that the
property is still throughout Crown property, and that the control could
have been as tight, and as wise, too, if the same wisdom had been used,
as it was in Nash’s day. The Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who
administer the Crown Estate, now public property, pass all the designs
and lay down any restrictions they desire. They can even impose designs
and architects upon their tenants, as they have done in the Quadrant and
are doing in Piccadilly Circus.
Let us consider the new street as a whole before we discuss any
individual buildings. What is its character? What does it stand for in
our civilisation? Has it anything to offer different from, but
comparable in value to, the old? Let us take the most obvious effects
first. The height of the buildings is different and much greater. So
much sunlight will not now enter the street, and the general air of
spaciousness is no longer there. The great majority of the designs no
longer stretch from return street to return street. The units,
therefore, are narrower, more closely packed, and jostle one another.
Under such circumstances we cannot expect the same suavity, and we
certainly have not got it. The chief place where the present controllers
have tried to give it to us is in the Quadrant. We will return to that
directly. Then the new street is in a different material from the old—in
Portland stone instead of stucco. This has given the buildings a much
heavier appearance and in itself is sufficient to alter the whole
character of the street. On one side of the street the stone will go
black. We can see that already in the Quadrant front to the Piccadilly
Hotel. On the other, and in places where the weather catches it, we may
expect the stone to take on the beautiful pearly quality Londoners know
so well. Now that most of it is white and clean it possesses at the
moment a temporary advantage which must not be expected to last. Soon we
shall have a black-and-grey street, with occasional high lights like
Broad Street, Bishopsgate, or any other City street in the same stone.
But it will be a street of big stores instead of the City banks, or of
the little shops of old Regent Street.
As we walk down new Regent Street we can already feel its new quality.
It is that of parts of Oxford Street, of Corporation Street, Birmingham,
or of Lord Street, Liverpool. That is to say, it is a provincial
quality. The street is no longer possessed by any dominant idea. The
buildings do not harmonise and melt into a single whole. They bear the
ordinary anarchic relations to one another we nowadays unfortunately
expect everywhere else save in Regent Street. True, the main cornices
are at one level, but it is often difficult to distinguish which is the
main cornice, so complicated are the new designs. Domes and turrets
breaking the skyline and other individualistic advertising features have
been allowed. Kingsway, especially in the lower part, is informed by
more general ideas, and consequently is a better street. It is this want
of submission of the individual building and trader to the whole which
has changed the character of the street, and has lowered it from its old
high level to that of a commonplace bustling thoroughfare, efficient
enough, no doubt, for those who consider it a suburban shopping centre,
but not for those who would have wished to see it symbolise again some
of the best aspects of our civilisation.
Let us give the Commissioners and their advisers credit, however, for
trying in two places to produce a continuous design. Of one, Piccadilly
Circus, re-designed as Piccadilly Square, it is too early to speak,
except, perhaps, to say that the work already done shows a slightly
countrified feeling very different from the abstract character of the
old circus. Of the Quadrant, however, where, like all vacillating people
who do not wholly know their own minds, the Commissioners changed from
the irregularities they had allowed in Lower Regent Street to an attempt
to impose upon the shopkeepers a continuous and highly monumental
design, more can be said. From the section which was rebuilt some years
ago as part of the Piccadilly Hotel, one can envisage the effect of the
Quadrant as a whole, if, and when Norman Shaw’s design is carried out.
One can see that its character will be something very different from the
old Quadrant. In place of that bright and happy spot, with its bold,
sweeping, unbroken lines against the sky, we shall have a curved gorge
lined with heavily articulated monumental architecture, of a municipal
or governmental flavour. If the heavy arches are maintained the little
shops will timidly peep out from beneath them. Few trades will survive
such heavy-handed treatment. The little milliners and jewellery-sellers
will have to give place, perhaps, to tombstone-makers and the agents for
cemeteries. The gay character of the street will certainly have gone. We
shall emerge from this curving cleft in mountains of stone in no mood to
saunter down the rest of the street, as in the old days. But who
saunters by great stores? One takes an omnibus or a taxi-cab to the
store one selects, plunges in and stays there, perhaps an hour buying
anything from socks to tomatoes. The character of shopping has changed,
and with it necessarily, the character of the street.
Nevertheless, I am convinced, even by certain of the new Regent Street
buildings themselves, like Mr. Verity’s fine St. George’s house near
Conduit Street, on the left-hand side going north, and some shop fronts
by Mr. Arthur Davis—a perfumery, in particular, in Upper Regent
Street—that had the best architectural brains of the country been
employed on this new problem of giving appropriate character to a street
of great stores it could have been successfully solved. The problem,
however, would have had to have been boldly faced from the start, so
that when we had lost the old unity we should have had a new one to put
in its place. What we have achieved is but a few isolated, disconnected,
and singularly unfortunate attempts at unity and a street which is no
more and no less than any other English shopping street—a cockpit for
competing shopkeepers. The Regent Street we have lost was
definitely—almost infinitely—more than this, and by so much are we, who
own and use the new, the losers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXII.
FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
FIFTH AVENUE is the most exciting street in the most exciting city in
the world. At any rate, this is true in the daytime. At night, Broadway
with its exaggerated Earl’s Court effects, its great drawings in
electric light high up against the sky of giant motor cars, pyjama-clad
men and women, appearing and disappearing, is so fantastic and absurd,
and withall so thrilling, that for a few hours round about midnight it
displaces the other thoroughfare, not only for the careless multitude,
but for the serious person, too, if such there be when he or she has
once trodden its stones. Long after twelve o’clock vast crowds line its
ample sidewalks, pour in and out of its endless theatres and its always
open shops, and get carried away with the carnival spirit of its
illuminated advertisements. It has its sky-scrapers, too, which Fifth
Avenue has not, and these are always strangest at night. To see
brilliant windows and towers of light floating in the sky, where
ordinarily one expects to see stars, means that one treads the pavement
in no solemn, downcast manner. One walks on air, not knowing what to
expect. A vermilion giant may suddenly grin at you in place of the moon,
and if you stand agape you may, with equal suddenness, find yourself
surrounded by artificially brightened eyes from all parts of Europe.
Certainly, Broadway has its thrills with which Fifth Avenue cannot
compete. It would, of course, scorn to do so. Its wonders are for the
saner hours, when Broadway, in its turn, is apt to look a little dingy.
Let us return, therefore, to our proper subject, and try to form some
general idea of its ordinary aspect. I think if one imagines a deep,
dark, strongly flowing river, gliding swiftly and silently between great
white cliffs of varying height, one will come near to it. The surface of
the water is black with occasional spots of green. The black is due to
endless streams of sleek, satin motor cars, eight abreast, in four lines
either way, which all glide along at the same pace. The green is due to
the motor omnibuses, free from all advertisements, which dot the
surface. I have not seen a horse-drawn vehicle in Fifth Avenue—perhaps
they are not allowed. The black river surface, which flows on for the
five miles or so of the street, has an occasional rock in the centre of
it. These rocks, which are really wooden towers from which the traffic
is directed, are placed on the crests of the slight rises in the
undulating surface of the street—I am afraid my metaphor is failing. In
them a big green or red light shows night and day, and with its
appearance the whole five miles of river suddenly stops, or equally
suddenly, flows on again. When it stops, the waters divide, and vast
crowds—mostly Israelites as of old—pass over dry shod. Only those who
inhabit the land of the brave and the free would allow themselves to be
so strictly regulated in this and other matters. But we have spent
enough time on the stream itself, thrilling as it is to watch; let us
examine now the perpendicular cliffs and the shore on either side.
The cliffs in the early part of the street are more even in height. They
begin with some old residences, revived in recent years as the homes of
artists, but very soon are chiefly inhabited by agents for dry goods. By
Twentieth Street, however, hotels and big stores begin, and the street
loses such continuity of skyline as it ever possessed. From there
onwards it is a series of strongly competing buildings which rarely
extend even across a whole block. The effect, therefore, against the sky
is very ragged, like an ill-grown set of giant teeth. No long cornice
lines run through. There are no continuous roofs—indeed, very few roofs
at all to be seen. In a sense, therefore, it is not a street at all,
only a collection of buildings, just as a checker-board town, like most
of New York, is not really a town at all, but only a collection of city
blocks. Unity of some sort, some continuous thought or character, is
required for both. It is this lack of unity which makes Fifth Avenue at
once so exciting and so tiring. One never knows what to expect, there is
no place for the eye to rest without distraction. If the individual
buildings were bad the streets would be a nightmare. As it is, they are
extraordinarily good, and the street becomes a museum of fine specimens,
and one knows how tiring that may be.
These specimens represent European architecture of many modern phases.
French and Italian predominate, English is conspicuous by its absence.
Gradually, however, especially in the banks and in buildings over ten
storeys high, for which no European precedent exists, a true American
type is beginning to emerge. Roughly, it consists of a rich group of
stories near the ground and an equally rich group near the top, with a
plain stalk between.
One of the earliest good buildings round about Thirtieth Street is that
for the famous firm of jewellers and glass-workers, Messrs. Tiffany. I
am told that the founder of the firm was a Venetian merchant. If so, his
architect very appropriately founded his building on the Grimani Palace
on the Grand Canal. He founded his scheme upon this; he did not copy the
original, as is often ignorantly stated. Instead, he made a peculiarly
refined building in marble and bronze, using the general composition and
great scale of the Italian building as his model. A palace on the Grand
Canal, with its rectangular shape and great size, is singularly like a
big building on this other great canal of wealth and traffic. The same
firm of architects, Messrs. McKim, Mead and White, built the Italian
building for a rival firm of silver-smiths—the Gorham building—on the
opposite side of the street. This building has a giant cornice and an
open belvedere under it, and though built twenty-five years ago, and
consequently an old building, probably in danger of destruction, it is
still one of the most striking in the street. Between Thirtieth and
Fortieth Streets are most of the big stores. Unlike similar buildings in
England, these are solid masses of stone, brick or marble architecture
standing squarely on stone piers, instead of, apparently on plate glass.
These stores do not seem to rely, as ours do, on the multitude of goods
shown in the windows. Everyone knows that it is possible to walk through
them and examine the endless counters without being asked to buy. The
windows, therefore, can have one or two typical or seasonable articles
well shown. Later on, as we approach the Central Park, the shops become
more specialised, and consequently smaller. Here are the dealers in
pictures, in jewellery, in _bric-à-brac_, and very exquisite are their
bronze windows, and indeed, their whole fronts. Gradually they are
displacing the private residences from this section of the street,
although a few multi-millionaires still maintain a French château or so,
mostly closed, for the delectation of the rubber-necks.
With the Central Park, however, the character of the street entirely
alters. One cliff disappears, and in its place you have the small trees,
grass and taxi-cab race tracks of the park. On the other side you have
individual houses, a few very vulgar, most of them very restrained and
elegant. The park itself, though, is a failure. Its winding drives and
small hummocks of hills cannot hide its rectangular shape, which the
increasing height of the buildings is every day making more evident. It
should be all levelled into terraces and relaid out in a formal manner.
Fifth Avenue practically ends where the park ends at 110th Street and
before then begins to degenerate. But out of its five miles of length it
has maintained its standard of fine if competing architecture for three
miles, and I know no other street of which that could be said. Apart
from the green of the park, there is one restful thing which we have
passed by. It is the one building of a non-competitive character, with
nothing to sell—material or spiritual—the free public library. It
occupies at least a couple of city blocks, and sets back from the street
with low cream-coloured marble façades and porticoes. Though not
entirely successful as a design, except in the rear façade to its stack
of books, it comes as a very pleasant break to the commercial buildings,
where between Thirty-ninth and Forty-second Streets they reach their
maximum intensity.
It is not only the vast scale of the street as measured by its width,
which seems enormous when one looks at the sea of traffic, but which
seems narrow when one looks at the towering buildings, nor the beauty of
those buildings or the delicacy of their detail that give Fifth Avenue
its peculiar character and interest. Without the great masses of
well-dressed men and women which crowd its wide pavements all day long
it would seem dull and heavy. I have noticed that on Sunday mornings
when searching for its half-buried cathedral and churches. Nowhere else
have I seen such floods of beautifully-dressed women. They appear, too,
to belong to all classes of society. It is only by some subtle and
slight restraint in the line of a cloak that one can distinguish the
woman with a few generations of wealth behind her from the stenographer
or shop assistant. All wear fashionable clothes, all have brilliant
complexions. The men are not so distinguished, but none are poorly
dressed. Indeed, in all New York, from the furthest east to the furthest
west, I could find no one in torn or dirty clothes. The air of
prosperity is everywhere, the rush and flow of life goes on unceasingly.
There is only one backwater, only one place where the competitive view
of life is put aside. It is in the interiors of the clubs, such as the
Metropolitan, the University, the Century, the Union and the Players.
Here the very reverse is the case. I know no clubs in any town so
spacious, so reposeful, so dignified and so pleasant. I imagine, the
human spirit tired of endless competition and the unceasing striving of
the individual to assert himself, instinctively makes a refuge where
communism in the arts of living reaches its highest point. Some of the
best Clubs are in Fifth Avenue or just off it. When one has had an
overdose of the street they are the only restoratives.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIII.
LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL.
LIVERPOOL has now entered into possession of a great work of the
imagination. This work will go on growing until its mastery is evident
to the whole world, but from now onward Liverpool can follow the growth
of her Cathedral with confidence. It is no small thing that a great town
should pursue an ideal of this sort. In doing so, Liverpool has herself
shown something of this great quality of imagination. As a citizen I
like to think whatever may be her failings, it is her outstanding
attribute. During the last twenty years she has not only taken the great
step, which she has lately celebrated, towards the creation of a temple
to her faith, to be, I believe, some day as great and as noble as any
yet made, but during the same space of time she has had the imagination
and faith to follow other enterprises of this spirit, such as the
establishing of a great university, and, among lesser projects, but
still indicating something of the same devotion to non-material things,
a town’s theatre. If the artist who has been responsible for giving life
and form to the Liverpool Cathedral has risen to the heights demanded by
so supreme an occasion, we must, nevertheless, remember from the outset
those who have had the courage during these years to conceive the
project and to provide the means for its realisation on such a scale
unattempted since the Reformation. They, as well as Sir Giles Gilbert
Scott, have laid the whole town under an obligation and have done a
service to us all. Pericles built the temples on the Acropolis, at
Athens, to direct the eyes of the Greeks, flushed with the spoils of
victory, away from material things. To all Liverpool, irrespective of
creed, the great building on St. James’s Mount, in its austerity and
beauty, is a similar symbol and a similar gift.
Before the architect came on the scenes the site was chosen. Those who
were responsible for this, against a good deal of popular clamour,
deserve well of the town. No English Cathedral, with the possible
exception of Durham, has so romantic a setting when you get near to it,
while no other site would, in my view have provided so good a position
from which the Cathedral could assert itself and what it stands for to
the whole Merseyside. Already in its present truncated form it is a
dominant object from the river, though there is one unfortunate grain
elevator below it on the river bank which, in its present shape, seems
to mock it. When its great tower, however, is completed, and its whole
monumental mass is seen grouped symmetrically about it, with its
subsidiary buildings at its base, like attendant tugs to a liner, it
will, I think, focus as it should the interest of all the river views.
It is fortunately separated from the great commercial buildings at the
Pier Head, and the vaster and loftier ones which are yet to arise in
that neighbourhood, by a considerable distance and a slight depression.
The business quarter of Liverpool, like that of New York, being tied to
certain centres, there is likely, for a century or more to come, to be
an intervening space of comparatively small buildings between the
Cathedral and the only structures which may possibly rival it in height
or bulk. This is very important. It would be fatal to confuse two such
different aspects of the town’s life.
Near at hand, and under its wing as it were, the Cathedral has the one
solemn graveyard Liverpool possesses where many of the citizens of its
great period are buried. It is a graveyard, too, of great romantic
interest, in the base of an old quarry with lofty sides, from whose
stone most of the older buildings in the town have been built. On one
side is the Piranesi-like wall supporting Hope-street, lined with
sloping walks and the arched entrances to vaults, while on the other is
the old quarry cliff, in summer green with trees, on which the cathedral
stands. It is among the great merits of Sir Giles Scott’s work that it
suits itself so well in detail to this foreground, just as in bulk and
outline the finished design will suit itself to the larger picture of
the town as a whole. There is a cliff-like character in the bold faces
of the transepts which echoes the cliff below. But it is more than that.
The horizontal mass of the building, which is emphasised in a way quite
unusual in a Gothic structure, tallies very happily with the horizontal
mass of the great stone base which the face of the quarry forms. The
greenery on this base, too, well sets off the colour of the red Woolton
stone, while in the depths below among the winding paths there is hardly
a single white marble tomb or angel to form a jarring note. If there is,
time has softened it to obscurity, and now that the Cathedral
authorities control the graveyard we may be sure no new ones will arise.
So much for the site. Let us now consider for a moment the scheme for
the finished exterior as the architect has planned it. Most people
remember the interesting design with twin towers over the two
transepts—there were only two contemplated in those days—and the high
roof connecting them with which Scott won the competition. A great
feature in this design was a series of gables along the chancel and nave
roof-line like small transepts. These have all been eliminated in order
to get greater horizontal character, together with the twin towers
themselves, whose somewhat obvious picturesqueness appealed to so many
people. Gradually the present symmetrical design has been evolved as the
architect has got deeper and deeper into the work. It has been a matter
of long and mature thought. Let us recall for a moment the stages. The
old design I have just described with its somewhat restless and
irregular outline, but with its strange power and novelty, was the work
of a young pupil in an office hardly out of his teens. The judges, Mr.
Norman Shaw and Mr. Bodley were strongly in its favour. Nevertheless, it
is on record that the committee would not accept it, and, indeed,
refused to accept any of the five final designs. Especially they felt
they could not go to a young man who had as yet built nothing. Finally
they persuaded Mr. Bodley to be joint architect. The latter has often
been blamed for accepting the position, having already acted as judge,
but only by his doing so did Sir Giles Scott and his design survive. For
five years they worked together and then Mr. Bodley died. There is a
large and elaborate model in existence which shows the stage reached in
their joint work. To my thinking it is Sir Giles’ original design tamed
down and prettified. Large traceried windows appear everywhere. However,
when he was free, he reconsidered everything. If there is any Bodley
left, it is in a few mouldings in the Lady Chapel. The main Cathedral is
entirely Scott, and the merit or otherwise that is in it, is his alone.
The work, whether we like it or not at first glance, is obviously
something new in Gothic architecture. The whole development of medieval
Gothic was in the direction of eliminating the wall surfaces. It
achieved this by a sort of skeleton construction of lofty piers, arches,
vaulting ribs, and flying buttresses. Great glass windows filled the
interstices, and these themselves were articulated by stone mullions and
tracery in the same linear way. The resulting structure was an intricate
scheme of thrusts and supports. Everything was propping something else
up. If you pulled out one support the whole would in logical theory come
tumbling down. The scoffers said the Crystal Palace was the unseen goal.
Certainly, whatever hard qualities such an engineering style contained
were emphasised and increased by the archaeologically-minded architects
of the Gothic Revival of last century, not least among them in this
respect, by Sir Giles Scott’s grandfather, Sir Gilbert. Here, however,
at Liverpool, we have something quite different. Although the boney
structure of piers and arches, and ribs is there, the architect has
clothed it with flesh. The most obvious characteristics of his exterior
are its mass and weight. A shell might knock a hole in it, but there
would be no danger of its falling. Instead of his building appearing a
piece of fairylike construction, as many of our old Gothic cathedrals
do, or a thin cast-iron triumph of engineering as some of our modern
churches, Sir Giles’ building has the massiveness and almost the repose
of a great Roman structure. It appears, from a little distance where the
joints cannot be seen, as if it were carved out of the solid, part
almost of the rock on which it stands.
This breadth and solidity which will be still further increased when the
symmetry of the finished building can be seen is a new quality in Gothic
architecture. It is one which is looked for rather in classical
buildings. It seems to me, therefore, in adding this quality to Gothic,
Sir Giles has rescued Gothic from a dead end and given the style a new
life. On the old lines it could only get thinner and thinner, more and
more wiry and linear. Now, however, by his plastic treatment, Gothic can
be made almost as broad and restful, as welcoming and urbane in its
effects as classical architecture, and yet retain its essentially
romantic character. I should like now to see the same architect design a
great banking hall or railway station. I believe he could give them all
the necessary breadth and dignity and yet infuse them with new vitality
and interest. By making too his building ultimately a perfectly
symmetrical structure, he has given his Gothic structure a monumental
character which will be a further distinguishing mark. We all know how
the Gothic cathedrals, particularly in France, rise as great piles of
masonry and glass above the roofs of the town. We know, too, however,
that unless we are looking straight at the west end, with its
symmetrical composition, how ill-balanced they often appear; the strong
square towers at one end and rounded chancel at the other shored up on
every side by an intricacy of flying buttresses. The Liverpool building,
with its square-ended nave exactly balancing in length its square-ended
chancel, with its pairs of square-ended transepts on either side
opposite one another and forming a base from out of which the great wide
tower rises, will make a balanced monument from all points of view. This
is a character then, to which we are not accustomed in Gothic
architecture, but one at which most classical buildings aim. Folk have
gone so far as to say Sir Giles has classicised Gothic architecture just
as they said his American confrère, the late Bertram Goodhue, who stood
to American architecture very much in the same way that he does to
English, Gothicised Classic. Both statements are, of course, an
exaggeration. Sir Giles has not produced any hybrid building. What he
has done has been to enlarge the scope of a certain style in
architecture, and in so doing he has put all architects into his debt.
This development of Gothic which he has brought about, will, I am
convinced, when seen by the historians in retrospect, be the
distinguishing mark of our period. If I am right in this it is an even
bigger thing to have done than to have built the Cathedral.
In judging the exterior as it is to-day, it is very necessary to
remember what the finished building will look like. When this is thought
of, certain things which may seem to stand up rather crudely now, like
the two turrets at the end of the chancel, will sink into their place in
relation to the whole. The great chancel itself, so massive and
rock-like, has indeed rather a stocky appearance. To understand it, it
must be imagined as a sort of porch to the great group of the four
transepts and the central tower. Looking at it from the corner of Hope
Street and Upper Parliament Street—one of the best points of view—we see
it rising out of the quarry with the Lady Chapel on one wing and the
Chapter House on the other, with galleries of vestries and halls about
its base, with the great solid buttresses rushing up to the roof. It is
a complicated but solid mass. Think, then, what this will mean when the
great tower rises behind it, so that the whole of the present chancel
seems but a supporting block at its base, a little bigger than the other
supporting blocks, the transepts. Think of the tower as beginning in
strong, massive walls above the great arches connecting the transepts,
and then gradually breaking into greater and greater complexity as it
masters the building and rises clear above it, to dominate not only the
Cathedral but a large section of Liverpool. I can think of no building
which will have such a dramatic climax as this, and because of this I
can think of no more inspiring gift for a rich man to make to Liverpool
than the gift of this tower.
Then if you walk down under the building along St. James Road you meet
almost equally dramatic effects. The great transept rises sheer like a
cliff from the wide spread of little steps at its foot—of ordinary size
really—while there projects in front of you at one end of these steps a
strong, massive porch, with deeply-moulded doorway and Piranesi-like
grille. Everywhere there is drama, but it is drama well controlled.
There is nothing nightmarish or extreme, though there may be some
youthful excesses, especially in the Lady Chapel. Indeed, one of the
greatest interests of the Lady Chapel to-day is to see by means of it
how the architect and his architecture have grown both in power and
control. I heard someone once say that he liked the outside of the
Cathedral because it was so ugly. Ugly and pretty are dangerous words
which mean very little in themselves, but I think the person I overheard
was getting at something real by his remark. He meant the building had
character and force. It has this everywhere. The great lines of the
design will not be seen till it is completed, but from every part of the
present exterior one can feel the strength of the mind and the
adventureness of the spirit which have conceived and moulded it.
With the interior one reaches a different plane. I find it very
difficult to speak about it, for I admire it so much. Admiration is not
the right word. It overawes me. Yet that is not quite right either. I
feel a worm when I first enter the building, but I always come out of it
with a feeling of great happiness and exaltation. One cannot explain a
great work of art as I feel this interior to be. It must make its own
blow upon the mind. Such an interior as this must succeed or fail with
the first impression. One may find all kinds of additional beauties
later on, but an interior, however vast, must compose into one great
whole. There is no doubt this does. The exterior will when we see the
tower. This does so already. I do not mean that when the vistas are
lengthened and the great central space formed that the picture will not
be more wonderful and more complex. I doubt, however, whether it will be
more intense. As you look now towards the altar and see the great piers
rising majestically on either side and the dim spaces between them, so
deep and lofty that the atmosphere and the stone seem to take on a
bluish tone, when, too, you look at the vaulting growing out of the
great arches and piers, with no intricacies of a triforium gallery to
break the lines, you feel you are in some great organic structure that
has grown to its inevitable shape by some law of its own being. The old
cathedrals have endless beauties of construction, of craftsmanship, and,
one must add, of accident. Liverpool Cathedral has an intellectual
beauty of its own, due, I suppose, to its being the design of one man,
who has felt intensely and constructed fearlessly, and who all the while
has had a clear grip of his ultimate intentions, however much from time
to time he may have varied his approach to them. I do not want, however,
to suggest for a moment that there is any intellectual or logical
coldness about the Cathedral interior. It is austere and grand, on a
scale we have not seen before in England, but it is not cold. Look at
the east end. The reredos, with its multitude of figures, its filigree
work and gilding, seems to be bursting into flame, and the rich colours
of the great window carry on this effect. The spacious floor in front,
with its quiet harmonious colouring, makes this burst of glory all the
more impressive. Everywhere, indeed, in the chancel, but not affecting
the bones of the design, is a rich underpattern of carving in wood and
stone, admirably blended. One may cavil here and there at a detail—I do
not like all the figure-carving myself, I think some of it is too
pretty—but who ever read a great novel and did not find a word or
sentence here and there which one imagined might be improved?
The view along the vista of the transepts, is as fine as down the
chancel. It is almost as dramatic and more austere. The war memorial
altar and its reredos stand out as fine incidents, but do not interfere
with the repose. The same may be said of the organ fronts to the
transepts. Let the eye run up from the great strong mouldings of the
stone arch to the little perforated wooden valance below the organ
gallery and then to the gallery itself. It is one dramatic and romantic
contrast after another. Then, again, above are the great pipes and their
delicate pierced wooden cases. Indeed, there is a sense of drama
everywhere, not, of course, in any cheap theatrical sense. All life is
drama, and if this building had none it would be dead instead of the
living and vital thing it is. Notice how nobly, yet dramatically, the
bishop’s throne stands up out of the gloom behind it, or how the single
great central mullion in the transept windows dramatically closes the
vista, but notice most of all the play of light and shade in the chancel
from the hidden windows in the aisles.
As you enter you only see the three great terminal windows, but you feel
the effect of the others on the walls and piers, some lit, some dark.
The electric lighting of the chancel at night from behind the great
piers will have something of the same effect. It is a splendid and
mysterious effect. If one saw it in an old building one would say at
once that it was a great and splendid effect reached no doubt
subconsciously, almost, perhaps, by revelation. Let us not refrain,
then, because the architect lives amongst us and is of our
generation—indeed, younger than most of us—from giving him credit and
honour for having made all this mystery and beauty. It is not calculated
beauty like certain stage effects which can be reproduced at any time,
but is deeply felt beauty. More and more as one looks at the building
one realises the strength of the imagination and the nobility of the
mind which has conceived and made this great thing for Liverpool. If
Liverpool has shown faith by her enterprise she has been rewarded by her
architect beyond measure.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIV.
DUBLIN IN 1924.
A CITY so beautiful as Dublin may survive a couple of wars within as
many years, but can it survive the peace which now possesses it? This is
the question that has haunted me since a visit recently paid of a few
hours duration. There were the same spacious squares of trees and grass
surrounded by broad-faced reticent houses, the same wide streets of
ample dignity, there was the same river with its fine stone bridges—a
river lined indeed with the ruins of the town’s two noblest buildings,
but hardly less picturesque because of that; you approached the city
from the sea through the same magnificent bay, with the same fine coast
line with its stately headlands on either side, and the mountains and
parklands behind. Yet the city itself was different. It wore a different
air, it carried itself with a different spirit. Superficially it seemed
down-at-heels, yet jaunty withal. One would not mind the down-at-heels
atmosphere, but jaunty self-complacency is another matter. One is
accustomed to decay in many a beautiful Italian town. The decay of
beautiful things has in itself an element of romance. Even artificial
decay sometimes possesses this quality. I found the battered Four Courts
interesting in a new way. They had the interest that the ruins of
ancient Rome had, before they were cleaned, garnished and labelled by
the archæologists—the interest they still have in Piranesi’s etchings.
You saw at the Four Courts pieces of magnificent carving, perhaps a
trophy of arms over a doorway, against a disorder of broken walls. The
carving seemed thereby to possess a new and more vivid life. It looked
as some French courtier might have looked in his brocaded clothes among
the debris of the Bastille. Besides the Four Courts can be repaired, and
I suppose even the lost dome can be restored to the Customs House. Till
the latter is done, however, the city is definitely the poorer. Its
absence is a gap that is felt acutely. The pierced dome of the Four
Courts is but a reveller whose fine clothes have been somewhat torn and
muddied, but who still keeps his feet and even adds a little ironic
gaiety to the scene. But the Customs House, as a whole, is laid low by
its loss. Without its dome—the envy of all non-metropolitan towns in
spite of their modern attempts—the great building is in the gutter. Its
massive walls and columns remain, but they have lost their meaning. The
long façade straggles on with nothing to hold it together. With its dome
it was the most powerful yet buoyant civic building in these islands.
Now it is not only prostrate but dull. But Irishmen will, I know, see
that these two buildings are restored to their pristine grandeur. The
uneasiness I feel about the town is not due to them nor to ruins of
whole sections to cellar level as at Ypres or Albert. It is due rather
to the innovations, to the new red Ruabon brick buildings in Sackville
Street, to the sixpenny stores in Grafton Street—the Bond Street of the
town—to the coarse granite Celtic Cross in front of the beautiful
Leinster House as a memorial to Michael Collins. Was any hero so badly
served by those who meant so well? I would have taken Nelson off his
column if I could have done no better, or I would have gone to America
for another Parnell monument. It is this acceptance of the second rate
which frightens me in a town too, which, till now, has possessed more
for its size that is first rate than either London or Edinburgh. It may
be a passing phase. The best architects of the town are desirous enough
to do well if they are employed. The republican spirit, which prevented
both the railway porter, who found me a seat in the mail train, and the
boots at my hotel from taking my modest tips, will in time find its due
expression. So far it has not done so, at any rate in material things.
Rather it has been content with a bourgeois vulgarity which even
Lancashire would scorn.
Perhaps it is waiting till the last of the Sassenach has disappeared. I
hope they came away on my boat—three women in monocles and a man dressed
as and with a face like a horse. But there was something too in the
remark of the jarvie who drove me on his car to Westland Row, “What’s
wrong with this town is that it has too many darned heroes.” Certainly
if all these heroes have monuments erected to them like poor Michael
Collins’s there will be no more Dublin. No town could stand such
treatment, least of all one whose charm is so finely gracious, and who
is at heart so truly aristocratic. Dubliners could at any rate no longer
gibe as pleasantly as they do now at that northern city with its one
book shop, if their own became but an expression of the rivalries of
petty commerce relieved with a multitude of barbaric monuments.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AUTHOR’S NOTE.
The Author begs to thank the Editors of _Architecture_, _The Manchester
Guardian_, _The Observer_, _The Weekly Westminster_, _The Liverpool
Daily Post and Mercury_ and _Country Life_, for permission to reprint
articles which have appeared in their papers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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