its various functions, and its requirements can no more be met by a
suite of dining-room or drawing-room furniture than they could by a set
of kitchen things. If we remember that large numbers of such houses
as we are speaking of are worked with one servant, and the majority
with not more than two; it will be obvious that this room, which in so
many cases will be used for an early breakfast, must be so arranged
that it can be easily and quickly cleaned. If we consider further the
great number of articles that must be kept handy in such a room, to say
nothing of the people themselves who are to occupy it--for whom after
all the room exists, and as a back-ground for whose life it alone has
any reason for being--it will be evident that the furniture cannot well
be too simple.
If the result is not to become a crowded jumble, ample allowance must
be made, in considering the decorations and furnishing, for the life
that is to come into the room, and for the hundred and one articles
which we may call the implements of such life. These of themselves
must form a large element, good or bad, in the decoration of a room;
and could they all be obtained graceful and beautiful, there would
be a liberal supply of ornament. But this is one of the greatest
difficulties; for, while it is possible to find beautiful plaster-work,
carving, gesso panels, and so forth, it is almost impossible to obtain
the necessary implements of life even tolerably elegant.
In vain do we seek to make a room look beautiful by the elaboration of
its decoration and furniture, irrespective of all that goes to make up
the life that will be lived in it. The successful room is the one which
looks well with all the life in it, not the one which looks its best
before it is occupied. It is only by making proper allowance for this
life that a living room can be made to look well. Great simplicity is
needed in the treatment of a room which may so soon become crowded and
restless; but which may also, if properly treated, be more charming and
homelike than any other, just because it is so full of life and the
evidences of life--a decoration after all by no means to be despised.
RAYMOND UNWIN.
BUILDING & NATURAL BEAUTY.
Around the cottage I live in there is a large rookery, spreading over
many trees which form a small wood on the hillside. Last year a pair of
rooks began to build a nest in a beech-tree that stands by the cottage:
they chose a large bough over-hanging the road, quite away from the
general colony, and in a very prominent position. This was evidently
the cause of great annoyance to the black-coated community, who
again and again destroyed the half-built nest. The enterprising pair
maintained their position however; and after some weeks of contention
got the nest completed, by working in turns, one mounting guard while
the other fetched the twigs. They reared their family without further
molestation, so far as I could observe; but this spring the first thing
the rooks did was to destroy the last remnants of the nest left by the
winter storms.
This interesting little episode of rook life set me musing as to why
the community should object to this nest. I could only suppose that its
isolated and prominent position offended their sense of the general
fitness of things, and that they wished to guard against the first
beginnings of “Suburban Villadom.” If so, we must I think commend alike
their good sense and their good taste. For there is nothing which it
seems more hopeless to harmonize with natural scenery than the modern
town suburb. We find plenty of cities, towns, and villages, castles,
mansions, and cottages, which are a joy in the landscape; but when a
modern town begins to sprawl its squalor or its suburban gentility out
into the fields, what desecration of scenery follows! Most people feel
this without realising the cause very fully. But if we look for it,
we shall find that modern suburbs specially offend in coming between
the town and the country; so that, however the city may be fitted to
beautify the landscape, we cannot see it from the fields; nor can we
catch a refreshing glimpse of the cool green hillside from amidst our
busy streets. For between lie miles of jerry cottages built in rows,
or acres of ill-assorted villas, each set in a scrap of so-called
landscape garden.
In the old towns which we admire when we chance to come on them, we
notice that the country comes up clean and fresh right to the point
where the town proper begins: and it does begin indeed: honest town,
confessed, which does not seek to look half-countrified. In the oldest
cities we sometimes find a wall with the country coming right up to
the gates, which adds to this effect. In old times all the townspeople
lived in the town, and tried to make it comely as a town; and when
this was done it generally looked pleasing in the landscape. It was
possible to get most charming peeps of country from its streets--framed
in perhaps with an old gateway, or with some decent town buildings.
Of our modern citizens, all who can afford it live outside the town,
removed from those who work to make them wealthy. Hence they lose
interest in the town as a dwelling-place, and we get a great central
business quarter, surrounded by the residential suburbs containing only
poor town buildings or nondescript half-country dwellings. It is not
however with suburbs only that we spoil scenery; in isolated buildings,
or groups of buildings, we very often put up what is offensive to the
lover of country; and it will I think be both interesting and useful to
enquire a little further why the buildings which our forefathers put up
mostly adorn a landscape, while our own erections so frequently spoil
it.
Much of the charm of old buildings is no doubt due to the kindly
hand of Time, which not only heals the scars that man makes on the
earth, but tones down the raw surfaces, and softens the hard lines
and colours of anything he may build. But not to Father Time can we
give all the credit. It will be more than he can do, I think, to make
our modern suburbs look as beautiful, as fitting in the scenery, as
many an old city or country town does. Apart from the question of
beauty in the style of building, which of course is an obvious factor
of great influence, there are a few more easily understood reasons
for the difference between old and new. If we take for example their
position: do not old houses and villages generally seem to nestle in
a valley, under a hill, or by the edge of a wood or copse, and both
by their placing and style convey the idea of shelter and retreat?
Sometimes this characteristic was carried so far, that we find houses
placed so as to get little or no view. But they were built for busy
people who lived mainly out of doors, and returned to their shelter
at night as the rooks come home to roost. Too often now we place a
building so as to strike a note of defiance with surrounding nature.
The thing stands out hard and prominent in the landscape; shouts at
you across the valley; and through not co-operating with the scene,
fails to convey anything of that sense of nestling in a fitting nook,
or on an appropriate ledge--that sheltering under Nature’s wing as it
were--which makes a building look really at home.
Then, too, does not the old building seem almost to grow out of the
ground on which it stands? Built of the local stone; roofed with
material common to the district--thatch, stone shingles, or grey
slates, perhaps; harmonizing in colour with the rocks and soil; it is
as appropriate to the earth on which it rests, as the twig built nest
of the rook is to the tree top on which it sways so lightly and yet so
securely.
As we pass from county to county, rejoicing in the unspoilt bits
of old villages and towns, we cannot but notice how much of the
restful quiet beauty is due to the general harmony. We see the grey
stone-roofed village of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, so quietly fitting
to the country of rocks and stone walls; the green slate of Cumberland
and Westmoreland, that country of bright colouring; the thatch of
Shropshire or Somerset, always cosy and homely looking, whether on the
timber-framed building or on the whitewashed cottage; or again, the
purple slates of North Wales, unobtrusive among the dark blue shadows
of her towering peaks, and fitly covering in the cottage whose walls
are of rough slabs of the same slate. The red tile, too, coloured
with the iron which tints the soil, more widely distributed and in
greater variety than any of the roof coverings, though not exactly a
natural product only needs to be clothed with the golden green of the
lichen to look as much at home as any of the rest: we know it well
in Staffordshire, and to think of Whitby without its red roofs is to
realise at once what beauty it can give to a scene. Each of these
roof coverings has a special beauty of its own; some look well almost
anywhere; but we do not always realise how much of roofs we see in a
landscape, or to what extent the restful charm of old places springs
from their harmony with surroundings and the general prevalence of one
material in the district.
Our fathers were not tempted as we are in this. They had to use the
local material and to stick to it. There were no railways in their
time carrying blue slates to Whitby, or red tiles to North Wales. Now
all these materials are brought to our doors, and the builder chooses
each according to his own fad; and so we get all sorts of materials
and colours hopelessly jumbled up together, with no thought of general
harmony.
Our manufactured materials too are less beautiful. Our tiles by perfect
machinery are made so true and flat that a modern tile roof looks as
though it had been ironed with a polishing iron, like a shirt front.
And both our tiles and bricks tend to become so hard and forbidding
that no kindly lichen will clothe them, no wind and rain soften and
tone them. It gives one something of a shock to see the delicate
clematis and the clinging ivy struggling with a wall which, after
twenty or thirty years, still looks as hard and new as the day it was
built. The old tiles were a little curled in burning, and had a surface
rough enough to afford lodgment for moss and lichen; and so the lines
were less hard, and the newness of surface and colour soon mellowed
into all sorts of lovely shades.
Many an old building that has little pretension to fine architecture,
yet adorns a scene of natural beauty by its simple fitness of design,
where a modern one would probably spoil it. Such design was the
outcome of a natural effort to get the most use and convenience out
of materials thoroughly known. Hence a general suitability is found
between design and material, and an obvious connection between quaint
features and the want that has called them into being. Look at the
plainest old four-square thatched cottage, and there will nearly always
be some interest in the way the thatch has been coaxed up over a
window, or a ridge worked to avoid a chimney gutter, which redeems it
from baldness. The same skilful handling of tiles is found in all real
tile districts; and so we find many picturesque gables, which we should
miss in a country of slates or stone shingles.
There is on all hands evidence of a willingness to give labour without
stint; to do a job well and a bit more; to linger over it, and see if
a little more work here and there would not improve the look. In fact,
we read in these old buildings, as in an open book, of a simple workman
who was something of an artist, one who could take pleasure in his
work, finding joy in the perfection of what he created, and delight in
its comeliness.
Whenever we again raise up such an army of builders, working at their
trades with the pleasure of artists, then will all buildings become
as beautiful as of old; then will it be possible for such workmen,
co-operating with a true architect or master builder, to raise fine
architecture, like our old cathedrals and abbeys. No effort of
office-trained architects, with workmen whose chief interest on the
job is to find ‘knocking-off time,’ can ever take the place of the
co-operation between real craftsmen under the leadership of the most
able among them: for it is to this that we owe most of the building
that we can truly say adorns our country.
RAYMOND UNWIN.
CO-OPERATION IN BUILDING.
As beautiful as an old English village.” The phrase arrests our
attention and calls up many a pleasant picture stored in our minds;
but with the remembered beauty there comes too the associated sadness
of something loved that is fast passing away. The picture we recall
may be the view down some long wide village street bordered with
clusters of cottages, some opening direct on to the roadside, some
with their bright bits of flower border in front; here and there a
break in the buildings is marked with the dark foliage of trees in a
larger garden; a dignified forecourt with its iron railings reveals an
old manor house, or a gate-way in a high wall overhung by elms leads
to the vicarage; while at the street end where the road turns away is
the lich-gate, leading to the church whose parapetted roof and slender
spire rising far above all the surrounding buildings complete the whole
group. Or maybe we picture to ourselves rather some village green,
with the rows of sunny whitewashed houses, the barns and haystacks of
an occasional farmyard, the end of an orchard, and the village school,
that are gathered round it.
In such views as these there are houses and buildings of all sizes: the
hut in which the old road-mender lives by himself, the inn with its
ancient sign, the prosperous yeoman’s homestead, the blacksmith’s house
and forge, the squire’s hall, the vicarage, and the doctor’s house,
are all seemingly jumbled together; and mingled with them are barns and
village shops, wood-yards and wheel-wrights’ sheds. Yet there is no
sense of confusion; on the contrary the scene gives us that peaceful
feeling which comes from the perception of orderly arrangement. This is
the more surprising because the order is rather intuitively felt than
seen or consciously realised by the beholder. It is due very largely
to the beautiful grouping of buildings and roofs, a grouping which has
come so inevitably that it seems as if it would be somewhat difficult
to avoid it, or to utterly spoil it. Certainly where many buildings of
various characters and sizes are gathered together, as in a village, a
picturesqueness of grouping is rarely absent even when the individual
buildings have in themselves no special beauty; and very often the
introduction of one or two really ugly modern buildings detracts little
from this particular charm.
The village was the expression of a small corporate life in which
all the different units were personally in touch with each other,
conscious of and frankly accepting their relations, and on the whole
content with them. This relationship reveals itself in the feeling of
order which the view induces. Every building honestly confesses just
what it is, and so falls into its place. The smallest cottage has its
share of the village street on to which the manor house also fronts.
It is content with that share and with its condition, and does not try
to look like a villa. It is this crystallisation of the elements of
the village in accordance with a definitely organized life of mutual
relations, respect or service, which gives the appearance of being an
organic whole, the home of a community, to what would otherwise be
a mere conglomeration of buildings. This effect is greatly enhanced
where the central feature around which the village has clustered, the
church, castle, or manor house, is of sufficient size and architectural
interest to challenge comparison with the whole village rather than
with the individual houses. The impressive pile of the old Priory
as seen across the valley towering above all the other grey roofed
buildings of the little town of Cartmel, is a fine example of this. The
sense of unity is further increased in most old villages by a general
harmony in colour and style of the buildings themselves, due to the
prevalent use of certain materials, which are usually those found in
the district.
In the modern building-estate all these elements of beauty are entirely
wanting. The land is cut up into little plots all about the same size;
these are sold to a chance collection of people who erect on them
houses of any conceivable style, or lack of style; each deals with his
own plot quite regardless of the others; and every house seems to be
wishing to dissociate itself as much as possible from its neighbours,
to look as distinct and imposing as it can. Ground enough not being
allowed for each house to stand comfortably within its plot, such
separation as exists only makes it possible for every house to block
the view from some other, and easy for the occupants to over-look
their neighbours and realise their near presence all round to a maximum
extent. No grouping of buildings is thought of nor any organized
arrangement, beyond occasionally some feeble attempt at laying out
streets; and it is rarely indeed that we seem able to erect a public
building of any sort at all in scale with the extent of the surrounding
houses.
To compensate for the loss of the interest springing from variety of
grouping, a loss specially evident in the old-fashioned four-square
suburban villa, an attempt is now mostly made to introduce some special
features into each individual house, and so to create an artificial
picturesqueness. This is not uncommonly done by needlessly cutting
up the roof with turrets from which there is no outlook, or gables
which serve no purpose except to provide an excuse for a little black
and white half-timber work. A street of such houses is however even
less satisfactory than one of the old square box houses, in that it
is more artificial, and lacks a certain element of dignity which its
predecessor often acquired from its very simplicity. In short, around
all our towns are spread patches of villadom of the beauty of which no
one can cherish any memories, but the ugliness of which causes them to
be regarded by many with a cordial hatred; so much so that to the lover
of natural scenery the commencement of a new house is regarded as a
sure sign of the coming destruction of the old beauty.
Modern conditions of life and work are not conducive to the production
of great architecture, and it seems probable that we shall have to
await some change in these conditions before much that is really
fine in building will be accomplished. But in the simpler buildings
required for domestic purposes there are marked signs of improvement.
Already a few architects are meeting our wants without affectation
or pedantry, but with simple directness and honesty of construction,
and are producing individual buildings of great beauty; but so long
as these remain isolated examples, mere units in a chance collection,
they can do little to help the whole effect. The various buildings must
be brought into harmonious relations one with another; the suburb or
settlement must be conceived in some broader spirit and developed in
relation to a definite idea of the whole, if any improvement is to be
effected.
We cannot of course put back the hands of time, nor can we re-create
the spirit which built the old churches that crown so many villages.
The relationships of feudalism have gone, and democracy has yet to
evolve some definite relationships of its own, which when they come
will doubtless be as picturesque as the old forms. But allowing full
force to these disadvantages, we could, if we really desired it, even
now so arrange a new building site that it should not be an actual
eye-sore, and might manage that it should have some little of the charm
of the old village.
Thanks to the growth of taste among all classes of people there is
springing up a demand for something of the kind. In all the large
towns are numbers of people who hate the ugly & dreary life that
they are condemned to live in them, who love the country and country
life, and who will travel long distances to and from their work that
they may be able to enjoy them. These people do not want to live in
isolated houses, out of sight of their neighbours; they are townspeople
of sociable instincts: but neither do they desire to live in a mere
extension of the fringe of the town. What they really want are country
villages, little centres of life large enough and varied enough to
give them interesting human society and a few of the more necessary
comforts of modern life, such as a post office, a railway station,
efficient drainage and water supply. These people have many common
interests, much that all would wish to preserve in a new home, as, for
example, fresh air, and an open view of country that cannot readily be
spoilt. Just such an amount of associated action as would ensure these
advantages for them all, would suffice to give the sense of cohesion
to the whole settlement which is so lamentably wanting when each
struggles ineffectually to secure as much as he can of them for himself
alone. With some co-operation the maximum of these advantages could be
obtained for every individual house, be it large or small; without it
none but those rich enough to purchase a large tract of country for
themselves can be secure of even a limited share of them.
Within easy reach of large towns, estates & farms are constantly
changing hands at prices little above their value as agricultural
land. Frequently we find the enterprising purchaser takes advantage
of the demand for country homes: he spends a few hundred pounds in
developing his purchase as a building estate, by making roads and
laying drains; then he cuts it up into small plots and sells it at
three, five, or even ten times the rate at which he bought it. If a few
of those who wish to secure a country home were to purchase such an
estate or farm among them, they could get all the advantage of cheap
land themselves. If they were then to develop the site on co-operative
lines, they could obtain many other equally solid advantages. The
houses could be grouped together and so arranged that each would obtain
a sunny aspect and an open outlook; and portions of the land could be
reserved for ever from being built upon to secure these views.
[Sidenote: _See plates 11, 38 and 39._]
The arrangement that should be adopted to obtain the best result, would
depend entirely on the nature of the site. If it were on the ridge
of some rising ground, probably the best plan would be to group the
houses at each side of a good broad roadway, taking the wide village
street as the suggestion; while on a good southern slope, the most
successful plan might be to gather the houses and other buildings on
three sides of an open space, adopting the village green as the model.
Where the site was large enough, and the slope sufficient, a second
green with its houses could be arranged, low enough not to obstruct
the view from the upper one; or where two sides of a valley were
included, villages might be placed on each of the slopes, leaving the
valley below for ever free to afford a pleasant prospect for each
village. The particular arrangement to be adopted would be a matter for
most careful thought, and no building should be commenced until some
definite conception of what the completed village was to be like had
been worked out. The sites for prospective schools, church, or other
public buildings, should be reserved from the first, in accordance
with the size to which the available land would allow the community to
grow. The houses should be clustered together as much as possible, not
set villa-wise each in the centre of a little plot. Some few houses of
wealthier members could stand back in larger grounds, taking advantage
of outlying positions or sharing in the common outlook as seemed
best: their gardens and entrances would make pleasant openings in the
buildings. But the majority of the houses should be gathered into
groups, which would inevitably acquire picturesqueness from the variety
both in size and form of the buildings.