Some Architectural Problems
of
To-Day
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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
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Made and Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & CO., LTD.,
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool,
and at London and Prescot.
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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.
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_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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.