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.
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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.