aspiring young architect to feel he could do with as little training,
even if he has been brought up in the atmosphere of a style as Scott
was. Besides, to-day he would probably have but little desire to build
in any exact tradition. He would rightly be ambitious, like Scott, to
give a modern meaning to his work. To do this successfully, however,
does not mean that the young architect need not know and study the old
work. Rather he must study it all the more to see what is essential in
it, and what merely transient and belonging to its own era. In any case
he cannot do without an alphabet. Certain things he will have to use to
gain any expression at all, that is, unless he desires to erect but a
purely engineering structure. He is sure to wish that his building
should make not only an emphatic appeal to the imagination, but should
have certain delicacies and refinements, that it should conjure up in
the beholder certain associated ideas. To obtain such things however in
a non-copying, non-traditional way implies more knowledge of the past,
not less. It means much measuring of old work, much studying of
proportions, both in plan and section as well as in elevation.
If, however, the young architect, to equip himself, must go through many
years of strenuous training, when that has been accomplished, a glorious
field of effort faces him. He will have learnt the rudiments of an art
in which any work, however small, is delightful labour. To design a
cottage successfully is a very happy exercise. Every piece of work which
comes to hand gives scope for thought and feeling. Thought alone is not
enough. That is the great charm of architecture. By thought an engineer
works, an architect by thought and feeling combined. An architect may
not become a rich man—he very seldom does—but, if he has the roots of
the matter in him, he can never become a dull one.
Then there is always the gamble of the great competition. In no other
profession can youth jump so readily to the great opportunity if he
cares to try. Admittedly it is a gamble, for assessors and judges are
very imperfect human beings, especially when working singly with no
opposing idiosyncrasies to cancel one another. Still the great gamble
sometimes comes off. E. A. Rickards was only twenty when, working with
his partners, his design won the great Town Hall and Law Courts
buildings at Cardiff, which for twenty-five years or more have proved
themselves good and beautiful buildings as well as a winning design—not
by any means, or even generally, the same thing. At twenty-eight Mr.
Ralph Knott won the competition for the great London County Hall. But I
do not want to dwell on the winning of competitions as the end or
beginning of an architect’s career. They are the spectacular successes,
but it must be confessed that very few of them have fallen to the
architects who are by consent the leading artists in their profession.
No, the pleasures of architecture must be the end in themselves, and to
the young man who, having the right equipment, seeks them earnestly as
his life’s work, there is no limit to the pleasure and interest his life
will afford him.
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XII.
COLOUR IN STREET ARCHITECTURE.
THE question is always being asked why cannot we have more colour in our
town buildings, and the makers of glazed tiles and terra-cotta are
always replying than we can if only we would. The people, however, who
seem most ready to accept definitely the invitation are the owners of
kinemas and public-houses. Here, then, is a mystery; on the one hand a
sincere desire for a brighter and richer architecture, and on the other
the chief response from those whose business it is to satisfy only the
very simplest desires and emotions.
The first question to answer is, What do we mean and hope by the word
“colour”? Do we mean by it masses of elementary reds, greens, blues, and
yellows, or do we mean the rich and varied tones of broken colour? If we
mean the latter, and some would find in it more “colour” than in the
former, the broken surface of old brickwork, the pearly greys, the rich
browns and yellows of stone provide it in abundance. But if by colour we
mean large solid surfaces of strong primary colours, we ought at once to
pay tribute to the efforts of the publicans who, wittingly or otherwise,
have in this matter been pioneers, unsung if not entirely unrewarded.
Before we proceed, however, to spread, as with a palette knife,
stretches of primary colours on our street fronts, let us look at the
whole canvas before us. A good third of the surface in any street scene,
and more at the intersections of streets, must be given up to sky. What
is its tone? Three days out of four a dull grey, and on the fourth at
most a pale blue. Our masses of solid colour have, then, to be seen
against a low-toned background. That is the really important factor. It
is in this that our street scene differs from one in Monte Carlo,
ancient Athens, or Thebes. In the brightness of the Mediterranean sun a
white building, even a stone or marble one, dazzles the eye so that its
form cannot be read. Colour is, therefore, necessary and agreeable, and,
as everyone knows, it was used in classical times in all its primary
strength. The famous frieze of low relief carving of the Parthenon was
not only coloured but placed under the shadow of the deep peristyle
behind a row of columns so that it might be read by light reflected from
the ground. This was the only way in which its full value could be
appreciated. Hence, too, the enrichment of the underside of cornices
rather than of their face. When a Liverpool or Manchester sky throws
down so little direct light, how much rises from a Liverpool or
Manchester street? The problem, therefore, in our northern greyer
latitude, of what is the happy tone of colour for our buildings (apart
from the aggravation of dirt and smoke, as the country town witnesses)
is altogether different. Masses of solid colour, which under a bright
sky look gay and happy, with us become heavy and crude. One has only to
recall the dismal entrances to the Tube railway stations in London to
see that solid colours, far from having a refreshing effect, have with
us just the reverse. It may be argued that the crudity would go, or at
any rate be less, if the whole street were in bright primary hues. At
present, among ordinary stone and brick buildings, the brightly glazed
coloured building is like an enamelled iron sign on an old wall. If the
whole wall were enamelled, however, there would still be the contrast
with the surface of the street, unless that were enamelled too, and with
the sky, which no form of sky-writing has yet been able to turn into
Prussian blue and vermilion.
The quality of the colour which the ancients used on their buildings,
when it was applied colour and not that of the natural material, marble,
brick, or stone, was not the quality we are invited to use to-day. As
far as can be judged from fragments, the quality of the colour on a
Greek building was more like that of thin water-colour than thick oil
colour, whereas the glazed materials of to-day are far more treacly than
oil paint. Look at the glazed portions of the Midland Hotel, Manchester.
They have a solid glueyness, a thick, uniform viscosity which is the
very negation of life and colour. Natural materials, though they may
very quickly become darker and duller in Manchester air, never become so
dead as these artificial ones. The latter may indeed be washed—unwashed
they hold the dirt in streaks and patches in a much less pleasant way
than natural ones,—but they cannot be brought back to life, for they
have never really lived. They were cast in moulds from the start, and
were repeated endlessly. In the baking, too, they twisted not a little,
so that there is always an uneven puffiness of surface and line. They
have not the clean-cut look of stone from the chisel, or even of
brickwork truly laid. It is a case of cast material in place of wrought,
and of a cast material which does not cast well. This, of course, only
applies to glazed and unglazed terra-cotta when used structurally to
take the place of brick or stone. It is quite another thing when it is
used decoratively, as the Delia Robbias used it, inset in brick, stone,
or plaster. Its very irregularities then increase its decorative value.
These objections, too, would not, in my mind, apply with quite the same
force to a purely surface material like tiles or mosaic. The difficulty
of the bright colouring against the dull sky would, of course, be there,
but from the multiplicity of joints and surfaces the colour would be
less solid, more broken in fact. In Portugal there are houses faced with
coloured tiles which give a pleasant effect, but there again the
latitude and atmosphere are different. We have yet to see a satisfactory
external use of glazed materials in this country. When it does come,
about which I am very doubtful, it must for good neighbourly reasons be
applied to a whole street or district at once. Isolated patches like
public-house fronts and Tube railway stations do the same sort of
violence to adjacent buildings in natural materials that an enamelled
iron sign does to a country lane when set up in a field alongside.
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XIII.
EVERYDAY ARCHITECTURE.
IF we were all fortunate enough to live in the few unspoilt English
villages or country towns that are left, or if we occupied an apartment
in Park-avenue or Fifth avenue, New York, or in the central part of
Paris, not to mention rooms in a palace in one of the hill towns of
Italy, we would understand without more ado that architecture is an
everyday affair. As it is, living in Liverpool or Manchester or in a
London suburb, we think of architecture, if we think of it at all, as an
affair of big buildings, town halls and cathedrals, and probably now and
then of banks and insurance offices. Even so, it is a mystery which a
few highbrow people know all about and no one else can understand. This,
of course, does not prevent us from enjoying the old villages and towns
we motor through. We have long learnt, indeed, that they provide the
chief interest in motoring. But that they are architecture, and that
each of the little buildings we see nestling together has been
consciously designed by someone, even if that someone did not call
himself an architect, never occurs to us. And perhaps rightly. We are so
accustomed to connect the word architecture and the man architect with
our ugly over-emphasised town buildings that these modest little country
ones are obviously something else. We assume that, like the trees or
like Topsy, they just grew.
Herein lies a complete fallacy, which is nothing less than a tragedy.
The cottages and little shops we have liked so much in our country
visits, without quite knowing why, have all been the cousins, once or
twice removed, of the squire’s mansion. The little village church has
borne the same relationship to the cathedral in the neighbouring town.
Now we know that the cathedral and the mansion house are architecture. I
am afraid, therefore, that we must admit that the others are
architecture too. If so, we shall come to this strange conclusion, that
in the days when things were beautiful they were all architecture.
Architecture indeed was an everyday thing. We might even go further and
say when it ceased to be an everyday thing, when it was reserved for
some theatrical make-believe, and became thereby divorced from life, it
ceased to be architecture. That is why the architect should be one of
the most important persons in the State, why he should be trained as for
a priesthood, and when trained why he should be trusted, why indeed the
whole external form of the material side of our civilisation should be
moulded by him. He, and he alone, if he is properly endowed and properly
trusted, has the means to make our towns beautiful again.
If our architects, however, are to be trained as priests, standing
between God and the people, the life they interpret in brick and stone
must be something very different from the sordid materialistic life
which has followed the industrial revolution. These old villages and
towns we liked were all antecedent to that revolution, and the life they
interpreted, to which they still bear witness, was something very
different from Victorian self-righteousness or Edwardian money-making.
These latter showed themselves very plainly in the architecture they
brought about. I suppose there has been no such vulgar period in our
whole architectural history as the last fifty years. Individualism ran
riot; restraint of every kind gave way, and our town buildings became
the be-columned and be-swagged, the overdressed and under-mannered
structures we know so well. Our suburbs became either the endless rows
of little grinning puppy-like villas of the poor or the be-gabled
flaunting sham half-timbered pressed-brick houses of the rich. And the
richer we got the worse our buildings became.
Now, thank God, we are all poor again, and what do we find? Everywhere
arising a leaner and cleaner architecture. The Government housing
schemes, whatever they have cost (and it is only fair to say that in the
majority of cases the excessive cost has not been inherent in the
design), show once more the simple cottage buildings of our travels, or
rather ones which exhibit an obvious relation to them. Everyone must
have been struck with the new everyday architecture which has grown up
on the outskirts of all our towns. Architecture and architects have been
brought back to the workman’s cottage. As the workman suffered most by
her neglect in the past, so rightly he is first to welcome her return. I
have not yet noticed that architecture has spread to any great extent to
the £1,500-£2,000 house, except in a few favoured spots. But the owner
of such a house can demand her services if he wants them. He may, of
course, still belong to the pre-war years of vulgar display. Some folk
never learn, even by a European war. The new, lean, straightforward
architecture of our own day, with no fly-blown philacteries of dead
ornament, is growing nevertheless. It is to be seen already in several
of our bigger new buildings. There was a beginning of it in the
cliff-like walls of the Adelphi and Cunard buildings, in Liverpool,
before the war. The great plain wall surfaces of the Bush building in
the Strand, with their even distribution of windows, giving expression
to the building’s total mass rather than to any individual feature, are
in the new manner. So is the fine stark massive block the Ministry of
Pensions has put up at Acton. So will be the new Holt building,
Liverpool, when erected. All these, like the new Government cottages, so
similar to one another in shape, express the increasingly communal
aspect of modern life. Strict economy and steel construction in the case
of the big buildings, strict economy and an appreciation of the value of
light and air in the case of the small buildings, have together led to
simpler, cleaner, more direct structures than our wealthy late Victorian
and Edwardian predecessors could dream of, much less desire. May the
demand for the new architecture continue to grow, and may the Schools of
Architecture prove worthy of the great mission which lies before them!
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XIV.
MODERN AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE.
IN the series of delightful letters Rupert Brooke sent from the States
to the old _Westminster Gazette_ before the war, he placed among
America’s five great achievements her modern architecture. Anyone who
has visited America recently will realise that if magnificent modern
architecture eight or ten years ago was one of the five finest things
she had produced, this architecture has now probably reached the first
place. It is very doubtful whether anything like this could be said of
any other country, and certainly not of our own. With us, the last fifty
years have hardly formed a great architectural epoch. This period may
have been distinguished in literature, both in prose and poetry, but
certainly not in the plastic arts, and least so in architecture. The
last twenty have no doubt seen an advance and the last ten a
proportionately greater one. The revived interest, first in old
furniture and then in old buildings, which has been so remarkable a
feature of these years has begun to react on our new buildings. Clients,
again, have taste and are beginning to exact it from their architects in
even greater measure. But any advance we have made has been nothing to
that made by our so-called transatlantic cousins. Their advance in the
oldest and noblest of the arts has not only been relatively greater than
ours, but their absolute achievement has been immeasurably greater too.
Starting with less good old work at their side—they had little more than
their wooden colonial houses—they have far outstripped us in the general
quality of their new. I say the general quality, for, of course, we have
not been entirely without our modern architects, who as artists have
upheld our ancient faculty of building beautifully, but unfortunately
such artists have been the exception. No one who walks through the City
of London, or along Oxford Street or New Regent Street, could maintain
that the mass of our modern town buildings compares with the few old
ones like Somerset House, or such of Nash’s plaster palaces as still
remain to serve as a standard. On the other hand, anyone who walks down
Fifth Avenue from, say, 30th Street to 70th Street passes block after
block of buildings all modern and mostly built during the last twenty
years, a great number of which are comparable in charm with the Italian
and French palaces which have distantly inspired them. They have the
same dignity and reserve which seems to be a distinguishing
characteristic of most eras but our own. They are scholarly buildings
too, in that there is little detail in them to worry the connoisseur in
the way in which some sudden break in the line of a modern piece of
furniture worries those who know the old. If the general idea of a
Florentine palace is used for the façades of a modern building, as in
University Club, it is used thoroughly and with knowledge; the small
refinements of contrasting textures and mouldings, the massive bulk and
cliff-like walls which go to make up the charm of the original finding
their echo in the modern building. The building is not Florentine in the
basement, Milanese in the middle stories, and Venetian at the top. I
should say that the distinguishing note of modern American architecture
is its scholarship. Thirty years ago some of these new buildings
appeared to the general public to be almost copies of famous European
ones, and the great American architect, McKim, justified this by saying
that as their continent lacked the foundation of fine old buildings,
such as we have got, on which to found their new, he was ready to import
them. But in so saying he did himself an injustice, for his buildings,
such as Tiffany’s, which are nearest to being copies of palaces in the
old world, are really very far from it; while his last and those of his
successors are faithful only to the spirit of the style in which they
are built and not to the letter. Have not some of our own best modern
buildings been produced in this way, such as the Reform Club in Pall
Mall, which is based quite obviously on the Farnese Palace in Rome, but
with a smaller scale to suit the smaller scale of our streets and
buildings?