buildings in general which strike the Englishman when he first sees New
York, Washington, or any of the larger Eastern Cities? I think the very
first thing is their apparent solidity and simplicity. They seem made up
of a few large parts rather than infinite numbers of small parts. If
columns are used they are used boldly as in the Lincoln Memorial or the
Temple of the Scottish rite at Washington, and are, as they should be,
dominating features. If we look, too, at the general mass of an American
building, we see that it is usually of some simple shape such as a
rectangular mass crowned by another rectangular mass or a cube crowned
by a truncated pyramid. Towers, gables, small domes, such as those with
which we are accustomed to ornament so many of our buildings, are
largely absent. The dome, when it is used, is used nobly to express some
great central civic or governmental building like the Capitol of the
State; indeed, in America the dome raised on a drum has almost come to
signify this and nothing else, just as in Italy and France it was
chiefly used to express the cathedral or cathedral-like church. This
simplicity of mass which is so necessary, if a building is to make a
strong impact on the imagination when first seen, is no doubt helped by
the rectangular sites on which most American buildings are built. The
scheme of cutting up the town area into rectangles by streets and
avenues crossing one another at right angles, while it often leads to
monotonous streets which appear to go on endlessly and have no proper
beginning or end, means, however, that most buildings of any size either
occupy a whole town block or have a return face on the cross street.
This at once gives them a solidity of appearance which buildings with
only one front to a street can never have. You notice this particularly
when you first arrive in New York at the Great Central Station, itself a
terminus on a scale of which we have not yet dreamt. You step out into
42nd Street and are surrounded on all sides by great creamy grey masses
of building which are shooting up into the sky all round you. They are
the great new hotels and apartment houses, a fresh one of which arises
every few months in this district. They seem like great solid cliffs of
stone and brick which have been cut with a knife into huge, simple
rectangular blocks. If they were of any fussy shape or covered with
turrets and gables they would be a nightmare. As it is, when once one
has got over the strangeness of their size, one finds them very
dignified. The streets which form the spaces between the blocks are
sufficiently wide for the sun to light up one face, leaving the other in
shadow, so that the full effect of their volume, as the cubist painter
would say, is felt. In these cases, all the architect has to do is to
emphasize their shape by decorating a group of storeys at the ground
floor level to form a base to his wall, and another group at the top to
form a coping leaving the middle portion plain and allowing the endless
windows in it to give texture very much as the bricks with their mortar
joints when properly built do with us. These hotel blocks, though, are
perhaps an extreme example of simple masses. The best high buildings,
however, follow the same scheme, only in this case the rectangle is
stretched upwards till it becomes a square tower or campanile. When so
treated and when it is well separated from other high buildings, the
so-called skyscraper is a thing of great beauty. As an isolated shaft of
white marble running up four or five hundred feet into the air and
crowned at the top with marble balconies and pyramidical roof, like the
campanile of St. Mark’s at Venice, it becomes a thing of intense and
delicate beauty. Such a marble tower is that of the office of the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Madison Square, which alike by
day and night, for it is lit up at night with floods of electric light,
is a romantic and wonderful object to all the central up-town district.
The high buildings at the foot of the island, while they form, as seen
from the river, one of the most thrillingly romantic sights in the
world, outdoing anything Albert Dürer ever imagined, spoil each other
when you see them close at hand by their proximity to one another. They
become a confused mass of buildings, very much in the way a series of
office façades do in the City of London, only here they add to the
tangle a variety of heights. The obvious lesson is that if we are to
adopt in England the high building, which has spread now to many other
towns in America besides New York, and to some in Canada too, we should
insist that where once one high building has been built no other shall
be built within a radius of, say, a quarter of a mile. In this way our
modern business towns would be enlivened with a series of towers which
would catch the eye in all directions, closing vistas and displacing
monotony with romance, while light and air would still circulate.
Washington is a city which is not burdened with the complete square
gridiron plan of other American cities. It is built on the fine scheme
of a French 18th century architect and engineer, named L’Enfant, and has
a number of diagonal streets radiating from the Capitol and other
important points. The result is that in addition to the square blocks
facing the main streets it has many terminal sites on which great public
buildings have been placed, where they can be seen dominating and
closing one or more vistas. Its streets therefore do not wander on
endlessly and aimlessly, but lead from the Capitol to White House or to
the Congressional Library—one of the worst buildings in America—or to
the Great Union Railway Station into which, by a modern improvement, all
railway lines converge. It has, too, the famous Mall, a stretch of grass
and trees many hundred feet wide and a couple of miles long, leading
from the Capitol past the great stark obelisk to Washington—the finest
and simplest monument in the world—to the Greek Doric Hall recently
erected in memory of Lincoln, in which the refinements of Greek marble
architecture live again. Washington, however, is a special city and its
buildings are largely Governmental buildings. In that sense it is not so
typical of American architecture as New York, Chicago, or half a dozen
other places. One may confess that one gets a little tired of its
colonnaded splendours, though it contains one or two of the most
striking modern classical buildings in the world, such as John Russell
Pope’s great and dramatic pile for the Masons of the Scottish rite, and
Paul Cret’s delicate jewel-like building for the South American
Republics.
The same note of simplicity and directness, which is the general
characteristic of the best American buildings in mass and exterior, is
also to be seen in their interiors. A great bank or commercial house
does not have for its accommodation, as so often in England, a series of
small rooms more or less cut off from one another with what is little
more than a waiting space for the public. Instead there is a great open
hall in which is apparently carried on the whole business of the
company. Across a sea of clerks’ heads you can make out in the distance,
only separated from the herd, if at all, by low glass partitions, the
president, the vice-presidents, and the managers of departments. The
result is that a banking hall, for such it is now called, becomes a
great architectural opportunity, which the leading American architects
have been eager to seize upon. But here again the architecture is
reserved and simple if of costly materials. As in their great railway
termini, where no advertisement posters are allowed, the bankers and the
business men generally have realised that a fine and dignified building
is in itself the best advertisement. We are still too content in
England, I think, to carry out our day’s work in office-rooms to which
we would not condemn our servants in our own homes. Perhaps it is some
relic of Puritanism, though I fancy it has more to do with Victorian
self-righteousness, that we seem to take a pride as a nation in working
in uncomfortable conditions. The American on the other hand will live in
a wooden shack or a tiny apartment, but will expect the office, where he
carries out his life’s work and spends most of his waking hours, to
express in some way the dignity of his labour. There is a good deal,
obviously, to be said for his point of view. At any rate, it is one
which appeals to his architect, with the result that we do not find in
America the architectural profession divided into artists who build
houses and surveyors who build offices, as it might roughly be said to
be divided in England. The American architect feels, as no doubt his
English confrère does, that all good building is within his province;
but he differs in this, that over there the best men seem to get the
best of every kind of work to do whether it be ecclesiastical,
commercial or domestic, and by their training, when they get it, seem
equal to carrying it out.
After all, however, it is not the opportunities either of site or money
which make great architecture, but the men who design it. How is it that
the men who create the buildings of America are, on the whole, more
successful in their bigger creations than the men over here? No one can
say of the heterogeneous mass of undigested nationalities, which at
present makes up the great United States, that, like the Greeks of old,
they are a race of artists. Neither in literature nor in painting have
they had the success they have gained in architecture and are beginning
to gain in sculpture. The explanation can only be in the organisation of
their work, and in that term I would include both their methods of
attacking problems as well as their methods of training. Let us take
their methods of attack first. The designing of buildings in America
like most things on that continent seems to gain in efficiency when done
on a large scale. The office of an American architect, when in fair
practice, is a very different affair to the office of a similarly placed
English architect. Fifty to a hundred assistants are no rare thing,
while in most of the big designing groups there are anything up to half
a dozen partners, or, if not so many partners, there are fully fledged
architects who have seats in the office using the office machine, and in
return giving their criticism and assistance when called upon. This and
the fact that in the end everything down to the position of a bell-push
has to be shown on American working drawings, owing to the absence of
the subsidiary profession of quantity surveyors which we have in England
with their strange skill in measuring alterations from the original
drawings, leads to a much greater preliminary study of the building both
as a whole and in detail than is possible to the English architect often
working single-handed or with a couple of assistants. Contrary to what
one might imagine the American architect by his training does not allow
himself to be hustled by his client into making up his mind prematurely,
neither does he in his turn hustle his assistants. He insists on keeping
his design in a fluid state, where everything can be altered, till he is
thoroughly satisfied that he has obtained the right solution to the
problem. To assist him in this he has not only the criticism of his
partners and assistants, but such a library of the world’s architecture
as can rarely be seen in a reference library in England. Where the
English architect, till recently, was content with a few photographs and
plates from illustrated papers, relying on his invention for everything
else, the American architect is sufficiently a scholar in his art to
desire to know before he starts his drawings the best solutions to his
particular problem the world has to offer. In fact, he feels as an
American architect he is the rightful heir to the world’s architecture,
and in his work he expresses this. When he wants to be stately and
imposing, as in his great railway stations, he is Roman in his
architecture; when he wants to express scholarship and refinement, as in
his art galleries and museums, he is Greek or Italian; and when it is
merely the domestic virtues or comforts he is dealing with, he turns for
inspiration to Italian, Spanish, or Georgian prototypes. This may not be
the way to produce great architecture—it obviously is not—but it
produces buildings which, if inoffensive and polite as individuals, in
the mass make suave and elegant cities.
In his training, too, the American architect’s methods have, till the
last fifteen years, equally differed from our own. Firstly, I suppose,
because the profession is a much more lucrative one in America with its
larger commissions and more expensive buildings than it is with us, the
American architect has been willing to spend more money on his
specialised education. More than twenty years ago he gave up the method
of apprenticeship which has come down to us from medieval times and
still lingers among us. Instead he has followed the French in their
system of architectural schools. These schools are now attached to all
the leading Universities, with four-year courses supplemented in many
cases with other scholastic work in Paris and Rome. In England some of
our Universities have started schools of architecture too. There is also
the school in London founded by the younger professional body of
architects, but so far these schools have not had time to influence
current architecture to the extent that the American ones have done. The
mass of practising English architects are still office-trained men with
the specialised and sometimes narrow outlook on their art, which they
have gained from the master under whom they served their apprenticeship.
The result is often charming individual work, especially in domestic
building where the problems to be faced are not of so generalised a
character. But the slightly eccentric and original solution, which may
be pleasant enough in a small country house, becomes an absurdity in a
bank or a municipal building. In such work the general restraint which
knowledge brings is more valuable than the happy inventions of the
individual designer. In our town architecture we have long suffered from
an excess of originality. In the days when there was a generally
accepted tradition, faith in that tradition prevented such blunders. The
days of faith in architecture are past. Unless we are to be content with
ignorance in our buildings knowledge must take its place. In the great
complexity of detailed knowledge required to make a large modern
building the minds of many men must be united. In that direction lies
efficiency in its broadest sense, and in that sense efficiency is
beauty. It therefore seems to me likely that in future we shall revert
again to something like the conditions under which the great Gothic
Cathedrals were built, when the architect, as an individual, was content
to sink himself in the greatness of his work. He lost his soul to find
it in his building. Perhaps the root explanation is that in England our
architects have been a little too anxious about their souls and the
expression due to them, while in America their architects have been
thinking mainly of the greatness of the work they are called on to carry
out.
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XV.
THE CHOICE OF A SMALL COUNTRY HOUSE.
CHOOSING a small country house by the man of average means who can
afford one at all is like choosing a wife. You may lay down beforehand
all kinds of rules you mean to follow—that the lady of your choice will
be blonde and fair, with a placid, broad outlook on life, and you will
almost certainly marry a sparkling brunette, quick, lively and
sympathetic. So with a house. You may think your ideal is some rambling
converted or convertible farmhouse, some picturesque Elizabethan or
Jacobean manor house, and you will end with the primmest of Georgian
proprieties, facing a village green or country high street, but with a
large walled garden behind, where you can be as private and irregular as
you like. You may think open raftered rooms with bare brick
chimneypieces, where you can stalk about in rough country clothes, the
thing you are in search of, and then you, or more probably your wife,
will fall to some set of spacious, sunlit, white-panelled Queen Anne or
Georgian chambers, looking out over trim lawns and well kept hedges. Or
you may find something that does not fall into either category,
picturesque or formal, but by a combination of both absolutely bewitches
you and drives all preconceived ideas to the winds; indeed, a house of
this kind generally does unless you are an absolute formalist and
pedant. There is something so very lovable in the marks of time, not
only the minor ones, such as floors slightly out of level, cornices
softened with the colour-washes of generations, but the major ones which
represent distinct past eras. The Jacobean house which has had parts of
it Georgianised carries with it the same history with which we ourselves
have been built up. It has, perhaps, its central hall with stone floor
and oak beams and great chimney-piece with rude carving over it,
answering to the rougher barbaric instincts which are deep in all of us;
and it has its Georgian rooms with their refined cornices and fireplaces
and long elegant windows calling for curtains of brocade or other fine
material. In these latter we can cast aside our thick boots and tweeds
and become civilised, urbane and even slightly cynical. In such a house,
therefore, we have rooms for various moods, corresponding not only to
the strata of our external civilisation but to the strata within us. In
some modern houses such things have been consciously attempted, but
their failure is generally complete. You may wear fancy dress for a
night, but you cannot, if you are an ordinary mortal, endure it for a
week. Affected age in a modern house is something of that sort, and it
becomes worse when it is an affectation not of one age, but of several.
No, a modern house needs unity; our grandchildren are the only people
who can break that unity successfully, because they will break in answer
to some new and real need not yet experienced by us.
Let us assume in this search for a small country house that it is no
marriage of convenience we desire. We are not tied, that is to say, to a
railway station, but with the help of a small car can reach a convenient
line when we want to go to town or to fetch our friends. Obviously, the
advent of the motor car has enormously increased the area of our choice.
We can now live in real country even if we have to go to town four or
five times a week. If London is our centre, we can get as far afield as
the Cotswolds, South Downs or the remoter parts of Essex. We can
therefore let our choice of a house range over modelled stone houses,
warm brick ones or those of wood and plaster. We may even, if we are
particularly interested in refined proportions, restraint and elegance
of detail, consider Regency and early Victorian stucco. In this latter
case, however, we must be prepared for a quinquennial paint bill, but we
shall have other compensations, not least in the original price, for
such houses are not yet popular. It will be noticed that I am ruling out
of our purview all absolutely modern houses, say, those of the last
sixty years or so. The reason is that you cannot generalise about such
buildings. You may find one to fit your individual taste just as well as
if you had instructed your architect to design it. But the chances are
against it for many reasons, chief among which is that the last
half-century has been a time of excessive individualism. To find,
therefore, an entirely satisfactory modern house that will not only fit
your material needs, but satisfy your spiritual ones too,—which is a
much more difficult but far more important matter for real happiness—is
highly improbable. I do not mean to say that there are not hundreds of
beautiful modern houses by Lutyens, Newton, Norman Shaw and their
followers, but each was designed for a particular client and in a
particular way, which older houses, as far as we can tell, were not. In
the days of a solid architectural tradition there were certain methods
of planning, certain methods of decoration from which no one thought of
departing. After the entire break-up of such traditions in the middle of
last century even the best architects and their clients sought for
individual solutions to problems and individual methods of expression.
Those who did not went on building the coarse Victorian houses we see in
all our suburbs. Obviously, these are out of the question. One would
sooner not live in the country at all than live in a suburban country
house, thereby preserving a blot on the countryside. But to return to
the good modern country house built by a good architect. You may say,
Why not buy that? What could be better? The construction is probably
sound, the drains and water supply all good, and the roof not likely to
be a source of expense for upkeep. I can only reply by comparing such a
house with other people’s clothes. You might find a suit of someone
else’s, or a ready-made one, which absolutely fitted you. It is
unlikely; but, even if you did, you would be wearing borrowed plumes.
Your distinction—and with a modern house, built for someone else, you
could not escape a certain prominence—would be that someone else’s. With
an old house, however modernised in its unessentials—unessential except
from the housewife’s point of view—you make no pretence that you are
more than a life tenant. You are merely the custodian and preserver of a
beautiful thing you intend to hand on in the same or in a better state
than you received it. Build a beautiful modern house by all means, and
by so doing add to the real wealth of the nation. That is a very
different proposition. Do it, though, with humility, as a man chooses a
suit, not as a woman chooses a dress. Make it something reserved and
quiet, answering not only to your special needs, but to the general ones
of our time. Make it fit the landscape and adhere to the type of
building traditional to the countryside. Do not introduce brick and
tiles into a stone and slate neighbourhood, or _vice versa_. If you do,
you will probably have to pay for your rashness in hard cash. I know a
neighbourhood in Essex where in the heat of the summer all the modern
brick buildings on the shrinking clay soil crack, whereas the old wood
and plaster ones float on the moving ground like ships and remain
intact.
If you are about to buy an old house, however, there are certain points,
rather obvious perhaps, which may be worth recalling.
First there is the question of the site, and in this, of course, one has
not the same freedom of choice as in a new house. For one thing, our
ancestors especially those who lived before the romantic movement, had
not the desire for extensive views from their windows that is
characteristic of to-day. The sites they chose were usually sheltered
ones, often in positive hollows. No doubt, access to roads, themselves
less numerous than now, had something to do with this, but it was a
question of temperament too. In Georgian times for the smaller houses
they seemed to prefer seclusion and privacy on one side of the house
even when they made a bold front to the road or village green on the
other. I suppose if they wanted a view they climbed a neighbouring hill
to get it. There is something, I think, to be said for this, especially
if the view is over the sea or a wide estuary. Such a view continually
before the eyes is apt to be depressing. A wide view is all very well in
a holiday resort as a contrast to the shelter of one’s walled garden at
home. To live on the mountain tops all the time, however, is too
strenuous for most mortals. We are not all poets and seers who can look
eternity in the face every hour of the day. There may, therefore, have
been a certain wisdom in the builders of old houses in sheltered
situations, an intuitive knowledge of psychology if not of hygiene. This
being so, it is all the more necessary to make sure, not only that the
house is dry or can be made so, but that the site itself does not exhale
vapours. It is not pleasant when November comes to find each night and
morning the chimneys of one’s house poking out of a cloud of mist while
the rising ground on either side is free. Such mists, however, are not
generally to be found above a chalk or gravel soil unless they come from
the sea. With clay and loam the matter is different, and it is well,
then, to make further enquiries if the house of one’s desire happens to
be in a hollow.
The dryness of the structure is a different matter. Most old houses were
built without damp-proof courses—I think an early nineteenth-century
invention. These are layers of slates and cement or asphalt or other
impervious material placed in the walls just above ground level to
prevent the damp from the ground rising through the foundations into the
walls above. Such things can be inserted yard by yard at a time, but it
is an expensive proceeding. If damp courses do not exist and are too
costly to put in, it is all the more necessary to see that the subsoil
is a dry one, such as gravel, sand or rock. A flagged basement assists
in keeping a house dry if it is dry in itself. If, however, it acts as a
sump or drain-pit for the surrounding soil, it, of course, makes matters
worse confounded, because it ensures damp even in dry weather. Some of
the driest houses are the old timber-constructed ones; if such had been
damp their timbers would have rotted away long ago. They, however, if
not damp are rather apt to be cold in winter and warm in summer, in
spite of the cavity in their walls. The inner and outer coats of lath
and plaster or weather-boarding are not really sufficiently thick for
comfort. Such houses, therefore, need more heating than those with
substantial brick or stone walls.
Let us now consider the walls a little. In most old houses they are
strong and substantial. They may, however, have been neglected.
Rain-pipes may have been left unrepaired, and frost may have entered and
disintegrated the mortar. This, however, is not a very serious matter. A
little re-pointing will set it right if it has not gone far. What is
more necessary is to look at the state of timbers built into the walls.
In most old houses these are plentiful both as wall plates and ties.
There are two chief dangers connected with them—worm and dry rot. Either
will turn them to powder or to a frail semblance of themselves about to
fall to powder. In both cases there is nothing to be done but to replace
them. Dry rot, however, is not a usual complaint of old houses. It is
much more often found in new. It comes not so much from damp as from bad
ventilation. A wood floor laid on concrete which has had linoleum on top
of it so that the wood is effectually smothered both above and below is
the sort of place where it starts. Unfortunately, once it starts it
spreads very quickly. Old houses by their age, therefore, generally show
themselves proof against it. Worm in the timbers is the reverse. This
works more slowly, and is to be found in the hard woods of old houses as
well as the softer ones of new. As in chairs, a little dust like sawdust
is the proof of its presence. Palliatives may be tried, but for the sake
of one’s furniture, if for nothing else, it is better to take the
timbers out.