maintenance, than the walls. Roughly speaking, the order of covering
materials in cost of upkeep would be thatch, most expensive of all, and
only suitable to quite small houses, then stone-slates, tiles and, last
of all, slates. But more important than the material covering is the
construction. Look to see whether there are internal valleys and flats
where snow and leaves can collect and check the flow of water till it
penetrates. The less of such gutters and flats the better. When they
exist they should be of lead, as indeed, they usually are in any decent
house. Repairs, however, in these hard times may have been done in zinc,
and zinc has a very short life in our climate. If the roof is of tiles,
it should have been boarded over the rafters and under the tiles.
Generally speaking, the steeper the roof, except in a very exposed
situation, where the wind can blow the covering off, the sounder it is
likely to be, for, of course, the water runs off more quickly. The
slope, however is determined by the style of the house, and the
materials by the slope. Slate, for instance, is quite safely laid at a
much less steep slope than tiles, thatch or split stones. Being a truer
material it lies closer. An over-all roof in two or four plain slopes
with no breaks in it is, whatever the material, the safest form. The
water is then shot everywhere into gutters clear of the walls or into a
simple lead trough behind a parapet. There are then no internal and
half-hidden gutters to leak and pour water down the centre of the house.
Indeed, it may be laid down as a general axiom that simplicity of mass
and form, given equally good construction, means cheapness of upkeep. A
simple cube or rectangular mass with a plain roof hipped all round with
no gables or dormers would be the most compact and cheapest of shapes,
not only to build, but to maintain. Such things, however, are obvious.
Let us now consider the internal arrangements.
The first question in these semi-servantless days is whether the old
house of one’s choice can be adapted to the restricted post-war service
which is all that most of us can afford. It behoves one, therefore, to
see whether the rooms can be so rearranged, without expensive
alterations, that the kitchen is not only reduced to a reasonable size,
but is sufficiently near the dining-room. Generally the spacious old
kitchen, with its flagged floor, its stretch of cooking apparatus down
one whole side, with open range, hot plates, ovens and boilers, had
better be abandoned. Sometimes it will make a billiard-room later and
sometimes even a garage. Perhaps the old pantry or scullery can be
turned into a modern kitchen. The point is that in any case you will
need new cooking apparatus on a reduced scale, but with greater
efficiency. The expense is when you have to build a new room for it.
See, therefore, whether you can avoid doing this by a readjustment of
function in the various rooms. The ideal arrangement, both in a new and
old house, is a small pantry between the dining-room and the kitchen
with the service through it. The pantry so placed acts as a buffer to
noise and smell from the kitchen, and yet is handy for setting things
down. However do not spoil a vista or some real architectural feature by
giving up a good sitting-room to a modern kitchen. If you love the
beauties of your house you can often pay too dearly for conveniences.
The same remark applies to baths. You will probably have to find extra
space for them, but it is obviously a sacrifice to give up to one a good
bedroom on the main front. With modern plumbing, in which the bath water
is at once taken outside the house and discharged in the open into a
rainwater-head, there is, in my opinion, no objection to a small bath in
each bedroom provided a suitable recess or space can be found for it.
The small American deep tub bath in which one can sit with the water
over one’s shoulders, but not lie full length, takes little space and
gets over many difficulties of placing. The safe general rule on all
these questions of adapting an old house to the conditions of to-day is
to see whether for kitchen, motor car or baths one can install the new
requirements without rebuilding or serious additions. On every ground
that is the safe proceeding, whether to preserve character, to avoid the
clash of old work with new, or merely to save outlay.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVI.
WREN AS A BAROQUE ARCHITECT.
WHAT is the quality in Wren’s work which gives it the very human appeal
it undoubtedly possesses? How is it different in this respect to the
work of Inigo Jones? Why do we all in our hearts love any of the façades
of St. Paul’s better than that of the Banqueting Hall, or, if that is to
compare things that are incommensurable, what is the quality in Trinity
Library, Cambridge, which endears it to us, while, as we pass down
Whitehall, we view the Inigo Jones building with respect and admiration,
but hardly with any sense of deep affection? We may even breathe a sigh
of thankfulness that we did not have the mile or two more of it Jones
intended.
It is an interesting problem, and one I think worth a little
consideration. Twenty years ago, when Belcher and Macartney’s “Later
Renaissance” was issued, Wren’s work appeared the final word in
architecture. No one challenged it except the Gothicists. Gradually,
however, the younger architects discovered architecture had not stood
still since the 17th century. Each of us pushed our enthusiasm a little
further, some pinned their faith to Chambers, some to Robert Adam. Some
even went as far as measuring Cockerell and Elmes and the later Greek
work. Finally there appeared Professor Richardson’s “Monumental
classical Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland,” and at last we
thought we saw the whole thing in perspective. All the time, however,
there were very vital folk like Sir Edwin Lutyens and E. A. Rickards who
stuck to Wren. The former is even reported to have said that the English
Renaissance ought to have been spelt the English Wren-naissance. So
to-day, especially with Wren bicentenary just past, we are all beginning
to cast our eyes back to the great 17th century master and find that,
incorrect as a great deal of his work was according to all the rules of
the game—coarse as a great deal of his detail undoubtedly is, with
faults of taste and inconsistencies of scale—there was something very
rotund, full-blooded, almost Falstaffian, in the mass of his work, which
makes us give him an affection we give no other. In comparison the work
of the later men, especially of the Neo-Grec ones, seems hard, even
spikey. It is all very well for the historians to tell us of Wren’s
mathematical genius and the consequent sublimity of his conceptions.
That, I beg leave to say as regards his architecture, with the possible
exception of Greenwich, is what is vulgarly called ‘eye-wash.’ The dome
of St. Paul’s is a paltry affair compared to the dome of St. Peter’s and
only insular prejudice would say otherwise. Its tricks of construction
are no doubt evidence of mechanical ability, but such are not
architecture. Internally with its muddle of unequal supporting arches or
externally with its tight unmodelled surface it is very inferior to its
great prototype. Yet the lovable quality of the work remains especially
in that nearer the eye. Think of the Dean’s doorway under the great
recessed arch of the window on the side of the North tower, or that
other lovable doorway, with its oval window and fat cherubs also under a
recessed arch in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow. What comfortable happy
invention! What richly curved surfaces; what cheery display, designed,
one may be sure, with sheer enjoyment.
In a very obvious sense all Wren’s architecture is civil architecture,
his cathedral and churches not less than the rest. He built in an age of
humanism, when paganism was no longer feared. As Miss Milman has wisely
said in her life of Wren, a church with him “would differ from a court
of kings only in being more full of splendour.” This was the renaissance
spirit, but it was the spirit more particularly of the baroque period
when, freed from the rules, though remaining masters of them, men built
for sheer swagger. It was in this spirit the Jesuit Churches of the
counter-Reformation were built. Knowing human nature, those wise men
chose a style for their sacred edifices full of dramatic human appeal.
So did Wren, as far as he knew and could. I venture to suggest that it
was because he had in himself a large share of this baroque spirit, this
happy posturing, and not because he was a scholar and a
mathematician—rather because he broke the rules instead of following
them, because in essence he was not a Palladian like the majority of
English architects—that he is loved to-day not only by architects, but
by the great mass of the people as no other architect has ever been. I
realise that in attaching the term “baroque” to Wren I am running the
risk of libelling him in the minds of many. That is because of the
unfortunate ill-odour which nowadays hangs to the word. The baroque is
synonymous with decadence we are generally told. Indeed the ordinary
text-books, like Anderson’s “Italian Renaissance,” either treat the
great parent baroque work in Italy with a few contemptuous remarks, or
leave it alone entirely. Yet one can hardly label as decadent a style
which covered Italy with the most vigorous buildings it possesses, which
gave the colonnade and baldacchino to St. Peter’s, which planted the
superb mass of Santa Maria della Salute at the end of the great sweep of
the Grand Canal—to mention but two examples.
What is the real function and intent of baroque architecture? Geoffrey
Scott defines it very well—“to give the picturesque its grandest scope
and yet to subdue it to architectural law.” “The baroque is not afraid
to startle and arrest.” “It enlarged the classic formula by developing
within it the principle of movement. But the movement is logical; it is
logical as an æsthetic construction, even when it most neglects the
logic of material construction. It insisted on coherent purpose, and its
greatest extravagances of design were neither unconsidered nor
inconsistent. It intellectualised the picturesque.” Baroque buildings,
he goes on to say in effect, may do all the above, “yet their last and
permanent impression is of a broad serenity; for they have that baroque
assurance which even baroque convulsion cannot rob of its repose. They
are fit for permanence: for they have that massive finality of thought,
which, when we live beside them, we do not question, but accept.”
Now I do not want to suggest that the full baroque spirit is to be found
in Wren’s work. It is obviously much too staid and too English for that.
But I do think that there is more of it there than we have been
accustomed to realise and that it is because it is there, giving
vitality and humanity to his architecture, we return with more affection
to his work than we do to that of either Inigo Jones, his more academic
predecessor, or to any of his Palladian successors. To my mind it was
very fortunate that instead of going to Vicenza, as Jones did, Wren
escaped not only the plague by going to Paris, but went there at the
very time the great Bernini visited that city. One can imagine that
these two men, both so energetic, vigorous and long-lived, both to
accomplish a prodigious amount of work in their lives, would be very
much of the same kidney. The influence of the elder, at the height of
his fame and treated as a prince by the French, on the young Englishman,
who till then had built but one or two small structures, who came
seeking information in every direction, was very likely immense. If one
looks for similarities of thought in design in Wren’s later work with
that of Bernini, they are not difficult to find. The great doorways of
the Chigi Palace are echoed in those of the river front of Trinity
Library, while the altar-piece of the Chapel of Chelsea Hospital might
have been designed by Bernini himself. It has the same sumptuousness,
the same great scale, and the same use of coupled columns. In the All
Souls’ collection of Wren drawings there is, too, a design for a
monument, with twisted columns covered with garlands, a sun-burst,
gesticulating angels and fat descending cupids—all in the best baroque
manner. This latter however is an extreme example, only quoted to show
Wren’s knowledge of baroque detail. It is when Wren is most like Bernini
in his decoration and less like the contemporary French artists, with
their insistence on free foliage and asymmetrical ornament, that he is
most satisfactory. The altar-piece at Chelsea is infinitely superior to
the more often quoted one at Trinity College, Oxford, where indeed the
baroque may almost be said to sink into the rococo.
“To give the picturesque its grandest scope and yet subdue it to
architectural law”—what better description could we have of Wren’s
towers? “The baroque is not afraid to startle and arrest.” Think of the
sturdy chapel of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, swaggering with its big
Corinthian order, its boldly broken pediment and its upstanding cupola,
among the timidities of Tudor Gothic. “It enlarged the classic formula
by developing within it the principle of movement.” Think of the barrel
vaults and saucer domes in the chapels and aisles of St. Paul’s or the
gay little Temple Bar neatly striding across the Strand. “Baroque
buildings are fit for permanence. They have a massive finality of
thought.” Trinity Library has just this quality in supreme degree. Its
last and permanent impression is indeed of a broad serenity, which the
back elevation to the river possesses in an even greater extent than the
courtyard front. But other buildings can be serene beside baroque ones.
The point is that this building of Wren’s has the rich modelling, the
warm vital spirit which in classical architecture is the peculiar
quality of the baroque and the baroque alone. All we know of the man
himself bears out this view of his architecture. In a pedantic age he
was no pedant. He had the enquiring mind so characteristic of the 17th
century, which sought new knowledge in every direction, leaving it to be
tabulated and scheduled by the colder and more precise 18th century. We
have preserved in the Parentalia several of his exuberant letters,
including one charming love-letter to the lady who was his first wife.
We know that like Michael Angelo he worked till he was nearly ninety,
compressing an immense amount of labour into his later years, and that
like him, too, his fiery spirit could not brook opposition. The list of
his executed works compares to-day in extent with that of a great
American architect, but to superintend that work he had to travel many
dreary days on horse back. He must have been a man of magnificent
physique and we know that he had a gay happy spirit. All who met him
delighted in his wit. His friends were legion. He knew everyone worth
knowing and had achieved fame in other walks in life before he began his
proper work. He was an honorary doctor both of Oxford and Cambridge
before he became an architect. It is difficult to imagine such a man
blindly following Vitruvius Palladio, Serlio, or any other theorist. He
might, and no doubt did, confound the ignorant by quoting them; but in
his own practice I feel confident he relied on his own innate genius for
expressive form, and that genius led him towards those self-confident
happy, almost swaggering, shapes we now in their fulness call baroque.
It is in his combination of such forms with the more sober methods of
English buildings that the great lovableness of his work lies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVII.
THE ANTI-SOCIAL CONTRACT.
ONE of the troubles in obtaining good buildings to-day, as everyone who
has tried in the capacity either as owner, architect or builder must
realise, lies firstly in the system of asking for competing tenders from
builders, and secondly in tying down the lowest tenderer to carry out
the work under a strict and binding legal contract. We look on the
builder as a contractor and call him such. His chief function in modern
eyes is to undertake to do a carefully specified piece of building for a
fixed sum. His profit is not specified and he is free to make as much as
he likes out of his operations as long as he carries out the specified
work in the specified way. The real difficulty is that by no manner of
means yet devised can the work be specified beforehand with absolute
accuracy, nor has any means yet been discovered by which, in all the
multifarious processes of building, it can be ascertained whether what
has been specified has been actually carried out. We may make drawings
as complete and thorough as is humanly possible; we may write long
specifications and have the number of bricks, and the amount of all
other material and labour to be used, assessed beforehand by a quantity
surveyor, yet quality of material and workmanship enters so largely into
every stage that no one can definitely say at the end that the contract
has been carried out to the letter. Further, we may appoint
clerks-of-work and other watch-dogs to follow the contractor at every
step on the building itself, or rather to attempt it, and yet we may be
fooled by work made off the site and brought to it, or by work done on
the job and covered up before the architect or any of his agents,
including the clerk-of-works, can see it.
The contract system of building means that directly the contract is
signed, the architect, representing the interests of his client, and the
contractor are there watching one another like rival detectives in a
divorce case. The contractor to obtain the contract has probably put in
too low a price. Everywhere in material and labour he is anxious to save
except where he can find, as in practice he always can, excuse in the
specifications and drawings for extras, when he is equally anxious to
spend unnecessary money. I do not want to suggest that the majority of
builders are not honest. Without any dishonesty in carrying out a
contract, which he knows will be strictly enforced against him, the
builder uses his wits to make the best living he can. If he has done a
good deal of work for the same architect he may take a long view and say
“I had better not do such and such a thing, because if discovered this
particular architect will not ask me to tender for his work again.” I
admit this often happens and to a certain extent the rigours of the
contract system are thereby tempered. But who, outside a lunatic asylum,
under such a system and under modern conditions, would expect good
craftsmanship to flourish and good sound building to arise? That it does
flourish now and then, and that good sound buildings are put up
occasionally is a miracle, which I, as an architect, can only put down
to some strange innate goodness in the breasts of many builders. I am
afraid this goodness is chiefly to be found in those who are styled
old-fashioned, in firms that have a tradition and in craftsmen who love
their work, whatever they may in a monetary sense make from it.
But why should this state of affairs exist? Why should the builder be on
one side and the architect on the other? Why should they not be
colleagues from first to last, each helping the other with his
experience? The answer is that this happy state of affairs can only take
place to the benefit of everyone concerned, and particularly of the
building owner, if the ordinary contract based on cut-throat tendering
is abolished. By far the most satisfactory work it has been my lot to
carry out, as well as the most enjoyable, has been that done under a
different system—a system of actual cost plus a fixed profit. In this,
to begin with, a careful estimate is made by independent quantity
surveyors of the cost of the proposed work, and both the builder and the
architect’s remuneration is fixed from the outset. If the building costs
more than the estimate, neither profits by the excess. Of course the
architect’s commission of six per cent. is so small that it cannot be
considered any temptation to him to increase the cost of the building
for the sake of it. Still it is more satisfactory, as an example to
everyone, and more pleasant for the owner, to know exactly what he is
going to pay each person.
What is the result? Everyone starts on the building operations as
friends and helpers. In place of antagonistic individual effort you have
team work. The larger experience of materials, which the average builder
who works for many architects possesses, is placed at the architect’s
and consequently at the client’s disposal. If he suggests red deal
instead of yellow for a certain piece of work the architect has no
reason to suppose he has some hidden motive behind his suggestion. Under
the present system the architect is wont to jump to the conclusion that
the yellow must be the better, because the builder has suggested the
red, and, if the yellow is in the contract, he will insist on it till
all is blue, and if the contractor makes a loss, he will take care to
make it good elsewhere. And after all, the red might have been better
for the particular position. We all know, however, even as free-traders,
that the desire to buy in the cheapest market has many qualifications.
Among them is human nature, and there is a great deal of human nature in
building, and especially in good building. If when we set out to build
we want real value for our money, as well as buildings which will be of
real value to the country when we have done with them, the sooner we
abolish the ordinary form of building contract the better. That is why I
have called it the Anti-Social Contract.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVIII.
AN INDICTMENT OF COAL SMOKE.
A LARGE northern city without smoke, or indeed any English town where
human beings for business reasons have to live in close proximity, is a
little difficult to conceive. If it came about suddenly we who live in
such places might feel not a little naked and awkward, so accustomed are
we to our own dirt. We are apt, indeed, to think that dirt and dignity
go hand in hand. A poet friend of mine, who had gone to live in Leeds,
told me that one day on visiting his bank in that city, instead of
finding it the massive gloomy black pile he expected, it stood out
before him as a trifling white building in glazed terra-cotta lately
washed. All its dignity and half its financial credit in his eyes had
gone. Such it is to be suddenly clean in black surroundings; where
before the crudeness of the architecture had been decently covered in
soot it now stood forth unashamed in all its absurdity. It was a test
the Leeds bank building could not stand, and it is one very few of our
more modern classical buildings could. To them the smoke deposit is a
grateful one, softening their crudities.
Manchester, however, has lately been cleaning, with the aid of a
sandblast, some of her older classical buildings dating from a pre-smoke
era, and these have stood the test nobly. The Theatre Royal is a good
example. From this one might argue, and I think with some fairness, that
as the pall over our towns has become heavier so our architecture has
deteriorated. I think it is really a case of cause and effect, though
admittedly other things aided in the decline. What is the use of Greek
delicacy and refinement in mouldings and ornament when an oily black
deposit will very quickly obliterate them and, as has been proved time
after time, in a few short decades crumble them away? The good architect
is likely to give up hope, and devote himself to clean buildings in the
country, where not only mouldings but even texture counts. So we have in
our smoky English towns our heavy over-ornamented buildings trying by
over-emphasis in every direction to force their way through the grime,
and in a clean smokeless town, like New York, light gay buildings with
clean line and surface and delicate ornament leaping up to the light and
trusting to their general shape and mass for their main effect. The
sunny city brings about bright clean-shaven buildings, the smoky one
be-whiskered coalheavers grinning at us in their oily facetiousness.