Sir C. H. Reilly

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I feel a worm when I first enter the building, but I always come out of it with a feeling of great happiness and exaltation. One cannot explain a great work of art as I feel this interior to be. It must make its own blow upon the mind. Such an interior as this must succeed or fail with the first impression. One may find all kinds of additional beauties later on, but an interior, however vast, must compose into one great whole. There is no doubt this does. The exterior will when we see the tower. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I know no clubs in any town so spacious, so reposeful, so dignified and so pleasant. I imagine, the human spirit tired of endless competition and the unceasing striving of the individual to assert himself, instinctively makes a refuge where communism in the arts of living reaches its highest point. Some of the best Clubs are in Fifth Avenue or just off it. When one has had an overdose of the street they are the only restoratives. ”

“ It is not only the vast scale of the street as measured by its width, which seems enormous when one looks at the sea of traffic, but which seems narrow when one looks at the towering buildings, nor the beauty of those buildings or the delicacy of their detail that give Fifth Avenue its peculiar character and interest. Without the great masses of well-dressed men and women which crowd its wide pavements all day long it would seem dull and heavy. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 90romantic 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. ”

“ The old cathedrals have endless beauties of construction, of craftsmanship, and, one must add, of accident. Liverpool Cathedral has an intellectual beauty of its own, due, I suppose, to its being the design of one man, who has felt intensely and constructed fearlessly, and who all the while has had a clear grip of his ultimate intentions, however much from time to time he may have varied his approach to them. I do not want, however, to suggest for a moment that there is any intellectual or logical coldness about the Cathedral interior. ”

“ The spaces between buildings are wider, and there is little bond of corporate union to be expressed. In the depths of his own domain every Englishman feels he can do what he likes, though in other matters he is even there a sufficient stickler for good form. “Good form” in every sense of the term is what is needed more than anything else to-day in civic building. The old words, “civil architecture,” express exactly what is desirable. Our town buildings should pay a conscious tribute to our civilisation instead of being merely an unconscious revelation of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At night, Broadway with its exaggerated Earl’s Court effects, its great drawings in electric light high up against the sky of giant motor cars, pyjama-clad men and women, appearing and disappearing, is so fantastic and absurd, and withall so thrilling, that for a few hours round about midnight it displaces the other thoroughfare, not only for the careless multitude, but for the serious person, too, if such there be when he or she has once trodden its stones. ”

“ All life is drama, and if this building had none it would be dead instead of the living and vital thing it is. Notice how nobly, yet dramatically, the bishop’s throne stands up out of the gloom behind 199it, or how the single great central mullion in the transept windows dramatically closes the vista, but notice most of all the play of light and shade in the chancel from the hidden windows in the aisles. ”

“ Who is impressed by their combined red brick and stone cinema-architecture? But no one fails to be impressed by the vast, simple Roman architecture of the New York stations or the great triple arched façade of the Union Station at Washington.
The Americans believe in architecture; they know its value at its best as both the most abstract and at the same time the most powerful form of human expression, and their railway magnates have the sense to make use of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it ever fulfils its owners’ conception and becomes a great depository of current articles of commerce, it will stand out to the world as such a depository. The man in the street will easily recognise it as such. There is rightly more than a touch of the warehouse character in it. The architect seems to me, therefore, to have solved that side of the problem better even in London than he has in New York. The New York building is a more obvious advertisement. Its tower is simply a beckoning finger. No one would expect a graceful Gothic tower to be a storehouse of samples. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By making too his building ultimately a perfectly symmetrical structure, he has given his Gothic structure a monumental character which will be a further distinguishing mark. We all know how the Gothic cathedrals, particularly in France, rise as great piles of masonry and glass above the roofs of the town. We know, too, however, that unless we are looking straight at the west end, with its symmetrical composition, how ill-balanced they often appear; the strong square towers at one end and rounded chancel at the other shored up on every side by an intricacy of flying buttresses. ”

“ As you look now towards the altar and see the great piers rising majestically on either side and the dim spaces between them, so deep and lofty that the atmosphere and the stone seem to take on a bluish tone, when, too, you look at the vaulting growing out of the great arches 197and piers, with no intricacies of a triforium gallery to break the lines, you feel you are in some great organic structure that has grown to its inevitable shape by some law of its own being. ”

“ Architecture, then, for some obscure reason, although she is the ancient mother of the plastic arts, and the one from whose embraces none of us can escape, herself escapes criticism. No one writes to the papers to say what a vulgar and pretentious building the new War Office is, or how badly Mr. Selfridge’s great block is behaving both to its neighbours and, indeed, to the whole town by its arrogant bearing. ”

“ What Manchester or Leeds would be like in a few years’ time for an architect to work in if the tons of tarry acids and soot from their domestic chimneys—the chief offenders—went down the sewers, as such refuse should as long as it remains refuse, instead of falling on our heads and our buildings, is difficult to imagine. They would, one may be sure, be towns of peculiar beauty, a beauty, too, very different to that of the sunny towns of the Mediterranean. ”