English architecture

“ There are two views as to English architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, it is held that in the days of Elizabeth architectural design shows a freshness, vivacity, and originality which express the genius of the time, and result in a truly national style, albeit one which never quite fulfilled its promise; and that in later periods designers became more and more imitative, and thereby lost from their [vi] work, however correct and refined, those qualities which make for supreme achievement. ”

“ And now that we have pointed out the kind of approach most peculiarly English, that approach will guide us to the only style of villa architecture which can be called English,—the Elizabethan, and its varieties; a style fantastic in its details, and capable of being subjected to no rule, but, as we think, well adapted for the scenery in which it arose. We allude not only to the pure Elizabethan, but even to the strange mixtures of classical ornaments with Gothic forms, which we find prevailing in the sixteenth century. ”

“ The true developments we have to look for are such as will be continually forced upon us by the necessities of new materials, new modes of construction, new requirements, and the altered habits and feelings of the age in which we are living; by the different modes of decoration which will from time to time offer themselves to our notice, and the importing into English architecture arts which had previously been peculiar to that of other countries and perhaps to wholly different styles. ”

“ Our architecture, for example, took five hundred years to develop out of the splendid Norman through the various transitions of Gothic down to the perfection of the English country house in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. If church architecture was decaying, domestic architecture was improving. Architecture is, of course, the first and most important of all the arts, and when the human intellect is being used up for some other purpose there is a temporary cessation; there is never any decay of architecture. ”

“ And in like manner it does not matter one marble splinter whether we have an old or new architecture, but it matters everything whether we have an architecture truly so called or not; that is, whether an architecture whose laws might be taught at our schools from Cornwall to Northumberland, as we teach English spelling and English grammar, or an architecture which is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or a parish school. ”

“ Strictly speaking, there is no English architecture at all, only foreign architecture adapted and domesticated in England. But how thoroughly and admirably domesticated I How entirely transmuted inwardly from the classic tragic monumental thing it was, into something which, even if in abstract design it seems unchanged, has a new expression, a new scale, a new subordination of part to part, and as it were a new circulation of the blood within it! It has all been made to bend and to cling like ivy round the inner man ”

“ It is a costly building, a refined and thought-out design; and yet one cannot say that there is anything of the past in it more than this—that it is based upon the spirit and taste of the Renaissance rather than upon that of the classic epoch, or of the mediæval epoch, early or late, or of the Post-Renaissance epoch, beginning in the North about 1650. This relative independence{206} is what the foreigner sees most strongly in modern English architectural practice. ”

“ The building, a triumphal arch flanked by pavilions, forming the entry to the processional road from Whitehall, is a dignified design.
In France, still the leading artistic nation of the world, the art of architecture has been in a most flourishing and most active state in the most recent period. It is true that there is not the same variety as in modern English architecture, nor have there been the same discussions and Recent French architecture.experiments in regard to the true aim and course of architecture which have excited so much interest in England ”

“ It can hardly, however, be called an architectural style; it would have no right to figure in any work illustrating the great architectural styles of the world. It was, in fact, the last dying phase of the English Renaissance; the architecture of the classic order reduced to a threadbare condition, treated very simply and in plain materials, in many cases shorn of its columnar features, and reflecting faithfully enough the prim rationalistic taste in literature and art of the England of the 18th century. ”

“ In establishing that outpost in the New World, which was to become the first permanent English settlement on this side of the Atlantic, as well as the beginning of the British Empire—now the Commonwealth,—they brought with them a knowledge of, and skill in, English architecture. At that time, the beginning of the seventeenth century, architecture in Britain had reached a very high level of culture—witness the great minsters, like Lincoln and York, or the great castles, like Windsor and Hampton Court. ”

“ Gothic architecture was so marvellously adaptable that all these parts, built at widely different times, at various and strongly-contrasted stages of the development of this English mediæval architecture, together make a single building that appears to possess the most felicitous unity of general design and a perfectly wonderful diversity of sectional design, for every part is in complete sympathy with the scheme as a whole. ”

“ The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries all saw a great growth in architecture; they were the Early English, the Decorated, and the Perpendicular Periods of architecture. In most of the old churches, and in many of the old mansions, we have specimens of all these periods; but not very many of the town houses founded in the Middle Ages, and still standing, are much earlier than the fifteenth century. In that age there was a great development of woodwork, and there is hardly one old town which has not some woodwork of that time in some of its old houses. ”

“ English innovations in decorative art of the eighties and nineties are accepted by most historians as providing one of the most important immediate sources of the Art Nouveau, [357] and English architecture and architectural theory of the later decades of the nineteenth century certainly offered a generic stimulus to Europeans between 1890 and 1910 that was of vital consequence to subsequent developments. ”

“ English houses have so long established themselves in the forefront of domestic architecture that the distinctive qualities which they exhibit need not be enlarged upon; no houses excel them for quiet dignity, appropriate treatment, and charm of effect. ”

“ English architects have enjoyed a unique legacy in the mansions of the Tudor and Renaissance periods, and the delightful character of these examples has been a never-failing inspiration for modern work.
Of great interest and value, therefore, are these volumes dealing with recent examples of English Domestic Architecture, by architects whose ability in this branch of work is acknowledged and admired. Great care has been exercised in the selection of the examples, which are illustrated by means of photographs reproduced to a large size, and accompanied by plans and descriptive particulars. ”

“ In architecture the English favour the development of that kind of special Gothic of which they are the inventors, the Perpendicular, a rich and well-ordered style, terrestrial, practical, pleasant to look upon. No one did more to secure it a lasting fame than the Chancellor of Edward III. and of Richard II., William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, the restorer of Windsor, founder of New College at Oxford, the greatest builder of the century. ”

“ Naturally the more expensive houses were the first to get the benefit of the architectural inspiration drawn largely from England. But now that English gables and dormers have spread so widely, now that we realize the beauty of our own colonial architecture, and that the Queen Anne craze is subsiding, so that only its best features remain, the less ambitious dwellings must not be left to the mercy of those builders whose ideas of beauty are limited to scroll-saw brackets and French roofs. ”

“ Transition from Norman to Gothic Architecture—The Period of Change—The Early English Style—Examples and Characteristics of the Style—Towers—Windows—Doorways—Porches—Buttresses—Pillars—Arches—Mouldings and Ornaments—Fronts.
The history of architecture is the history of change, sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden, but always change. People and nations change; new ideas spring up among them; new wants are created, and Architecture has to minister to these wants. A necessity arises and has to be met ”

“ If this process of analysis were to be carried on for a generation, it would be as difficult, and as purely a matter of speculative curiosity, to trace the sources of English and American architecture as the sources of the composite and living English language, which is adequate to every expression. We have been blaming the architects for accepting the forms of past architecture without analyzing them. ”

“ Early English Buildings are readily distinguished from those of the Norman period by their comparative lightness, their long, narrow, lancet-shaped, pointed windows, their boldly projecting buttresses and pinnacles, and the acute pitch of the roof. Internally, we have pointed arches supported on slender and lofty pillars, which are frequently formed of a number of shafts connected at intervals by bands. ”

“ In England and in the United States, the last quarter of the 19th century was a period of unusual interest and activity in architectural development. While other nations have been content to carry on their architecture, for the most part, on the old scholastic lines which had been Recent English architecture.prevalent since the Renaissance, in the two countries named there has been manifest a spirit of unrest, of critical inquiry into the basis and objects of architecture ”

“ If, for instance, we compare round-arched architecture in the eleventh century to the Anglo-Saxon form of speech of the time of Alfred the Great, and the architecture of the twelfth century to the English of Chaucer, that of the thirteenth will correspond to the richer language of Shakespeare, that of the fourteenth to the highly polished language of Addison and Pope, and that of the fifteenth to the English of our own day. ”

“ Some sketch of the state of recent architectural thought or endeavour in England seemed essential to the subject, since it is there that what may be called the philosophy of architecture has been most debated, and that thought has had the most obvious and most direct effect on English progress.architectural style and movement. ”

“ IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Through at least the first three decades of the twentieth century most architects of the western world would have scorned the appellation ‘modern’ or, if they accepted it, would have defined the term very differently from the way it has been understood in the immediately preceding chapters. For twentieth-century architecture that continued the historicism [511] of the nineteenth century the usual name in English is ‘traditional’. ”

“ When the need for feudal strongholds had passed, and the conditions of life in the open country had become peaceful, a type of domestic architecture arose in England which assumed its most characteristic form in the early Elizabethan Age. The best features of this architecture were of native growth out of the humbler forms of mediæval domestic building, the feudal castle, and the latest phase of Perpendicular Gothic. ”

“ And while this remark may seem to ignore architecture as such, i.e. the fine art of beautiful building, it expresses a fundamental principle; for to build a house to live in, shaped for the needs of civilized human life, is to secure the primary condition of good architectural effect. And no domestic architecture in Europe has had more genuine charm for the eye than that of England of the Elizabethan time in its integrity, as it may be seen, for instance, in the greater parts of Haddon Hall; St. Johns, Warwick; Hambleton Old Hall, Rutland; North Mymms, Hertfordshire, and others. [2] ”

“ And the civilized countries have almost with one consent returned, in the main, to the adoption of a school of architecture based on classic types. The taste for medievalism is dying out even in Great Britain, which has been its chief stronghold. ”

“ Have we any pretensions to an architectural system which all of us recognise as belonging to our age and country, the child of its peculiar civilization, the offspring of our climate and soil, and of the special tastes inspired by our love of nature? Or have we forms and models that have sprung from our institutions, our own domestic and insular predilections? ”

“ Even if Science must emerge from its Cyclopean forges and its potent laboratories in the shape of a gigantic chimney, why should not Art fly up to it, and bestow on it elegance of proportions and some richness of details?
And so I close my Address to you, by expressing a sincere conviction that the prospects of Architecture are most promising, but that they will greatly increase in proportion as we can promote among all classes reverence for the sacred, and taste for the beautiful. ”

“ May we not hope to see our native granite reposing in the ever-during strength of the Doric, or springing up in the grand and lofty Gothic, in forms which beauty and utility, the eye and the judgment, taste and devotion, shall unite to approve and to admire? But while we regard sacred and civil architecture as highly important, let us not forget that other branch, so essential to personal comfort and happiness,—domestic architecture or common house-building. ”