Victorian architecture

“ So also in the fifties, sixties, and seventies two principal camps are discernible among the architects. Their programmes were less clear than in the previous half century, and in one case much less widely accepted internationally. Yet the High Victorian Gothic of England, taken together with the later Neo-Gothic elsewhere, on the one hand, and what may be loosely called the international Second Empire mode on the other, subsume between them a fair part of the more conspicuous architectural production of the third quarter of the century. ”

“ The stiff and formal Georgian houses, the painful Victorian villas, and some of the earlier attempts at architectural improvement have been swept away to make room for modern replicas of still older styles which have been revived or incorporated in the nouvre art, which touches the home in its architecture and internal decoration, as well as in its furnishings. In modern dwellings the Elizabethan style has often been followed, although modern conveniences have been incorporated. ”

“ In 1850 the revival and expansion of semi-classic architecture wrought in brick would have been impossible; in 1870 the building world was ripe for the change. The architects themselves, after receiving their early education under the leaders of the stucco and plaster school of the later Georgian reigns, had had their ideas purified and refined by the art-teachings of the Victorian Gothicists. The result was a spontaneous movement to develop a new system of construction, with lintelled openings and square fenestration,—Queen Anne modified and elevated by mediæval teachings and traditions. ”

“ There is little profit in pursuing farther in the outlying areas of the western world evidence of direct influence from Paris (of which there is, for example, some in Russia) or autochthonous variants of the Second Empire mode. In this generally rather unrewarding period the best work mostly falls under the High Victorian Gothic rubric, or else it illustrates specifically the development of commercial and domestic architecture in the Anglo-American world (see Chapters 10 and 11; 14 and 15) . ”

“ And to these the Victorian-Edwardian age had added museums, law courts, theatres; such astonishing modernities as swimming-baths, power-houses, joint-stock banks, lending libraries, and art schools; and whole monumental streets and squares from the designs of a native architect without whose respectable name no history of British architecture could be called complete. George's town hall was the largest building in the city ”

“ How is it that this so-called irreligious age in which we live, and this certainly a vulgar one if we are to judge it by its civic buildings, has produced 38ecclesiastical buildings which are living and vital things, while that Victorian age, in spite of its hymns and its prayer meetings, its battles of the styles and its religious arguments, produced mainly, if not entirely, dead copies, or rather travesties, of worn out past architecture? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In our towns almost every tower and spire which we see is a modern building, though the styles may vary from Norman to Perpendicular and seventeenth century. Modern buildings, churches, halls, public offices, and private houses are mostly imitations of the work of past ages. There is no nineteenth-century style of English architecture. Some day, perhaps, England may develop a new style of architecture, such as the world has never yet seen, but at the present time we seem to be only able to copy and adapt the work of those who have gone before us. ”

“ If a new architecture thus arises, and takes its place among the arts of ages, it will soon have its Leone Albertis, its Palladios, its Vignolas; who will give its rules, and true proportions, and show it perhaps to be rhythmical and harmonic, as are the depressed tympanums of the old Doric, and the high-peaked fronts of our ancient cathedrals. ”

“ 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] ”

“ But while in England the new style was winning its way, in Italy it was passing the zenith of its vigour. The continued study of ancient monuments enabled architects to reduce the old methods of design to a system which could be acquired with ease, and architectural design became less a matter of invention than a capacity for adapting new buildings to old rules. ”

“ In fact, looking at our great public buildings of the day, will not a future age keep its judgment equally balanced on the question, whether we had decided between the classical style of the Treasury, or the mediaeval of the national palace, as best recording our tastes and feeling?
If this be so, must we not say, that looking at the past which has given us rules, and at the present which gives us data, our conclusion for the future of Architecture is not favourable, so far as public building is concerned? ”

“ But a national style of architecture was never reproduced by such means. It must grow up like the oak, unforced and in its native soil; and, when thus originating, its living forms become the embodiment of the polity, social history, and religious faith of the nation. Yet architecture is on this very account essentially a practical art, and even in the most gorgeous medieval cathedral a sense of fitness, and ideas of direct utility, may be traced as controlling powers influencing the whole design. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The building artisans, in fact, were collectively to take the place of the architect and the form of the building to be evolved by a natural process of growth. This was a favourite idea also with William Morris, who insisted that medieval art—the only art which he recognized as of any value (Greek, Roman and Renaissance being alike contemptible in his eyes) —was essentially an art of the people, and that in fact it was the modern architects who stood in the way of our having a genuine architecture of the 19th century. ”

“ Columns and pilasters, answering to nothing in the real structural scheme of a building, are disposed with no thought save for agreeable lines and rhythmical spacings. Thus they soon came to be used in many novel ways. They were set in pairs, stretched through several stories, embraced by pediments, and varied in countless fanciful ways. In this way the architecture of the Renaissance even more than that of imperial Rome, became a mere surface architecture differing fundamentally from all of the great architectural systems of ancient times, and of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Elizabethan architecture, which was in its flower during the latter half of the 16th century—more than a hundred years after the revival of classical architecture in Italy—shows the first symptoms of the adoption of the new style in England. The Elizabethan style—the name reaches back over the century—is characterised by much-pierced stonework, rectangular ornamentation, and a rough imitation of antique detail applied to masses of building, in which many Gothic features were still retained as regards general form, but altered as to ornament. ”

“ No, the change to Italian architecture was not for the better. It is true that picturesqueness was not stamped out of the genius of England, and so a number of the buildings that were put up until the reign of George the Second were shapely and often noble; indeed the classic style has a breadth about it, no doubt, that makes it safe for modern architects to deal with, especially in country houses. Of course the formal rows of windows, if the house is a very large one, are a serious matter to deal with, as far as the plan is concerned. ”

“ Thus we see that the adoption of the arched system of construction, unbiassed by any pre-existing laws of art, but aided only by the very rational desire to utilise the materials most abundantly provided by nature, led to two of the most important characteristics common to Romanesque and Gothic architecture, viz., the sub-ordinated arch and the clustered column, with the whole system of decoration derived from them; than which no two features can be pointed out which have been more richly fruitful of architectural forms the most original and beautiful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every necessity becomes a motive of decoration. The roofs, the leading off of the water, the introduction of light, the means of access and circulation to the different stages of the building—even less important matters, such as iron-work, lead-work, ties, props, the means of warming and ventilation, not only are not concealed, as is so often done in our buildings since the sixteenth century, but are, on the contrary, frankly acknowledged, and contribute, by their ingenious combination and the taste which ever presides over their execution, to the enrichment of the architecture. ”

“ Why should the Greek and Roman ovolo, cavetto, and square, be the only combination that we know of in our common mouldings? How much richer were the architects of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who drew with “free hands,” and gave us such exquisite effects of light and shade! We are firmly persuaded, that an architect, deeply imbued with the scientific principles of his profession, and endowed, at the same time, with the hand and the eye of a skilful artist, may cause a most happy and useful reformation of our national architecture. ”

“ Not a wall, however solidly built, has been left standing. And along that line of colossal monuments which is threaded by the Nile, temples, pyramids, and Memnoniums, with their carvings, and even their paintings, fresh without and within them, is there one single private building, from a cottage to a princely mansion, remaining; though, no doubt, hundreds and thousands of dwellings must have been built and rebuilt, to furnish workmen for these sumptuous edifices and princes to command their erection? ”

“ And if these old wooden houses seem to us wanting (as many are wanting) in the appliances and fittings which modern habits have rendered necessary, it was assuredly no fault of the 15th-century architect. They display both in design and construction, most conspicuously, the elements of common sense in meeting the requirements of their own day, which is, as has been well remarked, "the one thing wanting to give life to modern architecture;" and they have a character and individuality about them which renders almost every building unique. ”

“ In the front is a plain, but noble portico of the Tuscan order, executed in the most masterly manner; the columns are massy, and the intercolumniation large, which has an air of noble simplicity, that if compared with the most ornamented Gothic structures, shews the superiority of the Roman architecture in its plainest form, over the finest barbarism. The building, tho’ as plain as possible, is happily proportioned; the walls are of brick covered with plaister, and the corners of stone; the roof is flat, and though of great extent, is supported by the walls alone, without columns. ”

“ The “spaciousness” of the interior has given room, if not for an impartial representation, at least for a reminder of all the styles of architecture to which the XVII century was heir. There is the Renaissance conception of the antique in the ornamental columns; in the rose-window, there is a tribute to the Gothic; the tradition of the South is maintained by a coat of colours—many, if subdued; and the ground plan of nave and side-chapels might be called Romanesque. Although the vaulting is high and the room large, there is no simplicity, no beauty, no artistic virtue in this interior. ”