Post (architecture)

“ Somewhat as the post-Napoleonic period carried out at an ever lower level of quality the ambitions and aspirations of the revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, so in the post-war years—and particularly the last five—there has come about the realization of many urbanistic ideals that once seemed fantastic or Utopian when they were first proposed some forty years ago. ”

“ The common plaster cornice placed to unite walls and ceiling, in our ordinary houses, is a concession (on the part even of the jerriest of builders) to the æsthetic sense. We get the decorated frieze in architecture in obedience to the same demand, though originally a necessary feature of lintel construction, as we have seen, from the days of the festal garland hung around the eaves of the classic house, to its perpetuation in stone in so many varieties. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, we have defined the province of the architect to be, that of selecting such forms and colours as shall delight the mind, by preparing it for the operations to which it is to be subjected in the building. Now, no forms, in domestic architecture, can thus prepare it more distinctly than those which correspond closely with the first, that is, the fixed and fundamental, part of character, which is always so uniform in its action, as to induce great simplicity in whatever it designs. Nothing, on the contrary, can be more injurous than the slightest influence of the humours upon the edifice ”

“ We may suppose that an architect has a porch to design, and that the owner of the house does not have a great deal of money to put in it. There are four turned columns, a cornice, with a rafter finish, and underneath, a space in which may be inserted a small band of inexpensive scroll-work. A knowledge of the earlier architecture comes to his assistance in a wonderful way. For the turning on the columns the architect may select that from a column of the early English Gothic architecture of the fourteenth century. ”

“ In each bay of the ground story is a deep round-arched rectangular recess in the thickness of the wall, and over each of these an open gallery with two colonnettes and two small jamb pilasters carrying an entablature over each of the lateral spaces so formed, and an arch over the central one, an early instance of a form of compound opening that was much used in the architecture of the later Renaissance. ”

“ Now it is agreed that the more lofty and slender proportions of the Order of the Parthenon must have given to the original building a charm beyond that given by the stumpy proportions of the Pæstum temple: but it is also undeniable that many lovers of architecture, of this as of other epochs and styles, love especially the early work, that which is commonly known as archaic. ”

“ It is obvious that the same treatment cannot well be given to the walls of a church, a theatre, a concert or an assembly room, and a private residence, though it often is done. Nor can an interior, like that of a public hall or palace, that may have such architectural features as columns, pilasters, and well-marked panellings, either of marble, stone, or of wood construction, be treated in a similar manner to that which may be proper for the walls of a room which may be devoid of any architectural features. ”

“ Laing's speech, at the opening of the palace, he declares that "an entirely novel order of architecture, producing, by means of unrivaled mechanical ingenuity, the most marvelous and beautiful effects, sprang into existence to provide a building." ”

“ It had, perhaps, a row of arches down the middle, like the great hall of the palace of Blois, said to be of the thirteenth century, or huge kingposts supporting the ties between rafters, which in that case may have been as long as those of the later roof. The present roof, work of the fourteenth century, marks the beginning of a change in the style of architecture that accompanied and caused great changes in furniture and household woodwork. ”

“ It is not so much that the walls are thin, as that they have disappeared: there are no walls—only a series of piers dividing windows, the opening filled with glass being much greater, if measured along a horizontal line running through the windows, than is the extent of the solid masonry. You see at once wherein there is an excuse for the saying “a wall of glass with a roof of stone.” But there is more than this: the primary object of the designer has been to treat his construction as the main inspiration of his design. ”

“ The system of iron roofing, with all the architectural powers of which that material is susceptible, has been adopted by some with signal enterprise, ingenuity, and power.
"In another class of design the authors have viewed with enthusiasm the great occasion and object of the proposed Exhibition, and have waived all considerations of expense. They have indulged their imaginations, and employed the resources of their genius and learning, in the composition of arrangements which present the utmost grandeur and beauty of architecture, suited to a permanent Palace of Science and Art. ”

“ The Roman Doric order of the portico has much simple beauty. The entasis of the columns is more moderate than is common in later Renaissance design, and the light falls on their rounded surfaces, as they stand relieved against the dark void of the porch, with admirable effect. The façade as a whole is monotonous, but it has an expression of architectural reserve that is worthy of praise. ”

“ The building must be either quite chaste, or excessively rich in decoration. Every inch of ornament short of a certain quantity will render the whole effect poor and ridiculous; while the pure perpendicular lines of this architecture will always look well if left entirely alone. The architect, therefore, when limited as to expense, should content himself with making his oriels project boldly, channelling their mullions richly, and, in general, rendering his vertical lines delicate and beautiful in their workmanship ”

“ Peter's, an attic is interposed, but to spring a vault from an attic wall is an architectural barbarism; though it is perhaps no greater one than to spring it from an entablature, as the architects of the Renaissance had done from Brunelleschi down. In the small order of the aisles the entablature is simplified, and has only an architrave and cornice; while a member, like a diminutive attic, in retreat of the cornice, is interposed at the impost. ”

“ The chief innovation in the design was the wide separation of the interior stone dome from the lofty exterior decorative cupola and lantern of wood, this separation being designed to meet the conflicting demands of internal and external effect. To the same architect is due the formal monotony of the Place Vendôme, all the houses surrounding it being treated with a uniform architecture of colossal pilasters, at once monumental and inappropriate. ”

“ Thus we have church building, house building, ship building, and coach building. That one edifice stands, another floats, and another is suspended on iron springs, makes no difference in the nature of the art, if so it may be called, of building or edification. The persons who profess that art, are severally builders, ecclesiastical, naval, or of whatever other name their work may justify; but building does not become architecture merely by the stability of what it erects ”

“ How office buildings were gradually received into the realm of architecture and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had risen so high in that realm that few productions of the 1890s in other fields of building can compare in quality of design with the great early skyscrapers is perhaps more significant for western culture in general than the purely technical aspect of the story. ”

“ Our modern architects try to make their rooms mathematically square, a series of brick boxes, one on the other like pigeon-holes in a bureau, with flat ceilings and right angles in the corners, and are said to go through a profound education before they can produce these wonderful specimens of art. If our old English folk could not get an arched roof, then they loved to have it pointed, with polished timber beams in which the eye rested as in looking upwards through a tree. ”

“ Small statues should have been placed in the niches; but the building does not seem to suffer much from their absence. We can judge of it as being what it is, a most simple and practical City Hall, built with pointed arches, with a steep roof adorned by tower, dormer window{128} and pinnacle, and the whole structure covered by this thin veil of moulded, cusped and traceried ornament, chiefly because the church architecture of previous years had led up to that kind of design by natural evolution, and because the spirit of the time knew of but one architectural treatment. ”

“ Abroad, such necessities are met by three or four downright penthouse roofs, reaching each from within the window to the outside shafts of its mouldings; instead of the horrible row of ruled lines, the space is thus divided into four or five grand masses of shadow with grey slopes of roof above, bent or yielding into all kinds of delicious swells and curves, and covered with warm tones of moss and lichen. Very often the thing is more delightful than the stone-work itself, and all because it is broad, dark, and simple. ”

“ Simplicity, grandeur, ready means of construction, and of increasing or diminishing the accommodation, and of removal if required, forming altogether a specimen of the most recent improvements introduced into the art of building—these are the principal objects which it has been sought to attain. The whole of the construction is of iron, without a single piece of wood, the foundation being executed in brick; the façade to be in metal, porcelain, and glass, the floor of asphalte, the roof to be principally covered with ornamental thick glass, in large dimensions, or ground glass with patterns. ”

“ In southern architecture the roof is of far less importance; but here the soul of domestic building is in the largeness and conspicuousness of the protection against the ponderous snow and driving sleet. You may make the façade of the square pile, if the roof be not seen, as handsome as you please,—you may cover it with decoration,—but there will always be a heartlessness about it, which you will not know how to conquer ”

“ This chapter has summarized what was probably the greatest single innovation in nineteenth-century architecture, the rise of a new type of building to a position of prestige and of achievement comparable to that of churches and palaces in earlier periods. The same cannot be said of domestic architecture. The house was hardly a nineteenth-century invention like the office building. It was, however, modified almost beyond recognition as the century progressed, at the hands of several generations of creative architects. ”

“ Even his dormer windows, picturesque, and, in a way, mediæval as they are in design, have pilasters and a Doric frieze, all approximated in their proportion to the classical standard. As for the main wall, it only needs a glance at the portico of columns in{150} the middle of it, to see how the proportions of those two orders have swayed the design from end to end. This front, except the two dormers in the middle, which are later, is very nearly of the same date as that building which is shown in Plate LI. But the transition to neo-classic art is much farther advanced. ”

“ One architect may plan a house which will be plain to ugliness, the bricks laid in the most severe and commonplace fashion, and the outlines of the design—if design it can be called—devoid of any grace or variety. No projections to break up the dull flatness and give light and shade; no attempt to relieve the unmitigated square, hut-like appearance of the building. Another puts a pointed roof to his house, pierces it with pretty windows that have form without diminishing the light. He runs some courses of brick work round his building laid in diagonal or otherwise diversified lines. ”

“ This expedient of continued series forms the sublimity of arcades and aisles, of all ranges of columns, and, on a smaller scale, of those Greek mouldings, of which, repeated as they now are in all the meanest and most familiar forms of our furniture, it is impossible altogether to weary. Now, it is evident that the architect has choice of two types of form, each properly associated with its own kind of interest or decoration: the square, or greatest area, to be chosen especially when the surface is to be the subject of thought ”

“ Much the same fashion of architecture is popular nowadays, but people pay more attention to comfort. The governor's pillars were ingeniously disposed so as to darken all the windows looking that way, whether in the double parlours on the first floor, the bed-chambers on the second, or the big ballroom over the entire house on the third. ”

“ The sensitive architect must yearn to set the stone-cutters at work anew to bring out the expression of those parts that are especially in need of rhetorical exposition, to accentuate the sills of the arcades, to define and refine their arches, to emphasize the continuous line of the abacus, and especially to mark the summit of the sloping basement, which now is merged into the plane of the main wall, without the suggestion of a plinth. ”

“ CHURCH OF THE THEATINER MONKS AT MUNICH, BAVARIA.
DUCAL PALACE, GENOA, ITALY. upper stories formed galleries of communication between the smaller buildings to left and right. We are to consider this room then as the meeting-room and dining-room of a great number of companions and associates whose semi-privacy would not be invaded too seriously by the coming and going behind the screen. So much for the fitness of the building for its purposes: as to other considerations, the vigor of design, both in constructive and purely decorative members, hardly needs demonstration. ”