Restoration (architecture)

“ In architecture, close as it is to men's lives and their history, the visible result of time is a large factor in the realised aesthetic value, and what a true architect will in due measure always trust to. A false restoration only frustrates the proper ripening of his work.
If we may credit our modern eyes, then, those old, very secular builders aimed at, they achieved, an immense cheerfulness in their great church, with a purpose which still pursued them into their minuter decoration. ”

“ Platt in this judicious work of restoration, will give an impulse to other improvements in the right direction; while at the same time it excites a regret that alterations have been previously effected, in such utter disregard of the architecture of the Rows, seeing how beautifully their original appearance might have been preserved, to maintain the unique characteristic of the old city. ”

“ The printing and placing more frequently in the church of a card, pointing out the salient features and giving what is known of the history of the building, would also be a boon to those visitors who know something of architecture, and would stimulate a taste for it in others, and a respect for old work, the lack of which has been the cause of so much destruction under the specious name of restoration in the earlier half of the past century. ”

“ It would have illustrated my point better to have restored the lost portions, but I always draw a thing exactly as it is, hating restoration of any kind; and I would especially direct the reader's attention to the completion of the forms in the sculptured ornament of the marble cornices, as opposed to the abstraction of the monochrome figures, of the ball and cross patterns between the arches, and of the triangular ornament round the arch on the left. ”

“ One cannot help wondering if this extreme severity of restoration is absolutely essential; for if not essential, the vague disappointment might well turn to anger that in days when the art of architecture has become almost non-existent, it should be thought necessary to carry through such wholesale renewal of work, never to be replaced, belonging to the grand days of Gothic building. ”

“ Some critics strongly assert and argue that these old churches and other ancient edifices should not be restored, either to the former glory of coloured decoration or in their structural features. One critic follows another by repeating the arguments of his predecessor in art criticism, namely, that old buildings should be permitted to crumble slowly into decay, ruin, and nothingness, and also, that you cannot restore anything that does not exist. ”

“ It will be seen that where the original structure is strong enough it has been left, where it needs repair the old work has been copied, and here and there—as in the balustrading beneath the upper row of arches—features have been restored not absolutely necessary to the support of the building. There are those who object to this sort of restoration. ”

“ The great Past supplies us with the raw material, with orders, colonnades and arcades, pediments, consoles, cornices, friezes and architraves, buttresses, battlements, vaults, pinnacles, arches, lintels, rustications, balustrades, piers, pilasters, trefoils, and all the innumerable conventionalities of architecture. It is plainly our duty not to revive and combine these in those cold and weary changes which constitute modern design, but to make them live and speak intelligibly to the people through the eloquent modifications of our own instinctive lines of Life and Beauty. ”

“ But I happened myself to have made, five years ago, detailed drawings of the buttress decorations on the right and left of this tracery, which are part of the work that has been completely restored. And I found the restorations as inaccurate as they were unnecessary.
265. If this is the case in a most favorable instance, in that of a well-known monument, highly esteemed by every antiquary in France, what, during the progress of the now [Pg 253] almost universal repair, is likely to become of architecture which is unwatched and despised? ”

“ As a proof of the mischief which may be done by so-called restorations, let any person of good taste, who has paid even moderate attention to archæology and church architecture, look around, and say whether, out of the numerous ancient churches which have been attempted to be restored or renovated, during the last quarter of a century, there can be found more than some five or six, where bad taste or presumption has not been evinced in the attempts of the various architects to restore or renovate them. ”

“ The doorways are rich in marginal ornament—ornament within ornament, as it often is; for the dainty weeds and wild flowers overlace the antique tracery with their bright arabesques and deepen the grey of the stonework as it brightens their bloom. The thousand flowers which grow among English ruins deserve a chapter to themselves. I owe them, as an observer, a heavy debt of satisfaction, but I am too little of a botanist to pay them in their own coin. It has often seemed to me in England that the purest enjoyment of architecture was to be had among the 117 ruins of great buildings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It would be too painful a task to follow further the caricatures of form, and eccentricities of treatment, which grow out of this singular abuse—the flattened arch, the shrunken pillar, the lifeless ornament, the liny moulding, the distorted and extravagant foliation, until the time came when, over these wrecks and remnants, deprived of all unity and principle, rose the foul torrent of the renaissance, and swept them all away. So fell the great dynasty of mediæval architecture. ”

“ Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. A few sheets of lead put in time upon the roof, a few dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care ”

“ We have witnessed in our own day an attempt to resuscitate medieval architecture by a retrogression altogether opposed to the spirit of the old builders, in whose hands it grew like a thing of life that returns not upon the work of earlier years. ”

“ The ruins and the forest made the deep and abiding impression upon our minds; but our object is to present the building as restored, as subjects for speculation and comparison with the architecture of other lands and times. The supposed restorations were made after a careful examination, and in each case the reader will see precisely what we had to guide us in making them. I must remark, however, that the buildings are the only parts which we attempted to restore; the specimens of sculpture and stuccoed ornaments were drawn as we found them. ”

“ I have said that to the custodian of such a cathedral the surroundings are, if not sad, at least pathetic, for these magnificent and loved creations of human genius belong to a somewhat remote past, and, as far as these exquisite buildings are concerned, save for purposes of necessary repair—repair simply to arrest the ravages of time—for nearly four hundred years the clink of trowel and pickaxe has been hushed.
It is scarcely an exaggerated statement which speaks of architecture, in its noblest sense, as a lost art. ”

“ But, in any case, whatever may be the future of architecture, in whatever manner our young architects may one day solve the question of their art, let us, while waiting for new monument, preserve the ancient monuments. ”

“ The windows of the attic are like shrines for saints. The gargoyles, the medallions, the statuettes, the festoons, are like the elaboration of some precious cabinet rather than the details of a building exposed to the weather and to the ages. In the interior there is a profusion of restoration, and it is all restoration in color. This has been, evidently, a work of great energy and cost, but it will easily strike you as overdone. The universal freshness is a discord, a false note; it seems to light up the dusky past with an unnatural glare. ”

“ He prefers patching up a ruin to building a house; he raises shops and hovels, the abodes of inactive, vegetating, brutish poverty, under the protection of aged and ruined, yet stalwart, arches of the Roman amphitheater; and the habitations of the lower orders frequently present traces of ornament and stability of material evidently belonging to the remains of a prouder edifice. ”

“ The eternal durability to which, in all things, the hierarchy aspired, pointed out a style of architecture, especially in their sacred buildings, retaining, as most substantial, only the simplest forms and the largest masses. Hence, in these mysterious structures, whatever deficiency may be perceived in beauty or grace, is compensated by vastness and simplicity, the most powerful elements of the grand. ”

“ Nothing, in truth, is less sublime or more pitiful than a dismantled brick wall, robbed of its marbles and mosaics, naked of the covering of herbs that nature gave it, patched with plaster, propped with stonework, bound by girders, and smeared over with the trail of worse than snails or blindworms—pedants bent on restoration. ”

“ Of all the Restorations yet undertaken the worst have meant the reckless stripping a building of some of its most interesting material features; while the best have their exact analogy in the Restoration of an old picture, where the partly perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand of some unoriginal and thoughtless hack of to-day. ”

“ We apprehend the true rule of æsthetics in this case to be, as we implied before, that for restorations or exact facsimiles of buildings, whether classical or mediæval, the very form as well as the spirit of the ornaments contemporaneously used in such buildings should be most strictly adopted. An imitation, unless it is an exact one, is good for nothing, as far as architecture is concerned. ”

“ Our public buildings, those intended to serve as monuments and therefore summoning the utmost abilities of the architect, still make use of the arch, vault, and dome, or fall back frankly on modifications of the Greek temple with its rows of columns. So far as the outside appearance of modern buildings goes, all our fine architecture is essentially a burrowing in the past to recombine in slightly new proportions, and for new uses, elements taken from the most diverse countries and ages, but forming part of only two lines of development. ”

“ If we admire a vaulted construction, by all means let us use it, but do not let us emulate the vaulting of Diocletian’s Baths and Westminster Abbey or the domes of the Pantheon or St. Sophia in lath and plaster! If we want plaster casts of ancient monuments, let us place them in our museums, but, for goodness sake, let our buildings themselves be real! ”

“ Had not, indeed, the repairs and erection of public buildings called forth the dormant skill of our workmen, decorative art had long since become extinct amongst us. It may therefore be taken as a fundamental rule in architecture, that the decorations of buildings should be made357 either of the same materials as the edifices themselves, or that more costly substances should be combined with the former, and should serve for the decorator to exercise his skill on. ”

“ The urgent demand for new edifices to replace those destroyed by fire, and the necessity for observing strict economy in their erection, precluded picturesque grouping and well-studied designs. The quaint but dangerous architecture of 1666 was rapidly replaced by rows of plain, monotonous brick buildings, devoid of artistic merit. ”

“ In consequence of the known simplicity and regularity of most antique edifices, the task of restoration, by means of drawings and models, is much less difficult than might be supposed. The ground work, or some sufficient parts of it, commonly extant, shows the length and breadth of the building, with the positions of the walls, doors and columns. A single column, or part of a column, whether standing or fallen, with a fragment of the entablature, furnishes data from which the remainder of the colonnade and the height of the edifice can be made out. ”

“ You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care; but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay: more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan. ”

“ Now, though Charles Lamb says that second thoughts are not best, with W. they very certainly are: the effect would, without doubt, be taken in very close connexion with the ruins, rather too close, indeed, for the comfort of either monument: both would be utterly spoiled. Nothing in the way of elevated architecture will harmonise with ruin, but ruin: evidence of present humble life, a cottage or pigsty, for instance, built up against the old wall, is often excellent by way of contrast, but the addition or association of high architecture is total destruction. ”

“ An old building, such as this, is in constant need of attention. The problem has ever been the vexed one of renewing without destroying. But any one who enters Allhallows to-day will feel that the problem has been solved here with complete success. The later restorations, including the reroofing, restoration of the ancient battlements, and preservation of the lower parts of the outer walls, has cost, in round figures, twelve thousand pounds, and every penny has been wisely spent in handing down to future generations so wonderful a memorial of the past. ”