PART ONE
1800-1850
## CHAPTER 1
ROMANTIC CLASSICISM AROUND 1800
DESPITE the drastically reduced production of the years just before and after 1800, between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the termination of Napoleon’s imperial career, there are prominent buildings in many countries that provide fine examples of Romantic Classicism in its early maturity; others, generally more modest in size, give evidence of the vitality of the Picturesque at this time. Since England and America were least directly affected by the French Revolution, however much they were drawn into the wars that were its aftermath, they produced more than their share, so to say, of executed work. French architects before 1806 were mostly reduced to designing monuments destined never to be built or to adapting old structures to new uses.
The greatest architect in active practice in the 1790s was Sir John Soane (1753-1837), from 1788 Architect of the Bank of England. The career of his master, the younger Dance, was in decline; he had made what were perhaps his greatest contributions a good quarter of a century earlier. Whatever Soane owed to Dance, and he evidently owed him a great deal, the Bank[17] offered greater opportunities than the older man had ever had. His interiors of the early nineties at the Bank leave the world of academic Classicism completely behind (Plate 3). His extant Lothbury façade of 1795, with the contiguous ‘Tivoli Corner’ of a decade later—now modified almost beyond recognition—and even more the demolished Waiting Room Court (Plate 4A) showed that his innovations in this period were by no means restricted to interiors.
Soane’s style, consonant though it was in many ways with the general ideals of Romantic Classicism, is a highly personal one. At the Bank, however, he was not creating _de novo_ but committed to the piecemeal reconstruction of an existing complex of buildings, and controlled as well by very stringent technical requirements. Thus the grouping of the offices about the Rotunda, like the plan of the Rotunda itself, goes back to the work done by his predecessor Sir Robert Taylor (1714-88) twenty years earlier; while the special need of the Bank for various kinds of security made necessary both the avoidance of openings on the exterior and a fireproof structural system within. The architectural expression that Soane gave to his complex spaces in the offices which he designed in 1791 and built in 1792-4 had very much the same abstract qualities as those to which older masters of Romantic Classicism, such as Ledoux and Dance, had already aspired in the preceding decades (Plate 3). The novel treatment of the smooth plaster surfaces of the light vaults made of hollow terracotta pots, where he substituted linear striations for the conventional membering of Classical design, was as notable as the frank revelation of the delicate cast-iron framework of his glazed lanterns (see Chapter 7). These interiors have particularly appealed to twentieth-century taste, while Soane’s columnar confections of this period generally appear somewhat pompous and banal.
The Rotunda of 1794-5 was grander and more Piranesian in effect; thus it shared in the international tendency of this period towards megalomania. So also the contemporary Lothbury façade, with its rare accents of crisply profiled antae and its vast unbroken expanses of flat rustication, is less personal to Soane and more in a mode that was common to many Romantic Classical architects all over the Western world. The original Tivoli Corner of 1805, however, was almost Baroque in its plasticity, with a Roman not a Greek order, and a most remarkable piling up of flat elements organized in three dimensions at the skyline that could only be Soane’s.
On the other hand, the reduction of relief and the linear stylization of the constituent elements of the Loggia in the Waiting Room Court of 1804, equally personal to Soane, illustrated an anti-Baroque tendency to reduce to a minimum the sculptural aspect of architecture (Plate 4A). Planes were emphasized rather than masses, and the character of the detail was thoroughly renewed as well as the basic formulas of Classical design that Soane had inherited. This was even more apparent in the New Bank Buildings, a terrace of houses, begun in 1807, that once stood across Prince’s Street. Except for the paired Ionic columns at the ends, conventional Classical forms were avoided almost as completely as in the Bank offices of the previous decade, and the smooth plane of the stucco wall was broken only by incised linear detail.
Perhaps the most masterly example of this characteristically Soanic treatment is still to be seen in the gateway and lodge of the country house that he built at Tyringham in Buckinghamshire in 1792-7 (Plate 6A). There the simple mass is defined by flat surfaces bounded by plain incised lines. The house itself is both less drastically novel and less successful; various other Soane houses of these decades have more character.
Summerson has claimed that Soane introduced all his important innovations before 1800. However that may be, there is no major break in his work at the end of the first decade of the century, nor did his production then notably increase. It is therefore rather arbitrary to cut off an account of his architecture at this point; but it is necessary to do so if the importance of the Picturesque countercurrent in these same years, not as yet of great consequence as an aspect of Soane’s major works, is to be adequately emphasized. His concern with varied lighting effects, however, if not necessarily Picturesque technically, gave evidence of an intense Romanticism; more indubitably Picturesque was his exaggerated interest in broken skylines.
While Soane’s work at the Bank was proceeding, in these years before and after 1800, James Wyatt (1746-1813), capable of producing at Dodington House in 1798-1808 a quite conventional example of Romantic Classicism, was building in the years between 1796 and his death in 1813 for that great Romantic William Beckford the largest of ‘Gothick’ garden fabricks, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.[18] This was a landmark in the rise of the Gothic Revival. In 1803 S. P. Cockerell (1754-1827), otherwise far more consistently Classical than Wyatt, was erecting for his brother, the Indian nabob Sir Charles Cockerell, a vast mansion in Gloucestershire in an Indian mode. The design of Sezincote was based on early sketches made by the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818) and all its details were derived from the drawings Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) had made in India fifteen years before and published in _The Antiquities of India_ in 1800. The ‘Indian Revival’ (so to call it) had little success; in these years only the stables built in 1805 by William Porden (_c._ 1755-1822) for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton followed Sezincote’s lead.
The Neo-Gothic of Fonthill, however, a mode that had roots extending back into the second quarter of the eighteenth century, is illustrated in a profusion of examples by Wyatt, Porden, and many others. None, however, seems to have succeeded as well as Beckford and Wyatt at Fonthill in achieving the ‘Sublime’ by mere dimension. The characteristic Gothic country houses of this period were likely to be elaborately Tudor, like Wyatt’s Ashridge begun in 1808 and Porden’s Eaton Hall of 1803-12, or lumpily Castellated like Hawarden of 1804-9 by Thomas Cundy I (1765-1825) and Eastnor of 1808-15 by Sir Robert Smirke (1781-1867). The last, moreover, differs very little from Adam’s Culzean of 1777-90.
Some Gothic churches were built in these decades, too, as others had been ever since the 1750s. Such an example as Porden’s church at Eccleston of 1809-13, while more recognizably Perpendicular, lacked the brittle charm of the earlier ‘Gothick’ churches of the eighteenth century.
The virtuoso of the Picturesque mode and, after Soane, the greatest architectural figure of these years in England, was John Nash (1752-1835). Working in partnership with Repton for several years at the turn of the century, he turned out a spate of Picturesque houses, many of them rather small, with various sorts of medieval detail: Killy Moon in Ireland, built in 1803, is Norman; more usually they are Tudor or at least Tudoresque: his own East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight, which was begun in 1798, for example, or Luscombe in Devonshire, begun the following year. The medieval detail was probably designed by the French émigré Augustus (Auguste) Charles Pugin (1762-1832), whom Nash employed at this time (see Chapter 6). It is rather for their asymmetrical silhouettes and for the free plans that this asymmetry encouraged, however, than for the stylistic plausibility of their detailing that these houses are notable.
Finer than such ‘castles’ is Cronkhill, which Nash built in 1802 at Atcham, Salop. Here the varied forms are all more or less Italianate, and the whole was evidently inspired by the fabricks in the paintings of Claude and the Poussins—literally an example of ‘picturesque’ architecture. Actually more characteristic of the Picturesque at this time, however, is the Hamlet at Blaise Castle. There Nash repeated in 1811 a variety of cottage types that he had already used individually elsewhere, arranging them in an irregular cluster (Plate 50A).
The Rustic Cottage mode, like so many aspects of the Picturesque in architecture, had its origins in the fabricks designed to ornament eighteenth-century gardens. But the mode had by now attained considerable prestige thanks to the writings of the chief theorists of the Picturesque,[19] Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) and Uvedale Price (1747-1829). Their support was responsible also for the rising prestige of the asymmetrical Castellated Mansion and the Italian Villa; indeed, Payne Knight’s own Downton Castle in Shropshire of 1774-8 is both Castellated and Italianate. The appearance of several prettily illustrated books on cottages[20] in the nineties provided a variety of models for emulation, and from the beginning of the new century the Cottage mode was well established for gate lodges, dairies, and all sorts of other minor constructions in the country.
For larger buildings a definite Greek Revival was now beginning to take form within the general frame of Romantic Classicism. More young architects were visiting Greece and, for those who could not, two further volumes of Stuart and Revett’s _Antiquities of Athens_, appearing in 1787 and in 1794, and the parallel _Ionian Antiquities_, which began to be issued in 1769, provided many more models for imitation than had been available earlier. The Greek Doric order had first been introduced into England by Stuart himself in 1758 in the Hagley Park temple, as has been mentioned earlier; a little later, in 1763, he used the Greek Ionic on Litchfield House which still stands at 15 St James’s Square in London. From the nineties, the Greek orders were in fairly common use, as such a splendid group as the buildings of Chester Castle, of 1793-1820 by Thomas Harrison (1744-1829), handsomely illustrates. However, the handling of them was not as yet very archaeological.
Summerson credits the attack made by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (1770?-1831) in 1804 on Wyatt’s designs for Downing College, Cambridge, with helping to establish a more rigid standard of correctness. However that may be, the winning and partly executed design of 1806-11 for this college by William Wilkins (1778-1839) well illustrates the new ideals. Wilkins had made his own studies of Greek originals in Sicily and Southern Italy, and was publishing them in the _Antiquities of Magna Graecia_ at this very time (1807). The inherited concepts of medieval college architecture, largely maintained through the earlier Georgian period, were all but forgotten at Downing. The group was broken down into free-standing blocks, each as much like a temple as was feasible, and repeated Ionic porticoes provided almost the only architectural features. There was no Soanic originality here, no Picturesque eclecticism; perhaps unfortunately, however, this provided a codified Grecian mode which almost anyone could apply from handbooks of the Greek orders.
Wilkins was also responsible for the first[21] British example of a giant columnar monument, the Nelson Pillar of 1808-9 in Dublin. This 134-foot Greek Doric column in Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, of which the construction was supervised by Francis Johnston (1760-1829), initiated a favourite theme of the period usually, and not incorrectly, associated with Napoleon (see Chapter 3).
The Covent Garden Theatre in London was rebuilt in 1808-9 by Smirke. This pupil of Soane had, like Wilkins, seen ancient Greek buildings with his own eyes and generally aimed to imitate them very closely. His theatre was somewhat less correct than the Cambridge college, but despite the castles he had built it was Smirke rather than Wilkins who carried forward the Grecian mode at its most rigid through four more decades (see Chapter 4). Wilkins, however, at Grange Park in Hampshire in 1809 had shown, as C.-E. de Beaumont (1757-1811) had done at a country house called ‘Le Temple de Silence’ just before the Revolution in France, how the accommodations of a fair-sized mansion could be squeezed inside the temple form (admittedly with some violence to the latter). Grange Park provided an early paradigm of a Grecian domestic mode destined to be curiously popular at the fringes of the western world in America, in Sweden, and in Russia, but very rarely employed in more sophisticated regions (see Chapter 5). The house was much modified by later enlargements of 1823-5 by S. P. Cockerell and of 1852 by his son C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863).
Grecian design descended slowly to the world of the builders. The relatively restricted urban house-building of the two decades before Waterloo maintained a close resemblance to that of the 1780s. Russell Square in London, built up by James Burton (1761-1837) in the first decade of the new century, does not differ notably from Bedford Square of twenty years earlier—probably by Thomas Leverton (1743-1824)—except that the façades are smoother and plainer. But a still greater crispness of finish could be, and increasingly was, obtained by covering terrace houses—as for that matter most suburban villas also by this time—with stucco. In this respect the work of some unknown designer in Euston Square in London, which was built up at the same time as Russell Square, may be happily contrasted with Burton’s (which has in any case been much corrupted by the introduction around 1880 of terracotta door and window casings).
In industrial construction, such as the warehouses by William Jessop at the West India Docks, begun in 1799, and those by D. A. Alexander (1768-1846) at the London Docks, begun in 1802, the grandeur and simplicity characteristic of Romantic Classicism can be seen at their best.[22] These warehouses also presage the importance of commercial building in a world increasingly concerned with business (see Chapter 14).
During the years of the American Revolutionary War, 1776-83, years in which Romantic Classicism was maturing in France and in England, North Americans were not entirely cut off from the Old World. Not only did many earlier cultural ties remain unbroken—while a surprising reverse emigration of good painters from the New World to the Old occurred—but new cultural ties with the French ally were established, and these were maintained and reinforced by several émigrés of ability who arrived in the 1790s. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), hitherto as confirmed a Palladian as any English landowner of the mid eighteenth century, was undoubtedly influenced by his friend Clérisseau when he based his Virginia State Capitol[23] of 1785-96 at Richmond very closely on the best preserved ancient Roman structure that he had seen in France, the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, even though he used for the portico an Ionic instead of a Corinthian order. In this first major public monument initiated in the new republic Jefferson’s drastic aim of forcing all the requirements of a fairly complex modern building inside the rigid mould of a Roman temple was more consonant with the absolutism of the French in this period than with the rather looser formal ideals of the English.
Jefferson was not able to impose so rigid a Classicism on the new Federal capital of Washington at its start, despite the efforts of various French and British engineers, architects, and amateurs who
## participated in the competitions of 1792 for the President’s House
(White House) and for the Capitol and who worked on the latter during its first decade of construction. The White House[24] as designed by the Irish architect James Hoban (_c._ 1762-1831) was still quite in the earlier eighteenth-century Anglo-Palladian manner, and Jefferson’s own project was based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Neither the English amateur William Thornton (1759-1828) and his professional assistant who was also English, George Hadfield (_c._ 1764-1826), nor their French associate É.-S. Hallet succeeded in giving the Capitol[25] a very up-to-date character (Plate 82A). Yet it is these major edifices that still occupy two of the focal points in the Washington city plan,[26] which was prepared by the French engineer P.-C. L’Enfant (1754-1825) before his dismissal from public service in 1792.
It was Benjamin H. Latrobe (1764-1820), an English-born architect of German and English training, who finally brought to America just before 1800, and shortly to Washington, the highest professional standards of the day and a complete Romantic Classical programme. Indeed, he almost succeeded in making Romantic Classicism the official style in the United States for all time; at least it remained so down to the Civil War in the sixties, and a later revival lasted, as regards public architecture in Washington, from the 1900s to the 1930s (see Chapter 24). A pupil of S. P. Cockerell, Latrobe emigrated in 1796 and was soon assisting Jefferson on the final completion of the Virginia State Capitol as well as undertaking the construction of canals as an engineer. Not inappropriately Latrobe’s first important American building, the Bank of Pennsylvania begun in 1798, was also an Ionic temple, but with an order that aspired to be Greek. This Philadelphia bank included a great central hall whose saucer dome, visible externally, made it a more complex and architectonic composition than the Richmond Capitol. The flat lantern crowning the dome recalled, and may derive from, those over Soane’s offices at the Bank of England. Characteristically, Latrobe at this very same time was also building a country house, Sedgley, outside Philadelphia, with ‘Gothick’ detailing. By 1803 he had taken charge of the construction of the Capitol, nominally under Thornton, with whom he had continual rows. Most of the early interiors there were his, notably those in the south wing, fine examples of Romantic Classicism with French as well as English overtones; moreover he was still in charge of rebuilding them after the burning of the Capitol in 1814 down to his forced resignation in 1817.
In 1805 Latrobe submitted alternative designs for the Catholic cathedral in Baltimore. The Gothic design is one of the finest projects of the ‘Sublime’ or ‘High Romantic’ stage of the Gothic Revival; yet in its vast bare walls, carefully ordered geometry, and dry detail it is also consonant with some of the basic ideals of Romantic Classicism. The Classical design that was preferred and eventually built is perhaps less original; but internally, at least, this is one of the finest ecclesiastical monuments of Romantic Classicism, combining a rather Panthéon-like plan with segmental vaults of somewhat Soanic character (Plate 5). The cathedral was largely completed by 1818. The portico, though intended from the first, was added only in 1863, but the present bulbous terminations of the western towers are not of Latrobe’s design.
Near by in Baltimore the Unitarian Church of 1807 is by a Frenchman, Maximilien Godefroy (_c._ 1760-1833),[27] who was also responsible for the first Neo-Gothic ecclesiastical structure of any consequence in North America, the chapel of St Mary’s Seminary there, also of 1807. The Unitarian Church is a monument which might well have risen in the Paris of the 1790s had the French Deists been addicted to building churches. The triple arch in the plain stuccoed front below the pediment comes straight from Ledoux’s _barrières_; the interior, unhappily remodelled in 1916, was originally a dome on pendentives of the purest geometrical order. So also Godefroy’s Battle Monument of 1814 also in Baltimore, with its Egyptian base, might easily have been erected in Paris to honour some general prominent in Napoleon’s campaign on the Nile.[28] Another Frenchman, J.-J. Ramée (1764-1842), active since the Revolution in Hamburg and in Denmark, also came briefly to America. In 1813 he laid out Union College[29] in Schenectady, N.Y., on a rather Ledolcian plan and began its construction before he returned to Europe. His semicircle of buildings still crowns the hill—although two only are original—and Ramée here initiated a tradition of college architecture as remote from that of earlier American colleges, with their free-standing buildings set around a ‘campus’, as Wilkins’s Downing at Cambridge was from earlier English colleges.
The French eventually departed leaving no line of descent; but Latrobe had a pupil, the first professionally trained American in the field and, like Latrobe, almost as much an engineer as an architect. By 1808 Robert Mills (1781-1855) was supervising for Latrobe the new Bank of Philadelphia, Gothic (or at least ‘Gothick’) where his earlier Bank of Pennsylvania had been Grecian, and also building on his own the Sansom Street Baptist Church, a competent but not distinguished essay in Romantic Classicism. In the same year another Latrobe pupil, William Strickland (1788-1854), designed for Philadelphia a Gothick Masonic Hall; this was built in 1809-11, and later rebuilt, but according to the original design, after a fire in 1819-20.
Far more successful than either of these, if now overshadowed by the megalomaniac Classicism of the twentieth-century Philadelphia Museum of Art by Horace Trumbauer and others on the hill above, are the waterworks begun in 1811 on the banks of the Schuylkill. These are probably but not certainly by Mills rather than by the engineer Frederick Graff, whose name is signed to the drawings. These very utilitarian structures are most characteristic of the beginnings of Romantic Classicism in America, where Latrobe, Mills, and also Strickland were all three engineers as well as architects. Moreover, it is evident that engineering considerations often influenced their approach to architecture, just as architectural considerations gave visual distinction to much of their engineering. Thus they may be compared with engineers like Telford and Rennie in England as well as with the English architects of their day.
In this so-called ‘Federal’ period, when Romantic Classicism centred in the Middle Atlantic states thanks to Latrobe, Godefroy, Mills, and Strickland, the leading architect outside this area, the Bostonian Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844), was a late-comer to Romantic Classicism. His great public monument of the 1790s, the Massachusetts State House in Boston, had been designed originally as early as 1787-8, and even as executed in 1795-8 it derived principally from the Somerset House in London of Sir William Chambers (1726-96) and in one interior from Wyatt. His Boston Court House of 1810 first showed evidence of a change in his style, notably in its smooth ashlar walls of cold grey granite. That was a local material destined to lend particular distinction to the principal Romantic Classical buildings of Boston from this time forward (see Chapter 5).
The Frenchmen who came to America at the end of the eighteenth century or in the early 1800s (and shortly left again) could hardly import the French architecture of those decades; on the one hand, they had all been trained before the Revolution, from which most of them were in flight; on the other hand—and more consequently—there was almost no later architecture for them to reflect. Between 1789 and 1806 French building was at a standstill. Architects were mostly busy, if at all, with the decoration of various revolutionary fêtes and the accommodation of new political agencies in old structures.
One major example of the accommodation of an older structure to a new purpose deserves particular mention. In the years 1795-7 J.-P. de Gisors (1755-1828), E.-C. Leconte (1762-1818), and the former’s brother A.-J.-B.-G. de Gisors (1762-1835) built within the old Palais Bourbon the Salle des Cinq Cents, the legislative chamber of the First Republic. This hemicycle, at least as rebuilt along much the original lines by Joly in 1828-33, still serves as the Chamber of Deputies of the Fourth Republic. Such a chamber, so different in plan from the college-chapel arrangement of the British House of Commons with facing benches for Government and Opposition, is characteristically Romantic Classical in form, but this form has unfortunately proved to be conducive to an indefinite shading of multiple parties from right to left. The British model, suited to two-party rule only, was rarely imitated; the French one has been rather frequently, beginning with Latrobe’s House of Representatives in the Washington Capitol. Leaving aside the apparent political effect of the plan—not so notable in Washington as elsewhere—Gisors’s chamber seems to have been respectable if not especially distinguished. Covered with a segmental half dome and a barrel vault, both top-lighted, the smooth though rather richly decorated surfaces of the walls and the vaults made clear the interesting geometrical form of the interior space. The prototype was the lecture theatre of the École de Médecine in Paris erected in 1769-76 by Jacques Gondoin (1737-1818), one of the most advanced interiors of its day.
There was some private building in the Paris of the 1790s and early 1800s before public building eventually revived at Napoleon’s fiat. Typical and partly extant is the Rue des Colonnes, most probably by N.-A.-J. Vestier (1765-1816), although sometimes attributed to Poyet, who may have had some urbanistic control. This has an open arcade at the base carried on Greek Doric columns, here very modestly scaled, and cold flat walls above that are almost without any detailing whatever. This Paris street, as much as the arcaded ones of medieval and Renaissance Italy, may well have been the prototype for Napoleon’s first and greatest urbanistic project, the work of his favourite architects Charles Percier (1764-1838) and P.-F.-L. Fontaine (1762-1853). From his acquisition of La Malmaison in 1799 he kept them busy remodelling the interiors of his successive residences as First Consul and Emperor but rarely gave them new buildings to erect. This extensive planning scheme includes the Rue de Castiglione, running south out of the Place Vendôme, the Rue and Place des Pyramides, and the Rue de Rivoli facing the Tuileries Gardens. This last street was eventually extended to the east well beyond the Louvre by Napoleon III. The opening of the Rue de Castiglione was ordered in 1801; construction began the next year, and the execution of the rest went on, with long interruptions, for more than half a century.
Percier and Fontaine’s façades are characteristic of Romantic Classicism in their coldness of detailing and their infinite repetition of the same formula; but their Italianism, thin and dry though it is, recalls the plates in _Maisons et palais de Rome moderne_, which the two architects had published in 1798 before their professional star had risen very high (Plate 6B). With Nash’s Cronkhill, although in a very different and even opposed spirit, this scheme presages the international Renaissance Revival of the second quarter of the century. The very effective high curved roofs, filling out completely the ‘envelope’ allowed by the Paris building code, were added in 1855; more conventional two-pitched mansards were provided originally.
But the Empire mode, particularly as elaborated by Percier and Fontaine in the service of the Emperor, was primarily a fashionable style for interiors, and found perhaps its most characteristic expression in furniture, usually of dark mahogany with much ornate decoration of a character resembling gold embroidery on uniforms. Such flat decorative work is also found carved on exteriors, not only in France but wherever Napoleonic influence penetrated. Indeed in furniture and interior design generally non-French work is often of the highest quality, especially when executed for such clients as Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat at Naples.
Yet the character of French leadership in the arts had changed since the 1780s. The architects at the end of the _ancien régime_ had been truly revolutionary in their aesthetic and their social ideals. Napoleon’s designers, almost like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Stalin’s in our century, were flatterers and time-servers. Emulation of their work abroad was chiefly a matter of following well-publicized fashion; creative French influence still flowed, however, from men of the older generation now so largely forgotten at home. Thus it was at this point that Ledoux’s projects became generally available to others, thanks to his book published in 1804 and dedicated to Napoleon’s Russian ally of the moment, Alexander I.
Extensive building activity in Paris under Napoleon’s aegis began only in 1806, but once it started there came a positive flood of projects in conscious emulation of Louis XIV’s architectural campaigns. There was also the expectation that this activity would absorb unemployment in the building trades. But Napoleon, like later dictators who have initiated vast building projects, actually bit off a great deal more than he could chew. He was, however, more fortunate than Mussolini and Hitler in that the regimes which succeeded his in the decades between the First Empire and the Second were surprisingly willing to carry his unfinished monuments to completion. Still later, his nephew Napoleon III emulated him in an even more concerted programme of urbanism and monumental construction carried out over nearly two decades in a very different style—indeed in several (see Chapter 8).
The Colonne de la Grande Armée, replacing the statue of Louis XV at the centre of the Place Vendôme, is a properly symbolic monument of its epoch—first to be designed of the many giant columns that would arise all across the Western world from Baltimore to Petersburg within the next quarter century. Wilkins’s Nelson Pillar in Dublin, actually completed before the Paris example, has already been mentioned. The column in Paris is Trajanesque not Grecian, however, and was entirely executed with the bronze of captured guns. It well represents the Imperial Roman megalomania already evident in many projected memorials of the 1790s. Gondoin, its architect, with whom was associated J.-B. Lepère (1761-1844), provides a real link with the past, since his already-mentioned École de Médecine was one of the earliest major edifices in which Romantic Classical ideals were carried beyond the transitional stage of Soufflot’s Panthéon.
Even before the Colonne Vendôme was finished in 1810, a smaller and somewhat less typical monument, but equally Roman and also the first of a considerable line, had been completed by Percier and Fontaine. The Arc du Carrousel of 1806-8—once a gate to the Tuileries from the Place du Carrousel, now unhappily floating in unconfined space—has much of the daintiness and, in the use of coloured marbles, the polychromy of its architects’ contemporary palace interiors. Indeed, the richness of the detailing is far less characteristic of Empire taste in architecture than are their façades near by in the Rue de Rivoli (Plate 6B); the Arc du Carrousel must have provided a rather fussy pedestal for the superb Grecian horses stolen from St Mark’s in Venice that were originally mounted upon it.
Far more satisfactorily symbolic of imperial aspiration is the enormous Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, which looks down the entire length of the Champs Élysées today to overwhelm its brother arch even at that great distance (Plate 7). J.-A. Raymond (1742-1811), a pupil of Leroy, first received the commission; but with him was associated J.-F.-T. Chalgrin (1739-1811), the master of the younger Gisors, who soon took over and imposed his own astylar design. Chalgrin, like Gondoin, was an architect already well established under the _ancien régime_. His major innovation had been the reintroduction of the basilican plan[30] at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule in Paris in the 1760s, henceforth one of the favourite models for Romantic Classical churches in France and elsewhere on the Continent. Like many of the monuments of that earlier period by Chalgrin’s contemporaries, his Arc de l’Étoile reverts less to Roman antiquity than to certain aspects of the architecture of Louis XIV. Even its megalomaniac grandeur can be matched, relatively at least, in the Porte St Denis in Paris built in the 1680s by François Blondel, and it follows almost line for line the square proportions of that masterpiece. The arch was slowly brought to completion after Chalgrin’s death, first by his pupil L. Goust from 1811 to 1813 and from 1823 to 1830; then by Goust’s assistant, J.-N. Huyot (1780-1840), advised by a commission that included François Debret (1777-1850), Fontaine, and the younger Gisors; and finally from 1832 to 1837 by G.-A. Blouet (1795-1853). It owes its unmistakably nineteenth-century character partly to the crisp, hard quality of its imposts and entablatures and partly to the great Romantic figural reliefs executed in 1833 by Rude, Etex, and Cortot. These take the place on the piers of the more conventional trophy-hung obelisks on Blondel’s seventeenth-century arch. A certain post-Empire quality derives from the plastic complexity of Blouet’s attic; but on the whole the Arc de l’Étoile, if less original and less influential than Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, is Chalgrin’s masterpiece and Napoleon’s finest memorial.
The Place de la Concorde, projected by A.-J. Gabriel (1692-1782) at the end of the Baroque Age, continued to lack, even after a half century and more, appropriate monuments to terminate the cross axis. The building of a big church at the head of the Rue Royale to close the vista between Gabriel’s two colonnaded ranges on the north side of the square had bogged down well before the Revolution; across the river the much earlier Palais Bourbon, set at an angle, was even more awkward than before, now that the roof of the Salle des Cinq Cents rose above it. Since the amelioration of this southern terminal required only a tall masking façade set at right angles to the axis, this was promptly provided. Poyet in 1806-8 used the most obvious Romantic Classical solution for such a problem, a high blank wall with a ten-columned temple portico at its centre. The result is certainly an urbanistic success, if without any particular intrinsic interest; the raising of the portico above a high range of steps ensured, for example, its visibility from the square across the bridge. The form of the pediment was slightly modified and the sculpture by Cortot added in 1837-41.
In 1761 Pierre Contant d’Ivry (1698-1777) and, after his death, G.-M. Couture (1732-99) had made successive projects for a church dedicated to the Magdalen at the head of the Rue Royale, the latter already proposing that it be surrounded by a Classical peristyle. This structure, which was as yet barely begun, Napoleon now decided should be not a church but a Temple de la Gloire—he reversed his decision in 1813 after the Battle of Leipzig and the loss of Spain. For such a temple he understandably preferred, in the competition held in 1806, neither the first nor the second premiated design, both of church-like character, but one by Pierre Vignon (1763-1828) that proposed the erection of an enormous Corinthian temple on a high Roman podium. Inside, a series of square bays covered with domes on pendentives supported by giant Corinthian columns provided a structural solution technically Byzantine but as imperially Roman in scale and detailing as the exterior.
Construction of the Madeleine, begun in 1807, dragged on interminably. J.-J.-M. Huvé (1783-1852) succeeded Vignon as architect in 1828 and, like the Arc de l’Étoile, the edifice was finally finished only under Louis Philippe in 1845. The interior has a somewhat funereal solemnity, more characteristic of the post-Napoleonic regimes than of the period of its initiation. The rather obvious temple form of the exterior is redeemed by the superb siting, the really grand scale, and the rich pedimental sculpture by Lemaire. Like Chalgrin’s arch, Vignon’s Madeleine has continued to provide a major monumental nexus in the urbanism of Paris ever since.
Also proposed in 1806 but not initiated until 1808 was the Bourse by A.-T. Brongniart (1739-1813), another architect who had, like Gondoin and Chalgrin, made his mark long before the Revolution (Plate 8B). Again a free-standing peripteral structure like the Madeleine, the Bourse has suffered somewhat from its enlargement in 1902-3 by J.-B.-F. Cavel (_c._ 1844-1905) and H.-T.-E. Eustache (1861-?). Nearly square originally and unpedimented—and also set much closer to the ground—it must always have lacked the monumental presence of the Madeleine. But the interior with its ranges of arcades, derived almost as directly from a Louis XIV monument—in this case the court of the Invalides by Libéral Bruant—as Chalgrin’s arch was from that of Blondel, is very characteristic of the sort of reiterative composition generally favoured by Romantic Classicism. L.-H. Lebas (1782-1867) was associated with the elderly Brongniart from the start, and after Brongniart’s death the building was finished in 1815 by E.-E. de Labarre (1764-1833). Labarre was responsible also for the Colonne de la Grande Armée at Boulogne; this was proposed in 1804 and begun in 1810, but, like so many Napoleonic monuments, not finished until Louis Philippe took up its construction again in 1833. It was finally completed by Marquise in 1844.
In 1799 a fire made it necessary to rebuild the Théâtre de l’Odéon; but the original design of M.-J. Peyre (1730-88) and Charles de Wailly (1729-98), dating back to 1779, was repeated in 1807 with little change, as was also the case in 1819 when it was rebuilt again after another fire. This provides excellent evidence of the continuity of Romantic Classical style in France before and after the Revolution (see Chapter 3).
Napoleon had in mind the erection of various less monumental and more utilitarian structures than the Bourse and the Odéon; some of these were started, and one or two even finished, before the Empire came to an end. Behind one section of the façades in the Rue de Rivoli an enormous and rather dull General Post Office was begun in 1810 and eventually completed to serve as the Ministry of Finance under Charles X in 1827. Another ministry (Foreign Affairs) on the Quai d’Orsay was designed in 1810 by J.-C. Bonnard (1765-1818) and even begun in 1814; this was eventually carried to completion by Bonnard’s pupil Jacques Lacornée (1779-1856) in 1821-35. With its rich ordonnance of columns and arches, Bonnard’s façade had an almost High Renaissance air, or so it would appear from extant views of a structure long ago destroyed.
The Marché St Martin of 1811-16 by A.-M. Peyre (1770-1843), the Marché des Carmes of 1813 by A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer (1756-1846), and the Marché St Germain of 1816-25 by J.-B. Blondel (1764-1825), with their clerestory lighting and open timber roofs, are typical of the more practical side of Romantic Classicism.[31] The simple masonry vocabulary of these Parisian markets, so straightforward and without Antique pretension, was considered to be Italian (see Chapter 2).
The Napoleonic building flurry barely reached the provinces before its short course was over. The theatre in Dijon, begun about 1805 by Jacques Célérier (1742-1814), may be mentioned; but such plain square blocks with frontal porticoes could have been, and were, built in almost precisely the same form thirty years before—for example Ledoux’s theatre at Besançon of 1775-84. At Pontivy in Brittany, then called Napoléonville, the younger Gisors built a Préfecture in 1809 and a Palace of Justice with associated prisons two years later. A rather dull church, Saint-Vincent at Mâcon, repeating a model that had been new at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule forty years earlier, was also erected by him in 1810. The pair of front towers was a novelty suggested by an earlier project of Lebas.
It is quite characteristic of this period, so ready (as the French have been ever since) to employ elderly architects and so content with stylistic innovations that dated from before the Revolution, that Mathurin Crucy (1749-1826) rebuilt in 1808-12 the theatre in Nantes—very like that at Dijon—in exactly the same form as it had originally been designed by him in 1784-8; while he also finished in 1809-12 the Bourse and Tribunal de Commerce there which he had begun in 1791, just after the Revolution started, with no change in the original design. The setting of his theatre in the Place Graslin provided by continuous ranges of five-storey houses is presumably contemporary; despite the rather high roofs, the façades are notably crisp and smooth. The rusticated arcuation of the lower storeys might make plausible a date in the 1780s, but the rather thin and geometrically detailed iron balcony railings suggest rather the first or second decade of the new century, when the theatre was rebuilt.
If the imperial effort in France barely extended outside Paris except for the interior alterations that Percier and Fontaine carried out in the royal châteaux at Versailles, Compiègne, Saint-Cloud, and Fontainebleau—major examples of Empire decoration but not of architecture—the emperor and his nominees left their mark on most of the great cities of continental Europe. The Palazzo Serbelloni in the Corso Venezia, where Napoleon stayed in Milan, had been built by Simone Cantoni (1736-1818) in 1794. Similar to French work of the 1780s, it would probably have impressed the Emperor as still quite up-to-date. He ordered in 1806 the laying out in Milan of the Forum Bonaparte, according to the designs of Giannantonio Antolini (1754-1842), and the erection of a conventionally Roman triumphal arch, the work of Luigi Cagnola (1762-1832?), which was finally completed in 1838.
In Rome the development of the Piazza del Popolo, like the Forum Bonaparte a work of urbanism rather than of architecture, was based by Giuseppe Valadier (1762-1859), an Italian despite his French name and ancestry, on a project he had made as early as 1794. This project was modified by him under the Empire to incorporate ‘corrections’ by the younger Gisors and L.-M. Berthault (1771?-1823). Execution of the project actually began only in 1813 after Pope Pius VII returned from his Napoleonic captivity; Valadier carried it forward to ultimate completion in 1831. Valadier’s Roman church work, such as his new façade for San Pantaleone of 1806, just off the present-day Corso Vittorio Emanuele, is mostly too dull to mention; his domestic work was somewhat more interesting, but with little personal or even Italian flavour.
In Naples Leconte, who had worked with the two Gisors on the Salle des Cinq Cents in Paris, remodelled the San Carlo opera house in 1809 for Murat—it was, however, refronted in 1810-12 and rebuilt in 1816-17 (see
## Chapter 3). In association with Antonio de Simone, Leconte also
decorated rooms in the Bourbon Palace at Caserta,[32] originally built by Vanvitelli in 1752-74, for this Napoleonic brother-in-law. But the finest Empire things in the area were the Sala di Marte and the Sala di Astrea there, which de Simone, working alone, had begun to decorate slightly earlier in 1807 for Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte (Plate 25). As with so many architectural projects of the brief period of the Empire, it was left to a returning legitimate sovereign, in this case Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, to finish the job. Unlike the greater part of Percier and Fontaine’s work in the French palaces, these rooms at Caserta are interior architecture, not just interior decoration, and fully worthy in their scale and their sumptuous materials of the magnificent spaces, created almost half a century earlier by Vanvitelli, which they occupy. This is the more remarkable as de Simone was really a decorator not an architect.
The Napoleonic emendation of the Piazza San Marco in Venice calls for little comment. There Sansovino’s church of San Zimignan at the end was removed in 1807 and replaced with a structure by G. M. Solis (1745-1823) more consonant with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Procurazie by Buon and by Scamozzi along the sides. Solis’s emendation finally completed, and not unworthily, this most magnificent piece of urbanism in the form we now know it. La Fenice, the Venice opera-house, had been rebuilt by Giannantonio Selva (1751-1819) in 1786-92; of his work, however, only the rather dull façade remains. The exquisite Neo-Rococo interior is, rather surprisingly, of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, being by the brothers Tommaso and G. B. Meduna (1810-?), who restored the theatre after a fire in 1836.
Ever since the fifteenth century Italian architects had worked much abroad, generally bringing with them the latest stylistic developments. Now that day was largely over; France, England, and very soon Germany were exporting taste as Italy had done for so many previous centuries. After the Second World War her position as architectural mentor began, at least, to revive again (see Chapter 25).
The employment of foreign architects by Russian Tsars was a well-established tradition by the late eighteenth century;[33] most of them had been Italians, but one, Charles Cameron (_c._ 1714-1812), who represents like Adam the transition from Academic to Romantic Classicism, was Scottish.[34] There had also been a French designer of the most original order working in Russia early in the eighteenth century, Nicholas Pineau (1684-1754); he even formed his mature style there, initiating the ‘Pittoresque’ phase of the Rococo well before he returned to France. Half a century later Catherine the Great acquired the greater part of the drawings of Clérisseau, friend and mentor of Adam and also of Jefferson. Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, was so esteemed as a liberal ruler in what had once been the most advanced of French architectural circles that Ledoux, long left behind as a builder by Revolution and Empire, dedicated to him his book on architecture in 1804, as has already been noted.
Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801 he called on a less distinguished French architect, Thomas de Thomon (1754-1813), to design the Petersburg Bourse[35] for him; this structure, built in 1804-16, not Brongniart’s slightly later Bourse in Paris, is the great, indeed almost the prime, monument of Romantic Classicism around 1800 (Plate #8A:pl008A). The blank pediment, rising from behind a colonnade, the great segmental lunette lighting the interior, the flanking rostral columns, the smooth stucco so crisply painted, all establish this as a perfect exemplar of this period, even though every idea in it can be found in projects, if not in executed work, by Ledoux and Boullée dating from before the Revolution. An even more precise prototype is provided by a project for a ‘Bourse Maritime’ by Pompon that won a second Grand Prix de Rome in 1798; this was not published until 1806, after Thomon had begun his Bourse, but he was probably familiar with it all the same. Not only is the Bourse exemplary in itself; Petersburg—already a century old and with many vast Baroque palaces to its credit—rather than the newly founded city of Washington on the other side of the western world, offers the finest urban entity of this brief period and of the following decades during which Alexander and his brother Nicholas I continued for some thirty years major campaigns of construction along Romantic Classical lines.
Thomon’s chief Russian rival, Nikiforovich Voronikhin (1760-1814), was French-trained, a pupil of de Wailly. His Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg of 1801-11 is still rather Baroque in its obvious reminiscences of St Peter’s in Rome. But the Academy of Mines, which he began ten years later, although somewhat heavy-handed in the way Romantic Classicism tended to be, away from the great cultural centres, is almost as exemplary as Thomon’s Bourse. More characteristically Russian in its incredible extension and the great variety of its silhouette is the Admiralty[36] of 1806-15 by Adrian Dimitrievich Zakharov (1761-1811). But the end façades successfully enlarged to monumental scale the theme of the arched entrance to the pre-revolutionary Hôtel de Salm in Paris by Pierre Rousseau (1751-1810). Altogether the Admiralty exceeded in quality as well as in scale almost everything that Napoleon commanded to be built in France, except perhaps the Arc de l’Étoile.
Thus Romantic Classicism before Waterloo had major representatives all the way from Latrobe and Mills in America, the one a foreigner, the other a native, to Thomon and his two native rivals in Russia; while the work of Leconte in Naples could once be matched by that done by Ramée in Hamburg and Denmark before he went to America and by the projects, at least, of Desprez in Sweden (see below). Other Frenchmen were working throughout Napoleon’s realm and outside it as well; but the most distinguished architect of this period hitherto unmentioned was a Dane, C. F. Hansen (1756-1845). The design of his Palace of Justice of 1805-15 in the Nytorv in Copenhagen, with its associated gaol, derives from the most advanced projects made by Frenchmen in the earlier years of Romantic Classicism before 1800. The gaol and the arches of its courtyard are more definitely Romantic than anything executed in France under Louis XVI, for they specifically recall the ‘Prisons’ of Piranesi, those strange architectural dreams in which the Baroque seems to become the Romantic before one’s very eyes. The gaol also resembles a prison designed for Aix by Ledoux and owes a certain medieval flavour, one must presume, to Hansen’s first- or second-hand knowledge of the projects of Boullée.
Still finer, because more homogeneous in conception if less pictorially Romantic, is the principal church in Copenhagen, the Vor Frue Kirke in the Nørregade, designed in 1808-10 by Hansen and built over the years 1811-29. The severely plain tower above the Greek Doric portico at the front illustrates the more primitivistic and Italianate aspects of Romantic Classical theory—more precisely it might seem to derive from the tower of a project for a slaughterhouse by F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818),[37] a pupil of Leroy. The interior, eventually furnished with statues of Christ and the Twelve Apostles by one of the greatest Romantic Classical sculptors, the Danish Thorwaldsen, raises its ranges of Greek Doric columns to gallery level above a smooth arcuated base (Plate 4B). These carry a coffered Roman barrel vault in a way that follows quite closely, although with some change in the proportions, Boullée’s project for the Bibliothèque Royale. Not the least successful and original feature of the exterior is the plain half-cylinder of the half-domed apse broken only by a portal of almost Egyptian simplicity. But in Copenhagen, with its old tradition of building in brick, the characteristic Romantic Classical surfaces of smooth stucco seem alien and the curious pinky-brown that Hansen’s buildings are painted is certainly a little gloomy today.
In Sweden the Rome-trained French architect Desprez, whose projects of the 1780s have been mentioned, was largely occupied not with building but with theatre settings; however, there is at least the excellent Botanical Institute that he built in Uppsala, designed in 1791 and completed in 1807, with its characteristic Greek Doric portico and plain wall surfaces. More notable was his grandiose project, also of 1791, for the Haga Slott in the form of a very long peripteral temple with an octastyle pedimented portico projecting in the middle of the side. But Sweden saw no such monumental example of Romantic Classicism carried to execution. Typical of actual production is the country house at Stjamsund built in 1801 by C. F. Sundahl (1754-1831); this is more English than French in character, indeed with its plain rectangular mass and central portico almost literally Anglo-Palladian.
Harassed and recurrently conquered or _gleichgeschaltet_ though most of the German states were in the Napoleonic Wars (while Sweden eventually received a Napoleonic marshal as sovereign through the testament of her legitimate ruler) there was much more building altogether in these years of the turn of the century in Germany than in Sweden, or indeed in France, much of it of high quality. The frontispiece to Romantic Classicism in Germany is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, built in 1789-93 by K. G. Langhans (1733-1808). Still somewhat attenuated and un-Grecian in its proportions, this is the first of the Doric ceremonial gateways that were to be so characteristic of Romantic Classicism everywhere and also one of the most complex and original in composition. More ponderous and provincial is Langhans’s Potsdam theatre of 1795; but the Stadttheater at Danzig of 1798-1801 by Held, the City Architect, a cube with a Doric temple portico and a low saucer dome, follows a more Ledolcian paradigm.
David Gilly (1748-1808) was a more advanced Berlin architect than the elderly Langhans; but his best work of these years is the Viewegsches Haus in Brunswick of 1801-5 with its smooth stucco wall-planes, boldly incised ornament, and Greek Doric porch. More elegantly French is another Brunswick house of this period, the free-standing Villa Holland of 1805 by P. J. Krahe (1758-1840).
Gilly would have been overshadowed by his son Friedrich (1771-1800) had the latter lived, or so one must judge, not from his modest Mölter house in the Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin of 1799, but from certain major projects. One, of 1797, is for a monument to Frederick the Great which was widely and deeply influential for many years to come; another, of 1800, is for a Prussian National Theatre, improving upon Ledoux’s at Besançon as regards the interior and very original in its external massing. The monument raised a Greek Doric temple on a tremendous substructure of the most abstract geometrical character, surrounded it with obelisks, and set the whole in a vast open space, unconfined but—as it were—defined by subsidiary structures of very fresh and varied design (Plate 9A). The handsome gateway to the square seems to provide evidence of Gilly’s familiarity with such a highly personal work of Soane as his entrance arch at Tyringham (Plate 6A); however, the general tone of somewhat funereal grandeur recalls rather the monumental projects of Ledoux, Boullée, and the younger men of France who designed so much and built so little in this decade. Other contemporary Berlin architects, such as Heinrich Gentz (1766-1801), who built the old Mint in 1798-1800, and Friedrich Becherer (1746-1823), who built the Exchange in 1801, while up-to-date stylistically, were much less accomplished than Friedrich Gilly. His artistic heir was his fellow pupil Schinkel, whose architectural career really began in 1816 (see Chapter 2).
[Illustration:
Figure 1. Friedrich Weinbrenner: Karlsruhe, Marktplatz, 1804-24, plan ]
The Baden architect Friedrich Weinbrenner (1766-1826) was already active in Strasbourg in the 1790s, and his monument of 1800 to General Desaix on the Île des Épis, Bas-Rhin, is so French in every way that it properly finds a place in the official publication by Gourlier and others of the public works of France in these years. Returning to Karlsruhe, Weinbrenner began perhaps the most productive architectural career of any German of his generation, transforming the Baden capital into a Romantic Classical city somewhat less monumental, but more coherently exemplary, than Petersburg. His own house there dated from 1801 and his Ettlinger Gate from 1803. In 1804 he began work on the Marktplatz there, basing himself, however, on earlier projects that he had made in 1790 and in 1797 (Plate 10A). A Baroque scheme exists on paper for this square, closing it in with continuous façades and curving them round the ends. Weinbrenner’s characteristically Romantic Classical approach to the design of a square is quite different, similar to if somewhat less open than Friedrich Gilly’s intended setting for the Frederick the Great Monument (Figure 1). Two balancing but not identical buildings, each more or less isolated, face each other across the centre of the oblong space. The other less important structures appear as separate blocks. Their relative geometrical purity is underlined by the even purer form of the plain pyramidal monument erected in the centre in 1823. Such had for some time provided favourite decorations in Romantic gardens, but this was the first to be used as a focal accent in place of an arch, a column, or an obelisk. The City Hall on one side, with the associated Lyceum, was begun in 1804 and completed some twenty years later. The temple-like Evangelical Church which faces the City Hall was built in 1807-16. Something of the grand scale of the Corinthian portico on the front of the church is carried over into the interior, where two tiers of galleries run along the sides behind giant Corinthian nave colonnades. In the circular Rondellplatz, punctuated eventually by an obelisk in the centre, there rose in 1805-13 Weinbrenner’s Markgräfliches Palais, its portico set against the concave quadrant of the front. His domed Catholic church of 1808-17 was unfortunately entirely rebuilt in 1880-3.
Similar to Weinbrenner’s Rondellplatz is the Karolinenplatz in Munich, laid out by Karl von Fischer (1782-1820) in 1808. But this was originally even more Romantic Classical in disposition, since the individual houses were all discrete blocks set in the segments between the entering streets. The 106-foot obelisk in the centre here was erected in 1833 by Leo von Klenze (1784-1864). Fischer’s National Theatre in the Max-Josephsplatz in Munich, projected in 1810 and built in 1811-18—and later rebuilt by Klenze according to the original design after a fire in 1823—is a quite conventional monument of its day dominated by a great temple portico. Though not very crisp in its proportions, this theatre has real presence, particularly in relation to the less boldly scaled Renaissance Revival buildings by Klenze, the Königsbau of 1826 and the Hauptpostamt of ten years later, which flank it on the sides of the square.
Not to extend unduly this catalogue of German work of the very opening years of the nineteenth century, one may conclude with mention of the Women’s Prison in Würzburg by Peter Speeth (1772-1831) built in 1809-10. In this, much of the boldness of design of the French prison projects of Ledoux and Boullée was happily realized, if at a rather modest scale (Plate 17B). Speeth later proceeded to Russia, but what he did there is a mystery.
Austrian production was rather limited and on the whole undistinguished in this period. The extant façade by Franz Jäger (1743-1809) of the Theater an der Wien of 1797-1801 off the Linke Wienzeile in Vienna has a delicacy that is more _style Louis XVI_ than Romantic Classical. Neither the Palais Rasumofsky at 23-25 Rasumofskygasse in Vienna of 1806-7, built by Louis Joseph von Montoyer (_c._ 1749-1811) for Beethoven’s patron, nor his Albertina of 1800-4 on the Augustinerbastei has much character. There is equally little to be said for the Palais Palffy of 1809 at 3 Wallnerstrasse by the other leading Viennese architect of the day, Karl von Moreau (1758-1841). Despite his French name, Montoyer was a Hapsburg subject from the Walloon provinces; Moreau’s origin is uncertain, but he is reputed to have been trained, if not born, in France. If he was not French, Austria would be one of the few countries where no French architect worked in this period.
A certain sort of primacy must certainly be given to France in this period, although less definitely than in the decades 1750-90, because the French became the educators of the world in architecture and the codifiers of style once a new post-Baroque style had been created. Among Napoleon’s new institutional establishments was the École Polytechnique. Here architecture was taught by Durand, a pupil of Boullée, under the Empire and the following Restoration. His _Précis des leçons_ became a sort of Bible of later Romantic Classicism throughout his lifetime and even beyond. Above all in Germany, the instruction of Durand provided the link between the innovations of the creative decades before the Revolution in France and a new generation of architects who matured just in time to take over the building activities of the kingdoms which rose from the ruins of Napoleon’s empire. We may well precede any description of the achievements of Romantic Classicism after 1810 with some consideration of Durand’s treatise.
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## CHAPTER 2
THE DOCTRINE OF J.-N.-L. DURAND AND ITS APPLICATION IN NORTHERN EUROPE
FROM the time of Louis XIV France had been unique in possessing a highly organized system of architectural education. Under the aegis of the Académie, students were prepared for professional practice in a way all but unknown elsewhere. To crown their formal training came the opportunity, determined by competition, for the ablest to spend several years of further study as _pensionnaires_ in Rome. The revolutionary years of the 1790s disrupted temporarily the French pattern of architectural education and recurrent wars cut off access to Rome. The Empire, however, early re-established the pattern of higher professional education with only slight and nominal differences. From 1806 on, moreover, the competition projects for the Prix de Rome, including those from as far back as 1791, were handsomely published in a series of volumes.[38] Thus the whole international world of architecture could henceforth have ready access to the visual results of official French training in architecture, if not to the actual discipline of the Parisian ateliers.
Napoleon, as an ex-ordnance officer, felt more sympathy with engineers than with architects; hence he established a new École Polytechnique, where architecture was included in the curriculum along with various sciences and technics. J.-N.-L. Durand (1760-1834), the new school’s professor of architecture, published his _Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École Polytechnique_ in two volumes in 1802-5, thus making a fairly complete presentation of the content of French architectural education generally available.[39] Recurrent issues of this work down to 1840, of which at least one appeared outside France—in Belgium—allowed this popular treatise to become a sort of bible of Romantic Classicism that retained international authority for a generation and more.
Durand was a pupil of Boullée; but both the text and the plates of his
## book indicate his capacity for synthesizing and systematizing the
diverse strands of theory and practice that had developed in France in the previous forty years. Because of his temperament and background, and _a fortiori_ because he was teaching not in an art academy but in a technical school, Durand is doubtless to be classed within his generation as a proponent of structural rationalism. But he was a much more eclectic one than Soufflot’s disciple Rondelet, from 1795 professor at the École Centrale des Travaux Publics and author of the major treatise on building construction of the period.[40] Durand’s lessons incorporated many other aspects of Romantic Classicism, from the pure Classical Revivalism of one wing of the academic world to an eclectic interest in Renaissance and even, like his master Boullée, in certain medieval modes; only the recondite symbolism of Ledoux is absent. In general, one feels in Durand’s case, as always with the second generation of an artistic movement, some loss of intensity at various points where the awkward edges of opposed sources of inspiration were clipped to allow their coherent codification.
After a theoretical introduction concerning the goal of architecture, its structural means, and the general principles to be derived therefrom, Durand deals as a convinced ‘constructor’ with various materials and their proper employment before treating of specific forms and their combination. Only in the second part of his work, concerned with ways of combining architectural elements, do the visual results of his theories become fully evident. There he presents in plan and in elevation various structural systems from trabeated colonnades of Greek and Roman inspiration to arcuated and vaulted forms of Renaissance or even round-arched medieval character. Among his specific examples, ‘vertical combinations’ of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century elements outnumber the strictly Classical paradigms (Figure 2); whole plates, moreover, are given to schemes that are not only generically Italianate, but of Early Christian, Romanesque, or even Gothic, rather than Renaissance, inspiration. Common to most of his examples is the insistent repetition of elements, both horizontally and vertically, and most characteristic is his interest in the varied skylines that central and corner towers can provide, as also in the incorporation of voids in architectural compositions in the form of loggias and pergolas. More monumental façades fronted by temple porticoes are in a minority, although colonnades are frequent enough in his presentation of such specific features as porches, vestibules, halls, galleries, and central spaces. Here are to be found most of the detailed formulas—almost all derived from Boullée and from the Grand Prix projects of the previous decade—which the next generation of architects would follow again and again throughout most of the western world.
[Illustration:
Figure 2. J.-N.-L. Durand: ‘Vertical Combinations’ (from _Précis des leçons_, 1805) ]
In his second volume Durand turns from a consideration of architecture in terms of structural elements to a notably systematic presentation of buildings in terms of their varying functions. First he deals with urbanistic features, including not only bridges, streets, and squares, but also such supposedly essential elements of the ideal classicizing city as triumphal arches and tombs. A second section considers temples (not churches, it is amusing to note), palaces, treasuries, law courts, town halls, colleges, libraries, museums, observatories, lighthouses, markets, exchanges, custom houses, exhibition buildings, theatres, baths, hospitals, prisons, and barracks. Here were all the individual structures of the model Napoleonic city, of which Napoleon had time to build so few but of which the next decades in France and abroad were to see so many executed by Durand’s pupils and other emulators of his ideals.
For less representational edifices, from town halls and markets to prisons and barracks, Durand’s utilitarianism led him to substitute for colonnades and domes plain walls broken by ranges of arcuated openings, sometimes of _quattrocento_ or Roman-aqueduct character but as often of vaguely medieval inspiration. For nearly a half century such paradigms were very frequently followed, not only in France but even more in other countries, as Classicism continued to grow more Romantic.
Nor were the designs for houses that Durand provided in the final section of his book entirely uninfluential.[41] However, there were fewer of these, and the inspiration of far more executed work of the next forty or fifty years can be traced to his paradigms for public monuments than to his prescriptions for private dwellings. Indeed, Romantic Classicism is a predominantly public style, and its utilitarianism is of the State rather than of the private individual. However, the opposing current of the Picturesque, reflected in Durand’s book only in his concern for the ‘employment of the objects of nature in the composition of edifices’ (by which he meant hardly more than Italianate fountains and even more Italianate vine-hung loggias), provided amply for the individual (see Chapter 6).
It might seem natural to continue from this discussion of Durand’s treatise with some account of the executed architecture of France during the final years of the Empire after 1810, under the last Bourbons, and under Louis Philippe. Actually, however, the most concrete examples of Durand’s influence, and certainly the finest Durandesque monuments, are to be found not in France but in Germany and Denmark.
By the time of Napoleon, French influence on German architecture was a very old story. More and more French architects were employed by German princes as the eighteenth century proceeded, and by 1800 there were few German centres without examples of their work. As we have seen in the previous chapter, moreover, the work of various German architects in the 1790s and the early 1800s, whether or not they had actually studied or even travelled in France, showed their devotion to the early ideals of Romantic Classicism. Such men as K. G. Langhans and David Gilly in Berlin, Fischer in Munich, or Weinbrenner in Karlsruhe had no Napoleon to employ them; but they were happier than his architects in seeing their major works brought to relatively early completion. At Karlsruhe Weinbrenner’s comprehensive projects for the new quarters of the town continued to go forward down to his death in 1826. By that time his City Hall had finally been finished, and street after street of modest houses filled out the pattern of a coherent Romantic Classical city.
The Karlsruhe Marktplatz stands as one of the happiest ensembles of the early nineteenth century, happy not alone because Weinbrenner, who first conceived it, was able to carry it to final completion before architectural fashions had begun to change, but even more because that first conception dated back to the most vigorous period of the architectural revolution in Germany and was not notably diluted by the more pedestrian standards of later days (Plate 10A). In detail, perhaps, the original designs for the individual buildings were bolder; but the ideal of a public square, not walled in in the Baroque way but defined by discrete blocks, balanced but not identical, and focused by the eye-catching diagonals of the central pyramid, a geometric shape as pure as the cube or the sphere yet also an established formal symbol and a subtle memory of the Egyptian past, was fully realized (Figure 1). Outside the Marktplatz, except perhaps in the Rondellplatz with its central obelisk, Weinbrenner’s work is more provincial though in a very distinguished way. Here and there, moreover, a pointed arch or a touch of asymmetry showed his early response to the contemporary currents of the Picturesque.
Weinbrenner’s death in 1826 and the succession as State architect of Baden of his pupil Heinrich Hübsch (1795-1863) provides a natural break in the Romantic Classical story at just that point when the rise of new ideals began to make the more Classical side of Romantic Classicism out of date—in 1828 Hübsch himself published a characteristic essay, _In welchem Styl sollen wir bauen?_, a question to which the answers were increasingly various, and rarely the Classical style. Elsewhere in Germany, and notably in Bavaria, where the Wittelsbachs, raised to kingship while in alliance with Napoleon, were also the most culturally ambitious rulers of a post-Napoleonic state, there is no such sharp break. Leo von Klenze, born in 1784 in Hildesheim, lived until 1864; his Munich Propylaeon, completed only the year before his death and begun as late as 1846, is by no means the least Grecian of his works. Klenze (he was ennobled by his royal patron) had studied in Paris under the Empire not only under Durand at the École Polytechnique but also with Percier. In 1805 he had visited the other two main sources of up-to-date architectural inspiration, Italy with its Classical ruins and its Renaissance palaces, and England with its own early version of Romantic Classicism and its various illustrations of the Picturesque. In 1808 Napoleon’s brother Jerome, then King of Westphalia, who was already employing A.-H.-V. Grandjean de Montigny (1776-1850), had made the twenty-four-year-old Paris-trained German his court architect; in 1814 Maximilian I called him to Munich.
In 1816 Klenze began his first major construction, the Munich Glyptothek, a characteristic and externally somewhat dull sculpture gallery. This is dominated in the established French way by a tall temple portico in the centre, and the blank walls at either side are relieved, none too happily, by aedicular niches. But if the exterior (which survived the blitz) is conventional enough the interiors, completed in 1830 and originally filled—among other magnificent antiquities—with the sculpture from the temple at Aegina as repaired and installed by Thorwaldsen, made it one of the finest productions of the great early age of museum-building as long as they existed (Plate 9B). The plan, with a range of top-lit galleries around a court, was generically Durandesque in its square modularity; the sections followed almost line for line one of Durand’s paradigms for art galleries (Figure 3). The sumptuous decoration of the vaults and the superb sculpture so handsomely arranged by Thorwaldsen provided a mixture of periods—real fifth-century Greek and Empire—distressing to purists but wonderfully symptomatic of the ideals of the age.
The Glyptothek was the first building erected in the Königsplatz, a very typical Romantic Classical urbanistic entity. Faced by an even more completely columniated picture gallery, built by G. F. Ziebland (1800-73) in 1838-48, with Klenze’s Propylaeon of 1846-63 forming the far side of the square, the Königsplatz has all the coldness and barrenness which Weinbrenner happily avoided in his Marktplatz; by the time of its completion this must have seemed very out of date, not least to Klenze himself. But as the Propylaeon indicates, Klenze never eschewed trabeated Classicism, however much his best later work belongs to—indeed to a considerable extent actually initiates—the Renaissance Revival.
[Illustration:
Figure 3. J.-N.-L. Durand: ‘Galleries’ (from _Précis des leçons_, 1805) ]
His Walhalla[42] near Regensburg, built in 1831-42 but based on designs prepared a decade or more earlier, is the most grandly sited of all the copies of Greek and Roman temples which succeeded in the first half of the nineteenth century Jefferson’s initial large-scale example at Richmond, Virginia. Like the finest ancient Greek temples, it is raised high on a hill—that is actually what is most truly Classical about it, as it is also, paradoxically, what may today seem most specifically Romantic (Plate 16A). But the tremendous substructure of staircases and terraces, derived from Friedrich Gilly’s project for the monument to Frederick the Great (Plate 9A), could belong to no other period than this.
In the thirties Klenze, who had already visited Greece in 1823-4 before the establishment of a Wittelsbach monarchy gave employment to Bavarian architects there, was called to Petersburg. There, in 1839-49, rose his Hermitage Museum. The elaborate detailing of this, however Grecian it may be in intention, reflects the growing taste for elaboration in the second quarter of the century as his other Classical works do not. Still later, though not as late as the Propylaeon, is the Munich Ruhmeshalle of 1843-53, a U-shaped Doric stoa which provides in the Hellenistic way a setting for a giant statue of Bavaria by Schwanthaler. This is dull, and still in the old-established Grecian mode of the earlier years of the century. More characteristically, however, Klenze left all that behind him even before 1825, when Maximilian I was succeeded by Ludwig I.
Museums are the most typical monuments of Romantic Classicism, as a whole range of them[43] from the Museo Pio-Clementino by Michelangelo Simonetti (1724-81) at the Vatican in Rome of 1769-74 down at least to the Neuere Pinakothek in Munich of 1846-53 by August von Voit (1801-71) sufficiently illustrate. The two most purely Grecian examples, Smirke’s British Museum in London (Plate 33) and Schinkel’s Neues (later Altes) Museum in Berlin (Plate 13), were not yet designed when Klenze first turned his attention in the years 1822-5 to planning a gallery for paintings at Munich. Begun in 1826 and completed in 1833, the Pinakothek (later Ältere Pinakothek) might be considered the earliest monumental example of revived High Renaissance design. Yet there is little about it that cannot be matched in published French Grand Prix projects or in the plates of Durand; Bonnard’s ministry on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, moreover, must have been rather similar. The Pinakothek was largely destroyed in the Second World War, but has now been rebuilt according to Klenze’s original design, except for the ceiling decorations.
Another building by Klenze, the Königsbau section of the Royal palace in Munich, fronting on the Max-Josephplatz at right angles to Fischer’s theatre, is a more attractive early example of the Renaissance Revival. Begun in the same year 1826 as the Ältere Pinakothek, it was completed in 1833. The façade follows closely that of the Pitti Palace as extended in the seventeenth century, but carries the pilasters of Alberti’s Rucellai Palace, and in designing it Klenze must have drawn heavily on the _Architecture toscane_ of Grandjean de Montigny.[44] The planning inside is curiously free and asymmetrical considering the total regularity of the fenestration, but then little trace of the original Pitti plan had survived to be followed by an imitator.
In 1836 Klenze completed this square, so characteristic a product of two generations of Romantic Classicism, by facing the eighteenth-century Palais Törring on the other side from the Königsbau with a _quattrocento_ arcade in order to provide a monumental and harmonious Central Post Office. Another earlier square, the Odeonsplatz, with Klenze’s Leuchtenberg Palais of 1819, his matching Odeon completed in 1828, and a range of shops of 1822, also by him, on the other side of the Ludwigstrasse, has almost as much Italian Renaissance feeling but is less derivatively Tuscan. It follows rather the work of his master Percier in Paris under the Empire.
The increasing eclecticism of Romantic Classical architects is well illustrated by the fact that the Court Church[45] attached to the palace at the rear was built by Klenze in the same years as the Königsbau, 1826-37. This is covered by a series of domes on pendentives, derived presumably from the Madeleine in Paris but detailed to suggest, as Vignon’s do not, the ultimately Byzantine origin of the structural form; the immediate prototype, however, was probably one of Schinkel’s projects for the Werder Church in Berlin (see below).
In the creation of the principal street of Ludwigian Munich, the Ludwigstrasse, a rival of Klenze’s, Friedrich von Gärtner (1792-1847), like Klenze ennobled by his sovereign, played a more important role. Born in Coblenz, Gärtner studied first at the Munich Academy, where he was later to be professor of architecture and, from 1841, director. After his studies in Munich, he travelled in France, Italy, Holland, and England, although he had no formal foreign training such as Klenze’s. Gärtner’s first major work, destined by its tall twin towers to dominate the long and rather monotonous perspective of the Ludwigstrasse, was the Ludwigskirche built in 1829-40 (Plate 10B). If Klenze’s Court Church was Byzantinesque, Gärtner’s church was Romanesquoid, though still in a rather Durandesque way. Even more Durandesque, and very much finer, is the long façade of Gärtner’s State Library next door, which was built in 1831-40 (Plate 10B). Here the tawny tones of the brick and terracotta, as much as the slightly medievalizing detail of the arcuated front, give evidence of the Romantic rejection of the monochromy typical of the Greek Revival. But if this façade is warm in colour it could hardly be colder in design, throwing into happy relief the richer _ordonnance_ of Klenze’s nearby War Office of 1824-6 with its rusticated arches and low wings (Figure 4).
[Illustration:
Figure 4. Leo von Klenze: Munich, War Office, 1824-6, elevation ]
Rounding out the Ludwigstrasse are many other consonant structures. By Klenze is the Herzog Max Palais of 1826-30 on the right; by Gärtner the Blindeninstitut of 1834-8, farther down opposite the Ludwigskirche, and the University of 1834-40 together with the Max Joseph Stift that complete the terminal square. There stands also the inharmoniously Roman Siegestor of 1843-50 which is, rather surprisingly, also by Gärtner. Far more appropriate, if equally unoriginal, is his Feldherrenhalle of 1841-4 at the other end of the street above the Odeonsplatz, a close copy of the fourteenth-century Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The whole area constitutes what is perhaps the finest, or at least the most coherent, range of streets and squares of the later and more eclectic phase of Romantic Classicism. This exceeds in extent, though not in quality, Weinbrenner’s Marktplatz in Karlsruhe of the preceding quarter century. This brilliant Munich period came to an end on Ludwig I’s abdication in 1848; his successor Maximilian II’s attempt to find a ‘new style’ for his Maximilianstrasse in the next decade was a dismal fiasco, for this ‘new style’ as applied by Friedrich Bürklein (1813-73), a pupil of Gärtner, in building up the new street in 1852-9 proved to be merely a fussy and muddled approach to the English Perpendicular, already employed with more success by Bürklein’s master.
Before his death, the year before Maximilian II’s accession, Gärtner had all but completed the Wittelsbach Palace. This he had begun in 1843 using a very Durandesque version of English Tudor executed in red brick. Red brick also characterizes another example of contemporary eclecticism, the Bonifazius Basilika of 1835-40 by Ziebland. This was designed, as its name implies, in a Romantic Classical version of the Early Christian; but it is much less Roman in detail than the great French and Italian churches of the period of this generic basilican order (see Chapter 3).
Most of these variant aspects of later Romantic Classicism in Munich, whether Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Italian Gothic, or _quattrocento_ in inspiration, are also examples of what was called at this time in Germany the _Rundbogenstil_.[46] A large and prominent example in Munich, late enough to illustrate how this special mode of Romantic Classicism deteriorated after the mid century, was Bürklein’s railway station built in 1857-60. The whole station has now been largely but not entirely destroyed by bombing; originally it had a handsome shed with very heavy arched principals of timber.
Although the mode may be readily paralleled in other North European countries, the _Rundbogenstil_ is peculiarly German. It was, indeed, the favourite mode of the thirties and forties in most German states; certainly it is comparable in local importance to the mature Gothic Revival of these decades in England as the German Neo-Gothic is not (see
## Chapter 6). Deriving from the more utilitarian arcuated models provided
by Durand (and ultimately from the projects of his master Boullée and other French architects of the 1780s), the _Rundbogenstil_ is still a phase of Romantic Classicism even if in it the Romantic element has risen close to dominance. But in its rigidity of composition, repetition of identical elements, and emphasis on direct structural expression it is wholly in the line of the earlier and more Classical rationalism.
The changing taste of these decades usually demanded ever more and busier detail. Rivalry with the archaeological pretensions of the Greek Revival, moreover, called for a certain parade of stylistic erudition. But the archaeological sources drawn upon were very various and to varying degrees effectively documented. From the Early Christian to the _quattrocento_, most of them were more or less Italianate. However, there were some architects who succeeded—like Gärtner at the Wittelsbach Palace—in using pointed-arched precedent in a characteristically _Rundbogenstil_ way; others elaborated their detail with real originality rather than adhering closely to any past precedent at all.
On its _quattrocento_ side the _Rundbogenstil_ was perhaps most notably represented in Germany by the Johanneum in Hamburg of 1836-9 (completely destroyed in the Second World War), a large building surrounding three sides of a court and incorporating two schools and a library (Plate 11B). This was by C. L. Wimmel (1786-1845), like Hübsch a pupil of Weinbrenner, and F. G. J. Forsmann (1795-1878). This particular _Rundbogenstil_ work can also be classified as belonging, like Klenze’s Königsbau, to the international Renaissance Revival of which Hamburg was rather a centre. For example, the extant Exchange there of 1836-41 by these same architects is of richer and more High Renaissance character and not at all _Rundbogenstil_.
Many houses in Hamburg built by Gottfried Semper (1803-79), Alexis de Chateauneuf (1799-1853), who had studied in Paris, and others in the forties were of elegant Early Renaissance design—one by the former even having _sgraffiti_ on the walls—more like Klenze’s row of shops in the Odeonsplatz. The Rücker-Jenisch house of 1845 by the Swiss-born Auguste de Meuron (1813-98), a pupil of the same French architect, A.-F.-R. Leclerc, as de Chateauneuf, was certainly not _Rundbogenstil_ but rather a version of the Travellers’ Club in London. Thus it followed, in this anglicizing city, an epoch-making model by Charles Barry that dates from fifteen years earlier (see Chapter 4). However, de Chateauneuf’s Alster Arcade beside the waters of the Kleine Alster and his red brick Alte Post (now the Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv) of 1845-7 in the Poststrasse are both prominent and excellent examples of the _Rundbogenstil_ of this period in Hamburg, the latter being slightly Gothic in its detailing.
The work of Hübsch, Weinbrenner’s successor as State architect in Baden, despite his very serious archaeological study of Early Christian and Romanesque architecture,[47] falls somewhere between Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche and Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika without achieving either the crisply Durandesque quality of the one or the relative archaeological plausibility of the other. In his civil buildings, such as the very simple Ministry of Finance designed in 1827 and built in 1829-33, the more ornate Technische Hochschule of 1832-6, the Art Gallery of 1840-9, and the Theatre of 1851-3, all in Karlsruhe, very considerable originality of composition was more and more confused as he grew older by the fussy elaboration of the terracotta ornamentation.
In his later work Hübsch frequently used not the round but the segmental arch—a highly rational form with brick masonry—and was usually somewhat happier than the Bavarians in handling the tawny tonalities of brick and terracotta which so generally replaced the pale monochromy of the Greek Revival in the thirties and forties. A minor but especially fine example of his most personal manner is the Trinkhalle of 1840 at Baden-Baden (Plate 11A), rather better suited in its festive spirit to a watering-place than the Classical severity of Weinbrenner’s Kurhaus there of 1821-3. Hübsch’s churches are naturally more archaeological in character and definitely more Romanesquoid than _Rundbogenstil_. Those at Freiburg (1829-38), Bulach (1834-7), and Rottenburg (1834) are typical. The _Rundbogenstil_ railway stations of another Baden architect, Friedrich Eisenlohr (1804-55), at Karlsruhe (1842) and Freiburg precede Bürklein’s in Munich in date and are rather superior to it.
The _Rundbogenstil_ was particularly dominant in the southern German states, overflowing also into Switzerland, where the Federal Palace in Berne, built in 1851-7 by Friedrich Studer (1817-70), is a particularly extensive and nobly sited example. It was, however, in Prussia in the north of Germany that the greatest architect who worked in this mode was
## active, and he owes his reputation largely to his Grecian work.
Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, the only architect of the first half of the nineteenth century who can be compared in stature with the English Soane, was the great international master of two successive phases of Romantic Classicism, first of the programmatic Greek Revival, with which the post-Napoleonic period began almost everywhere in the second decade of the century, and then of the more eclectic phase that followed. Born in 1781, a generation later than Soane, Schinkel’s serious architectural production began only in 1816. His relatively early death in 1841 truncated his career; but his pupils and his spirit dominated Prussian, and indeed most of German, architecture for another score of years and more.
Somewhat as the long-lived Titian stood to the short-lived Giorgione stood Schinkel in relation to his near-contemporary and associate Friedrich Gilly, whose projects have already been mentioned (Plate 9A). Indeed, Schinkel showed almost as great a capacity to absorb and continue the revolutionary architectural ideals of the 1780s in France as Gilly—more, certainly, than most of the foreigners who visited Paris during the unproductive years following the Revolution, or even those who stayed on to study there.
Schinkel, however, soon to be one of the most architectonic of architects, made his earliest mark not with architectural projects but, like Inigo Jones in England before him, as a designer of theatre sets. Down to 1815 he executed no buildings of any consequence; but in his paintings of these years, even more perhaps than in his stage sets, he established himself as a High Romantic artist of real distinction. At their best these follow in quality very closely after the master works of German Romantic landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Characteristically, buildings play an important part in Schinkel’s pictures, and vast Gothic constructions in the ‘Sublime’ spirit of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey are actually more frequent than Grecian or Italianate fabricks.
[Illustration:
Figure 5. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: project for Neue Wache, Berlin, 1816 ]
But if Gothic projects form a more important part of his production on canvas, and also on paper, in the first decades of the century than is the case with any other architect of the period, even in England, Schinkel made his formal architectural debut as a Grecian and a rationalist. Named by Frederick William III State architect in 1815, his project of the next year for the Neue Wache (Figure 5), Unter den Linden, facing Frederick the Great’s opera house, is especially notable in the use of square piers—a Ledolcian extreme of rationalist simplification—beneath the Grecian pediment. His intense Romanticism also reveals itself in the heads of Pergamenian extravagance that writhe forth from the frieze above. Not surprisingly, in the building as executed, and happily still extant, Greek Doric columns replace the square piers. But the broad plain members that frame the cubic mass behind and, above all, the superb proportions of the whole reveal a surer hand than any other architect of the day in Germany possessed. The contrast with Klenze’s Glyptothek, begun the same year, is notable.
Schinkel’s Berlin Cathedral, as rebuilt in 1817-22 beside the Baroque Schloss of Andreas Schlüter, was a modest work and none too successful; its replacement in 1894-1905 by the enormous Neo-Baroque structure of Julius Raschdorf was no great loss.
There followed after the Cathedral a work of much greater scale, the Berlin Schauspielhaus, designed in 1818 and built in 1819-21 (Plate 12). Here the complexity of the mass diminishes somewhat the clarity of the geometrical order in the separate parts; but Schinkel’s rationalistic handling of Grecian elements is nowhere better seen than in the articulation of the attic by means of a ‘pilastrade’ of small antae or the reticulated organization of the walls of the side wings. The interior of the auditorium boldly combines very simple and heavily scaled wall elements with very delicately designed iron supports for the ranges of boxes and galleries.
Characteristic of the many-sidedness of Schinkel’s talent, if very much smaller and intrinsically less happy, is the War Memorial, also of 1819-21, on the Kreuzberg in Berlin. This is a Gothic shrine of the most lacy and linear design, 111 feet high and entirely executed in cast iron.
The Singakademie in Berlin of 1822 and a large house in Charlottenburg for the banker Behrend, on the other hand, are very accomplished exercises in a rigidly Classical mode such as his French contemporaries were currently essaying with markedly less elegance of proportion. The Zivilcasino in Potsdam, begun the next year, where an awkward site forced—or perhaps merely justified—an asymmetrical juxtaposition of the parts, illustrated an aspect of Schinkel’s talent that is particularly significant to his twentieth-century admirers: the imposition of coherent geometrical order upon an edifice markedly irregular in its massing. This was something the English were only playing at in these years when they designed Picturesque Italian Villas such as Nash’s Cronkhill or loosely composed Castellated Mansions such as Gwrych (Plate 49).
It is characteristic of Romantic Classicism that Schinkel’s masterpiece—and, with Soane’s later Bank interiors, the masterpiece of the period—should be a museum. The Altes Museum, designed in 1823 and built in 1824-8, faces the Schloss across the Lustgarten, to which Schinkel’s just completed Schlossbrücke gave a dignified new approach. The Museum quite outranked his rather undistinguished cathedral; yet at first glance it may seem one of the least original and most tamely archaeological of Romantic Classical buildings (Plate 13). Substituting for the paradigm of the pedimented peripteral temple that of the stoa, Schinkel evidently counted on the prestige of a giant Grecian order to impress his contemporaries, quite as Brongniart had done at the Paris Bourse (Plate 8B). But the Museum retains the admiration of a twentieth century usually bored, and even shocked, by such stylophily because of the extraordinary logic and elegance of its total organization.
The frontal plane of superbly detailed Ionic columns is not weak at the corners, as colonnades seen against the light generally are, for here spur walls ending in antae firmly enframe the long, unbroken range. And if this frontal columnar plane is unbroken—and also seems to deny by its giant scale the fact that this is a two-storey structure—within the dark of the portico, made darker and more Romantic by a richly coloured mural designed by Schinkel and executed under the direction of Peter Cornelius, one soon becomes aware of a recessed oblong where a double flight of stairs leads to the upper storey. Moreover, lest this façade be read, like a stoa, as no more than a portico, there rises over the centre, still farther to the rear, a rectangular attic.
[Illustration:
Figure 6. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Berlin, Altes Museum, 1824-8 section ]
It is characteristic of the purism of Schinkel’s approach, a purism not archaeological but visual, that this attic masks externally a Durandesque central domed space (Figure 6). Such circular central spaces, so recurrent in Romantic Classical planning, had been a favourite setting for classical sculpture, the principal treasure of most art collections of this period, ever since the Museo Pio-Clementino was built at the Vatican. None is finer than this in the proportional relationship of interior colonnade, plain wall above, and coffered dome with oculus. Most, indeed, are but feeble copies of the Roman Pantheon; this exceeds in distinction, if not in scale, its ancient original.
But the Museum, unlike the Munich Glyptothek, had to have picture galleries as well as sculpture halls; and Schinkel’s organization of these, so much less palatial than Klenze’s in his Pinakothek, is a technical triumph of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism. Screens at right angles to the windows, and thus free from glare, provided the greater part of the hanging space, a premonition almost of the movable screens of mid-twentieth-century art galleries (Figure 6).
The external treatment of the rear walls of the Museum, moreover, achieved a clarity of mathematical organization and a subtlety of structural expression in the detailing which was also hardly equalled before the mid twentieth century. Tall windows in two even ranges express clearly the two storeys of galleries behind; the stuccoed walls between delicately suggest by their flat rustication—so like that Soane used on the Bank of England—the scale of fine ashlar masonry. But the giant order of the front is also clearly echoed in the flat corner antae just short of which the string-course between the storeys and the rustication of the walls are stopped. A prototype of such detailing can be seen in the Athenian Propylaea, no doubt familiar to Schinkel through publications; a derivation—or at least a superb twentieth-century parallel—is the way Mies van der Rohe handles the juxtaposition of steel stanchions and brick infilling in his buildings erected for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in the last fifteen years (see
## Chapter 20).
The rapid deterioration of rationalist Grecian standards, which followed within a few decades even in the hands of Schinkel’s ablest pupils, is to be noted in the Neues Museum, built in 1843-55 by F. A. Stüler (1800-65) behind the Altes Museum. It is even more evident in the contiguous Nationalgalerie, also by Stüler but based on a sketch by Frederick William IV. This temple stands on a very high substructure in an awkward perversion of the theme of Gilly’s monument to Frederick the Great and Klenze’s Walhalla. It was finished only in 1876 by which time, even in Germany, Romantic Classicism was completely dead (see Chapter 9).
Behind his museum Schinkel himself had built in 1828-32, along the banks of the Kupfergraben, the Packhofgebäude. This range of utilitarian structures was definitely consonant, towards the Museum, with the Grecian rationalism of its rear façade. But for the warehouses at the remote end of the group Schinkel used a rather direct transcription of Durand’s paradigm for an arcuated market.[48] Here, at almost precisely the same time as at Gärtner’s State Library in Munich and Hübsch’s Ministry of Finance in Karlsruhe, the _Rundbogenstil_ makes an early appearance as an alternative to the trabeated Grecian. In comparably utilitarian works of a few years earlier, the Military Prison in Berlin begun in 1825 and the lighthouse at Arkona of the same date, Schinkel had already used dark brickwork unstuccoed, but with square rather than arched openings; while on his long-demolished Hamburg Opera House, begun also in 1825 and completed in 1827, there were arched openings throughout of a somewhat High Renaissance order but far more severely treated than by Klenze on his Munich Pinakothek.
To the year 1825 belongs too the beginning of the Werder Church in Berlin, Gothic in its vaults, as also in its detail, and executed in brick and terracotta. Less just in its scaling than his earlier Gothic monument of cast iron, this church as executed makes one regret that Schinkel’s domed project of 1822, derived either from Vignon’s interior of the Madeleine in Paris or from one of Durand’s paradigms, was not executed.
In 1826 began Schinkel’s extensive and varied work for the Royal family at Potsdam,[49] the town destined to be the richest centre of later Prussian Romantic Classicism. Here he worked in close association with the heir to the throne who was later, after 1840, king as Frederick William IV. This romantic and talented prince—who actually wished he were an architect rather than a ruler—frequently provided Schinkel and, after his death, Schinkel’s pupils with sketches from which as we have seen in the case of the Nationalgalerie) various executed buildings were elaborated with more or less success. One of the great amateurs, his was a very late example of direct Royal intervention in architecture. Some of the modulation of Schinkel’s style towards the Picturesque—still more evident in the work at Potsdam of his ablest pupil Ludwig Persius (1803-45)—may be credited to this princely patron.
In Berlin, in the later twenties, Schinkel was also remodelling and redecorating palaces for Frederick William’s brothers, major works in scale but rather limited in architectural interest.[50] More characteristic of Schinkel’s best Grecian manner is the somewhat later palace for Prince William built in 1834-5 by the younger Langhans (K. F., 1781-1869). This architect’s still later theatre at Breslau, begun in 1843, is worth mention at this point and also the old Russian Embassy of 1840-1 in Berlin by Eduard Knoblauch (1801-65), but Schinkel’s comparable work is fifteen years earlier.
At Potsdam, even though much of what he did there also consisted of enlarging earlier buildings, Schinkel was freer than in Berlin. Collaboration with the gardener P. J. Lenné (1789-1866), who provided superb naturalistic settings in the tradition of the English garden, may have encouraged a looser and less Classical sort of composition. In many views, Charlottenhof with its dominating Greek Doric portico, remodelled from 1826 on as the residence of the Crown Prince, may appear a sufficiently conventional Greek Revival country house. But if one considers the planning of the house and its close relation to the raised terrace, and also the relation to the solid block of the open pergola—’an object of nature’ in Durand’s special sense—one sees that here, as earlier at the Zivilcasino, but from no necessity enforced by the site, Schinkel sought to apply the most stringent sort of geometrical order to an asymmetrical composition. For this, of course, the Erechtheum and to some extent the Propylaea on the Akropolis, those two fifth-century Greek examples of Romantic Classicism, provided precedents. At Schloss Glienecke near by, also begun in 1826 for another Prussian prince, Karl, whose palace in Berlin he was remodelling too, the Athenian derivation is very patent in the later belvedere of 1837 based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. But it is the asymmetrical massing of carefully organized elements here that reveals the extent to which Schinkel was able to absorb and actually to synthesize with the discipline of Romantic Classicism one of the major formal innovations of the Picturesque. The bold off-centre location of the tower actually makes of this a sort of Italian Villa in the Cronkhill sense.
In the enlargement of the medieval Kolberg Town Hall in Pomerania, begun in 1829, Schinkel employed secular Late Gothic in a version as stiff and mechanical as that of Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace a decade later. A remarkable centrally-planned Hunting Lodge, built for Prince Radziwill at Ostrowo in 1827, on the other hand, illustrated a bold attempt to apply the principles of Durandesque structural rationalism to building in timber; the result is very different indeed from the contemporary American, Russian, and Swedish houses of wood that were designed as copies of marble temples.
In 1828 a series of designs for churches in the new suburbs of Berlin, several of them executed in reduced form in the early thirties, showed a drastic shift away from Classical models—still sometimes offered as alternatives and actually executed in two cases—towards the creation of a very personal sort of _Rundbogenstil_. All intended to be of brick with terracotta trim, these were less successful than the house he built of the same materials for the brick and terracotta manufacturer Feilner in Berlin in 1829. In its perfect regularity and rigid trabeation this recalled the rear of the Museum (Figure 7). But the employment of delicate arabesque reliefs in the jambs of the openings, quite in the _quattrocento_ way, illustrated rather more agreeably than the church projects the characteristic modulation in these years away from Grecian and towards Italianate models.
[Illustration:
Figure 7. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Berlin, Feilner House, 1829, elevation ]
The happiest and most informal example of this modulation is to be seen in the Court Gardener’s House on the Charlottenhof estate of 1829-31 (Plate 14A). The closely associated Tea House and Roman Bath of 1833-4 loosely enclose the square rear garden at the junction of two canals. As the plan of the house itself clearly reveals, this was not a new construction but a remodelling, or encasing, of an earlier gardener’s house; but more important to the total effect than the original solid block is the skilful disposition of the clearly defined voids in the three-dimensional composition, voids which include pergolas of varying height, loggias, and even an open attic below the main roof.
On the one hand, the inspiration for this must have come from Durand’s illustrations of the ‘employment of the objects of nature’ or perhaps from other French works[51] more specifically dealing with Italian buildings in the countryside. On the other hand, rather more than most English Italian Villas in the line of Nash’s Cronkhill, this seems to be based on some real knowledge of Italian rural, not to say rustic, building. But visually, as at Cronkhill and at Glienecke, the pivot of the whole composition is the tower around which the various elements, solid and hollow, are as carefully organized as in a piece of twentieth-century Neoplasticist sculpture. This Gardener’s House is as much the international masterwork of the asymmetrically-towered Italian Villa mode, one of the more modest yet extremely significant innovations of the first half of the nineteenth century, as is the Altes Museum of formal Grecian Classicism.
At Potsdam and near by Schinkel’s pupil Persius, before his untimely death only four years after Schinkel’s, produced many other compositions of this order, often by remodelling eighteenth-century buildings.[52] Two of the finest are the Pheasantry, which is specifically a towered Italian Villa, and the group that includes the Friedenskirche, carried out by others from Persius’s designs in 1845-8 (Plate 15). In this latter group the principal feature is a close copy of an Early Christian basilica, even to the inclusion of a real medieval apse mosaic brought from Murano; yet compositionally the group is a masterpiece of the classically ordered Picturesque, rivalling Schinkel’s Gardener’s House in subtlety and elegance. Even more personal to Persius is the delicacy of detailing and the unusual external arcade of his earlier Heilandskirche of 1841-3, with its graceful detached campanile, by the lakeside at nearby Sakrow.
Also notable are his steam-engine houses, particularly that for Schloss Babelsberg. The inclusion of medieval and even Islamic detail indicates the increasing eclecticism of taste around 1840; yet the disparate elements are so scaled and ordered as to compose into an asymmetrical pattern of Italian Villa character in which the minaret-like chimney provides the dominant vertical accent. Less Picturesque is the Orangerieschloss, based on a sketch by Frederick William IV and executed after Persius’s death by A. Hesse.
Schinkel’s big Potsdam church, the Nikolaikirche, designed in 1829 and built up to the base of the dome in the years 1830-7, stood right in the town, not in the park like his work for the princes, and is a wholly formal monument. It was planned as a hemisphere above a cube in the most geometrical mode of Romantic Classicism. As in the case of Soufflot’s dome of the Panthéon, this was undoubtedly influenced by Wren’s St Paul’s in London which Schinkel had seen on an English voyage in 1826. Unfortunately Persius had later to add corner towers, almost like the minaret chimney of his Babelsberg engine house, in order to load the pendentives when he completed the church in 1842-50. These irrelevant features quite denature Schinkel’s formal intention. The interior, however, is superior to those in most of the centrally planned churches of this period in various countries that were based on the Roman Pantheon.
Schinkel did not have such opportunities of building whole squares and streets as did his Baden and his Bavarian contemporaries. For all his efforts, the Berlin Lustgarten was probably never very satisfactory urbanistically because of the inadequate focus that was provided by his modest cathedral beside the massive Baroque Schloss and the awkward shift in the axis where the Schlossbrücke enters from Unter den Linden. At the other end of Unter den Linden the Pariser Platz inside K. G. Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate shows little evidence of Schinkel’s intended regularization of the surrounding buildings. All that he was actually able to carry out there was the Palais Redern of 1832-3 (in fact a remodelling), and this was demolished in 1906 to make way for the Adlon Hotel.
The façades of the Palais Redern gave a _quattrocento_ Florentine impression because of their relatively bold over-all rustication; only the large openings were arcuated, however, the ordinary windows being lintel-topped. Significant of Schinkel’s new interest in asymmetrical order was the disposition of the four arched openings; these were balanced in relation to the corner of Unter den Linden but unbalanced in relation to either façade alone; the other windows were quite regularly spaced.
If Schinkel seems to have adopted here a version of the Renaissance Revival—as, for that matter, he had already done much earlier in his somewhat similar remodelling of the Berlin City Hall in 1817—at the Neue Tor, also of 1832, he provided two gatehouses which were in a sort of _Rundbogenstil_ Tudor comparable to Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace of fifteen years later. His trip to England[53] had fascinated him with English architecture, old and new; there he had noted everything with intelligent interest—from medieval castles to the towering new cotton mills near Manchester with their internal skeletons of iron. He had no occasion, however, to make large-scale use of iron construction, though there is little doubt that had he lived on through the forties he would have done so with both technical and aesthetic mastery.
At Schloss Babelsberg,[54] built for the rather tasteless brother of his own particular patron, later the Emperor William I, he essayed an English sort of castle, admittedly more in the contemporary Picturesque mode of the new Castellated Mansions of Nash and Wyatt than like any real medieval one. This was designed in 1834 and begun in 1835. Persius took it over on Schinkel’s death, redesigning one of the principal towers, and it was finally finished after Persius’s death by Heinrich Strack (1805-80) in 1849. Though certainly not inferior to Smirke’s Eastnor or Cundy’s Hawarden, if without the lovely site and the richly organic composition of Busby’s Gwrych, Babelsberg is better appreciated in Schinkel’s or Persius’s drawings than in actuality. Schloss Kamenz, a rather Tudoresque remodelling of an earlier structure which Schinkel undertook in 1838, is more typical but no more successful.
Although playing but a very minor part in Schinkel’s own production, his exercises in the Chalet mode should at least be mentioned. Not only do these illustrate the very wide range of his own eclectic inspiration, considerably wider than that of Durand and the French of the previous generation, they also represent one of the peripheral aspects of his achievement which his pupils, and German architects of the mid century generally, delighted to exploit. The happiest work of his followers, however, continued rather the Italian Villa line of Glienecke and the Court Gardener’s House, a line in which Persius at least all but equalled his master.
The Grecian work of Schinkel’s imitators and emulators tended to be overdecorated and lacking in geometrical order while their _Rundbogenstil_ is in general awkwardly proportioned and incoherently ornamented (see Chapter 9). Outside Prussia, such Hamburg architects as Wimmel & Forsmann and de Chateauneuf illustrate better than other North Germans the real possibilities of the _Rundbogenstil_. De Chateauneuf had something of an international reputation, moreover, after winning the second prize in the competition held in 1839-40 for the Royal Exchange in London. His design for that was based on the Loggia dei Lanzi, and may well have provided the suggestion for Gärtner’s Feldherrenhalle in Munich begun the next year.
It is impossible and unnecessary to follow Romantic Classicism to all the other German centres. At Darmstadt the Classical Ludwigskirche of 1822-7 by Georg Moller (1784-1852),[55] a pupil of Weinbrenner, is a handsome circular edifice with an internal colonnade below the dome. Thus it is rather like the ‘central space’ in Schinkel’s Museum, but more broadly proportioned. A boldly arched entrance of almost Ledolcian character is set against the external circumference of blank wall rather than the more usual temple portico. The Artillery Barracks at Darmstadt of 1825-7 by Moller’s pupil Franz Heger (1792-1836) provided a notably early example of the _Rundbogenstil_. Comparable was August Busse’s Castellated Zellengefängnis in Berlin of 1842-9, the first German example of a penitentiary radially planned and with individual cells (see Chapter 5). Stüler’s destroyed Trinitatiskirche in Cologne, a Persius-like Early Christian basilica completed in 1860, was much finer than his Berlin churches (see Chapter 9).
Also _Rundbogenstil_, but of a more medievalizing order, was Semper’s Synagogue of 1838-41 in Dresden. Its centralized massing is uncharacteristically plastic. His Palais Oppenheim there of 1845-8 at 9-11 An der Bürgerwiese, based on Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace, was a handsome and very ‘correct’ example of the international Renaissance Revival to be compared, like de Meuron’s house in Hamburg, with Barry’s London clubhouses. The Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden was Gothic, however, providing further evidence of Semper’s rather directionless eclecticism at this time.
[Illustration:
Figure 8. Gottfried Semper: Dresden, Opera House (first), 1837-41, plan ]
His principal works of this period were the first Opera House[56] in Dresden of 1837-41, where Wagner’s early triumphs took place, burnt and rebuilt by Semper later, and the nearby Art Gallery of 1847-54 which completed so unhappily the circuit of the marvellous Rococo Zwinger by Daniel Pöppelmann. The one was a rather festive, the other a rather solemn example of the Renaissance Revival; both are more notable for their planning and their general organization than for any visual distinction (Figure 8). The Opera House in Hanover, built by G. L. F. Laves (1789-1864) in 1845-52, is less original in plan but more sober, even a bit Schinkelesque, in design (Plate 14B). Its interior has been completely done over since it was bombed in the Second World War.
The historian tends always to press forward, forcing rather than retarding the pace of development in his written account. Klenze’s Propylaeon, however, has already provided evidence of the late continuance of Grecian ideals in the German States; in Stuttgart the Königsbau of 1857-60 by C. F. Leins (1814-92), a pupil in Paris of Henri Labrouste, provides a worthier example, although this was actually begun twenty years earlier by J. M. Knapp (1793-1861). In Vienna, as late as 1873, the Parliament House of Theophil von Hansen (1813-91) provides a gargantuan example of what the French had first aspired to build almost a century earlier. Ambiguous in its massing, if still very elegant in its Grecian detail, this contrasts markedly with Hansen’s other Viennese work of the third quarter of the century which is generally of High Renaissance design (see Chapter 8).
This Copenhagen-born and trained architect knew Greece at first hand, for he and his brother H. C. Hansen (1803-83) worked in Athens for some years for the Wittelsbachs and the Danish dynasty that succeeded them. Along University Street in Athens a conspicuous range of porticoed structures is theirs. The University, built in 1837-42, is by the elder brother; the Academy, built in 1859-87, was designed by Theophil and executed by his pupil Ernst Ziller; the National Library was also designed by Theophil in 1860 and completed in 1892. Conventional essays in the international Greek Revival mode, here made somewhat ironical by their proximity to the great fifth-century ruins, these lack the elegance and refinement of Theophil’s Palais Dimitriou of 1842-3 (lately destroyed by the enlargement of the Grande Bretagne Hotel towards Syndagma Square) as also the more than Schinkelesque restraint of the earliest Romantic Classical building in Greece. This is Gärtner’s gaunt but distinguished Old Palace,[57] designed in 1835-6 for Otho of Wittelsbach immediately after his assumption of the Greek throne and built in 1837-41 (Plate 17A).
The Old Palace and its neighbour the Grande Bretagne still dominate the centre of modern Athens. The palace, in its regularity, its austerity, and its geometrical clarity of design, is a finer archetype of the most rigid Romantic Classical ideals than anything Gärtner built in Munich; indeed, perhaps those ideals were nowhere else ever followed so drastically at monumental scale except in Denmark. One may even wonder irreverently if the fifth century had many civil buildings that were so pure and so calm!
Gärtner and the Hansens set the pace for a local Greek Revival vernacular of a rather North European order. In its detail this vernacular sometimes exceeds in delicacy that of the later centuries of antiquity, as illustrated here in the Stoa of Attalos in the Agora—at least as that has lately been reconstructed—or the Arch of Hadrian. Not all of the new construction was Grecian, however: Klenze’s Roman Catholic Cathedral (Aghios Dionysios) in University Street is a basilica with Renaissance detail, built in 1854-63; the modest English Church of 1840-3 is rather feebly Gothic and reputedly based on a design provided by C. R. Cockerell that was much modified in execution.
Of the leading Greek architects of the period, Lyssander Kaftanzoglou (1812-85), Stamathios Kleanthis (1802-62), and Panajiotis Kalkos (1800?-1870?), only Kleanthis was German-trained. This talented pupil of Schinkel followed his master’s Italianate rather than his Grecian line, and the house he built in 1840 for the Duchesse de Plaisance on Kiffisia Avenue (now the Byzantine Museum) is a distinguished example of a Durandesque Italian villa, with simple arcading front and rear and low corner towers. Kaftanzoglou, trained at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris and in Milan, was somewhat less able; but the large quadrangular Grecian structure that he designed in the fifties and built in 1862-80 to house the Polytechneion in Patissia Street more than rivals the academic buildings by the Hansens in University Street in the careful ordering of its parts and the correct elegance of its details. Of Kalkos’s work little remains in good condition today.
The new capital of remote Greece possesses more, and on the whole more impressive, Romantic Classical buildings than do Vienna and Budapest, capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In them ambitious urbanistic projects were initiated only later after the accession of Francis Joseph in 1848. The Theseus Temple in the Volksgarten in Vienna of 1821-3 by Peter von Nobile (1774-1854),[58] a Swiss who had made his reputation in Trieste, is hardly more than a large Grecian garden ornament conscientiously copying the fifth-century Hephaisteion in Athens line for line. His nearby Burgtor, begun the following year, is much worthier in its heavy, almost Sanmichelian, way. More characteristic, however, is the work of Joseph Kornhäusel (1782-1860) and of Paul Sprenger (1798-1854).
Kornhäusel’s Schottenhof, opening off the Schottengasse, is a housing development built in 1826-32 in collaboration with Joseph Adelpodinger (1778-1849). This is of extraordinary extent and arranged very regularly around several large internal courts. The smooth stucco walls, restricted ornamentation, and regular fenestration, brought out to the wall surface by double windows, can be matched in many streets of the city that were built up in these decades. Behind such a façade in the Seitenstettengasse lies Kornhäusel’s elegant but rather modest Synagogue of 1825-6. This has an elliptical dome and an internal colonnade that carries a narrow gallery. Much richer is his rectangular main hall of 1823-4 in the Albertina; as has been noted, this palace had already been enlarged in 1801-4 in Romantic Classical style by Montoyer. Kornhäusel’s hall is finished in mirror and in pale yellow and pale mauve scagliola with chalk-white Grecian details and sandstone statues of the Muses by J. Klieber.
With Kornhäusel all is classical; Sprenger, on the other hand, employed a rather tight version of the _Rundbogenstil_, more Renaissance than medievalizing, for his considerably later Mint of 1835-7 in the Heumarkt in Vienna. More original, and with charming arched window-frames of terracotta in delicate floral bands, is his Landeshauptmannschaft of 1846-8 at 11 Herrengasse. This contrasts happily with the Diet of Lower Austria, projected in 1832-3 and built in 1837-44 by Luigi Pichl (1782-1856), next door at No. 13, a rather heavy and conventional example of Romantic Classicism; so also does No. 17, a very simple block originally built by Moreau for the Austro-Hungarian Bank in 1821-3. The later bank building across the Herrengasse at No. 14, built by Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) in 1856-60, well illustrates the modulation of the _Rundbogenstil_ here, as in Germany, towards richer and more Gothicizing forms after the mid century. The glass-roofed passage extending through this to the Freyung is still very attractive, despite its shabby condition, and worthy of comparison with other extant examples of passages elsewhere in the Old and New Worlds (see Chapters 3, 5, and 8).
The great nineteenth-century Viennese building campaign of Francis Joseph began in 1849 with the initiation of the Arsenal. There the outer ranges (now mostly destroyed by bombing) were completed in 1855 from designs by Edward Van der Nüll (1812-65), a pupil of Nobile and Sprenger, and his partner August Siccard von Siccardsburg (1813-68). The Army Museum of 1850-6 is by Ludwig Foerster (1797-1863) and Theophil von Hansen (who had married Forster’s daughter after moving from Athens to Vienna), and the chapel of 1853-5 is by Karl Rosner (1804-59). These are all in slightly varying _Rundbogenstil_ modes, and they show, like Ferstel’s bank, the changed taste of the mid century, most notably in their rather violent brick polychromy (see Chapter 8).
In Budapest the National Museum of 1837-44 by Michael Pollák (1773-1855) is a vast rectangle fronted in the conventional way by an octostyle Corinthian portico and with a somewhat Schinkel-like severity of treatment on the side wings. This is another major example of the museums which were such characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism everywhere. Among many other large and typical public monuments designed by Pollák, the Kommitat Building may be mentioned as of comparable size and dignity to his museum.
If first Greece and then Austria employed Danish Hansens in the forties and fifties, the earlier Romantic Classical tradition of C. F. Hansen, who in any case lived on until 1845, was still better maintained at home by his pupil M. G. B. Bindesbøll (1800-56). Where C. F. Hansen’s inspiration was Roman and Parisian, Bindesbøll’s seems rather to have been German, as was common in his generation. Certainly his masterpiece, again a museum and indeed a museum of sculpture, out-Schinkels Schinkel. The Thorvaldsens Museum[59] in Copenhagen was built in 1839-48 to house the sculpture and the collections of the thoroughly Romanized Bertil Thorwaldsen, which he had determined in 1837 to present to his native country. The mode, of course, is Greek but completely astylar like the rear of Schinkel’s Berlin Museum; the general impression, particularly of the court with Thorvaldsen’s tomb in its centre, is surprisingly Egyptian (Plate 16B). The mathematical severity of the architectural design is warmed by the murals on the walls, once largely washed away but now all renewed; they romanticize thoroughly its rigid geometrical forms. Even the purely architectural elements, moreover, were once polychromed, if the present restoration of the colour is correct.
The murals on the exterior of the museum were designed in 1847-8 and executed in 1850 by Jørgen Sonne in a sort of coloured plaster intarsia with heavy black outlines. Developing a happy idea of Bindesbøll’s, these tell rather realistically the story of the transport of the sculpture from Rome to Copenhagen. The foliate work on the court walls was carried out by H. C. From in 1844—laurel-trees, oaks, and palms. In the interiors, where Thorwaldsen disposed his own sculptures somewhat less formally than he had the Aegina sculptures in the Munich Glyptothek, the intricate and brightly coloured decoration of the barrel vaults is in that Pompeian mode which had been a part of the Romantic Classical tradition ever since the time of Clérisseau and Adam. This provides a happy contrast to so much Neo-Classic white marble statuary set against plain walls painted in strong flat colours. The finest of these ceilings have no modern rivals, even in Adam’s eighteenth-century work, for the precise geometrical organization of the panels and the delicate refinement of the very low plaster reliefs. Bolder and wholly abstract are the floors of tile mosaic arranged in a bewildering variety of patterns, some imitated from Roman models but more of them so original in design that they suggest ‘hardedge’ paintings of the 1960s.
In his few other executed works and projects Bindesbøll showed himself considerably less Classical and Schinkelesque than in this museum; perhaps the museum reflects Thorvaldsen’s taste as much or more than his own. Tending, like other Danes of his generation, towards the _Rundbogenstil_ in his urban buildings, for his country houses he arrived at a very direct and logical rural mode in which rustic materials and asymmetrical compositions were controlled by a Romantic Classical sense of order and decorum. If, on the one hand, his interest in bold structural polychromy in the fifties parallels that of the English Butterfield, his domestic mode forecasts that of the English Webb (see Chapters 10 and 12). Bindesbøll’s production was small indeed, but at least the very simple _Rundbogenstil_ Agricultural School of 1856-8 at 13 Bulowsvej in Copenhagen, executed after his death, deserves specific mention here.
J. D. Herholdt (1818-1902), living almost half a century longer than Bindesbøll, was naturally more productive. He was also a master of the _Rundbogenstil_ hardly rivalled in his generation even by the ablest Germans. Late as is his National Bank at 17 Holmens Kanal in Copenhagen—1866-70—this is one of the finest examples anywhere of the more Tuscan sort of _Rundbogenstil_. His University Library of 1857-61 in the Frue Plads is less suave in design but much more original in its brick detailing. As late as the eighties he maintained the Romantic Classical discipline in his Italian Gothic Raadhus at Odense of 1880-3 as well as carrying out many tactful restorations of Romanesque churches. Of his fine Copenhagen Station of 1863-4 the wooden shed now serves on another site as a sports hall.
G. F. Hetsch (1830-1903) also continued the Romantic Classical line, most happily perhaps in his Sankt Ansgarskirke of 1841-2, the Roman Catholic church in the Bredgade in Copenhagen. Ferdinand Meldahl (1827-1908), although capable of very disciplined Early Renaissance design in his office building at 23 Havnegade in Copenhagen of 1864, led Danish architecture away from Romantic Classicism and the _Rundbogenstil_ towards a rather Second Empire sort of eclecticism after he became professor at the Copenhagen Academy in 1864 and its director in 1873 (see Chapter 8).
With its great individual monuments by C. F. Hansen and Bindesbøll and its streets of fine houses in the Romantic Classical vernacular, Copenhagen provides today a more attractive picture of the production of this period than almost any other city. Norway, at this time less prosperous than Denmark, has work by Schinkel himself. At least the designs for the buildings of the University at Christiania, erected in 1841-51 by C. H. Grosch (1801-65), a pupil of C. F. Hansen and of Hetsch, were revised by Schinkel just before his death, and the handling of the walls is certainly quite characteristic of his work in the clarity and logic of their articulation.
In Sweden, where the dominant influences in the early nineteenth century were first French and then German as in Denmark, there was no comparably brilliant development of Romantic Classicism. Rosendal, a country house built in 1823-5 by Fredrik Blom (1781-1851), is a pleasant and very discreet edifice that might well be by almost any French architect of Blom’s generation. His Skeppsholm Church in Stockholm of 1824-42, circular within and octagonal without, is a typical but not especially distinguished work of its period. More characteristic are the modest wooden houses with Grecian detail. These are similar to, but in their naive ‘correctness’ less extreme than, the temple houses of Russia and the United States. Their board-and-batten walls might, paradoxically, have inspired one aspect of Downing’s anti-Grecian campaign in America in the forties (see Chapter 15).
In 1850 Stüler was called to Stockholm from Berlin to design the National Museum. Eventually completed in 1865, this is in a richer Venetian Renaissance mode than he usually employed at home. Such more definitely Romantic modes were generally exploited by native architects only much later. For example, the Sodra Theatre of 1858-9 in Stockholm by J. F. Åbom (1817-1900) is still quite a restrained example of the revived High Renaissance; while so excellent a specimen of the more Tuscan sort of _Rundbogenstil_ as the Skandias Building in Stockholm by P. M. R. Isaeus (1841-90) and C. Sundahl dates from 1886-9, but must be compared with German work of at least a generation earlier.
Holland has even less of distinction to offer in this period than Sweden.[60] Yet the Lutheran Round Church on the Singel in Amsterdam, as it was rebuilt after a fire in 1826 by Jan de Greef (1784-1834) and T. F. Suys (1783-1861), a pupil of Percier, lends a distinctly Venetian air to the local scene with its great dome, despite the admirably Dutch quality of its fine brickwork. The original church was built in 1668-77 by Adriaen Dortsmann, and doubtless the peculiar plan, with main entrance under the pulpit and double galleries at the rear outside the main rotunda, derives from the older building.
The monumentally Classical Haarlemer Poort of 1840 in Amsterdam by J. D. Zocher (1790-1870) may also be mentioned, as it is nearly unique in Holland. This has the stuccoed walls that, in Holland as elsewhere, generally replaced exposed brickwork under the influence of international Romantic Classicism. The Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, built by Z. Reijers in 1839 and demolished in 1933, dominated by an Ionic portico of stone, might well have risen in any French provincial city of the day. Very similar, except that the portico is Corinthian, is the Palace of Justice in Leeuwarden built in 1846-52 by T. A. Romein (1811-81). Handsome also, but like the Hague Academy less autochthonous in character than the Round Church, is the long stone façade beside the Rokin of the Nederlandsche Bank in the Turfmarkt (1860) by Willem Anthony Froger. On the whole, Holland is the exception that proves the rule. Almost alone in Northern Europe Dutch architects failed, in general, to accept Romantic Classicism as it was adumbrated most notably in the treatise of Durand; while local conditions, in any case, reduced monumental architectural production to a minimum in the decades between Waterloo and the mid century.
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## CHAPTER 3
FRANCE AND THE REST OF THE CONTINENT
BEFORE considering English architecture in the years between Waterloo and the Great Exhibition, it will be well to turn to that of France. The drama of the supersession of a supposedly purely Classical school in painting by a purely Romantic one, the contrast between such giants as Ingres on the one hand and Delacroix on the other, cannot be matched in the tame course of French architecture in this period; only very rarely was the accomplishment of these great painters or of half a dozen others, ranging from Géricault and Bonington to Corot and Daumier, equalled in quality by a Henri Labrouste or a Duban. Although the art of Ingres is in many ways parallel to Romantic Classicism in architecture, no French architect of this generation really approaches him at all closely in stature, although he numbered several among his close friends. Still less is there among architects any rebellious Romantic of the distinction of Delacroix or any ‘independent’ comparable to Corot.
The Empire left a vast heritage of unfinished monuments. It is properly to the credit of the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe that these were brought to completion a generation after their initiation; but all the credit for them has in fact generally accrued to Napoleon himself. The intervening Restoration of the returned Bourbons, tired, reactionary and bigoted, gave its support largely to the construction of religious buildings. Appropriately, the first important new commission under Louis XVIII was for the Chapelle Expiatoire in memory of his brother Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. This chapel with its raised tomb-flanked forecourt, lying between the Rue Pasquier and the Rue d’Anjou off the Boulevard Haussmann, was begun in 1816 and completed in 1824 (Plate 18A). Somewhat less appropriately, it was Napoleon’s favourite architect Fontaine—his partner Percier had by this time retired—who received the commission. But the character of the project and of the regime led him to modulate his earlier imperial style from the festive and the triumphal towards the solemn and the funereal. Not an unworthy example of Romantic Classicism, this nevertheless lacks the crispness and clarity of the best contemporary German work. Nor does it much recall—as it well might have done—either the delicacy of the _style Louis XVI_ or the ‘Sublime’ grandeur of the many projects for monumental cenotaphs designed by the previous generation of architects and by those of Fontaine’s own generation in their youth.
To restore the strength of the church, as the piety of the later Bourbons demanded, priests had to be trained in quantity. The next significant work undertaken in Paris after the Chapelle Expiatoire was the Séminaire Saint-Sulpice in the Place St Sulpice by É.-H. Godde (1781-1869); this was begun in 1820 and completed in 1838. So flat and cold are its façades that the observer may readily fail to note that the design somewhat approaches, perhaps unconsciously, the _quattrocento_ Florentine. However, it quite lacks the archaeological character of Klenze’s Königsbau in Munich, designed only a few years later, or the vigour and assurance of Wimmel & Forsmann’s Johanneum in Hamburg. In fact, of course, it derives almost directly from Durand and not from any careful study of Grandjean de Montigny’s _Architecture toscane_. Somewhat more definitely Early Renaissance in detail are the Baths at Mont d’Or, built by L.-C.-F. Ledru (1771-1861), a pupil of Durand, in 1822, and the Barracks in the Rue Mouffetard in Paris as extended in 1827 by Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75). Both exploit a rusticated Tuscan mode somewhat as Klenze was doing in Munich, but much less archaeologically.
Shortly after the Séminaire, Godde undertook several Paris churches. Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou in the Rue St Dominique of 1822-3 replaced a church destroyed in the Revolution. Finer and considerably larger is Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrament in the Rue de Turenne, built in 1823-35. Both are barrel-vaulted basilicas in the tradition of Chalgrin’s Saint-Philippe-du-Roule; the latter is rather elegant in its dry severity, the former confused by various later additions behind the altar. Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle of 1823-30 is smaller and more modest, as are also two nearly contemporary Paris churches by A.-I. Molinos (1795-1850), Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Neuilly of 1827-31 and Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles in the Place du Dr Félix Lobligeois in Paris of 1828-9. All these churches lack externally the Grecian grandeur of scale of the London churches of the period built by the Inwoods and others (see Chapter 4), but the basilican plan provides interiors that are considerably more interesting than the galleried halls with which most English architects were satisfied at this time. Of course, such a highly original interior as that of Soane’s St Peter’s, Walworth, of 1822 is in a different class altogether.
A much larger and more prominent church than any of Godde’s or Molinos’s is Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in the Rue de Chateaudun, one of the few really distinguished products of this dull period. It was the result of a competition held in 1822 which was won by Lebas, Brongniart’s collaborator on the Bourse (Plate 18B). This five-aisled edifice was built at very great expense in 1823-36 and sumptuously decorated with murals that added as much as a sixth to the total cost. The basic model is again the Early Christian basilica but here interpreted in thoroughly Classical terms, with a tall temple portico rivalling those of London at the front and no vaults or arches except at the east end. Evidence of a certain eclecticism is the rich coffering of the ceiling in panels alternately square and cruciform; so also is the introduction of a domed chancel before the apse. Both features are certainly of _cinquecento_ inspiration.
To modern eyes, attuned to the late fifth-and sixth-century basilicas of Ravenna, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette certainly has a far less Early Christian air than Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika in Munich of the next decade; but doubtless the great Imperial basilicas of Rome of the fourth and early fifth centuries, notably Santa Maria Maggiore with its trabeated nave colonnade, were originally something like it. In any case, Lebas’s church is a highly typical monument of Romantic Classicism and a major one. In France, as elsewhere, the accepted range of precedent now extended well beyond Greek and Roman antiquity to include Italian models of fifth- and of sixteenth-century date, if very little from the centuries between. Even before the construction of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the Belgian-born P.-J. Sandrié and Jacob Silveyra (1785-?) in building a big Parisian synagogue in the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth in 1819-20 had also followed rather closely the basilican formula.
The most important Parisian church of the second quarter of the century, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul off the Rue Lafayette, is also a five-aisled classical basilica (Plate 19). This was begun in 1824 by Lepère, but work was soon suspended. When it was carried to completion in 1831-44 Lepère’s son-in-law J.-I. Hittorff (1792-1867) took over, and he has generally received credit for the whole job. In utilizing a rising site, which required terraces and flights of steps in front, and in providing two towers, Lepère and Hittorff gave their church more prominence and a richer, if rather clumsily organized, three-dimensional interest.[61] Hittorff’s archaeological studies in Sicily had made him an enthusiast for architectural polychromy, and to contemporaries the great novelty about Saint-Vincent-de-Paul was the proposal to use enamelled lava plaques on the exterior.[62]
The French did not, like the Germans, turn to the use of tawny brick and terracotta in the second quarter of the century; but the interest of Hittorff and his generation in applied polychromy relates their work a little to that of the Romantic colourists in painting.[63] Unfortunately almost none of this polychromy remains visible now; and so the shift away from the monochromy that is characteristic everywhere of Romantic Classicism down to this period is less evident in France than in other countries.
Especially fine is the open timber roof of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, although in fact only a part of the actual construction is exposed; while the fact that the colonnaded apse is wide enough to include the inner aisles as well as the nave gives a quite unprecedented spatial interest to the east end. Moreover, in this interior Hittorff achieved a rich warmth of tone quite different from the coldness of Godde’s and Molinos’s churches of the twenties. His Cirque des Champs Élysées of 1839-41 and Cirque d’Hiver of 1852 were even more brilliantly polychromatic both inside and out. But the most conspicuous extant works of Hittorff, the Gare du Nord of 1861-5, the Second Empire façades surrounding the Place de l’Étoile, and the decoration of the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Élysées with fountains and other features under the July Monarchy, provide today little evidence[64] of this aspect of his talent once so notable to contemporaries at home and abroad.
Especially happy is the siting of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on the upper side of the new polygonal Place Charles X (now Place Lafayette), of which the other sides were filled in the twenties with consonant houses by A.-F.-R. Leclerc (1785-1853),[65] a pupil of both Durand and Percier, and A.-J. Pellechet (1789-1871). Less characteristic of Romantic Classical urbanism than the squares and streets of Karlsruhe and Munich, this nevertheless well illustrates the dignity and the regularity of the houses then rising in the new quarters of Paris. The very considerable new quarter in Mulhouse, which was laid out and built up in 1826-8 by J.-G. Stotz (1799-?), a pupil of Leclerc, and A.-J.-F. Fries (1800-59), a pupil of Huyot, is more properly comparable with Karlsruhe.
Most of the new churches in the suburbs of Paris and the French provinces followed basilican models. The parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which was brought at last to completion in 1823-7 by A.-J. Malpièce (1789-1864) and his partner A.-J. Moutier (1791-1874), a pupil of Percier, following the original designs of M.-M. Potain (1713-96) of the 1760s, is much more modest and somewhat less Roman. In Marseilles the younger M.-R. Penchaud (1772-1832), who designed in 1812 and built in 1827-32 the Palais de Justice at Aix on Ledoux’s earlier foundations, erected in 1824 a large Roman basilica for the local Protestants, doubtless with some conscious reference to Salomon de Brosse’s seventeenth-century Protestant Temple at Charenton of two hundred years earlier. By exception, however, the Protestant Temple at Orléans by F.-N. Pagot (1780-1844), a pupil of Labarre, which was built in 1836, is a plain cylinder in plan. Saint-Lazare in Marseilles, built by P.-X. Coste (1787-1879) and Vincent Barral (1800-54) in 1833-7, followed Notre-Dame-de-Lorette even more closely than does Penchaud’s Protestant church.
In the more modest parish church of Vincennes outside Paris, which rose in 1826-30, the very last years of the Restoration, J.-B.-C. Lesueur (1794-1883) was already using a rather Brunelleschian sort of detail that is not without a certain cool elegance. More definitely of the Renaissance Revival is Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe, the parish church of La Villette in the Rue de Crimée in Paris built by P.-E. Lequeux (1806-73) much later, in 1841-4. It is one of half a dozen that Lequeux began in the forties, in addition to designing the town halls of this and several other quarters of Paris. Lequeux employed definitely _quattrocento_ detail somewhat more lavishly than Lesueur had done at Vincennes, and produced at La Villette one of the most satisfactory French churches of the Louis Philippe epoch. In building a small Norman church at Pollet near Dieppe in 1844-9, Louis Lenormand (1801-62), a pupil of his uncle Huvé, used Early Renaissance detail of a more French sort that may not improperly be called _François I._ Such detail was highly exceptional in ecclesiastical architecture even as late as the forties.
The housing of public services, initiated so actively by Napoleon, continued at a much reduced pace under Louis XVIII and Charles X. The Paris Custom House of 1827 by L.-A. Lusson (1790-1864), a pupil of Percier, with its great arched entrance rising from the ground and its similar transverse arches inside, was later transformed—three bays of it, at least—into a Protestant church by one of Lebas’s pupils, the German-born F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), for Louis Philippe’s German relatives in 1843. A similar reflection of Durand’s utilitarian models may be seen in the vast Government Warehouse at Lyons, begun in 1828 by L.-P. Baltard (1764-1846), Lequeux’s master, who had worked when very young with Ledoux on the Paris _barrières_. This contrasts notably in its consistent arcuation with the belated giant Corinthian colonnade that fronts Baltard’s Palace of Justice there, built in 1836-42, and parallels fairly closely the contemporary warehouses Schinkel was building in Berlin. More characteristic of the rather mixed official mode of the period is the Custom House of 1835-42 at Rouen by C.-E. Isabelle (1800-80), a pupil of Leclerc. This is of interest chiefly for the tremendous rusticated arch of the entrance, which quite overpowers the rest of the _palazzo_-like façade.
For educational institutions most new construction was subsidiary to existing buildings. At the École Polytechnique, A.-M. Renié (_c._ 1790-1855), a pupil of Percier and Vaudoyer, provided in 1828 a new arcuated and rusticated entrance hardly worthy of the school where Durand was now teaching a second generation of architects. P.-M. Letarouilly (1795-1855) made in 1831-42 additions that are less unworthy, but hardly more interesting, to Chalgrin’s Collège de France, built originally in the 1770s. But his great contribution, of course, was the _Édifices de Rome moderne_—the first volume of which appeared in 1840. Finally completed with the publication of the third volume in 1857, this was the bible of the later Renaissance Revival in France as of several generations of academic architects throughout the rest of the world. The École Normale Supérieure by the youngest Gisors (H.-A.-G. de, 1796-1866), a pupil of Percier, is a large, wholly new building of 1841-7; this looks forward to the Second Empire a little in its high mansard roof and seventeenth-century detailing, extremely dry and sparse though that is (see Chapter 8).
Private construction was for the most part very dull, whether in city, suburb, or country. As an example of the country houses that were built in some quantity, a typical project of 1830 for one by Hittorff may be illustrated (Figure 9). With its careful if rather uninteresting proportions, its rigid rectangularity, and the stiff chains of rustication that provide its sole embellishment, however, this rises somewhat above the general level of achievement of the period.
The _François I_ character of the detailing of Lenormand’s Pollet church has been mentioned. In domestic architecture such national Renaissance precedent had rather greater success even if nothing very novel or original developed from it. In 1825 L.-M.-D. Biet (1785-1856), a pupil of Percier, brought to Paris the court façade of an early sixteenth-century house from Moret and applied it to a _hôtel
## particulier_—always called with no justification the ‘Maison de François
I’—in a new residential area of Paris. This house shortly gave the name ‘François I’ to the entire quarter between the Champs Élysées and the Seine. The barrenness and brittleness of Biet’s own elevations were more of a tribute to his respect for the old work than to his creative ability.
[Illustration:
Figure 9. J.-I. Hittorff: Project for country house for Comte de W., 1830, elevation ]
Within the next few years houses built by such architects as L.-T.-J. Visconti (1791-1853), another pupil of Percier, and Famin tended to grow ever richer. In 1835 P.-C. Dusillion (1804-60), an architect otherwise more active abroad than at home, used _François I_ detail with the lushest profusion on a house at 14 Rue Vaneau. The façade rather resembles an interior of the so-called _style troubadour_ turned inside out. Much the same may be said for the block of flats built by Édouard Renaud (1808-86), a pupil of Leroy, at 5 Place St Georges in 1841. But this was rather an exception to the severity and regularity of Parisian street architecture under the Restoration. This was generally maintained, moreover, under the July Monarchy for blocks of flats, even by men like Visconti and Lesueur whose private houses were often very rich indeed.
Two country houses of 1840 make a more extensive and plausible use of _François I_ features. One is the Château de St Martin, near St Paulzo in the Nièvre, built by Édouard Lussy (1788-1868), a pupil of Percier; this is elaborately picturesque in silhouette but still rigidly symmetrical. Another by J.-B.-P. Canissié (1799-1877), a pupil of Hittorff, at Draveil, S.-et-O., is somewhat irregular both in plan and in composition. But the _style François I_ in the France of the second quarter of the nineteenth century had neither the general acceptance nor even the vitality—at that relatively low—of the revived ‘Jacobethan’ in contemporary England.
Even where a major sixteenth-century monument had to be restored and enlarged, as was the case with the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, the architects Godde and Lesueur were at some pains to regularize and chasten the unclassical vagaries of Boccador’s original design (Plate 22A). Most of the work by Lesueur was done after 1837; from 1853 Victor Baltard (1805-74), son of L.-P. Baltard, carried on; then the whole had to be rebuilt after it was burned under the Commune. The present rather similar edifice by Théodore Ballu (1817-74), a pupil of Lebas, was begun only in 1874, the year of his death, and eventually completed by his partner P.-J.-E. Deperthes (1833-98). Except for the high French roofs, looking forward like those by Gisors on the École Normale to the next period, the general effect of Lesueur’s work here was very Italianate.
A somewhat similar character can be seen in a few wholly new structures of more or less _François I_ inspiration, for example the Museum and Library at Le Havre built by C.-L.-F. Brunet-Debaines (1801-62), a pupil of Vaudoyer and Lebas, in 1845. In such a major commercial work of this period as the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, built by J.-L.-V. Grisart (1797-1877), a pupil of Huyot, and C.-M.-A. Froehlicher in 1838, it is hard to say whether the continuous arcading derived from French or from Italian sixteenth-century precedent. The iron-and-glass interiors were of more interest (see Chapter 7).
There has seemed no need to emphasize thus far, as regards its effect on architecture, the change of regime that took place in 1830, even though that date in the other arts of France is sometimes thought to mark the triumph of _romantisme de la lettre_ over earlier Neo-Classicism. No such triumph took place in architecture, although it is evident that sources of inspiration other than the Antique were rather more frequently utilized after 1830 than before, if to nothing like the same extent as in Germany. Yet thanks to Victor Hugo and Guizot, Gothicism had by now acquired a less reactionary connotation than under the last Bourbons and was receiving the support, up to a point, of the July Monarchy (see Chapter 6).
For political reasons Louis Philippe desired especially to emphasize the continuity of his liberal monarchy with the more liberal aspects of the Empire and to reclaim for France the Napoleonic glories that the Restoration had denigrated. So Napoleon’s ashes were brought back to the Invalides, where Visconti, hitherto chiefly active in the domestic field, prepared in 1842 a setting for them as funereal as the Chapelle Expiatoire but more sumptuous in its use of coloured marbles. Napoleon’s Temple de la Gloire (the Madeleine) and his Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile were finally brought to completion, the one by Huvé in 1845, the other by Blouet in 1837, as has already been noted. Several new monuments, very much of the Empire type, were also erected in Paris.
Where Napoleon’s Elephant Monument was to have marked the site of the Bastille, J.-A. Alavoine (1778-1834), and after his death L.-J. Duc (1802-79), a pupil of Percier, erected in 1831-40 the gigantic Colonne de Juillet, rather less Imperial Roman and more French Empire than Napoleon’s Colonne Vendôme, but like that all of metal. In the centre of the Place de la Concorde there rose, with echoes of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (and less relevantly of Sixtine Rome), a real obelisk presented to Louis Philippe by the Khedive in 1833; thereafter, Hittorff ornamented in 1836-40 the square, the Champs Élysées, the Place de l’Étoile, and the Avenue de la Grande Armée with big fountains, lamp standards, and other pieces of elaborate urbanistic furniture.
While the Empire embellishment of Paris was thus finished up or complemented, the July Monarchy also developed a fantastically extensive
## activity in the construction of hospitals, prisons, and other such
utilitarian structures. Vast and plain, these could hardly be duller in the eyes of posterity. Yet they derive quite directly from Durand’s admirable paradigms for such structures and more remotely from the social, if not the aesthetic, aspirations of such men of high talent as Ledoux and Boullée, who initiated Romantic Classicism before the Revolution. If a funerary edifice—the Chapelle Expiatoire—best epitomizes the architecture of the Restoration, some enormous public institution is the contemporary, if inappropriate, architectural equivalent of the Romantic arts of Delacroix and Berlioz in the thirties and forties! Very conspicuous, and quite characteristic of these as a class, is the Hôtel Dieu, beside Notre-Dame in Paris, although this was actually built[66] very much later, in 1864-78, by A.-N. Diet (1827-90). It is the only one that can be readily seen without being jailed or certified; but most of them were amply presented in contemporary publications.
Penchaud, whose Marseilles Protestant church has already been mentioned, was one of the ablest and most productive provincial architects of the Restoration and Louis Philippe periods. His lazaret at Marseilles, built in 1822-6, is more Ledoux-like than the Aix Palace of Justice that he erected on Ledoux’s foundations and considerably more original than his triumphal arch of 1823-32 at Marseilles, called the Porte d’Aix. On this arch, however, the liveliness of the relief sculpture provides something of the same Romantic _élan_ as that of Rude on the Arc de l’Étoile—Rude’s work dates, of course, from the Louis Philippe period. The Marseilles arch continues the Roman ideals of the Empire; the more significant lazaret revives the social and utilitarian ideals of the preceding Revolutionary period.
In Paris Lebas’s Petite Roquette Prison for young criminals, in the Rue de la Roquette, designed in 1825 and executed with some modification of the original project in 1831-6, hardly rivals his great church in interest; but the polygonal plan with machicolated round towers at the corners recalls both the special medievalism of Boullée and the Millbank Penitentiary[67] in London of 1812-21 which Lebas had actually visited. Of more historical significance was the no longer extant Prison de la Nouvelle Force (or Mazas) commissioned in 1836 and built in 1843-50 by E.-J. Gilbert (1793-1874), a pupil first of Durand at the École Polytechnique and then of Vignon, the recognized leader in this field under Louis Philippe. Its radial cellular planning showed, like Barry’s Pentonville Prison of 1841-2 in London, the significant influence abroad of the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia built by John Haviland (1792-1852) in 1823-35. This plan was made known to Europeans by two reports on American prisons, one by William Crawford, published in London in 1834, and another by F.-A. Demetz and Blouet, published in Paris in 1837. On this prison J.-F.-J. Lecointe (1783-1858) was associated with Gilbert.
Much larger is Gilbert’s Charenton Lunatic Asylum of 1838-45 at St Maurice outside Paris, which he designed and built alone. The vast and orderly grid of this institution provides a community that is almost of the order of a complete town. The innumerable bare and regular ranges of wards are dominated by the temple portico of the centrally placed chapel, an ecclesiastical monument of some distinction that is unfortunately inaccessible to visitors. Such work, often as extensive in the provinces as near the capital, was much admired and studied by foreigners even quite late in the century. To the French, moreover, it carried a special prestige; the line of descent was direct from Boullée to Durand and from Durand to Gilbert and his provincial rivals, such as the brothers Douillard (L.-P., 1790-1869; L.-C., 1795-1878, a pupil of Crucy), who were responsible for the Hospice Général (Saint-Jacques) at Nantes built in 1832-6 (Plate 20). In the estimation of contemporaries, this was one of the two main lines of development in this period, balancing socially and intellectually the more aesthetic programme of polychromatic romanticization pursued by Hittorff, Henri Labrouste, and Duban.
Representational public buildings, although usually much less plain in design, are likely to be even more heavy-handed than the prisons and lunatic asylums. Their architects’ strictly functional approach was capable of achieving a rather bleak sort of distinction which should have been sympathetic to the twentieth century had they been better known. The Palace of Justice at Tours of 1840-50 by Charles Jacquemin-Belisle (1815-69), with its unpedimented Roman Doric portico, is typical enough of a very considerable number of large and prominent civic structures. Lequeux’s Paris town halls in the outlying _arrondissements_ are just as dry but less monumentally Classical.
Happily there are a few finer public buildings, mostly in Paris, structures not least interesting for their bold use of metal and glass. Among early railway stations only the Gare Montparnasse of 1848-52 by V.-B. Lenoir (1805-63) and the engineer Eugène Flachat (1802-73) and the Gare de Strasbourg (Gare de l’Est) of 1847-52 by F.-A. Duquesney (1790-1849), a pupil of Percier, still stand in Paris. The Gare de l’Est, with its vast central lunette expressing clearly the iron-and-glass arched train-shed, is a most notable early station. The detailing, of a somewhat High Renaissance—at least not Greek or Roman—order, is pleasant but undistinguished (Plate 22B). This detailing has been effectively maintained in the modern doubling of the front of the station. The original shed by the engineer Sérinet was long ago replaced.
The other great Parisian structure of the forties in whose construction the visible use of iron played a prominent part, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in the Place du Panthéon, is especially distinguished for the originality and elegance of its detailing, even more as regards that of the masonry of the exterior than of the ironwork within (Plate 21). Henri-P.-F. Labrouste (1801-75), a pupil of Lebas and Vaudoyer, who designed this library in 1839 and built it in 1843-50, is the one French architect of the age whose name can be mentioned—though a little diffidently—with those of the great architects of the earlier decades of the century outside France, Soane and Schinkel, even if his contemporaries usually gave precedence to Gilbert or to Hittorff. Yet Labrouste hardly ranks for quality with a Dane of his own generation such as Bindesbøll, although his library is much more advanced both stylistically and technically than the contemporary Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen.
Everywhere except in England this was a period, like the first quarter of the century, in which official architecture exceeded private in interest. Moreover, the priority that the erection of monuments of public utility, from markets and prisons to art galleries and libraries, received over the building of churches and palaces gave significant evidence of the rise of a new pattern of bourgeois culture. It is therefore quite appropriate that this library of Henri Labrouste’s should be the finest structure of the forties in France. The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève is also one of the few buildings of the second quarter century anywhere in the world that has been almost universally admired ever since its completion, if successively for a variety of different reasons. The façade of the library, often ignored by those praising the visible iron structure of the interior (Figure 14), outranks in distinction almost all other contemporary examples of the Renaissance Revival anywhere in the world; but it is worth noting that the flanking administrative block and the Collège Sainte-Barbe also offer a premonition of the next period in their prominent mansard roofs. (Henri’s brother F.-M.-T. Labrouste (1799-1855) supervised the construction of the college.) The façade of Henri’s administrative block is a composition of real originality and exquisite co-ordination of parts to which the term Renaissance Revival need hardly be applied; this is what _style Louis Philippe_ really means, or ought at least to mean.
By Charles X’s time the Salle des Cinq Cents at the Palais Bourbon, erected by the two older Gisors and Leconte in the 1790s, was in such a bad state that it was necessary to rebuild it, adding at the same time a library. J.-J.-B. de Joly (1788-1865) in 1828-33 followed closely the original design; but behind the scenes, as it were, he used a great deal of iron to ensure a lasting structure. He also embellished the walls with a richly coloured sheathing of French marbles and, in the library, with murals by Delacroix. With less originality, but with respect for a major monument of the seventeenth century, H.-A.-G. de Gisors much enlarged the Luxembourg for Louis Philippe in 1834-41, repeating Salomon de Brosse’s original garden façade, in order to accommodate a new chamber for the House of Peers. His chamber followed closely the earlier one there of 1798 by Chalgrin; the new chapel which he also provided at the Luxembourg has even more of the colouristic richness demanded by advanced taste in this period. The Luxembourg Orangery, later the Luxembourg Museum, which was built by Gisors in 1840 in an early seventeenth-century mode, used brick for the walls with only the dressings of stone, a rare instance of such external bichromy in the Paris of its day despite the lively interest in the employment of colour in architecture.
The present Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay was built in 1846-56 by Jacques Lacornée (1779-1856), who had completed in 1821-35 his master Bonnard’s earlier Ministry near by that was begun for Napoleon in 1814. Superimposed arch orders produce a rich and rather Venetian version of the Renaissance Revival not unrelated to the treatment of the somewhat exceptional Empire building on which he had worked. Duc began to plan the restoration and enlargement of the Palace of Justice in Paris as early as 1840, but the handsomest and most conspicuous portions of this elaborate complex date from the Second Empire. J.-F. Duban (1797-1870) started the restoration of the old Louvre, over which a hot controversy soon ensued, in 1848; the New Louvre, begun by Visconti in 1852 and carried forward after his death in 1853 by Lefuel, would be the prime monument of the succeeding period (see Chapter 8). Duban’s capacities in this period—he did his best work rather later (Plate 72B)—are better appreciated in the building for the École des Beaux Arts he completed in 1838 and in the elegant Early Italian Renaissance design of the Hôtel de Pourtalès of 1836 in the Rue Tronchet, perhaps the finest Paris mansion of its day.
However, it was not with such _hôtels particuliers_ but with _maisons de rapport_, that is, blocks of flats, that the streets of Paris, like those of Berlin and Vienna, were mostly built up in these decades. Earlier ones, such as those in the Place de la Bourse, are very carefully composed yet almost devoid of prominent architectural features (Plate 27C). In the later thirties and above all the forties, however, the detail grew richer and more eclectic, while the façades were in general much less neatly composed. Not only were rich Italian or French Renaissance features popular but exotic oriental ornament was more than occasionally used. The planning became more complex and elastic also; but both in exterior design and in interior organization the type remained firmly rooted in late-eighteenth-century tradition. The Paris streets of the first half of the nineteenth century have a notable consistency of scale and character, since the cornice lines, and even the shapes of the high roofs, were controlled by a well-enforced building code and their eclecticism of style is little more than a matter of detail.
More than in other countries in this period, the major virtues of French architecture lay in the placid continuance of well-established lines. Traditions were being slowly eroded, but there was very little of that urgent desire to overturn the immediate past which coloured so significantly much English production of the thirties and forties. Nor was there the German capacity in this period for carrying over into medievalizing modes the basic discipline of established Romantic Classicism. Not surprisingly, French leadership in architecture, established under Louis XIV and renewed under Napoleon, was largely lost; it came back, however, with the Second Empire (see Chapters 8 and 9). All the same, architectural controversy flourished at home in these decades.
Quite naturally, French influence still remained largely dominant in contiguous Belgium and much of Switzerland. If Studer’s work in Berne falls under the German rubric of _Rundbogenstil_, in French-speaking Lausanne and Neuchâtel important commissions went to Frenchmen. An Asylum for the former city was designed by Henri Labrouste in 1837-8; another in the latter town, built a few years later, is by P.-F.-N. Philippon (1784-1866), a pupil of J.-J. Ramée who had also worked with Brongniart. Both are characteristically respectable examples of _Louis Philippe_ work. Labrouste also designed a prison for Alessandria in Italy in 1840.
In Belgium, under Dutch rule from the fall of Napoleon down to 1830, the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, begun in 1819 by the French architect L.-E.-A. Damesme (1757-1822), who had once worked on the Paris _barrières_ with Ledoux, and completed by E.-J. Bonnevie (1783-1835), is a large but typical example of the theatres built in the French provinces by architects of the previous generation. It was not improved by an enlargement and remodelling of 1856, but the original temple portico is noble in scale and handsomely detailed. Characteristically, Damesme also built the Brussels prison. When a new generation of Belgian architects appeared led by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79), who had studied with Huyot, more international influences were evident. For example, Poelaert’s fine early school of 1852 in the Rue de Schaerbeek in Brussels shows little of Huyot but a good deal of Schinkel in its rationalistic handling of Grecian forms. Poelaert’s boldness here, which even suggests that of Alexander Thomson in his Glasgow work of this decade and the next, prepares one a little for his later Palace of Justice designed in the sixties (see Chapter 8).
The long pre-eminence of Italy in the arts came to an end even before the end of the old regime. Architects still flocked there, finding in each generation new sources of inspiration as first Renaissance palaces and then medieval churches succeeded Roman ruins as the preferred quarry of travellers of taste. But not after Piranesi was there an Italian architect with real international influence. At the opening of the new century doctrine flowed from Paris, not from Rome; increasingly, moreover, architects turned to England and Germany for still fresher ideas and ideals.
Only a few Italian cities were notably ornamented in this period; on the other hand, none were blighted, and much ordinary building hardly even bears clear indications of its date. The characteristic and prominent productions of the period are, however, quite up to the highest international standards. They have thus far been underestimated, not least by the Italians themselves, partly because they are so much overshadowed in interest by earlier work, partly because they carry in Italy for the first time since the Gothic the onus—not entirely justified—of following a foreign lead.
The Pope, like other legitimate sovereigns who returned to power after Napoleon’s fall, carried out existing projects, notably those for the Piazza del Popolo as planned by Valadier. He also initiated in 1817 the building of a new wing for the sculpture museum at the Vatican, the Braccio Nuovo by Raffaelle Stern (1774-1820). Completed in 1821, this is one of the finest of the many galleries in the line of descent from Simonetti’s Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican of which the first half of the nineteenth century saw so many (Plate 24). Taller and less ornately embellished than Klenze’s galleries in the Munich Glyptothek, and with rather stronger spatial articulation, this is none the less well within the Romantic Classical tradition as it had been established by the previous generation of French architects.
The principal architectural activity of the post-Napoleonic years in Rome and, indeed, of the whole later period of papal rule was the reconstruction after a fire of the great fifth-century basilica of San Paolo fuori-le-mura. Begun by Pasquale Belli (1752-1833) in 1825, with whom were associated the younger Pietro Camporesi (1792-1873) and F. J. Bosio (1768-1845), the supervision was taken over after Belli’s death in 1833 by Luigi Poletti (1792-1869), who completed the job in 1856. Following closely the august original in its dimensions and proportions, San Paolo has a truly Roman Imperial scale; but the hardness of the materials, the polish of their surfaces, and the cold precision of their handling recalls rather the contemporary Paris churches of Lebas and Hittorff without matching their relatively rich colour. A more modest Roman monument of this period in a conspicuous location is the Teatro Argentina by Camporesi.
The Teatro Carlo Felice in the Piazza de Ferrari in Genoa, built by C. F. Barabino (1768-1835) in 1827, is a more advanced and distinguished Romantic Classical structure of considerable originality, now badly damaged by bombing. Barabino was also responsible for designing the Camposanto di Staglieno at Genoa with its Pantheon-like chapel and its endless colonnades. Begun in 1835, this project was carried to completion by G. B. Rezasco (1799-1872).
Naples[68] has more interesting monuments of this period to offer than Rome or Genoa. Yet San Francesco di Paola, which was built from designs by Pietro Bianchi (1787-1849) in 1816-24 in resolution of a vow of Ferdinand I, can hardly be considered much more original than San Paolo (Plate 26A). The interior is another of the innumerable copies of the Pantheon that were erected all over Europe and America in this period; but the Berninian quadrant colonnades in front are better handled than at Voronikhin’s Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg. The great saucer dome, moreover, is rather happily echoed in the two smaller domes on either side; they serve also to tie together the side colonnades and the pedimented portico. Above all, this church is most effective urbanistically. The colonnades enclose the square north of the Royal Palace in a quite Baroque way; while the church as a whole, because of the giant scale of its parts and its cleanly sculptural composition, stands as a discrete object in the best Romantic Classical way against the higher portion of the city that rises behind. Less happy in the city picture is the front of the San Carlo opera house, carried out a little earlier in 1810-12 by Antonio Niccolini (1772-1850), who also redecorated the interior in 1816-17 and again in 1841-4. This has adequate open space only at the sides; and the curiously high-waisted façade, in any case rather underscaled in its parts, must be seen in a perspective sharper than is becoming to most post-Baroque monuments (Plate 23B).
The throne room in the palace at nearby Caserta, decorated for Ferdinand II by Gaetano Genovese (1795-1860) in 1839-45, is a surprisingly worthy late pendant to de Simone’s contiguous interiors of more than a generation earlier, very rich indeed in its gold-and-white decoration, but superbly ordered. Genovese also carried out an extensive and tactful remodelling and enlargement of the Royal Palace in Naples in 1837-44, most notably the regularization of the long façade above the quay.
No other Italian city provides quite such prominent examples of individual Romantic Classical monuments as do Rome and Naples. The setting of San Carlo in Milan, built by Carlo Amati (1776-1852) in 1844-7, a rectangular recession from the line of the present-day Corso Matteotti, provides no such build-up for its Pantheon-like dome as does Bianchi’s San Francesco. The giant granite colonnades at the base of the contiguous blocks do, however, continue effectively the pedimented portico on either side of the little _piazza_. Only at Turin, almost more French than Italian always, were great squares and wide, arcaded streets carried out in this period, but without focal monuments of any
## particular distinction. These squares and streets vie with Percier and
Fontaine’s in Paris, yet they also continue a local seventeenth-century tradition that was to remain alive down into the Fascist period.
The expiatory church in Turin, which paralleled in motivation Ferdinand I’s in Naples, the Gran Madre di Dio, was proposed in 1814 and built on the farther bank of the Po by Ferdinando Bonsignore (1767-1843) in 1818-31 to celebrate the departure of the French and the return of the House of Savoy to its capital (Plate 26B). This is a far duller and less original example of a modern structure based directly on the Pantheon than is the Tempio Canoviano of 1819-20 at Possagno.[69] For this the great Romantic Classical sculptor of Italy, Thorvaldsen’s rival Antonio Canova, was the client and apparently also the designer.
It is not Bonsignore’s church that is notable in the Turin scene but the vast Piazza Vittorio Veneto opposite, laid out by Giuseppe Frizzi (1797-1831) in 1818 and later surrounded by fine ranges of arcaded buildings mostly carried out between 1825 and 1830 (Plate 26B). At the upper end of this tremendous square two quadrants draw in to meet the arcaded Via Po. Characteristically, the arcades here are supported on compound piers based on those in the seventeenth-century Piazza San Carlo but simplified and sharpened now to conform to Romantic Classical standards. Also a typical Turin feature, but new in this period, was the syncopation of the handsome iron balconies of the upper storeys. This theme marks most of the houses in the quarter contiguous to this square, a quarter built up over the next generation in a remarkably elegant and consistent way more than rivalling the contemporary districts of Paris or Vienna.
The other principal square of this period, on the farther side of the new quarter and at the outer end of the present-day Via Roma, is the Piazza Carlo Felice. This was laid out by the engineer Lombardi and by Frizzi in 1823, and has façades by Carlo Promis (1808-73) that also extend on both sides of the square along the broad Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II. Continuous arcades cross the street ends, as in the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and the balconies are syncopated. The fine big trees in the square and along the Corso are a happy addition to the urban scene quite uncharacteristic of the rest of Italy.
The inner end of the Piazza Carlo Felice is not curved but semi-octagonal. Originally the outer end was open and defined only by rows of trees; later, in 1866-8, the handsome Porta Nuova Railway Station was built there by the engineer Alessandro Mazzuchetti (1824-94) and the architect Carlo Ceppi (1829-1921). Now this terminates the long central axis of the city which extends from the Royal Palace through the Piazza Castello, the Piazza San Carlo, and down the Via Roma to the Piazza Carlo Felice.
Turin has other monumental edifices of this period besides the Gran Madre di Dio. There are, for example, two later churches in the new quarter, San Massimo and the Sacramentine; the latter, by Alfonso Dupuy, was built in 1846-50 from a design of 1843, with later portico by Ceppi; the former in 1845-54 by Carlo Sada (1809-73). Both are domed, but less Pantheon-like than the Gran Madre. They lack, unfortunately, the elegance and delicacy of scale of the houses of the period in the streets that surround them.
Milan owes less than Turin to the architectural activity of this period. The present decoration of the interior of the opera-house, La Scala, which was built by Giuseppe Piermarini (1734-1808) in 1776-8, dates from 1830 and is by Alessandro Sanquirico (1774-1849). This is quite similar in the sumptuousness of its white-and-gold ornamentation to Genovese’s later throne room at Caserta. The square gatehouses at the Porta Venezia, built in 1826 by Rodolfo Vantini (1791-1856), are boldly scaled and effectively paired. The Palazzo Rocca-Saporiti of 1812 by Giovanni Perego (1776-1817) in the Corso Venezia with its raised colonnade rivals in interest Cantoni’s better-known Palazzo Serbelloni of the 1790s near by. The much smaller and considerably later Palazzo Lucini of 1831 in the Via Monte di Pietà by Ferdinando Crivelli (1810-55) is so expert an example of High Renaissance design that it can readily be taken for real _cinquecento_ work. Paradoxically, such an extremely literate specimen of the Renaissance Revival is far less characteristic of Italy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century than of England or Germany. More typical of Italian taste in the thirties and forties are the buildings facing the flank of La Scala across the Via Verdi with their complex rhythm of fenestration and their very rich but still vaguely Grecian ornamentation. Eventually the Italians did, however, take up occasionally the Renaissance version of the international _Rundbogenstil_, and none too happily. For example, the Casa di Risparmio (known vulgarly as the Ca’ de Sass), built by Giuseppe Balzaretti (1801-74) in 1872 across the street from the refined and discreet Palazzo Lucini, is a stonier example of Tuscan rustication—as its nickname suggests—than was ever produced by the Northern Europeans who first revived the mode half a century earlier.
A charming ornament to a smaller city is the Caffè Pedrocchi[70] in Padua of 1816-31 by Giuseppe Jappelli (1783-1852), a pupil of Selva, and Antonio Gradenigo (1806-84). Delicate in scale, interestingly varied in the handling of solids and voids, and most urbane in the discretion of its carefully placed ornamentation, this is certainly the handsomest nineteenth-century café in the world and about the finest Romantic Classical edifice in Italy (Plate 23A). Exceptional in this period in the Latin world is the Neo-Gothic wing known as Il Pedrocchino attached to the café, designed by Jappelli and for the same client; this was completed in 1837.
Trieste in this period, like the cities of Lombardy and the Veneto, is more Italian than Austrian architecturally. As a result it outshines Vienna in the extent and the quality of its early nineteenth-century construction. The new buildings were largely concentrated around the Canal Grande, a rectangular lagoon extending inland from the Riva Tre Novembre. At the head of this rises Sant’ Antonio di Padova, built by Nobile in 1826-49, long after this former Trieste City Architect had been called to Vienna as head of the architecture section of the Akademie there. Occupying a position somewhat similar to that of the Gran Madre di Dio in Turin, Nobile’s church is considerably more interesting, particularly as regards the generous spatial organization of the interior. The Canal Grande is flanked by contemporary palaces that are harmonious with one another in scale but quite varied in detail. The largest and finest, facing the sea on the left, is the Palazzo Carciotti. This was completed in 1806 by Matthäus Pertsch, a Milan-trained architect who had provided in 1798 the façade of the Teatro Verdi here in Trieste. With its raised portico and small dome, the Palazzo Carciotti is one of the most prominent and successful Italian buildings of the opening years of the century.
At the other side of the Latin world, the Iberian peninsula participated rather less than the Italian in the advanced architectural movements of the first half of the century. In Madrid the Obelisk of the 2nd of May, built by Isidro Gonzalez Velasquez (1764/5-?) in 1822-40, and the Obelisk of La Castellana (1883), by Francisco Javier de Mariateguí, are rather modest specimens of a widely popular sort of erection compared to Smirke’s gigantic Wellington Testimonial in Dublin or Mills’s Washington Monument. The Palace of the Congress of 1843-50 by Narciso Pascual y Coloner (1808-70) is a dull example of that nineteenth-century Classicism that hardly deserves the qualification ‘Romantic’.
Italians, little employed elsewhere out of their own country in this period, provided the principal new public edifices of Lisbon. F. X. Fabri (?-1807) built the Palace of Arzuda, begun in 1802, and Fortunato Lodi (1806-?) the Garret Theatre more than a generation later in 1842-6; both are as uninspired as the contemporary monuments of Madrid. As late as 1867-75 the Municipal Chamber of Lisbon by the local architect Domingos Ponente da Silva (1836-1901) maintained the Classical mode at its most conventional. Already, with the establishment of the Braganza headquarters in Rio de Janeiro early in the century, Portuguese vitality was passing to the New World (see Chapter 5). Yet if Lisbon has no individual Romantic Classical monuments of much interest, the lower city, extending from the Praça do Commercio to O Rocio, is a splendid example of late-eighteenth-century urbanism, initiated after the earthquake of 1755 by Eugenio dos Santos de Carvalho (1711-60).
In the eighteenth century Petersburg owed its grandeur as a Baroque city largely to the work of imported Italian architects; but with the rise of French and English influence in the later decades of the old century and the first of the new the day of the Italians was over, there as elsewhere (see Chapter 1). Alexander I’s aspirations, after as well as before Waterloo, were wholly French, not Italian. The Committee for Construction and Hydraulic Works, indeed, which Alexander set up in 1816 to pass the designs of all public and private buildings in his capital, had a French military engineer, General Béthencourt, as its chairman. Yet the principal architect of the post-Napoleonic decades, Karl Ivanovich Rossi (1775-1849), although he had an Italian family name and was of Italian origin, was Russian-born and Russian-trained. Rossi’s General Staff Arches of 1819-29 and the vast hemicycle of which they are the centre continue happily the urbanistic tradition of the older generation; but the detail is Roman not Greek, and the taste altogether coarser and more provincial than that of Thomon and Zakharov (Plate 27B). This is even more true of his Alexandra Theatre of 1827-32 and his Senate and Synod of 1829-34.
August Augustovich Monferran (1786-1858), to whom was assigned the building of St Isaac’s Cathedral[71] in 1817, a vast pile that he completed only in 1857 (Plate 27A), was French, despite the Russian form in which his name is here given, and actually a pupil of Percier. In his youth he had worked under Vignon on the Madeleine, moreover. Monferran lacked, like most of his own generation who remained in France, both the originality and the finesse of the earlier generation, just as Nicholas I lacked the taste of his brother Alexander I. A wealth of sumptuous materials, granites and marbles, marks this church, however, and the dome is of some importance in technical history because it is entirely framed in iron (see Chapter 7).
Another typical monument in the Napoleonic tradition rose also from Monferran’s designs, the Alexander Column of 1829 in the Winter Palace Square (Plate 27B). This may well be the largest granite monolith in the world—a typically Russian claim—but it quite lacks the elegance of Alavoine’s still later Colonne de Juillet in Paris or the scale of Mills’s Washington Monument. The Triumphal Gate of 1833 by Vasili Petrovich Stasov (1769-1848) is a trabeated Greek Doric propylaeon, somewhat comparable to Nobile’s Burgtor in Vienna; more significant is the fact that, like the July Column in Paris and Monferran’s great dome, not to speak of a curious Egyptian suspension bridge of this period in Petersburg, this structure is all of metal.
In 1840 the authority of the Committee of 1816 was terminated and in Petersburg, as so generally elsewhere in Europe, coherent urbanistic control came to an end. The great architectural period there was over as Moscow, with its nationalistic traditions, came more to the fore. Characteristically, the most important new church of the second quarter of the century, the Cathedral of the Redeemer of 1839-83, was built in the older capital and is the first major Russian example of Neo-Byzantine. One is not surprised to find that Konstantin Andreevich Ton (1794-1881), its architect, was German not French; for in a sense this represents a rather clumsy local variant of the German _Rundbogenstil_, continuing the particular eclectic line initiated by Klenze in his Munich Court Church more than a decade earlier.
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## CHAPTER 4
GREAT BRITAIN
IN English terminology, the most productive period of Nash and Soane, the two greatest Romantic Classical architects of England, extending from 1810 down to the thirties, is loosely referred to as ‘Regency’, and the rest of the first half of the century as ‘Early Victorian’. Neither term has much more specific meaning in an international frame of reference than does ‘Restoration’ or ‘Louis Philippe’ in France, not to speak of ‘Biedermeier’, which is sometimes used for this period in Germany and Austria. ‘Regency’ production includes the characteristic monuments of mature Romantic Classicism in England and also much work that makes manifest the Picturesque point of view. Early Victorian production illustrates the modulation of Romantic Classicism into the Renaissance Revival, and includes as well the most doctrinaire phase of the Gothic Revival (see Chapter 6).
Although current researches are somewhat amending the picture, it is accepted that private architecture has generally been more significant in England than public architecture. This was least true in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Soane had been Architect to the Bank of England, in effect if not in fact an important branch of the State, from 1788. Nash succeeded Wyatt in the office of Surveyor-General—although he was only given the title of Deputy—in 1813. And in 1815 Soane, Nash, and Smirke, undoubtedly the three leading architects of their day if one excepts Wilkins, became the members of a new board set up by the national Office of Works, which was at a peak of its authority and activity immediately after Napoleon’s downfall. Soane and Smirke, though not personal favourites of George IV, were knighted, like several of their German contemporaries. The principal building project of the day, the laying out and the construction of Regent Street and Regent’s Park, the latter on Crown land, had the fullest personal support of George IV, first as Regent and after 1820 as King.
Yet Soane’s most important work between 1810 and 1818 was private, except for what he built as Architect to the Chelsea Hospital, and, in the case of his house and his family tomb, wholly personal. All that remains of consequence of his work at the Chelsea Hospital, the stables of 1814-17, might as well be private, for this is no great monument with columned portico and Pantheon-dome such as preoccupied most architects of Soane’s generation and status abroad (Plate 28A). Rigidly astylar, boldly arcuated, and executed in common yellowish London stock bricks, with no more deference to the purplish walling bricks and bright orange-red rubbed dressings of Wren’s earlier buildings at the Hospital than to his English Baroque style, this is as utilitarian as any project of Durand’s. Moreover, in its very simple detailing this reflects, and quite consciously, something of that primitivistic aspect of international Romantic Classical theory deriving from the theories of Soane’s favourite critical author, Laugier. Above all, in the proportioning and in the organization of the arcuated elements, the design of the stables is personal almost to the point of perversity. It is far more comprehensible to the abstract tastes of the twentieth century than in accordance with the ideals most widely accepted in the England of Soane’s own day.
Soane’s Dulwich Gallery of 1811-14, outside London, is likewise built of common brick and has similarly primitivistic detailing. This structure is most characteristic of its period in being a museum, indeed it is the earliest nineteenth-century example; but it could hardly be more different from the line of sculpture galleries that runs from Klenze’s Glyptothek in Munich through Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. Nor does it much resemble the picture galleries of the period running from those in Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin through Klenze’s Ältere Pinakothek in Munich to Voit’s Neuere Pinakothek, also in Munich. It is least unlike the last of these, although that was designed forty years later; this similarity may help to suggest how confusingly advanced in style Soane, eldest of the leading architects of the post-Napoleonic decades, remained even in middle and old age.
But Soane’s _Rundbogenstil_—so to apply this term out of its German context, as one might do even more properly to the Chelsea Hospital stables—is a round-arched style with a difference. There are neither medieval nor _quattrocento_ Italian overtones here. While Soane’s approach was creatively personal in the detailing as well as in the over-all organization, that approach seems most closely parallel to Durand’s rationalism, particularly in the technical skill with which the monitor-lighting was handled. The centrepiece of the Gallery is a mausoleum in which Soane’s virtuosity in three-dimensional composition—an interest that sets him well apart from most of his generation on the Continent—and also at abstract linear ornamentation, produced here by plain incisions in the stone slabs of the lantern, reaches something of a climax.
Even more of such ornamentation is to be seen on the family tomb in St Pancras churchyard of 1816 as also, though much more chastely handled, on the façade of his own house[72] of 1812-13 at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The interiors of this house are full of spatial exercises, many of them miniscule in scale, which Soane developed later in various public structures. It may suffice here to mention the small breakfast-room with its very shallow dome, its varied and ingenious effects of indirect lighting, and its characteristic decoration by means of incised linear patterns and convex mirrors.
In 1818 there began for Soane a new spate of public activity that continued down to 1823. A series of offices at the Bank of England[73] now carried further the spatial and decorative innovations of the interiors of the 1790s. Whether or not these were finer is a matter of taste; but the continuous arched forms without imposts, the smoother surfaces, and the very abstract linear decoration certainly represent a more advanced stage of Soane’s personal style (Plate 28B). Under the Act for Building New Churches of 1818, which generated great activity in the ecclesiastical field, Soane was one of the guiding architects; he built, however, only three churches for the Commission that was set up by the Act. St Peter’s, Walworth, in South London, of 1823-5 is both elegant and ingenious in the way the galleries are incorporated into the internal architectural organization rather than treated as mere afterthought. The other two are less successful.
Almost all the other churches built under the Act, or by other means, in these years were rather conventionally Grecian, that is if sufficient funds were available; otherwise they were what is called ‘Commissioners’ Gothic’ (see Chapter 6). The contrast that the former provide with the Walworth church helps to emphasize the highly personal character of Soane’s achievement even in his least esteemed work. St Peter’s was evidently designed from the inside out, and owes almost nothing to the architecture of any period of the past. The type-church of the age in England, however, comparable in historical significance to Lebas’s slightly later Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris, is St Pancras of 1818-22 in the Euston Road in London built by William Inwood (_c._ 1771-1843) and his son (H. W., 1794-1843). Very evidently this was designed from the outside in, for its features are derived from the Erechtheum, a monument which the younger Inwood actually went to Athens to measure after the church had been begun.[74]
English tradition required a lantern above the temple portico at the front, and so the Inwoods devised a sort of Gibbsian tower for St Pancras out of elements borrowed from the Athenian Tower of the Winds. Urbane yet rather barren, the interior lacks even the tepid religious feeling of the French basilicas of the day. The architects, and contemporaries generally, were more interested in the caryatid porches—for there are not one but two—that flank the rear.
Other Inwood churches in London, such as All Saints in Camden Street of 1822-4 and St Peter’s in Regent’s Square of 1824-6, are equally Greek in detail but less directly related to particular ancient monuments. They are also much less impressive. No more interesting are most of the Grecian churches built by other architects. St Mary’s, Wyndham Place of 1823-4 by Smirke, however, is set apart by the circular tower placed on the south, a feature which he had already used on St Philip’s, Salford, of 1822-5. His church at Markham Clinton in Nottinghamshire of 1833, cruciform in plan and with a fine octagonal lantern, is considerably more original, but it was rather a family mausoleum than an ordinary parish church.
A revolution was getting under way in Great Britain in the realm of church architecture at this very time, and the heyday of the temple church was destined to be brief. After the early thirties only Nonconformists continued to build them. But such a Congregational chapel as that built by F. H. Lockwood (1811-78) and Thomas Allom (1804-72) in Great Thornton Street, Hull, in 1841-3, its broad temple front flanked by lower side wings, still had real distinction, a distinction rarely maintained after this date, although rather similar structures continued to be erected for several more decades both in London and in the provinces.
In Scotland, where Greek sanctions lasted longer than in England, Alexander Thomson (1817-75) built in the fifties and sixties three of the finest Romantic Classical churches in the world. His Caledonia Road Free Church in Glasgow of 1856-7 was designed for those Presbyterians who had left the established Scottish church in 1843 (Plate 29). This owes a great deal to Schinkel’s suburban Berlin churches, which Thomson must have known through the _Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe_. The composition is more Picturesque, in being markedly asymmetrical, and the superb tower at the corner reduces the temple front to a subordinate element in a sort of Italian Villa composition. Yet the idea for this sort of composition may well have come from Schinkel also, a derivation which the rather _Rundbogenstil_ character and asymmetrical organization of certain of Thomson’s earlier suburban villas seems to make still more probable. The interior of the church is very different from that of Soane’s in Walworth, but it is equally architectonic in the Schinkelesque way the galleries are incorporated in the general scheme. This is real interior architecture, not just a gallery-surrounded hall like the Grecian churches in England built back in the twenties.
Thomson’s more prominently located St Vincent Street Church of 1859, also in Glasgow, is not finer. But it utilizes a difficult site with striking success, and the exotic eclecticism of the spire is peculiarly personal to Thomson. His Queen’s Park Church of 1867, in a southern suburb of Glasgow, was as perversely original as anything by Soane, and is perhaps Thomson’s final masterpiece. Inside, he handled the light iron supports with clear logic and elegantly appropriate painted decoration. Both the heavy masonry tower—which is, of course, invisible from the interior—and the heavy clerestory are carried on these delicately proportioned metal columns with a frankness and boldness hardly equalled before the twentieth century. Externally Thomson detailed the trabeated masonry with the purity of a Schinkel and the originality of a Soane, yet he composed the façade in three dimensions in a fashion that is almost Baroque beneath his strange near-Hindu ‘spire’.
Thomson’s churches, late though they are, can be better understood as examples of Romantic Classicism, sharing important qualities with the boldest French projects of the 1780s, than in relation to any other stage of nineteenth-century architectural development. Yet it will be evident later that they also have a good deal in common with the architectural aspirations of their own quarter of the century (see
## Chapter 9).
Soane in his latest work seems at times to have produced what were almost parodies of his characteristic Bank interiors, approaching in their strangeness and their oriental allusions the exotic spires of Thomson. As these things do not survive, it is hard to know whether the Court of Chancery at Westminster of 1824-5, with its pendentives cut back so that they are no more than a sort of plaster awning, or the Council Chamber in Freemasons’ Hall, with its strange canopy-like covering, were effective or not. But these interiors do help to explain why the idiosyncratic, not to say cranky, Soane left on his death in 1837 no such living tradition behind him as did Schinkel in Germany.
Nash, Soane’s rival as England’s leading architect in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, was a very different sort of man. Until his marriage he was of no great prominence; it was the Regent’s favour which then brought him to the fore. As an urbanist, if not as a designer of individual buildings, he was worthy of his opportunities—and no architect of his generation had greater. His distinction at what is today called ‘planning’ resides not alone in the amplitude, the elasticity, and the resultant variety of his schemes, but as much perhaps in his ability as an entrepreneur in carrying amazingly extensive operations to completion. Few, moreover, succeeded better than Nash in modulating Romantic Classicism towards the Picturesque; and this was over and above his important direct contribution to Picturesque practice in the building of castles, villas, and cottages.
At the beginning of the second decade of the century the lease of the Crown’s Marylebone Estate fell in. Nash’s scheme for its development, by far the most comprehensive, won the day, evidently because he had the personal backing of the Regent. Nash’s scheme of 1812, somewhat modified in ultimate execution, provided for a park—Regent’s Park—surrounded by terraces of considerable size organized into a series of palatial compositions (Figure 10). The traditions of homogeneous terrace design go back to the early eighteenth century, and terraces facing out towards open scenery appeared soon after the middle of the century. But what Nash planned for Regent’s Park, and in the main executed, vastly exceeded not only in extent but also in originality the early eighteenth-century terrace in Grosvenor Square, where the idea of over-all composition was probably first tried out, or the mid-eighteenth-century Royal Crescent at Bath by John Wood II (1728-81), which was the first terrace to face not a square or a street but open park-like country. This work around the park alone should have been enough to make Nash’s reputation.
But in these unquiet years, when the world was briefly trying to live at peace with Napoleon, Nash sensed the Regent’s ambition to embellish London in a way to rival the Emperor’s plans for Paris. He therefore projected a street which should proceed, much as had been proposed even before this, along the line where the residential West End began, northward from the Regent’s residence at Carlton House to the southern entrance of the new park. An early scheme for such a street, entirely lined with colonnades and interrupted by squares in which public structures would stand in splendid isolation, suggests his original aim of emulating the Rue de Rivoli and Parisian monuments like the Madeleine and the Bourse. As the project was gradually adjusted to the realities of the situation, most of its geometric regularity and practically all of its Parisian character disappeared. The colonnades survived only along the Quadrant leading out of Piccadilly Circus; the Duke of York’s Column in Waterloo Place, rising between the two blocks of Carlton House Terrace, which eventually replaced Carlton House, is the one feature of Napoleonic scale and character. It is not by Nash but by the Duke of York’s favourite architect, Benjamin Dean Wyatt (1775-?1850), and was built only in 1831-4.
Instead of an imitation of Paris, something vastly more original was created, an example of civic design whose full implications are perhaps not wholly digested even today. Nash, the former partner of the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818), in his new Regent Street as well as in his Regent’s Park and its surrounding terraces, sought to carry out, not with natural scenery but with urban scenery, the principles of Picturesque landscaping. Yet his architectural vocabulary remained well within the accepted range of Romantic Classicism.
Waterloo Place is wholly formal, serving as a sort of forecourt to Carlton House when it was laid out in 1815. But going up Lower Regent Street the separate buildings erected in 1817-19 were separately designed, to a harmonious scale but with no over-all regularity of shape and size. At Piccadilly, first the Circus, also of 1817-19, a circular place, and then the Quadrant of 1819-20 took care most ingeniously of a drastic leftward shift in axis. A relatively monumental façade, that of the County Fire Office, faced the head of Lower Regent Street; the other façades of the Circus were regular and plain in an almost Soanic way (Plate 30). The Quadrant gained great distinction from its projecting colonnades of Doric columns (made of cast iron) and from the skilful placing of a domed pavilion opposite its western end.
From there on the street, as carried forward in 1820-4, proceeded more directly, but with great variety in the individual façades—one terrace of houses over shops (1820-1) was by Soane. There were also special pavilioned structures to phrase several slight changes in direction and to mark the openings of intersecting streets. At Regent (now Oxford) Circus a second circle, similar to that at Piccadilly but elaborated by Nash with a Corinthian order, marks a major cross artery. Above this the street continues quite straight for a little way; then comes another sharp leftward shift in the axis. There Nash placed his All Souls’ Church, which was built in 1822-4. Its curious fluted steeple still rises through the colonnade that crowns the tower to provide a pivot by which the eye is carried around the sharp corner. Almost at once another right-angled turn leads into the broad pre-existing esplanade of Adam’s Portland Place. From here on all is formal again as at Waterloo Place.
At the upper end, between the top of Portland Place and the Park, was to be a large residential circus. Of this only the two southern quadrants were built—one of them the earliest portion of the whole scheme, initiated at the very start in 1812. As executed, there are above this—for this part of the scheme is all extant—two regular terraces facing each other across Park Square.
In 1813, as has been said, Nash succeeded Wyatt in the Surveyor-General’s office; but it was in the role of private entrepreneur rather than as an official that he executed the Regent Street scheme, hazarding his own rising fortune and using every device of subleasing to carry the project through. This he accomplished in the relatively short period of fifteen years, even though the renewal of the war held up execution for several years immediately after the start. Of all this nothing remains below Portland Place but the planning and All Souls’. However, in the district east of Lower Regent Street, the Royal Opera Arcade still exists behind New Zealand House and, much larger and more conspicuous, the conventional temple portico of the Haymarket Theatre of 1821 stands at the end of what is now Charles II Street.
At the base of Waterloo Place, facing the Green Park, the two ranges of Carlton House Terrace, built in 1827, still rise above their cast-iron Doric basement colonnades. In the lower half of this square, south of Pall Mall, with the two clubs on either side—one by Nash, the other by Burton—and the Duke of York’s Column silhouetted against the distant scenery of park and Government buildings between the two wings of Carlton House Terrace, Nash’s urbanism can still be fully appreciated. The full grandeur of Napoleon’s Paris or Alexander I’s Petersburg is lacking, but so also is their archaeology. This obviously belongs to the nineteenth century. It establishes, for modern eyes, Nash’s capacity as ‘planner’ quite as much as do his terraces around Regent’s Park, as these were carried out in 1820-7 by himself and by various younger architects working under his general supervision.
[Illustration:
Figure 10. John Nash: London, Regent Street and Regent’s Park, 1812-27, plan ]
Curiously enough, the first Regent’s Park terrace, built in 1821 while construction was still proceeding in Park Square, was at least nominally by young Decimus Burton (1800-81), the talented son of the builder James Burton, who was as active here in these years as in Bloomsbury. Dignified and severe, although not Grecian in detail like the handsomer Ionic York Terrace and its flanking Doric villa completed the next year, Cornwall Terrace certainly lacks the specifically Nashian qualities. Happily typical of Nash’s response to urbanistic opportunities is the way he opened York Gate in the middle of York Terrace through to the Marylebone Road in order to incorporate visually the new façade provided by Thomas Hardwick (1752-1829) in 1818-19 for the Marylebone Parish Church.
Sussex Place of 1822, with its curved plan and its ten domes, is much more notably Picturesque; but the most spectacular composition of all is Cumberland Terrace, Nash’s in general conception, but executed by James Thomson (1800-83) in 1826-7 (Plate 32). This is far more palatial, at least superficially, than the rather humdrum Buckingham Palace that Nash was gradually erecting for the King from 1821 on.[75] When seen through the trees of the park or in sharp perspective from the ring road, this range of houses provides a Picturesque three-dimensional composition of a dream-like order—what matter if the conventional Classical elements are organized and executed in a very slapdash way?
The total scope of the Regent’s Park development provided a ‘New Town’ in a rather complete sense inspired possibly by Ledoux’s ‘Ville Idéale’. There were detached villas in the park, mews behind the terraces, a market-place to the east, modest two-storey houses near by in Munster Square and, finally, the two Park Villages, carried out by his protégé Sir James Pennethorne (1801-71) after Nash’s ideas from 1827 on. These last are extensions of the Picturesque hamlet, consisting of groups of semi-detached villas some of Italianate, some of Tudoresque character, loosely strung along curving roads, which provide the very prototype of the later-nineteenth-century suburb.
To most of his professional contemporaries, and not least to his associates on the Board of the Office of Works, Soane and Smirke, Nash seemed an opportunist and almost a charlatan. He differed as markedly from the archaeologically-minded Smirke as from Soane, even if he was as ready to borrow Greek orders from the one as incised detail from the other. Despite the independent stylistic position of Soane and of Nash, Britain could hardly have produced a line of archaeologist-architects from James Stuart to C. R. Cockerell—a line at least as distinguished as the French line from Leroy to Hittorff—without developing by this time Greek Revival doctrines quite as rigid and as self-assured as those of France and Germany. From the end of the second decade of the century the Grecian mode was, indeed, rather more firmly entrenched in Great Britain than anywhere on the Continent.
The historical importance of Wilkins’s Downing College at Cambridge has already been noted. If Wilkins was never able to complete this, so that it remained but a fragment of an ideal Grecian college, he had greater opportunities later in London, opportunities which on the whole he muffed. His University College of 1827-8 in Gower Street impressed contemporaries because its central temple portico ran to _ten_ columns in width. It is not otherwise distinguished, and the advancing wings of the quadrangle are not by him. His St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, of the same date, is a much more modest building (Plate 31). Yet it already shows some of the restlessness, if little of the elaboration, of later Grecian work on the Continent, such as Klenze’s Hermitage Museum in Petersburg. The hospital, although the theme of the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus is ingeniously exploited, lacks the delicacy and elegance of Decimus Burton’s Ionic screen of 1825 across the way (Plate 31).
The hospital is, however, rather more original than Burton’s nearby Constitution Hill Arch, also of 1827-8, now moved back towards the Green Park. This is one of the two erected in connexion with the new Buckingham Palace and in conscious rivalry of those Napoleon had set up in Paris and other Continental cities. The other one, originally forming the entrance to the court of the palace, is Nash’s Marble Arch of 1828; that was moved to the corner of Hyde Park where Park Lane meets Oxford Street in 1851 after the palace was refronted by Blore in the late forties. Neither arch has the urbanistic value of Benjamin Dean Wyatt’s Duke of York’s Column or of the Nelson Column, erected in 1839 in Trafalgar Square by William Railton (1803-77), because of their very casual siting. Apsley House, as remodelled by B. D. Wyatt for the Duke of Wellington in 1828, rising too high beside the Burton screen, is not altogether an addition to the group at Hyde Park Corner.
Wilkins’s largest and most conspicuous work, and the one which ruined his reputation, is the National Gallery of 1832-8. The long façade of this, extending across the top of Trafalgar Square, is excessively episodic and best seen in sharp perspective looking along Pall Mall East or from the south side of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The order is not Greek, since the columns of the portico Henry Holland (1745-1806) erected in front of Carlton House in the early 1790s were re-used, and the little dome behind the central pediment is almost Byzantine in character. Comparison of this Picturesque-Classical composition with Cumberland Terrace is inevitable; the honours are all Nash’s.
If Wilkins made the first Grecian spurt, it was Soane’s pupil Smirke who held the course. In Trafalgar Square the unified range of buildings built in 1824-7 on the west side that once housed the Union Club and later the College of Physicians contrasts most strikingly with Wilkins’s National Gallery. Heavy, dignified, and immaculately ‘correct’ in its Greek detailing, this block also shows considerable variety in the handling of standard Romantic Classical elements without any such striving for Picturesque effect as the National Gallery. Later additions on the west have not seriously damaged Smirke’s work.
It is highly typical that the most considerable Grecian edifice of London should be a museum and library. The British Museum, begun by Smirke in 1824, was not completed until 1847.[76] Its principal internal feature, moreover, the domed Reading Room built of cast iron in the central court (see Chapter 7), was designed and carried out in the mid fifties by Smirke’s younger brother Sydney (1798-1877). Only the King’s Library was finished rapidly within the twenties to house the library of George III. This is dignified and crisp, if somewhat less immaculately correct than Smirke’s façade in Trafalgar Square.
The characteristic south front of the Museum, one of the most overwhelming examples of Romantic Classical stylophily, or love of columns—there are forty-eight of them—was one of the last portions of the whole to be completed (Plate 33). The great temple portico and the colonnade that is carried round the inner sides and the ends of the flanking wings was probably not decided on until the thirties; such a redundancy of columns seems to belong well into the second quarter of the century—compare Elmes’s St George’s Hall in Liverpool (Plate 34A) or Basevi’s Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The façade of Smirke’s General Post Office of 1824-9, with columns used only at the centre and the ends, and two ranges of good-sized windows between, was more characteristic of the usual Romantic Classical balance between columnar display and rationalistic provision for internal function.
Wilkins and Smirke were not alone in providing Grecian public buildings for the London of George IV. The London Corn Exchange of 1827-8 by George Smith (1783-1869) was an excellent example, less heavy than most of Smirke’s work, less inconsequent than Wilkins’s. Decimus Burton, who provided various gatehouses at Hyde Park as well as the screen at Hyde Park Corner in 1825—the modest ones at Prince’s Gate are almost identical with Schinkel’s tiny Doric temples at the Potsdamer Tor in Berlin—also provided the finest façade in Waterloo Place when he built the Athenaeum there in 1829-30. This clubhouse is severe and astylar externally but grand and sumptuous within to a degree hitherto unknown. Henry Roberts (1803-76), a Smirke assistant, followed his former master closely in the design of the Fishmongers’ Hall built in 1831-3. His great Ionic portico rises as splendidly above the solid substructure that flanks the Thames as Klenze’s Walhalla does above its stepped terraces.
Corporate clients that came to the fore in the thirties saw in the solemn Grecian mode the best means of achieving representational monumentality in their buildings; moreover, they were increasingly ready to employ leading architects in order to obtain it. C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863), the son of S. P. Cockerell, soon to be Soane’s successor as Architect of the Bank of England, began his distinguished career as a favourite servant of the financial world by providing the Westminster Insurance Office in the Strand in 1832 with a range of Doric half-columns. Five years later, in the London and Westminster Bank in Lothbury, he attained a still greater effect of dignified restraint, with no loss of sumptuousness, in an astylar façade of great originality.
The new railways, whose earliest stations had been very modest indeed, were as interested as insurance companies and banks in the representational dignity of Classical frontispieces. At Euston Grove in London, before what was intended to be a double station planned by the engineer Robert Stephenson (1803-59)[5^a] in 1835 to serve the London & Birmingham and the Great Western Railways, there rose from the designs of Philip Hardwick (1792-1870) the Euston ‘Arch’, a giant Greek Doric propylaeon; for the Birmingham terminal of the railway at Curzon Street Hardwick provided a second gateway that is more in the form of a Roman triumphal arch. This theme John Foster (1786-1846) expanded into a continuous Roman screen in front of Lime Street Station at Liverpool in 1836. At Huddersfield James P. Pritchett (1789-1868) and his son Charles fronted the main station block in 1845-9 with a Roman temple portico and flanked it with minor colonnaded features. The Monkwearmouth station by John Dobson (1787-1865) of 1848 is similar, but Grecian in its detailing.
More appropriate to modern eyes was the endless red-brick façade designed by Francis Thompson for Robert Stephenson’s Trijunct Station in Derby of 1839-41. This was astylar but had various subtle projections and recessions of the wall plane and a comparable variety of levels in the very long skyline. Thompson also, in the stone towers he designed for Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge of 1845-50, handled his material with a superbly rational directness (Plate 61). The technical significance of such structures as examples of the new uses of iron which the railways encouraged, must be considered later (see Chapter 7). Of comparable quality to Thompson’s work is the enormous Royal Navy Victualling Yard at Stonehouse of 1826-35 by the engineer Sir John Rennie (1794-1874)—able son, like Robert Stephenson, of a more famous engineer father and also a brother-in-law of C. R. Cockerell. Despite the severity characteristic of the period, this has an almost Baroque plasticity and vigour of silhouette rarely achieved by contemporary architects before the mid-century.
Except for certain large provincial and suburban Nonconformist churches, the heyday of the temple portico came to an end about 1840. The last prominent example in London is the Royal Exchange, built by Sir William Tite (1798-1873) in 1841-4, but there is nothing Classical about other aspects of this prominent structure. The side, rear, and court façades are in a sort of Neo-Baroque that prefigures the bombast of the third quarter of the century (see Chapter 9).
Grecian public monuments were as characteristic of provincial cities in the twenties and thirties as of London, perhaps more so. Francis Goodwin (1784-1835)[77] provided Manchester with a handsome town hall in 1822-4, now long since superseded. In the latter year he lost the competition for the new Royal Institution there to the young Charles Barry (1795-1860), hitherto most unsympathetically employed in building cheap Gothic churches for the Commissioners.[78] This edifice Barry erected over the years 1827-35. Happily it still stands, serving as the Manchester Art Gallery, an excellent example of Barry’s command of that Grecian idiom which his more personal Italianate mode forced into obsolescence even before this building was finished (see below).
In 1828 Foster began the fine Grecian Custom House in Liverpool, completely destroyed, alas, in the blitz; while in 1831 Joseph A. Hansom (1803-82) won the competition for the Birmingham Town Hall with the most striking British example of the temple paradigm. This characteristic Romantic Classical edifice, raised on a high rusticated podium, was slowly executed by Hansom and his partner Edward Welch (1806-68) over the next fifteen years and more.
The more widespread the use of Greek forms became, the less vitality and character they seemed to retain. It is not the columnar detail, so much more correct than that at Regent’s Park, which gives interest to the terraces—built from the twenties on—that George Basevi (1794-1845) designed for Belgrave Square in London or to those of slightly later date designed by Lewis Cubitt (1799-?) and by John Young in Eaton Square; it is the remarkable scale and extent of this newest urban development, rivalling that at Regent’s Park, which was undertaken by the builder Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855), Lewis’s brother, for the Grosvenor Estate behind the gardens of Buckingham Palace.
So also at Newcastle, where Thomas Grainger (1798-1861), with the presumptive assistance of Dobson[79] as designer, laid out and built up a series of streets from 1834 on, it is not the more correctly Greek orders that make Grey Street a finer piece of urbanism than Nash’s Regent Street; it is the fine, creamy freestone that replaces London’s stucco and the skilful organization of the ranges of buildings, all so much more carefully grouped and related to one another than in Regent Street, along the curving and rising slope. The Grey Column, built by John Green (?-1852) in 1837-8, is superbly placed in the best manner of the period as a focal accent at the top of the development just like the Duke of York’s Column at the bottom of Lower Regent Street. The cleaning of many buildings has of late much enhanced the attractiveness of central Newcastle.
It was not until the early forties that Greek Revival buildings began to be characterized by contemporaries as ‘insipid’. But Basevi’s façade of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, begun in 1837 and carried to completion with some emendations by C. R. Cockerell in 1847 after Basevi’s death, well illustrates some of the changes that were already coming over Romantic Classical design. As at Wilkins’s National Gallery, the silhouette is elaborately varied—here much more skilfully than in Trafalgar Square. As with Tite’s Royal Exchange, there is also a most un-Grecian sort of plastic bombast. The orders are not Grecian but Roman, moreover, and the spirit is more Roman still, but Roman of the later Empire in the East, as at Baalbek or Palmyra.
St George’s Hall in Liverpool, the latest of the major Romantic Classical monuments of England, was finished like the Fitzwilliam by C. R. Cockerell long after its original designer’s death. It displays much less bombast and much more true grandeur of scale. The young Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1814-49) won two successive competitions, for a Hall and for Law Courts, in 1839 and 1840 respectively. Then, when it was decided to combine the two in one structure, he paid a visit to Berlin to study the work of Schinkel. Schinkelesque, indeed, is the long colonnade facing Lime Street Station, and even more so the curious square piers, free-standing in their upper half, that Elmes used elsewhere on the building (Plate 34A).
The temple portico at the south end is conventional enough, but with its steps boldly raised above a massively plain foundation wall; the rounded end to the north is much more original and also rather French in feeling. French surely, but of the Empire rather than the contemporary July Monarchy, is the tremendous scale of the whole and the stately axial planning of the sort to be seen in many Prix de Rome projects of the preceding fifty years. The great hall is slightly larger than its prototype in the Baths of Caracalla.[80] As completed by Cockerell in the early fifties, the interior lost all the Grecian severity of the exterior. Together with the elegant elliptical concert hall, planned by Elmes but entirely executed by Cockerell, the great hall belongs to the next period of architectural development as much by its rich decoration as by its date.
It was in Scotland, not in England, that the Greek Revival had its greatest success and lasted longest. There seems to have been some special congruity of sentiment between Northern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century and the ancient world. Edinburgh, which considered itself for intellectual reasons the ‘Athens of the North’, set out after 1810 to continue in a more Athenian mode the extension and embellishment of her New Town begun in the 1760s. The result rivals Petersburg as well as Copenhagen, Berlin, and Munich. Indeed, in Edinburgh, what was built between 1760 and 1860 provides still the most extensive example of a Romantic Classical city in the world.
If the architecture of Edinburgh is largely Classical—the most conspicuous exceptions are the inherited medieval Castle on its rock at the head of the Old Town and the Walter Scott Monument in Prince’s Street Gardens—the setting is extremely Picturesque. The fullest scenic advantage was taken of the castle-crowned hill, above the filled-in and landscaped North Loch, and of the two heights to the east and the south-east, Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat. The latter was kept quite clear of buildings, the former gradually turned into a sort of Scottish Akropolis. Perhaps fortunately, the largest structure there, the National Monument, a copy of the Parthenon by C. R. Cockerell and the local architect W. H. Playfair (1789-1857), was never finished; thus it appears to be a ruin and adds to the Picturesque effect of this terminus to the eastward view along Prince’s Street.
Calton Hill is approached, and the view of it framed, by Waterloo Place, the buildings of which were erected by Archibald Elliott (1763-1823) in 1815-19. This is no unworthy rival of the homonymous square in London, despite the lack of a central column. The view had to remain open to the hill beyond, where Playfair’s Observatory was rising in 1814-18 and later, in 1830, the Choragic Monument by Thomas Hamilton (1785-1858) dedicated to that very un-Grecian poet Robert Burns, as well as various other objects of visual interest. In St Andrew’s Square in the New Town, however, is the Melville Column. This was built by William Burn (1789-1870) in 1821-2 and based, like the Colonne Vendôme in Paris, on that of Trajan.
These Scottish architects were perhaps more fortunate than Dobson in the material available to them; Edinburgh’s Craigleith stone becomes with time a rather deep grey, but not so black as that in Newcastle when left uncleaned. Seen in Playfair’s terraces, executed gradually from 1820 to 1860, which run around the base of Calton Hill on the south, east, and north, the effect may be rather dour; but the dignity and solidity of these Grecian ranges, rivalled in the contemporary circuses on the slopes to the north of the eighteenth-century New Town, are undeniably impressive.
From the completion of his Observatory in 1814 to the completion of the Scottish National Gallery forty years later Playfair continued to ornament Edinburgh with Classical (and on occasion with non-Classical) structures. Looking south along the cross-axis of the new Town, one sees just beyond Prince’s Street his Royal Scottish Institution begun in 1822, its rather massive Doric bulk happily crowned just after its completion in 1836 by the seated figure of the young Queen Victoria (Plate 34B). Behind this lies his Ionic National Gallery of 1850-4, which is not unworthy of comparison with Smirke’s British Museum begun more than a quarter of a century earlier. High to the rear, on the slopes of the Old Town, rise the two towers of the Free Church College, also by Playfair and begun in 1846, framing with their crisp Tudorish forms the richer and more graceful spire (sometimes attributed to Pugin) of Tolbooth St John’s, which was built by James Gillespie Graham in 1843.
Finer than any individual work of Playfair’s, and splendidly sited on the south side of Calton Hill, is the High School by Thomas Hamilton (1784-1858). Begun in 1825, this complex Grecian composition shows how well the lessons of the Athenian Propylaea were learned by Scottish architects. More original, but still essentially Grecian, is Hamilton’s Hall of Physicians in Queen Street of 1844-5.
Banking was not far behind State and Church as a patron of monumental architecture in Scotland. Before the astylar _palazzo_ mode took over the financial scene, two banks grander than any in London had been erected in the Edinburgh New Town. The Commercial Bank of Scotland of 1846 in George Street by David Rhind (1808-83), despite its pedimented portico, is no longer Greek in detail; the British Linen Bank of 1852 in St Andrew’s Square by David Bryce (1803-76), more plastically Roman still, has giant detached columns upholding bold entablature blocks, an idea deriving from C. R. Cockerell’s rejected competition design for the Royal Exchange in London.
As the earlier mention of Thomson’s churches in Glasgow will have indicated, the Greek Revival lasted even longer there than in Edinburgh. But such edifices as the Royal Exchange of 1829-30 by David Hamilton (1768-1843) or Clarke & Bell’s Municipal and County Buildings of 1844 do not rival the work of Playfair and of the other Hamilton in the capital; nor is there in Glasgow much good urbanism of this period. In his domestic work Thomson remained closer to the conventional norms of the Greek Revival than in his churches. However, in Moray Place, Strathbungo, of 1859, where he lived himself, he produced the finest of all Grecian terraces (Plate 35A) and, still later, in Great Western Terrace an ampler if less original composition.
In England the Greek Revival was barely established as the dominant mode in the twenties before it was challenged. Barry, as has been noted earlier, began his career with the building of cheap Commissioners’ Gothic churches, but his favourite mode was the Renaissance Revival. We have seen that in Germany the Renaissance Revival may be considered to begin with Klenze’s Munich work of the mid twenties. Now, in 1827-8, Barry built the Brunswick Chapel, later St Andrew’s, at Hove in a _quattrocento_ mode—the exterior, that is, for the modest interior can hardly be thus characterized, and in its present form includes various changes since Barry’s time. The façade looks rather nineteenth-century French to modern eyes; yet comparable French churches, such as Lequeux’s Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe in Paris, are mostly from five to fifteen years later (see Chapter 3). Barry doubtless turned to some of the available French publications on the Italian Renaissance for his detail, most probably to the _Architecture toscane_ of Grandjean de Montigny and Famin, but he certainly did not derive the design of his church from current Continental practice.
Following immediately upon the Brunswick Chapel, Barry built for Thomas Attree of Brighton a symmetrical Italian Villa, now the Xavierian College, with an architectural garden setting. This was part of a scheme, otherwise unexecuted, for surrounding Queen’s Park, east of the town, with a range of detached houses, some Italianate, some Tudoresque, in an extensive suburban development of the order of Nash’s only slightly earlier Park Villages. The intended effect can best be seen in Decimus Burton’s Calverley Estate at Tunbridge Wells carried out over the years 1828 to 1852.
Far more important, however, was the fact that Barry in 1829 won with a _palazzo_ composition the competition for the new Travellers’ Club. This was built in Pall Mall in the next two years beside the prominent corner site where Burton’s astylar but still Grecian Athenaeum was rising. Raphaelesque on the front—although not as derivative from Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace in Florence as was claimed at the time—but rather Venetian on the rear, this clubhouse notably eschews the flat barrenness and the giant orders of the Grecian mode to throw emphasis on the elegant aedicular treatment of the windows and the bold _cornicione_ which crowns the top (Plate 35B).
Very soon Charles Fowler (1791-1867), who owned the copy of Durand’s treatise now in the Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects, was introducing a more utilitarian sort of Italianism in the Hungerford Market in London of 1831-3, now long gone, and in the Lower Market at Exeter of 1835-6. There the Durandesque and almost basilican interiors, destroyed in 1942, contrasted markedly with the Greek Doric detailing of the façade of his Upper Market of 1837-8.
In 1836 Barry designed a larger edifice of the _palazzo_ type, the Manchester Athenaeum built in 1837-9. But this was overshadowed in size, in prominence, and in quality by the new Reform Club next door to the Travellers’ in Pall Mall; for this he won the competition in 1837, and it was built in 1838-40 (Plate 35B). Here his model was obviously San Gallo’s Farnese Palace in Rome. But there are many differences such as the unaccented entrance, the balustrade which sets the façades back from the pavement, the simpler and more San Gallesque top storey, the corner emphasis provided by prominent chimneys, not to speak of the metal-and-glass roofing of the central court.
Barry’s two Pall Mall clubs provided architectural paradigms much followed through the forties and well into the third quarter of the century. Moreover, W. H. Leeds (1786-1866), in the text of a monograph on the _Travellers’ Club-House_ published in 1839, developed at some length the arguments for a Renaissance Revival. A little less evidently than the Continental work of these years in Renaissance modes, but none the less truly, Barry’s _palazzi_ represent a continuation of Romantic Classicism. In the block-like unity of the external masses, the regularity of the fenestration, and the extreme orderliness of the planning his _palazzo_ mode is at least as characteristic an aspect of later Romantic Classicism in Great Britain as is the _Rundbogenstil_ on the Continent.
This is considerably less true of two other directions in which Barry first turned in the thirties. It would be premature, however, to discuss here the design with which Barry won the competition for the new Houses of Parliament in 1836 (Plate 54). As the first major public monument to be designed anywhere in Gothic this constituted above all an epoch-making step in the English revolt _against_ Romantic Classicism (see Chapter 6).
This is not so much the case with Barry’s first and only important essay in the ‘Jacobethan’ mode—or the Anglo-Italian as he preferred to call it—the remodelling of Highclere Castle in Hampshire, proposed as early as 1837 and carried out over the next two decades (Plate 37A). Despite the Picturesque effect of its towered and bristling silhouette, this great country house rigidly maintains the quadrangular plan of the Reform Club and is almost as regular as that in composition, and even more coldly crisp in its detailing. Much the same can be said of Mentmore House in Buckinghamshire, built by Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65) in 1852-4 in a very similar vein but more directly derived from Smithson’s Elizabethan Wollaton Hall near Nottingham. In general, however, the extremely popular Jacobethan Revival of these years, even more than the contemporary revival of the _style François I_ in France, represents a reaction not merely against the Greek Revival, as does the _palazzo_ mode, but against the basic disciplines of Romantic Classicism and was one of the major stylistic vehicles of the later Picturesque.
On the other hand, the utilization of pre-Gothic medieval forms in England in this period, so closely similar in its result to the Romanesquoid aspect of the _Rundbogenstil_, seems to have been only
## partly Picturesque in intention. From the twenties on a very
considerable number of churches, mostly small, had Norman Romanesque detail, but usually there was little or no attempt to break away from the hall-like tradition of the Late Georgian church in their plans. However, three rather large churches that are early medieval in inspiration but not Norman in detail deserve particular mention, for they are among the finest, though not the most historically significant, built in Britain in the early forties.
St Mary and St Nicholas’s, Wilton, built by T. H. Wyatt (1807-80) and David Brandon (1813-97) in 1840-6 for Sydney Herbert and his Russian mother, might almost have risen in the Prussia or the Baden of this period. However, this Italian Romanesque basilica, with tall, detached campanile and rich internal polychromy of Cosmati-work brought from Italy, is rather more archaeological than Persius’s or Hübsch’s churches in Germany. On the other hand, the so much more original Christ Church of 1840-2 in Streatham, south of London, by J. W. Wild (1814-92) is so similar to Prussian work that some knowledge on Wild’s part of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects of a decade earlier might almost be assumed (Plate 36). Although the exposed yellow brickwork and the touches of external brick polychromy are notably premonitory of the next period, the splendid obelisk-like campanile and the crisp ranges of clerestory windows, for all their pointed tops, are quite as much within the range of Romantic Classicism as the German churches that this recalls. The handling of the galleries of the interior had local precedent in Soane’s churches of the twenties as well as in Schinkel’s of the thirties. Although the barrel vaults are presumably only of plaster, St Jude’s, Bethnal Green, in London, built by Henry Clutton (1819-93) in 1844-6, has an impressive cruciform interior. The exterior here is notably Germanic with two thin towers flanking the great polygonal apse.
But these three churches, for all their individual excellence, are exceptional in England. They are related to the broad contemporary current of the Renaissance Revival that Barry had set under way only in rejecting Grecian sanctions even more completely than he. Barry was himself too versatile ever quite to repeat the strict _palazzo_ formula of the Reform Club, although he almost came to that in the British Embassy in Istanbul of 1845-7. For this he provided sketches as early as 1842 and later emended the plans of the local executant architect, W. J. Smith. This structure, carrying the Renaissance Revival to, or even beyond, one edge of the western world as Grandjean de Montigny did to Rio de Janeiro at the other edge, is considerably larger than the Reform Club and rather bleak, though splendidly sited and very dignified indeed. At Bridgewater House in London of 1847-57, however, Barry enriched the _palazzo_ paradigm quite considerably, not only by the introduction of a good deal of carved work but also by breaking the continuity of the garden front towards the Park in order to emphasize the end bays. This personal compositional device is even more conspicuous on the river front of his Gothic Houses of Parliament.
It was for clubhouses and business buildings that Renaissance models were most generally used in England after 1840. For the remodelling of the Carlton Club in 1847 Sydney Smirke, who had provided the winning design in a select competition, based himself, not on San Gallo’s Farnese Palace in sixteenth-century Rome as Barry had done at the Reform Club next door, but on Sansovino’s Library in sixteenth-century Venice. Before this was finished in the mid fifties, C. Octavius Parnell (?-1865) and his partner Alfred Smith had erected across Pall Mall in 1848-51 the Army and Navy Club based on Sansovino’s Palazzo Corner della Cà Grande. Both are now gone.
But if these architects in London were moving in the late forties towards an altogether richer and more plastic sort of High Renaissance design, from which almost all traces of the cold asceticism of Romantic Classicism had departed, most provincial architects were content to stick fairly close to the Farnese Palace model of the Reform Club well down into the sixties. This was most notably true in the design of edifices for financial institutions. In 1840 George Alexander (?-1884), who had made his own study of the _cinquecento_ in Italy, designed the Savings Bank in Bath as a little Reform Club; the next year in the Brunswick Buildings in Liverpool A. & G. Williams applied the formula to a much larger block of general offices. Henceforth the mode was solidly established for almost a generation.
Barry usually gave a characteristically Italian Villa bent to the many country houses that he remodelled by introducing a tall loggia-topped tower (used to store water for the more elaborate sanitation now demanded) placed asymmetrically at one side of the main block. The first of these was at Trentham Park, near Stoke-on-Trent, where a second later rose in the stable court; the finest are those at Walton House near London of 1837 and at Shrubland in Norfolk of 1848-50. In these the inherited Georgian blocks became subordinate parts of rich three-dimensional compositions almost like the villas that Schinkel and Persius built at Potsdam. The rebuilding of Osborne House as a country retreat for Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight gave Royal sanction to the Italian Villa mode. Unfortunately she did not employ Barry; the work was done in 1845-6 and 1847-9 by the builder Thomas Cubitt and the design was dictated, if not actually prepared, by Prince Albert.
Despite the continued use of Greek forms for certain purposes and in some areas, the controls of Romantic Classicism were loosening rapidly in Great Britain in the forties. A real change of style was at hand; but since certain stylisms, such as the conventional use of Renaissance forms, tended to continue indefinitely, it is hard to know just where to draw the line chronologically.
The Geological Museum in Piccadilly in London, built in the late forties by Pennethorne, Nash’s protégé and his successor at the Office of Works, was far more successful than the ballroom wing he added in the early fifties to Buckingham Palace. Even that, however, was a considerable improvement on the curious façade—more Neo-Baroque than Neo-Renaissance—with which Edward Blore (1787-1879) masked the front of Nash’s edifice in 1847. The Museum was more successful precisely because its exteriors retained the regularity and severity characteristic of Romantic Classicism. Still later, the Free Trade Hall built by Edward Walters (1808-72) in Manchester in 1853-6 followed the lusher Sansovinesque Italianism of Smirke’s Carlton Club, while his many handsome warehouses there moved ever farther away from the severity of Barry’s Athenaeum despite their generic _palazzo_ character. Yet the Corn Exchange in Leeds, erected as late as 1860 by Cuthbert Brodrick (1825-1905), is still Romantic Classical in the cool regularity of its diamond-rusticated walls broken only by ranges of plain arches (Plate 37B).
There can be little question, however, that his Town Hall in Leeds of 1855-9, despite the reiterative grandeur of its giant colonnades and the evident derivation of its principal interior from St George’s Hall in Liverpool, is in English terms definitely ‘High Victorian’ (Plate 78A). If the Corn Exchange can hardly be considered typically Early Victorian in character, and in any case is some ten years too late in date, it might almost be called _Louis Philippe_, so close is it to some French work of the 40s.
Run-of-the-mill English railway stations of the forties, mostly designed by engineers and minor architects, clearly rank in their dullness with the most utilitarian French work of that decade. They indicate to what depths of conventionality late Romantic Classicism in England had sunk by this time. Yet Lewis Cubitt’s long-demolished Bricklayers’ Arms Station in London of 1842-4, with its entrance screen compounded of rustic Italian elements derived from the books of Charles Parker,[81] seems to have had considerable plastic interest. Moreover, the great plain arches at the front of his King’s Cross Station of 1850-2 (Plate 66A) remain to signalize to every traveller a masterpiece of the period more than worthy of comparison with Duquesney’s somewhat earlier Gare de l’Est in Paris (Plate 22B).
On the whole, however, for all that King’s Cross is one of the major late monuments of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism, it is better to consider railway stations in relation to their sheds of iron and glass, technically, that is, rather than stylistically (see Chapter 7). They illustrate especially well something which the stylistic preoccupations of the first half of the nineteenth century tended to mask from most contemporaries, the success with which new functional needs were satisfied in this period by the bold use of new materials and new types of construction.
Yet the most characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism in Europe after those prime urbanistic symbols of Napoleonic or counter-Napoleonic triumph, the arches, the columns, and the obelisks that rose in all the great cities from Petersburg to Madrid, are the museums and libraries, starting with Soane’s Dulwich Gallery, begun in 1811, and ending with Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, opened in 1850. These are useful, yes; moreover, they serve what were effectively new purposes, purposes closely related to the rising ideal of providing cultural opportunities for the general public. On the whole, however, they could be carried out—and so they usually were down to Labrouste’s library—with established methods of construction; while their cultural significance—and in the case of the sculpture galleries from Klenze’s Glyptothek, begun in 1816, to Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum, opened in 1848, their very contents—seemed to justify, if not indeed to demand, the use of Greek or Roman forms.
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## CHAPTER 5
THE NEW WORLD
IN varying degree Romantic Classicism left its mark on all the major cities of Europe. Paris without the Napoleonic monuments that Louis Philippe brought to completion is inconceivable, while Karlsruhe, Munich, Petersburg, and Edinburgh owe most of their architectural interest to this period.
In the New World, where the independence of the principal colonies of the European nations, British, Spanish, and Portuguese, was generally established in this period or just before it, one might expect that Romantic Classicism would have made a still more conspicuous contribution to the architectural scene. Yet the very youth of most of the countries of the New World, settled though many of them had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also the strong cultural links that they still maintained with the ancient traditions of their several homelands, tended to hold them back from entering fully into the new international movement of the day in architecture. What national libraries, moreover, were yet needed in Venezuela or Colombia, what sculpture galleries in the American Middle West? Columns and obelisks, if not triumphal arches, rose—frequently very belatedly—to celebrate national heroes of the various wars of independence; but outside the eastern United States the still very simple organization of society and the primitive means of transport required neither the institutional edifices of France—markets, hospitals, and prisons—nor the new railway stations of England.[82]
Yet in the United States, and not alone along the eastern seaboard, the period of Romantic Classicism left a very rich architectural deposit. The monuments of real distinction range all the way from such a church as Latrobe’s Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore (Plate 5), one of the very finest ecclesiastical edifices of the first half of the century to be seen anywhere, to Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia of 1823-35, the first to be planned on the radial cellular system (Figure 11). Studied and published by the English penologist William Crawford as well as by Demetz and Blouet,[83] this provided a new functional concept for penal architecture influential abroad from the time that Gilbert projected his Nouvelle Force Prison in the late thirties. Haviland’s prison was Castellated like Lebas’s Petite Roquette, not Grecian in detail; his New York prison of 1836-8, however, was Egyptian in detail, to which it owed its curious nickname, ‘The Tombs’. That both Latrobe and Haviland were English-born and English-trained is certainly significant; the latter, who was a cousin of the painter Haydon and a pupil of H. L. Elmes’s father James (1782-1862), had first tried his luck in Petersburg.
The characteristic and almost universal use of Grecian forms in domestic building, however, in many parts of the country continuing down to the Civil War of 1861-5, was the result of no foreign influence. Moreover, the Grecian details were not drawn by most architects and builders from the great basic treatise of Stuart and Revett, available in America only to a very few, but at second hand from the local Builders’ Guides[84] prepared by Haviland in Philadelphia, Asher Benjamin (1773-1845) in Boston, Minard Lafever (1798-1854) in New York, and various others. Such authors consciously Americanized what they borrowed from European sources in order to adapt Classical masonry forms to the ubiquitous wooden construction of the American countryside.
There are two levels of Romantic Classicism in America. Work of the upper professional level is found chiefly in the big eastern cities where architects operated who were either themselves foreign-born and foreign-trained or else pupils and emulators of such. The lower vernacular level is more conspicuous in America than in Europe because it includes a much greater proportion of building production than in older countries, where so many structures of earlier periods remain extant. ‘Carpenter’s Grecian’, so to call it, represents the perhaps naïve, but culturally significant, determination of all who built to exploit, in some degree at least, the modern style of their day.
The frontiersman in the Oregon of 1850 when raising a tavern in the Willamette Valley thus shared with the new and old royalties of Europe the satisfaction of architectural patronage. Moreover, like so many English gentlemen of the eighteenth century or such a nineteenth-century prince as Frederick William IV, he often took a hand at design himself. In this he was assisted by memories of the relatively settled towns he had left behind in the Middle West, themselves largely products of this period architecturally, and also by the Builders’ Guides issuing from the east in recurrent editions.
It was not alone the transient patronage of a Corsican soldier, for a few brief years heir to Louis XIV and overlord of Europe, nor the Building Committee of an autocrat on the banks of the Neva controlling all public and private architecture in an Imperial capital for a quarter of a century, that really established Romantic Classicism as the last universal style before that of our own day. It is the fact that Boston architects and builders, when Quincy granite (that most perfect of Romantic Classical building materials) became readily available in the mid twenties, arrived at a rational sort of trabeated design as distinguished as Schinkel’s; while three thousand miles to the west, and a quarter of a century later, amateur builders working in wood produced almost the same sort of ‘pilastrades’, simplified well beyond the Americanized paradigms of Greek antae they found in the plates of Asher Benjamin’s books, as Schinkel had in Berlin.
The Grecian writ ran far south to Buenos Aires in Latin America, where the broad portico of the cathedral, designed by the French engineer Prosper Catelin and built in 1822, follows closely Grand Prix designs of the 1790s; and deep into the Antipodes as well where Australia moved like the United States into nationhood and into the Greek Revival at much the same time, but at a slower pace and with less sophistication.
Washington, as the greatest fiat city of the period, might well have been, rather than Edinburgh, the Romantic Classical city _par excellence_. Even so, as it was laid out by a French engineer in the 1790s the prototype of its plan was not the Baroque city but the French hunting park. And L’Enfant envisaged for it no walled-in streets and squares but rather the isolated block-like structures that once stood around his ‘circles’ as some still stand around Fischer’s Karolinenplatz in Munich. In Washington, moreover, from 1803 when Jefferson made him Surveyor of Public Buildings until 1817, Latrobe generally had his headquarters; there his pupil Mills became Government Architect and Engineer in 1836, retaining the post until 1851.
[Illustration:
Figure 11. John Haviland: Philadelphia, Eastern Penitentiary, 1823-35, plan ]
The great monuments of the thirties still stand in Washington, mostly designed by Mills himself at the peak of his career. But at the Capitol (Plate 82A), rising at the head of the main axis of the city, the Romantic Classical elements of the edifice completed in 1827 by Bulfinch are now all but invisible between and below the wings and the dome added after 1851 by Thomas U. Walter (1804-87). Hoban’s White House, moreover, on the cross axis, remains, despite its restoration by Latrobe after the War of 1812 and two twentieth-century campaigns of enlargement and reconstruction, a quite Anglo-Palladian—indeed, almost Gibbsian—work. These focal edifices largely belie the Romantic Classical ideals so boldly epitomized in the tallest of all nineteenth-century obelisks, Mills’s Washington Monument. This was designed in 1833, begun in 1848, and not completed until 1884, when T. L. Casey, an Army engineer, sharpened the pitch of the pyramidon and crowned it with solid aluminium.
Immediately beside the White House, however, the Grecian granite of Mills’s Treasury (Plate 38A), worthy of Playfair if not of Schinkel, is overshadowed by the former State, War and Navy Department Building with its tremendous Second Empire plasticity (Plate 82B). Begun in 1836, when Mills received his official appointment, the Treasury was largely completed by 1842; the west wing was added by Isaiah Rogers (1800-69) in 1862-5 following the original design.
Mills’s career got under way decades before he was called to Washington (see Chapter 1). Churches in Philadelphia, Richmond, and Baltimore occupied him first, of which the most notable is the octagonal Monumental Church in Richmond begun in 1812. This is an austere structure with a strongly geometrical organization of the elements, but much less suave and refined than Latrobe’s Baltimore Cathedral. Polygonal planning also gives original character to his Insane Asylum of 1821-5 in Columbia, S.C.; but this has, at the front, a giant Greek Doric portico such as was just becoming even more conventional in America than in Europe at this time.
In an age so monumentally-minded it was a much earlier work, for which Mills won the competition in 1814, the monument erected in honour of Washington at Baltimore in 1815-29, that first made his national reputation. This was the first giant column to be erected in the New World. Superbly placed on a square podium of almost Egyptian severity at the centre of cruciform Mt Vernon Place, this Doric shaft is one of the most effective of the many that this period produced, even if it lacks the megalomaniac scale of his later obelisk in Washington. Mills claimed credit also for proposing the obelisk form for the Bunker Hill Monument[85] which Solomon Willard (1783-1861) erected in Charlestown, Mass., in 1825-43.
In Washington Mills’s Government buildings include, besides the Treasury and the Monument, the Patent Office and the old Post Office Department, both begun in 1839. These are sober masonry edifices of wholly fireproof construction incorporating much vaulting. They are dominated by Grecian porticoes, like the Treasury, but without that more conspicuously sited structure’s peristyles along the sides. Mills’s smaller custom houses in various seaboard towns are simple and massive blocks of granite ashlar, the best preserved today being that in New London, Conn. These provided worthy symbols of Federal authority among the slighter edifices of wood and brick that filled the seaports of this period. Like Latrobe, Mills was as much engineer as architect, which helps to explain his preoccupation with fireproof construction; moreover, lighthouses and waterworks figured prominently in his total production.[86]
Mills, more than anyone else, set the high standard of design and construction for Federal buildings that was fortunately maintained by his successors until after the Civil War. These were Ammi B. Young (1800-74), who took over the Government post[87] in 1852, and Rogers, who followed him ten years later in 1862. In remote San Francisco the Grecian rule in Federal architecture continued very late, as the U.S. Mint there of 1869-74 rather surprisingly indicates. This was possibly designed by Rogers just before his death even though A. B. Mullet had succeeded him in office in 1865.
Related to the Romantic Classicism of Washington is certain Virginia work. Arlington House, as remodelled by the English-born and English-trained Hadfield, rises just across the Potomac River on a high hill-crest; by its tremendously overscaled Paestum-like temple portico, added in 1826 to give grandeur to a modest earlier mansion, this provides a more monumental note in the Washington scene than anything of this period inside the city except Mills’s obelisk and his Treasury.
Just outside Charlottesville, Jefferson, after his retirement from the Presidency, devoted himself architecturally as well as educationally from 1817 until his death to the organization of the University of Virginia and the construction of its buildings. The layout, with pavilions for the various professors’ use linked by porticoed galleries behind which the students’ rooms are placed, culminated at the upper end in the Library and was originally open[88] to the view at the bottom (Figure 12). Although most of the pavilions reflect earlier stages of Romantic Classicism—if not usually the Anglo-Palladian with which Jefferson’s architectural career had begun half a century earlier—this is a more remarkable entity than his Virginia Capitol. Perhaps it has a lesser general historical importance, yet it is certainly not without special significance for America. This is most notably true of one of the pavilions whose design was suggested to Jefferson by Latrobe in 1819. Here for the first time a modern American dwelling, and one of quite modest size—for these pavilions were used as houses for the professors as well as providing classrooms on the ground storey—was encased within the shell of a prostyle Greek temple. Moreover, Jefferson accomplished this rather more successfully than Beaumont in France in the late eighteenth century at the Temple de Silence, or Wilkins in England at Grange Park in 1809.
Not the least successful among the innumerable imitations of the Roman Pantheon, the building which originally served as the Library of the University, built in 1822-6, dominated the two ranges of colonnade-linked pavilions (Plate 38B). Here more drastically than by Wilkins at Downing College or Ramée at Union, the earlier Anglo-Saxon patterns of educational architecture were reconstituted in Romantic Classical guise, yet the University of Virginia did not have a very considerable influence, then or later. The central group at Amherst College in Massachusetts—two dormitories of 1821 and 1822 and a chapel between of 1827—offers a modest group of quite different but equally notable quality on a splendid hill-crest site (Plate 45). At other colleges only individual structures usually survive from this period.
The temple house, initiated by Jefferson and Latrobe, had a tremendous success with builders in the thirties and forties, particularly in the new territories west of the Alleghenies. But the finest and most paradigmatic came rather earlier and were architect-designed. Ithiel Town (1784-1844), for example, built the Bowers House in Northampton, Mass., in 1825-6 with an Ionic portico on the main block and fronted the lower side wings with antae. The big Corinthian Russell house, a pure temple with no side wings—the present wing was added later—rose in Middletown, Conn., to the design of his partner, A. J. Davis (1803-92), in 1828.
From such a ‘Parthenon’ as Berry Hill in Virginia, built by its owner James Coles Bruce in 1835-40, which is flanked by two lodges also of temple form, to innumerable more modest houses in the older towns of Ohio and Michigan, the roster of such edifices is infinitely extensive. It is also surprisingly varied in scale and in the materials used—most, but not all, are of white-painted wood—as also in the handling of the dominating columnar porticoes. In the South, for example, the characteristic plantation houses of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi are peripteral but unpedimented, with external galleries splitting the height of the giant columns. Natchez in Mississippi has several fine examples; in Louisiana, Greenwood near St Francisville of about 1830 may be specifically mentioned, and also Oak Alley of 1836 at Vacherie near New Orleans.
The most ambitious Grecian houses of the Deep South are often very late in date, and architects were rarely employed to design them. Moreover, Greek detail was adopted in the South only very slowly and rarely used with the correctness of the Northern builders, who leaned so heavily on the plates of the orders in the books of Benjamin and others. Belle Meade, near Nashville, of 1853, being by the distinguished Philadelphia architect Strickland, is something of an exception in several ways; it had, for example, a fine portico of square antae executed in white marble that was almost Schinkelesque. Vast Belle Grove at White Castle, Louisiana, built by Henry Howard in 1857, was probably more effective in the romantically ruinous state in which it existed for many years before its final destruction than in its pristine condition, so confusedly eclectic was the general composition, with Italianate as well as Classical elements quite casually mixed.
Unpedimented porticoes are not unknown in the North, both east and west of the Alleghenies, as in the Levi Lincoln house of 1836 (once in Worcester, Mass., now moved to nearby Sturbridge) by Elias Carter (1781-1864) with its convex-fluted Doric order. Such original touches, which many carpenters introduced out of plain ignorance and more sophisticated architects developed out of a conscious desire to nationalize and personalize even such absolute paradigms as those of the Greek orders, often lend variety and piquancy to the mode. The finest Grecian houses, such as Elmhyrst at One Mile Corner, Newport, R.I., built probably by Russell Warren (1783-1860) about 1833, certainly owe their originality to the studied intentions of architects. This house, in particular, has a façade composed in overlapping planes that is not unworthy of Cockerell (Plate 42B). On the other hand, the Hermitage near Savannah, Georgia, designed by Charles B. Cluskey _c._ 1830, could almost be by Schinkel, so simple and pure is its design.
Trained architects, on the whole, were too rationalistic or too adventurous to follow closely the plain temple model in domestic or institutional work. Walter presumably surrounded Andalusia, the home of the philhellene banker Nicholas Biddle outside Philadelphia, with a Doric temple-shell in 1833 only against his own better judgement. In 1833-47 he also built for Girard College in Philadelphia, of which Biddle was the trustee who called the tune, an enormous Corinthian temple. Inside this he incorporated a variety of educational functions only with considerable difficulty, but he vaulted all the interiors in the manner of Latrobe and Mills in order to provide a completely fireproof structure.[89] Curiously enough, this was one of the first American buildings to be published abroad,[90] thus rivalling Haviland’s prison, but it attracted no emulators in Europe. By the thirties, of course, these buildings by Walter were no novelties in Philadelphia.
[Illustration:
Figure 12. Thomas Jefferson: Charlottesville, Va., University of Virginia, 1817-26, plan. ]
Philadelphia, the former colonial metropolis and briefly the national capital, was much more than Washington the cultural centre of the country in the early decades of the century. Here Latrobe had had his start, significantly with a bank in the form of an Ionic temple. Now in 1818 Strickland,[91] a native-born American and quite untravelled, won in competition the commission for building the Branch Bank of the United States with a much more archaeologically correct temple. Like various European and British public monuments of the period, but unlike any bank abroad, this is a marble Parthenon. But the various needs of the banking business were skilfully provided for inside, and the principal barrel-vaulted interior is very fine indeed. Built in 1819-24, this bank (later a Custom House) rivals the Bavarian Walhalla and the Scottish National Monument, though lacking their splendid hill-top sites. It was just the thing to establish Strickland’s national reputation. But his Merchants’ Exchange in Philadelphia of 1832-4, with a rounded end and a trabeated ground storey, provides more interesting and impressive evidence of his talent, perhaps the greatest of the generation following Latrobe in America (Plate 40).
Strickland’s latest major work, the State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee, of 1845-9, still a temple but with various accretions, has the high site his bank lacked, but it suffers otherwise from the general deterioration of the sense of Grecian style after the mid thirties, a deterioration quite as evident in American architecture as in European. This Tennessee temple was the last but one of a series of state capitols that followed the model of Jefferson’s at Richmond, Virginia, rather than Bulfinch’s dome-crowned Boston State House or the national Capitol in Washington. The first example that was correctly Greek in detail seems to have been that for Connecticut in New Haven; it was built by Town and his partner Davis in 1827-31, and has long since been demolished. However, that designed by Gideon Shryock (1802-80) in Frankfort, Kentucky, was going up at about the same time.
In 1831-5 Davis built a larger and grander Greek Doric temple (no longer extant) as a Capitol for Indiana at Indianapolis, but provided it with a small central dome. The latest of all the temples built to serve as state capitols was a very modest one of 1849 at Benicia, California, where the columnar portico was reduced to two Doric columns _in antis_—it is worth noting that this was erected in the very year that Sutter’s gold strike first put California on the map of the world.
Other state capitols of this period are Grecian but not of temple form; a good example is that Town & Davis built at Raleigh, North Carolina, which was begun in 1833. The finest of all is that for Ohio at Columbus,[92] begun in 1839-40 and carried to completion over the years 1848-61. Here the giant ‘pilastrade’, for which columns are substituted in the central third of the front, has a Schinkel-like directness and severity (Plate 39A). Not so happy is the flat-topped central lantern, which is also surrounded by a pilastrade. In conscientious pursuit of trabeated consistency the architects thus sought to mask the rounded shape of the dome within, as had been tried in various French projects of the late eighteenth century and by Schinkel in the Altes Museum already.
After Philadelphia, Boston was the architectural metropolis of this period; and from Boston, beginning in 1827, issued the later treatises of Benjamin purveying the Grecian orders to carpenters and builders all over the North and the Middle West. Here Bulfinch, however, established as the leading architect in the 1790s, long remained faithful to the ideals of Chambers and Adam (see Chapter 1).
At University Hall, built for Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., in 1813-15, Bulfinch used granite for the ashlar of the walls as he had done for his Boston City Hall of 1810, but the white-painted wooden trim is not yet Grecian. The Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, also of granite, was designed by him in 1816-17, just before he left for Washington to take over from Latrobe supervision of the construction of the Capitol. The hospital building (now known as the Bulfinch Pavilion) as executed by Alexander Parris (1780-1852) in 1818-20 is certainly a mature Romantic Classical edifice if not a typically Grecian one. Above the plain pediment of the central portico a square attic with corner chimneys supports the saucer dome, and the long side wings with three ranges of unframed windows display the fine granite ashlar of Boston in all its cold pride. Compared to Latrobe, however, Bulfinch remained a provincial if not a colonial designer, high as is the intrinsic quality of his best work.
A younger generation, hitherto much influenced by Bulfinch’s established manner, took over leadership in Boston on his departure for Washington. Parris soon provided the first Greek temple in conservative New England when he built St Paul’s Church (now the Anglican Cathedral) in Tremont Street in 1819-21. Where Strickland’s contemporary Philadelphia bank was Doric and of marble, this is Ionic with the portico executed in the Acquia Creek sandstone from Virginia which was then being used so much in Washington. Solomon Willard carved the capitals. Parris’s Stone Temple of 1828, the Unitarian ‘Church of the Presidents’—the two Adams presidents—in Quincy, Mass., is not at all a temple in form but more comparable to the Grecian churches built in England in this decade. The Stone Temple outranks most of them in dignity, however, because of the superbly appropriate local material of which it is built. It was from this town that the Quincy granite came that was employed for the best Boston buildings of the next thirty years and more, and this church was a relatively early instance of its monumental use. Quincy granite had become more readily available after the first American railway was built from the quarries to the seashore by Willard solely to facilitate bringing it out by water.[93]
The first notable use of this granite away from Quincy had been for the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Mass., built by Willard in 1825-43. Not only Mills, as has been mentioned, but the sculptor Horatio Greenough[94] and also Parris claimed, and perhaps deserve, some credit for the particular form of this simple but grandiose obelisk, which rivalled those of the Old World a decade before Mills’s in Washington was designed. On its completion, a steam-operated lift or elevator was provided in 1844 capable of carrying six people; this was one of the earliest examples of an important technical device that would later influence architecture profoundly (see Chapter 14).
Granite imposed rigid restrictions on detailing. But the new generation knew how to make of those restrictions an opportunity for developing a highly original sort of basic classicism such as even the most determined European rationalists rarely approached. The houses at 39-40 Beacon Street in Boston, now occupied by the Women’s City Club, and the David Sears house at No. 42, now the Somerset Club (Plate 43B)—the latter by Parris and of 1816, the former probably by him and of 1818—as also the granite terrace at Nos. 70-75, probably by Benjamin, are good examples of domestic work of this period. More important is Parris’s Quincy (properly Faneuil Hall) Market in Boston, designed in 1823 for Mayor Joseph Quincy as the central feature of a considerable urbanistic development on the site of earlier docks. This domed and porticoed structure lacks the geometrical severity of the Sears house with its great bow on the front and its superbly placed scroll panel; but in the Market House Parris not only used cast iron for the internal supports but also experimented on the exterior with a trabeated framework of monolithic granite piers and lintels. The same sort of ‘granite skeleton’ construction (so to call it) was also used but with greater delicacy of proportion and elegance of finish—note the Soanic incised detail of the wooden window-frames—for the commercial buildings[95] which Parris designed and that various lessees shortly built along the streets that flank the Market House to the north and the south (Plate 112B). This was one of the major structural innovations of the period (see Chapter 14).
Within a few years other Boston architects and builders were currently using this sort of construction, and it soon spread to several New England cities. However, more typical of the urban ambition of the twenties and thirties than the destroyed block of 1824 in Providence by J. H. Green (1777-1850), which followed line for line Parris’s commercial work, are two other buildings there. The Providence Arcade of 1828 by Warren has not one, but two terminal porticoes of Ionic columns executed in granite and also a fine interior consisting of raised side galleries under an iron-and-glass roof. Few extant galleries of this decade in Europe are as notable in scale and in finish. The Washington Buildings of 1843 by James C. Bucklin (1801-90), who had assisted Warren on the Arcade, had a plain range of three storeys of window-pierced red-brick wall above a trabeated granite ground storey, the whole dominated by a central pedimented feature (Plate 39B). This was a commercial project as grand as any in contemporary Europe in scale, in materials, and in finish, although without the originality of the trabeated all-granite bow-front of Rogers’s contemporary Brazier’s Buildings on State Street in Boston. Yet Bucklin’s Westminster Presbyterian Church in Providence of 1846 is a straight Greek Ionic temple like so many other non-Anglican edifices of this period in England and America.
Where Romantic Classicism, and more specifically the Greek Revival, found its noblest opportunities in Europe in public monuments, in America after the days of Latrobe it was rather commercial, institutional, and even industrial[96] commissions that stimulated architects and builders to original achievement, while public work grew more and more conventional. For instance, the Lippitt Woollen Mill of 1836 in Woonsocket, R.I., and the Governor Harris Manufactory at Harris, R.I., dating from as late as 1851 can both be properly described as ‘in the Grecian vernacular’. They are most admirably proportioned and very soundly built, with walls of random ashlar masonry and boldly scaled wooden trim, very plain, yet of generically Greek character. The discipline of Romantic Classicism accorded well with the requirements of industrial building; not until the present century would factories of comparable architectural quality be built. Moreover, they were often complemented by consonant low-cost housing, as in the extant mill village at White Rock, R.I., of 1849.
No European public edifice has a grander Greek Doric portico than that which dominates the tremendous four-storey front block of the Lunatic Asylum in Utica, N.Y., of 1837-43, designed by no architect, according to the records, but by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, William Clarke (Plate 46). Still later, in 1850, after the Grecian mode was _passé_ with most architects if not with the general public, Davis built in the Renaissance Revival mode that he called ‘Tuscan’ the Insane Asylum at Raleigh, North Carolina; this is distinguished by his characteristic arrangement of the windows in tall vertical bands. Such American institutions are not at all unworthy of comparison with the best French productions of the period by Gilbert and others, although generally of rather smaller size (Plate 20).
[Illustration:
Figure 13. Isaiah Rogers: Boston, Tremont House, 1828-9, plan ]
Hotels in Europe had not as yet received much architectural elaboration, nor did they in general before the mid century. Such English hotels of Grecian pretension as the Queen’s by W. C. and R. Jearrad at Cheltenham, which opened in 1837, or the Great Western in Bristol by R. S. Pope (1781-?), opened two years later, are rather exceptional, being located at spas, and in any case a decade later in date than the first notable American example. It was in Boston, at the Tremont House built in 1828-9, a Grecian granite structure of dignified grandeur externally (Plate 41) and of considerable functional elaboration internally (Figure 13), that Rogers and his clients consciously initiated a new standard of hotel design. For thirty years Rogers himself, in various hotels from New Orleans—the St Charles—to Cincinnati—the Burnet House—all long ago demolished, personally maintained and, at least in terms of functional organization, continued to raise that standard. Not for nothing did the big new London hotels of a generation later label their bars and their barber-shops ‘American’.
In 1832 Rogers began the Astor House in New York; when completed in 1836 this already outranked the Tremont House in every way. Not least extraordinary must have been the elaborately fan-vaulted hall. This reflected that eclectic interest in Gothic of which Rogers’s wooden Unitarian Church of 1833 in Cambridge, Mass., provides extant evidence. The last hotel that he built was the Maxwell House in Nashville, Tennessee, of 1854-60.
Rogers’s pre-eminence at hotel design was signalized from the first by the publication in 1830 of a monograph on the Tremont House;[97] thus the hotel joined the prison as a type of building in which American influence became important internationally. But Rogers’s practice was by no means confined to hotels; among other things he gave both Boston and New York their Merchants Exchanges long before he became Supervising Architect in Washington. The colonnade of the latter, a little like that of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, still survives at the base of McKim, Mead & White’s First National City Bank in Wall Street to illustrate Rogers’s high competence at handling a standard Romantic Classical theme.
Resort hotels repeated the same Grecian themes in wood, their columns being often much attenuated in order to rise three and four storeys above the circumambient verandas. However, an early example, the first Ocean House of 1841 at Newport, R.I., had a colonnade only two storeys tall set against the main four-storey block. On the Atlantic House there of 1844 the fourth storey occupied the broad Greek entablature surrounding the entire main block, but the front portico of elongated Ionic columns was only hexastyle. Both were burnt many years ago, but later examples of inferior quality remain in several forgotten spas and mountain resorts of the period, particularly in New York State.
New York City was drawing architectural talent in these years from other cities. Before Rogers moved there from Boston in 1834, mid way in the Astor House campaign, Town & Davis had arrived from Connecticut. Davis’s Sub-Treasury in Wall Street begun in 1834,[98] however, is rather less successful than the earlier New England houses of similar temple form that he and Town had designed. Davis was himself more notably a protagonist of the Picturesque, despite all the very large and prominent Grecian buildings for which he was responsible (see Chapter 6). Yet his Colonnade Row in Lafayette Street of 1832, a terrace all of freestone with a free-standing giant Corinthian colonnade, equals in grandeur anything of the period that London or Edinburgh have to offer (Plate 42A). More typical of New York in this period than Colonnade Row, and of uncertain authorship, is the terrace of red-brick Grecian houses built on the north side of Washington Square in the thirties, of which a few have survived on sufferance the vandalous encroachments of New York University.
Some of the finest Greek houses are by provincial architects. One such is stone-built Hyde Hall in Cooperstown, N.Y., very crisp and severe as it was remodelled in 1833 by Philip Hooker (1766-1836) of Albany, who had built it originally in 1811. Still others are of uncertain authorship, notably the Alsop house of 1838 in Middletown, Conn. This is a symmetrical Grecian villa almost worthy of Schinkel’s Potsdam, with very fine murals on the exterior as well as inside. The Alsop house (now the Davison Art Centre of Wesleyan University) was probably designed by a relative of the family who had access to the resources of the Town & Davis office; however, the painters employed were Italian or German. The Wooster-Boalt house of 1848 in Norwalk, Ohio, indicates the late continuance of real restraint and sophistication of design in the Middle West, something already lost in the sumptuous mansions of New Orleans and the Deep South. But many Middle Western houses illustrate rather the surprising elasticity of Carpenters’ Grecian.
A mode that approaches the German _Rundbogenstil_—indeed, in the work of such foreign-trained architects as the Prague-born Leopold Eidlitz (1823-1908) relatively authentic examples of that mode—was not uncommon in the America of the mid century.[99] The Astor Library in Lafayette Street opposite Colonnade Row, built by A. Saelzer in 1849, was a good example. Less successful was Appleton Chapel at Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., by Paul Schulze (1827-97), who sent over the drawings from Germany, and later settled in America. Begun in 1856, this was a very reduced version of Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche in Munich with only one tower. However, the largest and finest example was by a precocious student at Brown University, Thomas A. Tefft (1826-59).[100] This was the Union Station in Providence, begun in 1848 and gradually carried out by Bucklin and his partner Talman (Plate 44). This station rivalled in extent and in the distinction and ingenuity of its rather Lombardic Romanesque detailing, simply executed with ordinary red brick, the German ones by Eisenlohr and Bürklein in Baden and Bavaria; without much question it was the finest early station in the New World. Tefft also designed various New England churches of somewhat similar character, all dominated by very tall and simple spires. However, his churches in the East are outrivalled by such a Middle Western example as the Union Methodist in St Louis, built by George I. Barnett (1815-98) in 1852-4. Tefft’s best works, other than the station, are not _Rundbogenstil_ but Barryesque; such is the brownstone Tully-Bowen house on Benefit Street in Providence of 1852-3, for example. Others were building as fine ones there, however. The consistent use of brownstone and red brick well illustrates the sharp reaction that had set in by his time against the pale tones and untextured surfaces of the Greek Revival.
The towered Italian Villa[101] was introduced by John Notman (1810-65) in Bishop George W. Doane’s house at Burlington, NJ., in 1837 and soon
## actively propagandized by A. J. Downing (1815-52) in his influential
books (see Chapters 6 and 15). Indeed, the Barryesque Renaissance mode was also probably first introduced by the Scottish-born Notman at the Philadelphia Atheneum[102] built in 1845-7 (Plate 47A). These non-Grecian, yet still basically Romantic Classical, modes were in relatively common use by 1850, though not very much earlier. Young, for example, who had made his reputation with the saucer-domed but otherwise Greek Custom House[103] that he built in Boston in 1837-47, substituted a somewhat Barryesque manner for Mills’s Grecian as the current mode for Federal buildings[104] when he became Supervising Architect in 1853. But neither Notman nor Young was a Barry—nor even as competent at such design as the youthful Tefft—and the most notable result of the waning of the Greek Revival in the forties, in the East at any rate—it waned much more slowly in the South and West—was the rise of a rather considerable variety of Picturesque modes of suburban-house design, of which the Italianate was only one (see Chapters 6 and 15). In cities, the shift from the characteristic granite or, more usually, hard red brick with white trim to the chocolate tones of brownstone, used alone or with brick, is much more indicative of a general change of taste than any widespread exploitation of Renaissance forms.
A fine relatively early Italian Villa such as the Stebbins house of 1849 on Crescent St, off Maple St, in Springfield, Mass., by Henry A. Sykes belongs to the realm of Romantic Classicism like Schinkel’s or Barry’s country houses in this mode (Plate 43A). But on the whole the Italian Villa in America is rather one of the many vehicles of the Picturesque reaction against a doctrinaire Greek Revival. This fact was well illustrated in one by Eidlitz, also in Springfield, on Maple Street, that was built of brick with much wooden ‘gingerbread’ of a vaguely Tyrolean order and latterly, at least, painted a warm pink where Sykes’s villa is painted white with brown trim. Sykes’s originality within the Italian Villa mode is most happily illustrated by the former observatory at Amherst College, now known as the Octagon, whose stuccoed polygonal elements stand in such interesting contrast to the severe row of red-brick dormitories and chapel behind. Not often did the mid century add so effectively to groups of buildings produced in earlier decades.
Just as the Iberian peninsula was in general devoid of significant architectural activity in the first half of the nineteenth century, so in the Spanish and Portuguese lands beyond the seas there came no early wave of autochthonous Romantic Classicism to submerge and succeed the Baroque that had flourished there to the end of the colonial period and beyond. In Brazil Dom Pedro, later the first Brazilian Emperor, under whose rule the centre of gravity of Portuguese civilization moved from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, imported in 1816 a group of French artists. They were expected to found a new post-Baroque Brazilian culture much as Alexander I’s architects had done a little earlier in Russia. One was the French architect Grandjean de Montigny, author with Famin of that most influential work _L’Architecture toscane_ to which all Europe turned for _quattrocento_ models, who had been employed by Jerome Bonaparte in Westphalia as long as Napoleon’s Empire lasted. He erected in Rio in 1826 the first home for the new Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, founded of course on the model of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, the Market, and the extant Custom House. He also trained a group of Brazilians who gave local architectural production an Empire flavour that lasted until it was superseded well after the mid century by a wave of Second Empire influence.
In vernacular building traditional treatments were often maintained in Brazil, notably the use of _azulejos_ (glazed tiles) for wall surfaces and of rich painted colour for the ubiquitous stucco. But more sophisticated work can be very French indeed. For example, the Itamaratí Palace in Rio of 1851-4 by J. M. J. Rebelo, a pupil of Grandjean de Montigny, might well be taken for a _hôtel particulier_ erected in the new quarters of Paris in the earlier decades of the century (Plate 47B). Beautifully restored, this now houses the Brazilian Foreign Office—one says ‘Itamaratí’ as one says ‘Quai d’Orsay’. Rebelo also built the Summer Palace at Petrópolis. The Santa Isabel Theatre at Recife, Pernambuco, built about 1845, which is so like a French provincial theatre of this period, is by another French architect who had settled in Brazil in 1840, L.-L. Vauthier.
In Chile, on the other side of the South American continent, C.-F. Brunet-Debaines (1799-1855), a brother of the architect who built the Museum and Library at Le Havre, was employed on government work in Santiago. But the schools that such French architects assisted in founding had more significance than the few buildings they were able to erect. Henceforth, Latin America would be less dependent in architecture on the Spanish and Portuguese homelands than on Paris. The character of the larger cities outside their colonial cores—if, indeed, more than a few early monuments remain extant—was henceforth determined by this fact. However, it is the Second Empire and not the First which left the more visible mark; for the various capitals, some like Montevideo in Uruguay almost without earlier architectural history, saw their greatest expansion in the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth.
The establishment of a Latin American architecture of really autochthonous character, as distinguished from the continuance of various local vernacular building traditions, had to await the present period (see Chapters 22 and 25). Once again French influence had a significant role to play. But between the arrival of Grandjean de Montigny in 1816 and Le Corbusier’s first visit to South America in 1929 that continent took little part in the major architectural developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the United States, building on the professional foundations laid by Latrobe and exploiting to the full new structural materials and methods, rose before the nineteenth century was over to a position of world leadership (see Chapters 13, 14, and 15).
What is true of Latin America is not altogether untrue of the British Dominions in the New World and at the Antipodes, as also of various British Colonies throughout the rest of the world. No French architects were imported, of course, and the links with England remained very close and strong. As in all colonial situations, however, the transfer of new ideas from the homeland was slow and inefficient and the capacity of _émigré_ architects usually rather low. No Latrobes or Havilands seem to have gone to the Dominions; and the Greek Revival was hardly accepted before the forties, when it was already passing out of favour in the United States.
The first professional to work in Australia, Francis Greenway (1777-1837), who arrived in Sydney in 1814 as a convict and almost at once became Governor Macquarie’s architect, remained faithful in most of his public work to the modes of his eighteenth-century youth in Bristol. But his house of 1822 for Robert Campbell, Jr, in Bligh Street in Sydney showed that he had real skill as a designer of up-to-date Regency villas. Canada had no early architect of comparable ability to serve the British community.
As the western world expanded in the nineteenth century, significant architectural achievement tended to move outwards from the old centres on the Tiber, the Seine, and the Thames; but that movement was always very uneven, and still remains so today. Russia was building more and finer structures of Western European character than Spain and Portugal; while the United States, not yet fantastically disparate in size and population, produced many more productive Romantic Classical architects than either Holland or Sweden. All the same, the architectural leadership of the western world remained for at least a generation longer in the old centres of Europe; our story must return to where it started in order to proceed beyond the mid century or even to complete the account of the period 1810-50.
Romantic Classicism came to no sudden end. If in Vienna a monumental Grecian Parliament house could rise as late as the seventies, so in the desert of Arizona the Crystal Palace Saloon of 1878 at Tombstone is still in the Greek Revival vernacular. From the very first, on the other hand, there was some admixture of the Picturesque in Romantic Classicism. Almost all the architects that have been mentioned, both of the earlier and of the later generation, were more eclectic in their practice and even in their theories than this account of their major works has made altogether evident. But in the main, down into the forties, Romantic Classicism, while increasingly eclectic, remained a coherent style whose canons controlled most of the accepted variants to the Grecian.
The dissolution of the dominant stylistic discipline, hardly completed even in the fifties, had nevertheless begun very early indeed. In terms of historical significance, if not of absolute achievement, the Picturesque rises rapidly in comparative importance from the time of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey in the 1790s. Beside Soane’s crisp Bank interiors it is necessary to carry in the mind’s eye the prophetic image which his renderer J. M. Gandy (1771-1843) provided of them as a Romantic ruin; nor should the vast dream-like Gothic cathedrals that Schinkel made the centre of some of his early paintings be forgotten in the cool presence of his Grecian Schauspielhaus and Museum. Fortunately no one is likely in looking at Barry’s _palazzi_ to forget that they are contemporary with his Gothic Houses of Parliament; one does, however, tend to forget that the career of his associate Pugin as protagonist of the mature Gothic Revival ended well before Barry’s did as the chief English protagonist of the Renaissance Revival. Earlier the Gothic Revival was hardly more than a special aspect of the Picturesque; with Pugin, however, it became a major movement in its own right and actually anti-Picturesque in theory, if rarely so in practice. To a considerable extent, moreover, the Gothic Revival usurped during the forties the centre of the stage in England, if hardly to the same degree in other countries even in the following decades.
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## CHAPTER 6
THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL
THE principal modern treatise on the Picturesque with a capital P, Christopher Hussey’s of 1927, is subtitled ‘Studies in a Point of View’. By the opening years of the nineteenth century the term had come to have a far more precise, if also a more complex, meaning than the adjective ‘picturesque’ as it is generally used today. But Hussey is perfectly correct: the Picturesque is no more a style than is the Sublime, it _is_ a point of view. That point of view nevertheless influenced architecture[105] increasingly as the first half of the nineteenth century wore on. It had a solvent, and eventually a destructive, effect on the dominant Romantic Classical style as has already been suggested in discussing the later work of various leading architects in several countries.
The Picturesque had its early eighteenth-century origins[106] in England, and its most notable theorists were English. In the first quarter of the century, moreover, there was no British architect so resolutely Grecian that he did not, either on his own initiative or in deference to his clients’ wishes, experiment with alternative modes in conscious pursuit of the Picturesque. Despite the stringencies of the Greek Revival as represented, early, in Wilkins’s Downing College or, later, in Smirke’s British Museum, Smirke had built several Castellated mansions in the years before Waterloo and Wilkins the Gothic screen and the hall range at King’s College, Cambridge, in the twenties; while at the National Gallery in the thirties he handled standard Classical elements in a markedly Picturesque way. Nash was the initiator of one characteristically Picturesque mode, the asymmetrically towered Italian Villa, at Cronkhill in 1802; he also exploited in an exemplary way another longer-established one, the Rustic Cottage, in Blaise Hamlet in 1811 (Plate 50A). The score or more of Castellated mansions that Nash built were always Picturesque and irregular whether their detailing was Norman[107] or some sort of Gothic. Above all, he handled the urbanistic development which was his greatest achievement in a thoroughly Picturesque way. Soane’s Picturesque was of a less usual order and his personal tendency was as much or more towards the Sublime, otherwise a largely forgotten category after 1810.
But from 1810 on new buildings in which the basic principles of Romantic Classicism were ignored and exotic stylistic alternatives to the Grecian exploited were generally larger, more prominent, and also more creatively original than they had ever been before. C. A. Busby (1788-1838) was responsible as late as 1827 for one of the finest, most formal, and most extensive examples of Romantic Classical urbanism, Kemp Town at Brighton. Yet in 1814 he exhibited at the Royal Academy his design for Gwrych Castle, completed in 1815, which he was building in North Wales near Abergele, presumably in collaboration with his client, Lloyd Bamford Hesketh, a notable amateur (Plate 49).
The next year Nash began for the Regent the transformation of his favourite residence, the Royal Pavilion[108] at Brighton. This was at that time an elegant early example of a Romantic Classical house as first remodelled and enlarged by Henry Holland[109] (1745-1806) just before the Napoleonic Wars began. Nash now made of it an extraordinary oriental confection (as had already been proposed by Repton[110] in 1806). Part Chinese, part Saracenic, and part Indian, this is quite in the spirit of Porden’s earlier Dome near by (Plate 48). Festive and frivolous, the Pavilion resembles an oversized garden fabrick or sumptuously ornamented marquee; but the scale is fully architectural, even monumental, both externally and in the principal apartments. Not least interesting is Nash’s frank use of visible iron elements. These are not masonry-scaled like the columns he employed later in the Regent Street Quadrant and on Carlton House Terrace, but delicate and playfully decorative. The pierced ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 have naturalistically coloured bamboo detailing and the tops of the four columns that carry the monitor over the kitchen of 1818-21 are embellished with copper palm-leaves (Plate 58A).
The Pavilion had no real sequel; even the Regent, King as George IV from 1820, tired of it almost as soon as it was finished. Indeed, he forsook Brighton for good in 1823 just as the general building activity there,[111] commonly but incorrectly called ‘Regency’, was getting under way. Turning his attention to Windsor Castle, the King employed Sir Jeffrey Wyatville (1776-1840) to remodel the accumulated mass of heterogeneous construction there into a Picturesque mansion of the Castellated sort in which the real medieval elements were quite submerged. But Windsor, being much more obviously a remodelling than was the Pavilion when Nash completed it, is not a very exemplary specimen of a fake castle. Busby’s Gwrych, set against a hanging wood, its round and square towers simply detailed and tightly though asymmetrically composed, is a better instance of that abstract sculptural massing which critics of the mid century would sometimes define as ‘architecturesque’ (Plate 49). For this sort of three-dimensional composition the Italian Villa mode provided on the whole a better vehicle. Wyatville, for example, did his best to turn the vast regular mass of late seventeenth-century Chatsworth[112] into a more Picturesque adjunct to its landscape setting by Capability Brown (1715-83), by adding a long service wing on the north side and terminating that with a very large and tall loggia-topped tower.
Well before George IV undertook the remodelling of Windsor, a relatively modest mansion linked the Castellated mode more closely to the rising enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. The author of the immensely popular Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott, employed Blore in 1816 to build Abbotsford near Melrose in Roxburghshire in this vein—it was much extended along the same lines by William Atkinson (_c._ 1773-1839) in 1822-3. With its definitely Scottish features Abbotsford initiated a special mode, the Scottish Baronial, that eventually received Royal sanction when Queen Victoria acquired Balmoral Castle near Ballater in 1848, a modest residence built in the late thirties by John Smith of Aberdeen. At the time she and Prince Albert first occupied this Scottish retreat Balmoral was quite small, but it was reconstructed in 1853-5 on a vastly larger scale in the same Scottish Baronial mode by William Smith, son of the original architect, working in close collaboration with Prince Albert. Thus the Queen’s two private residences, Osborne and Balmoral, both in part at least designed by the Consort, illustrated—in neither case very happily—the two major types of determinedly Picturesque design for edifices of some consequence, the Italian Villa and the Castellated; the viability of the Rustic Cottage mode was necessarily rather limited and hardly suitable for Royal use.
Castellated design was not restricted to the field of country-house building. At Conway, in Wales, the engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834) in his suspension bridge of 1819-24 and, after him, Robert Stephenson and his associated architect Francis Thompson in the tubular bridge[113] there of 1845-9 castellated the piers out of deference to the nearby thirteenth-century Castle. Another example of Engineers’ Castellated is the first Temple Meads Railway Station at Bristol, built in 1839-40 by I. K. Brunel (1806-59). Brunel, however, had preferred Egyptian forms for the piers of the Clifton Suspension Bridge[114] near Bristol that he designed in 1829.
Somewhat more appropriately, prisons were likely to be Castellated in the forties and fifties, thus echoing the design as well as the planning of Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The Reading Gaol of 1842-4 by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) and his partner W. B. Moffatt (1812-87) and the Holloway Gaol in London of 1851-2 by J. B. Bunning (1802-63) are the most striking examples. Both are essentially Picturesque essays; but by the time the latter was built the accepted standards of fake-castle building had entirely changed. The reconstruction of Alton Castle in Staffordshire, about 1840, by A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) was archaeological in intention; even more archaeological is Peckforton Castle in Shropshire, newly erected by Anthony Salvin (1799-1881) in 1846-50, and his extensive ‘restoration’ of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland carried out in the next decade. Thanks to its magnificent hill-top site and its present state of disrepair, Peckforton is in fact notably Picturesque; but the fine, hard, structurally expressive detailing of the beautiful pink sandstone may almost be considered anti-Picturesque—contemporaries praised it for its ‘realism’.
The welter of alternative Picturesque modes is most entertainingly epitomized in the model village of Edensor,[115] built by Joseph Paxton in 1839-42 at Chatsworth. He was probably assisted by John Robertson, a draughtsman for that encyclopaedist of the Picturesque, J. C. Loudon.[116] One particular mode, however, had begun to take the lead even before this ‘point of view’ came closest to dominance in the early decades of the new century. The use of Gothic[117] for new churches was common enough from the mid eighteenth century. Down to about 1820, however, this was usually done without much archaeological pretension. The mood of the protagonists of what was then called ‘Gothick’, whether architects or clients, was not very serious. Architects lacked accurate illustrations of old work such as the volumes of Stuart and Revett and other similar treatises were providing for the Grecian. In the first two decades of the new century the more thorough and general study of ancient Gothic monuments in England and the handsome publications of John Britton (1771-1857)[118] and of Nash’s Gothic specialist, the elder Pugin,[119] were gradually changing the situation. Thomas Rickman (1776-1841), a pharmacist turned medievalist, began to put his knowledge[120] of old churches to practical use; his St George’s, Birmingham, built 1819-21, is a not unsuccessful essay in revived Perpendicular. Several others had built or were building by this time churches whose relationship to monuments of the medieval past was about as close as that of most of the contemporary Grecian work to its ancient models. St Mary’s, Bathwick, in Bath, of 1814-20 is at once very early and exceptionally well-scaled. The local architect John Pinch (1770-1827) even vaulted it throughout in Bath stone.
The ultimate purging away of the frivolity of Georgian Gothick detail and the effective substitution of archaeological for Picturesque ideals in over-all composition was by no means always a gain. In two later Birmingham churches, St Peter’s, Dale End, of 1825-7, and Bishop Ryder’s of 1837-8, Rickman did not improve on St George’s, while St Luke’s, Chelsea, built in London by James Savage (1779-1852) in 1819-25, despite its great size and its stone vaulting, is as cold and dry as the Grecian churches of the day and quite inferior to Pinch’s.
Edward Garbett’s Holy Trinity, Theale, of 1820-5—with tower added after the architect’s death by John Buckler (1770-1851) in 1827-8—is rather more interesting and also premonitory of what was coming. Here the detail, imitated from Salisbury Cathedral, is thirteenth-century in character, not fifteenth-sixteenth-century, as in the churches of Pinch, Rickman, and Savage. Moreover, Theale is more boldly scaled and more plastically handled altogether than are theirs. The placing of the tower, far to the rear on the south side, while more Picturesque in its asymmetry than the standard position at the centre of the west front, is also an archaeological echo of the free-standing tower which still existed then beside Salisbury Cathedral.
Most Gothic churches built in the twenties and thirties under the Act of 1818—Commissioners’ Churches as they are called—were neither very satisfyingly Picturesque nor at all archaeological. The usual reason for preferring Gothic to Grecian, indeed, was to save money by avoiding the need for expensive stone porticoes! Barry’s Commissioners’ Churches around Manchester and in north-eastern London are among the better examples; but only his St Peter’s, Brighton, of 1824-6 (not financed by the parsimonious Commissioners) is at all elaborate. Among the most successful contemporary examples are several by one of Soane’s pupils, R. D. Chantrell, at Leeds. His Christ Church there of 1823-6 has considerable spatial grandeur in its tall nave and aisles, while the Perpendicular detailing is rich and even fairly plausible.
Generally preferable to the ecclesiastical Gothic of this decade is the collegiate work; of this more exists both at Oxford and at Cambridge than is generally realized. At King’s College, Cambridge, Wilkins’s Gothic screen fronting the quadrangle and the hall range at right angles to it are not altogether unworthy of the magnificent Perpendicular chapel and Gibbs’s Fellows Building that form the other two sides. Wilkins won the competition for this work in 1823, and it was all completed by 1827. Still more appealing, because an effectively independent entity, is Rickman’s New Court at St John’s College, also at Cambridge,[121] built by him with the aid of his pupil Henry Hutchinson (1800-31) in 1825-31 (Plate 50B). This is not very plausibly Gothic perhaps, but the papery planes of the light-coloured ashlar walls of the U-shaped quadrangle, now richly hung with creeper, form an eligibly Picturesque composition above and behind the open gallery across the south side despite their total symmetry.
By the thirties standards of Gothic design were generally rising, both in the greater degree of plausibility attained by the leading practitioners and in their more positive command of various borrowed idioms. Thus Barry’s King Edward’s Grammar School in Birmingham, designed in 1833 and built 1834-7, seems to have been a rather satisfactory Neo-Tudor design, notably Barryesque in the breadth of the composition and in the use of strong terminal features. This building was unusually literate in detail owing to the assistance of the younger Pugin, who was just about to make a tremendous personal reputation as a Gothic expert thanks to his books.[122]
Pugin’s _Contrasts_, published 1836, marks a turning point even more than does the acceptance in that year of Barry’s Gothic design for the Houses of Parliament. Newly converted to Catholicism, Pugin believed the building of Gothic churches to be a religious necessity. His programme of Gothic Revival was far more stringent than any existing programme of Greek Revival or, _a fortiori_, of Renaissance Revival. If the Gothic were really to be revived, Pugin saw that its basic principles must be understood and accepted. Merely to copy Gothic forms was as futile, and to him as immoral, as merely to copy Grecian or _cinquecento_ ones. The methods of building of the Middle Ages must be revived; architecture must again derive its character, in what he considered to have been the true medieval way, from the direct expression of structure; and at the same time it must serve the complicated ritual-functional needs of revived medieval church practices.
In some ways Pugin’s ideas are closely parallel to those of the most rationalistic Romantic Classical theorists in France; doubtless they could be traced back, through his father, to French eighteenth-century sources (see Introduction). However, Pugin’s primary motivation was devotional and sacramental. Approaching all matters of building with passion, he could not but reject the frivolous emphasis on visual qualities that had always been characteristic of the Picturesque point of view.
The mature Gothic Revival that began with Pugin, essentially an English manifestation despite its presumptive French background and carried eventually wherever English culture extended—as far as the West Coast of the United States and to the remotest Antipodes—grew out of the Picturesque yet is itself basically anti-Picturesque. One must build in a certain way because it is right to do so, not because the results are agreeable to the eye. The Gothic Revival thus came to be, for about a decade, as absolute as the most doctrinaire sort of Grecian Classicism. When the Anglicans of the Established Church just after 1840 took over and began to apply rigidly the principles of the Catholic Pugin, a new church-architecture came into being. This is quite as characteristic of the nineteenth century as is Romantic Classicism, even though the mode was—nominally at least—entirely dependent on English medieval Gothic of the fourteenth century. Within a decade, however, Puginian Gothic, after being accepted and codified by the Cambridge Camden Society,[123] developed into a much more original mode, the High Victorian Gothic, very remote indeed from the models which Pugin had recommended as providing the only proper precedents for the Revival (see Chapter 10).
Here it will be well to consider two exceptional Gothic monuments, designed in the late thirties and built in the forties, one very large, the other rather small, which did _not_ follow the new Puginian standards, even though in the case of one of them Pugin collaborated on the design from the first. The most Picturesque addition to the Romantic Classical scene in Edinburgh, curiously effective by contrast with the big-scaled and very cold Grecian structures near by, is the Sir Walter Scott Monument in Prince’s Street Gardens (Plate 51). This was designed in 1836 and executed in 1840-6 by G. Meikle Kemp[124] (1795-1844). His project had originally been placed below both Fowler’s and Rickman’s in a competition; as the local contender, however, he had eventually obtained the commission in 1838. The lacy elaboration of this florid shrine, if less appropriate to Sir Walter’s own brand of medievalism than Abbotsford, is certainly in the richest Late Georgian tradition of the Picturesque.
Picturesque also are certain aspects of the Houses of Parliament, notably the contrast in shape and placing of the two towers at the ends and, above all, the silhouette of the Clock Tower, almost certainly one of Pugin’s personal contributions to the design (Plate 54). But essentially the Houses of Parliament, as might be expected of Barry, their architect, are one of the grandest academic productions of the nineteenth century. Summerson has suggested a relationship to Fonthill Abbey in the way the plan is organized round a central octagon; there may also be an echo of Wyatville’s east front of Windsor in the composition of the river front. But except for the incorporation of the medieval Westminster Hall, the Crypt Chapel, and the Cloister Court, which necessitated irregularity along the landward side, the plan is almost as regular and as classically logical in its balanced provision for multiple functions as a pupil[125] of Durand might have developed. Equally regular are the façades and, in the case of the principal front towards the river, elaborately symmetrical as well.
The rich Late Gothic detail was provided in incredible profusion by Pugin, who worked under Barry against his own developing taste for earlier and less lacy Gothic forms. Doubtless, like the towers, this detailing reflects the Picturesque, but the extreme regularity of the façades provides also the characteristic reiterations of Romantic Classicism. Pugin is supposed to have said that the river front was ‘all Greek’, a considerable exaggeration. But just as Highclere shows what Barry’s basic principles of design could produce when expressed in the revived Jacobethan mode, so without too great a strain one can imagine this front executed with some sort of Renaissance detailing, if hardly in columnar Grecian guise.
Commissioned in 1836, the Houses of Parliament rose slowly. The House of Lords was opened in 1847; the House of Commons only in 1852, the year of Pugin’s early death. Even at the time of Barry’s death in 1860 the whole group was still not finished, although his eldest son (Edward Middleton, 1830-80) made but few personal contributions when he took over control and finally completed the job later in the decade. During this extended period of about thirty years the Puginian phase of the Gothic Revival had been initiated and run its entire course; even the succeeding High Victorian Gothic was more than half-way over by the mid sixties. Like the Napoleonic monuments of Paris, which were also a generation a-building, the Houses of Parliament belong historically to the period of their beginning. They are not quite pre-Victorian, since construction above ground began only in 1840 after considerable revision of the competition design, but they are definitely Early Victorian.
Not all of Pugin’s own work is as remote in character from the Houses of Parliament as his mature principles would lead one to expect. His first church of any consequence, St Marie’s, Derby, of 1838-9, is Perpendicular in style and very crisp and flat in treatment. Nevertheless, both in its detailed ‘correctness’ and in Pugin’s real command of the national Late Gothic idiom, this church marks a great advance over the work of Rickman and the other Gothic architects of the older generation who were still in practice. Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, a remodelling, is confused by the retention of earlier elements and also by a considerable addition made by Pugin’s son (Edward Welby, 1834-75) in the sixties. But the portions carried out in 1837-52 are quite consonant with Pugin’s work done in association with Barry. The great hall is a definitely archaeological feature of the plan yet also a feature that would be of great significance in the later development of the nineteenth-century house (see Chapter 15).
If Scarisbrick is not exactly _anti_-Picturesque, comparison with such a great house as Harlaxton near Grantham, first designed by Salvin in the Jacobethan mode in 1831 and rising under Burn’s supervision from 1838 on, reveals how little the Picturesque really influenced Pugin even at the beginning of his career. However, Neo-Tudor Lonsdale Square in London, begun by R. C. Carpenter (1812-55) in 1838, is still less Picturesque than Scarisbrick because of its extreme regularity. This example makes evident how far other young architects—and Carpenter was precisely Pugin’s contemporary—were behind him in understanding and exploiting even Late Gothic forms; yet within a very few years Carpenter became the most ‘correct’ of Anglican church architects by following Pugin’s lead.
In 1839 and 1840 Pugin designed two modest churches that provided favourite paradigms for Anglo-American church-building for a generation and more. St Oswald’s, Old Swan, Liverpool, built in 1840-2, adopts the fourteenth-century English parish-church plan with central western tower broach-spired, aisles, deep chancel, and south porch, each element being quite clearly expressed in the external composition. Internally the effect is low and dark, since Pugin provided no clerestory, roofed the nave with much exposed timber, and filled the traceried windows with stained glass. More original is St Wilfred’s, Hulme, Manchester, built in 1839-42, in that the tower—never completed, alas—was set at the north-west corner. The detail of St Oswald’s is fairly elaborate, including a rather rich east window. St Wilfred’s is simpler, with lancet windows to avoid the expense of fourteenth-century tracery.
A larger, more complete, and more expensively decorated example of the Old Swan model was St Giles’s, Cheadle, of 1841-6 (Plate 52A). This has a quite magnificent, if hardly very original, spired tower and interior walls all patterned in colour. Here Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin’s most important patron, provided sufficient funds to furnish the church as the architect intended. Pugin’s largest churches, unfortunately, never received the carved work, stained glass, and painted decoration that he planned for them. At St Barnabas’s, Nottingham, now the Catholic Cathedral there, of 1842-4 he achieved externally a rather fine piling up of related masses at the rear, the whole crowned by a central tower. For lack of any decoration, however, this is grim without and barren within, despite all the spatial interest of the very complex east end.
Pugin, always his own severest critic, was most nearly satisfied with the church that he built for himself next door to his own house, the Grange, at Ramsgate.[126] The house dates from 1841-3, the church from 1846-51. Externally of Kentish knapped flint and internally of Caen stone with a very heavy roof of dark oak, this edifice is worthy of his highest standards of revived medieval construction. But it is rather less original and interesting in external massing and internal spatial development than such a big bare church as St Barnabas’s. To the house we will be returning later (see Chapter 15).
Pugin’s production is largely concentrated in the years 1837-44, between the two periods of his employment by Barry on the Houses of Parliament. By 1844 other architects, Anglican and not Roman Catholic, were accepting his principles and rivalling his success. G. G. Scott, for example, never a really great architect but a notable self-publicist, after modest beginnings designed the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford in 1841 in the form of a fourteenth-century Eleanor Cross and followed up that prominent commission by building the large suburban London church of St Giles’s, Camberwell, in 1842-4. At that time he was still in partnership with Moffatt. Then, in 1844, he signalized the international standing of the English Gothic Revival by winning alone the competition for the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, which he carried to completion over the years 1845-63.
Although the body of this church was all but completely destroyed by bombs, the tower and spire still dominate the Hamburg skyline (Plate 52B). It is interesting to compare this grand scenic accent with the tower and spire of the Petrikirche, almost equally prominent, built in 1843-9 by de Chateauneuf and Fersenfeld (Plate 57A). Although built, with a curious echo of London’s characteristic stock brick, of an unpleasantly yellowish brick, while the Petrikirche is of a handsome deep-red brick like de Chateauneuf’s Alte Post, the silhouette is so enriched with elaborate fourteenth-century stonework—part English, part German in derivation—that it almost rivals in richness of effect Kemp’s Walter Scott Monument in Edinburgh. Yet the scale is grand, the parts well related, and in every way it represents a more advanced, almost mid-century taste, in contrast to the simplicity and the geometrical clarity of de Chateauneuf’s square brick tower with its plain triangular gables and its very tall and svelte metal-clad spire.
From 1845 down to 1855, when Henry Clutton (1819-93) and William Burges (1827-81) won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France and G. E. Street (1824-81) received the second prize, the pre-eminence of English architects at plausible revived Gothic was generally recognized abroad. Though few of the innumerable churches built by Scott and his rivals at home in the forties are in any way really memorable, by the middle of that decade the characteristics of English church edifices had been completely revised, largely thanks to the propaganda of the Cambridge Camden Society. There is no more typical nineteenth-century product than a Victorian Gothic church of this period built to the Camdenian canon; yet the real achievement of the most original architect who designed such churches, Butterfield, belongs to the next, or High Victorian, phase (see Chapter 10). The more Puginian Carpenter, the other favourite architect of the Society, who died in 1855, is hardly as interesting a designer—however ‘correct’ he may be—in such prominent works as St Paul’s in West Street, Brighton, of 1846-8 and St Mary Magdalen’s, Munster Square, in London of 1849-51, as in what he built for Lancing College in 1851-3. There the plain high-roofed ranges with their fine smooth walls of knapped flint and very flat and simple cut-stone dressings have a quality of precision quite lacking in most contemporary churches. Almost finer is St John’s College, Hurstpierpoint, although largely posthumous in execution.
Scott, Carpenter, and Butterfield all supplied designs for churches in various parts of the British Empire; other English architects emigrated to the Dominions and to the United States, carrying with them the doctrine of the Gothic Revival, just as French architects half a century earlier had carried a rather different sort of doctrine all over the western world. As a symbol of Britain’s major world position, moreover, English churches now rose in many Continental cities, from German watering-places and French Riviera towns to remote capitals such as Athens and Istanbul. Remarkably alien in their foreign contexts, these express the vigour and the assurance, if rarely the real creative possibilities, of the Victorian Gothic.
The Established Church in England was the great patron of the revived Gothic, although other denominations were not far behind. But the use of Gothic was by no means confined to churches, nor indeed to country houses as it had largely been in the late eighteenth century. No other Gothic public buildings rivalled the Houses of Parliament; but in 1843-5 Philip Hardwick, designer of the most Grecian of railway stations, with his son (P. C., 1822-92) built the Hall and Library of Lincoln’s Inn in London of Tudor red brick with black brick diaperings and cream stone trim. This offered a foretaste of the external polychromy which would be the sign-manual of the next period of revived Gothic in England. An earlier, more severe, sort of Tudor, carried out in stone, served Moffatt, Scott’s former partner, for a mansion at No. 19 Park Lane. But this house was most exceptional; in the forties London architects and builders generally eschewed Gothic of any sort except for churches. Generically medieval, if not specifically Gothic, inspiration would eventually play a major part in forming the advanced commercial mode of the late fifties and sixties however (see Chapter 15).
The success that Victorian Gothic, initiated by a Romanist and supported by the Catholicizing wing of the Church of England, had with non-Anglicans in England and throughout the English-speaking world is surprising. Ritualistic planning, almost the essence of the Revival to Pugin and his Camdenian followers, was naturally avoided; but the Gothic work of the best Nonconformist architects, such as the Independent Church of 1852 in Glasgow by J. T. Emmett, is by no means unworthy of comparison with Scott’s, if not the more puristic Carpenter’s. Samuel Hemming of Bristol even employed a few touches of Gothic detail on the prefabricated cast-iron churches that he exported all over the world from Bristol in the early fifties.
The mature Gothic Revival, as has been said, is more anti-Picturesque than Picturesque, at least in the realm of theory; as a writer in _The Ecclesiologist_ expressed the matter succinctly, ‘The true picturesque derives from the sternest utility.’ Yet the revived Gothic could only be expected to appeal widely to architects and to a public who had long fully accepted the Picturesque point of view. All its irregularity and variety of silhouette, its plastically complex organization and its colouristic decoration, its textural exploitation of various traditional and even near-rustic materials is profoundly opposed to the clear and cool ideals of Romantic Classicism, but fully consonant with the Picturesque.
The significance of the English Gothic Revival of the thirties and forties is manifold, and no two critics will agree how to assess it. Certainly the functional doctrines of the Revival and its renewed devotion to honest expression of real construction remain of great importance, even though much of this runs parallel to—if, indeed, it does not follow from—the more rationalistic aspects of Romantic Classical theory. In this way the Revival made a positive historical contribution, if not perhaps as new and original a one as has sometimes been maintained in recent years.
Negatively, the English Gothic Revival was clearly of very great effectiveness as a solvent, not only of the rigidities and conventionalities of Romantic Classicism, but also of the older and deeper Classical traditions that had been revived by the Renaissance and maintained for several centuries. The lack of an equally effective solvent on the Continent helps to explain why the revolutionary developments of the next period, particularly in the domestic and in the commercial fields, were so largely Anglo-American.
Even in the twentieth century it may be said that part of the profound difference between a Wright and a Perret lay in the fact that one had the tradition of the English Gothic Revival in his blood—largely through reading Ruskin—while the other had not (see Chapters 18 and 19). Still later, the California ‘Bay Region School’ of the 1930s and 1940s implies a Gothic Revival background, however little its leaders may be aware of the fact; the coeval ‘Carioca School’ of Brazil manifestly has no such background (see Chapter 25). It is therefore of more consequence to see how the ideals of the Picturesque, and concurrently the anti-Picturesque doctrines of the Gothic Revival, were accepted in the United States, than to give comparable attention to Europe, where neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival were very productive of buildings of distinction. For that matter, most of the American buildings that fall under these rubrics are but feeble parodies of English originals. The Greek Revival architects of America were no unworthy rivals of the Europeans of their day; the exponents of the Picturesque and the followers of Pugin—sometimes the same men—produced little of lasting value. But when seen in relation to the later development of the American house, the contribution of the Picturesque period, lasting in America down to the Civil War and even beyond, is of real significance (see Chapter 15).
There was not much eighteenth- or very early nineteenth-century Gothick of consequence in America. Latrobe’s Sedgeley of 1798, Strickland’s Masonic Hall in Philadelphia of 1809-11, and Bulfinch’s contemporary Federal Street Church in Boston were none of them of much intrinsic interest, and all are now destroyed. Other early manifestations of the Picturesque were even rarer, and it was not until the thirties that a concerted Gothic movement got under way. Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary of 1821-9 was very modestly Castellated; Strickland’s St Stephen’s in Philadelphia, a rather gaunt two-towered red-brick structure of 1822-3, more or less Perpendicular, represents but a slight advance in plausibility over his Masonic Hall.
The finest works of the next decade are a group of churches in and around Boston, all built of granite. Willard’s Bowdoin Street Church in Boston of 1830 and St Peter’s of 1833 and the First Unitarian or North Church of 1836-7, both in Salem, Mass., are the best extant examples (Plate 55A). The material discouraged detail, but provided, when used rock-faced, an almost antediluvian ruggedness. Tracery is generally of wood and much simplified; the most characteristic decorative features are very plain crenellations and occasional quatrefoil openings. Thus, on the whole, these monuments are closer to Romantic Classicism than to the Picturesque and have little in common with English work of their own day or even of the preceding period. However, the wooden Gothic of this period is in general of a rather lacy Late Georgian order.[127]
The mid thirties saw some quite elaborate Gothic houses of stone, such as A. J. Davis’s Blythewood of 1834 at Annandale, N.Y., and Oaklands, built by Richard Upjohn (1802-78) the next year at Gardiner, Maine. Both architects were capable of designing at the very same time Greek edifices of considerably higher quality—Davis’s Indiana State Capitol of 1831-5 at Indianapolis and Upjohn’s Samuel Farrer house of 1836 at Bangor, Maine, for example—but both were already leaders in the rising revolt against the Grecian.
Upjohn’s Trinity Church in New York completed in 1846 is the American analogue of Pugin’s St Marie’s, Derby, and by no means inferior despite its plaster vaults (Plate 53A). With Trinity to his credit Upjohn, English-born but not English-trained, became the acknowledged leader of the American ecclesiologists. At Kingscote, Newport, R.I., which he built in 1841, Upjohn also rivalled Davis as a designer of Picturesque Gothic houses. But he was almost equally addicted to Italianate forms, even in the church-building field, for there his rigid ecclesiological principles made him unwilling to use Gothic except for Episcopalians. His non-Gothic work ranges from a vague sort of _Rundbogenstil_, as illustrated in his Congregational Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn of 1844-6, once provided with a highly original spire of scalloped outline, and the more Germanic Bowdoin College Chapel in Brunswick, Maine, of 1844-55, to Italian Villas, such as that built in Newport, R.I., for Edward King in 1845-7 (now the Free Library), and even to public buildings in the Italian Villa mode, such as his City Hall in Utica, N.Y., of 1852-3 (Plate 53B). His basilican St Paul’s in Baltimore, Maryland, of 1852-6—its style is rather surprising, since the parish was Episcopalian—is more successful than most of his later Gothic churches. His Corn Exchange Bank of 1854 in New York, round-arched if not exactly _Rundbogenstil_, was one of the most distinguished early approaches to the use of an arcaded mode for commercial building (see Chapter 14). Of very similar character and comparable quality was the H. E. Pierrepont house in Brooklyn completed in 1857.
But Upjohn’s reputation, rightly or wrongly, is based on his Gothic churches. Externally these are usually quite close to contemporary Camdenian models; internally they are often distinguished by very original—and also very awkward—wooden arcades rising up to the open wooden roofs above. St Mary’s, Burlington, NJ., of 1846-54 is perhaps the most attractive and English-looking of his village churches, the modest cruciform plan culminating in a very simple but delicate spire over the crossing. Not least significant, moreover, are Upjohn’s still more modest wooden churches[128] of vertical board-and-batten construction, such as St Paul’s in Brunswick, Maine, of 1845. They illustrate, like his openwork wooden arcades, a real interest in expressing the stick character of American carpentry. This interest is intellectually similar to, but visually very different from, Pugin’s devotion to the direct expression of masonry construction. At building churches in stone British immigrants like Notman and Frank Wills (1827-?)[129] were not surprisingly Upjohn’s rivals in the quality of their craftsmanship.
Running parallel with Upjohn’s career is that of Davis, but with the difference that he built few churches and, as Ithiel Town’s former partner, continued on occasion, even after the latter’s retirement in 1835, to provide Grecian as well as Gothic designs. He was perhaps most successful, however, with Italian Villas such as the Munn house in Utica, N.Y., or the E. C. Litchfield house in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y., both of 1854. At Belmead, in Powhatan County, Virginia, built in 1845, he introduced Manorial Gothic to the southern plantation, but this mode never rivalled the Grecian peripteral temple in popularity in the South. Walnut Wood, the Harral house in Bridgeport, Conn., of 1846, was more typical and long retained all its original furnishings. With the building of Ericstan, the John J. Herrick house in Tarrytown, N.Y., in 1855 Davis brought the fake castle to the Hudson River valley—so frequently compared to that of the Rhine and favourite subject in these years of a new American school of landscape painters of the most Picturesque order. As a scenic embellishment Ericstan was not unlike the ruins that Thomas Cole introduced in his most Romantic and imaginary landscapes.
Despite Davis’s ranging activity, extending westward into Kentucky and Michigan, elaborate Gothic houses, whether Castellated or manorially Tudor, were relatively rare in the America of the forties and fifties. But a type of gabled cottage with a front veranda and elaborate traceried barge-boards was rather popular. This is well represented by the extant Henry Delamater house in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and also by that of William J. Rotch of 1845 in New Bedford, Mass., both by Davis himself. The mode was energetically supported by Davis’s great friend, the landscape gardener and architectural critic A. J. Downing (1815-52).
Downing was a characteristic proponent of the Picturesque point of view, leaning heavily on earlier English writers. The designs for Picturesque houses, some by Davis, some by Notman, one at least—the King Villa—by Upjohn, and others presumably by himself, illustrated in Downing’s two house-pattern books[130] were quite as likely to be towered Italian Villas as Tudor Cottages or more pretentiously Gothic designs. Most significant of all are those called Bracketted Cottages by Downing for which he recommended the board-and-batten[131] external finish that Upjohn later took up for modest wooden churches. But these, which are neither very Picturesque—at least with the capital P—nor yet at all Gothic, are better considered in relation to the general development of Anglo-American house-design in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 15).
Rare in execution, as are indeed all the more exotic Picturesque modes, but also significant for its later influence, was the Swiss Chalet. Although chalets were illustrated in the English Villa books of P. F. Robinson (1776-1858)[132] and others from the twenties, the finest extant American example is fairly late, the Willoughby house in Newport, R.I., of 1854. As this is by Eidlitz, it may be presumed to derive from Swiss[133] or German sources rather than from Robinson’s or other English designs.
Thus at Newport, already rising towards its later position as the premier American summer resort, there were by the time the Civil War broke out in the early sixties examples of the Tudor Cottage (Upjohn’s Kingscote), the towered Italian Villa (his Edward King House)—as for that matter also the more Barryesque symmetrical villa without tower, the Parish House of 1851-2 by the English-trained Calvert Vaux (1824-95)[134]—and the Swiss Chalet, not to speak of other more formal houses which here in Newport began to show very early the influence of the French Second Empire. There were also several big hotels of this period, now all destroyed. Two Grecian examples have been mentioned earlier; but the second Ocean House, built by Warren in 1845, was Gothic, a gargantuan version of a Davis-Downing Tudor Cottage. On this the Tudoresque veranda piers were carried to a fantastic height in naïve competition with the columned porticoes of the previous Ocean House and the Atlantic House.
If there were in America no castles of the scale and plausibility of Salvin’s Peckforton, no pavilions of the pseudo-oriental magnificence of Nash’s at Brighton, the will to build them was none the less present. Ericstan has already been mentioned; while at Bridgeport, Conn., P. T. Barnum erected Iranistan in 1847-8 in conscious emulation of the Regent’s pleasure dome at Brighton from designs he had obtained in England. This was carried out by Eidlitz. Longwood, near Natchez, Mississippi, by Samuel Sloan (1815-84), begun in 1860, is even more ambitiously oriental, but was left unfinished when the Civil War broke out the next year.[135] Rather curiously the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, set down like an enormous garden fabrick in L’Enfant’s Mall near the Mills obelisk, was at the insistence of its director, Robert Dale Owen,[136] designed as a Norman castle by James Renwick (1818-95). Built in 1848-9 of brownstone, this is a very monumental manifestation of the Picturesque and one of the more surprising features of a capital otherwise mostly Classical in its architecture. On the whole the happiest American achievements in the Picturesque vein were the towered Italian Villas, from Notman’s Doane house of the mid thirties down through Upjohn’s City Hall in Utica of the early fifties and Davis’s still later houses in the East and the Middle West (see Chapter 5).
The Gothic Revival in America, deriving after 1840 from Pugin and the Camdenians, was a much more alien movement than the Greek Revival. In the British Dominions and Colonies, even though the characteristic production of this period is in many ways more similar to that of the United States than to that of the homeland, the Neo-Gothic achievement appears somewhat less exotic. However, St John’s in Hobart, Tasmania, by John Lee Archer, which was completed in 1835 in the most rudimentary sort of Commissioners’ Gothic, is far inferior to the granite churches of its period in the Boston area. From that to Holy Trinity in Hobart, completed by James Blackburn in 1847, the advance in mere competence is very evident. Yet, as in the case of Upjohn in America, the Norman church that Blackburn built for the Presbyterians of Glenorchy and even more his Congregational Church at Newtown, an asymmetrically towered Italian Villa edifice, may well be preferred to his Gothic work.
Greenway’s Government House Stables of 1817-19 in Sydney, Australia, were already Castellated, but in a modest eighteenth-century way. M. W. Lewis’s Camden church of 1840-9 was based on plans sent out by Blore and simply executed in red brick. In W. W. Wardell (1823-99), who emigrated as late as 1858, Australia finally obtained an experienced Neo-Gothic architect of real ability. He had already made his mark in England a decade before his departure with Our Lady of Victories, Clapham, in London; but even that very decent early church of his required no specific mention in the English section of this chapter. His Australian work is too late to be considered here (see Chapter 11).
Across the Atlantic, communications were doubtless quicker than with the Antipodes, and the cultural climate of Canada was undoubtedly more similar to that of the homeland. The first important Neo-Gothic work in Canada, however, was built for the French and not the British community. Notre Dame, the Catholic Cathedral of Montreal, was originally designed and erected by an Irish architect, James O’Donnell (1774-1830), in 1824-9 somewhat to the disgust of most French Canadians, who considered O’Donnell’s Gothic to be Anglican when in fact it was merely Georgian. Equipped later with western towers and redecorated internally with operatic sumptuousness in the seventies, it is not easy to realize just what Notre Dame was like when O’Donnell completed it. It was bigger, certainly, but not more advanced than the New England churches of a few years later.
In 1845 Wills arrived in Canada from England and began the Anglican Cathedral at Fredericton, New Brunswick, as a moderate-sized cruciform parish-church with central tower, the whole of rather run-of-the-mill Camdenian character despite its pretensions. Very similar, but considerably larger and richer, is the Montreal cathedral which he began a decade later in 1856. His American churches, though smaller and less elaborate, have somewhat more character. Canadians must have sensed Wills’s inadequacy almost at once, for both Butterfield and G. G. Scott were asked to send out church designs in the forties. The former provided in 1848 a scheme for a more elaborate east end for Wills’s Fredericton Cathedral, which had been started only three years before. Scott’s Cathedral in St John’s, Newfoundland, initiated in 1846, deserves a relatively important place in the roster of his churches as Butterfield’s New Brunswick work does not. But this large edifice was completed only some forty years later by his son (G. G. II, 1839-97). Even the stone used here was imported from Scotland.
As in the United States, there is plenty of more-or-less Gothic domestic work in Canada, most of it relatively late. An early and rather pretentious secular edifice was the so-called Old Building of Trinity College, Toronto, erected in 1851 by Kivas Tully (1820-1905). This was a by no means incompetent example of Collegiate Gothic, but more like Wilkins’s or Rickman’s work of the twenties at Cambridge than the advanced Camdenian edifices of its own period. Canadian Neo-Gothic rose to a certain autochthonous distinction only in the next period (see
## Chapter 10).
If early illustrations of the Picturesque point of view and of the mature Gothic Revival are on the whole of minor interest in the English-speaking world outside Great Britain, that whole world from California to Tasmania was absorbing the propaganda of the English exponents of the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival. This had its effect in the succeeding period when the High Victorian Gothic of England was exploited to more considerable purpose than the Neo-Gothic of the Early Victorian period. By the time a great English critic came to the support of the Gothic Revival, John Ruskin (1819-1900), he had almost from the original publication of his _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ in 1849 more readers beyond the seas than at home.[137]
Neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival has the same importance on the Continent of Europe as in English-speaking countries. The Picturesque point of view was carried abroad by the great British artistic invention of the eighteenth century, the English garden—_jardin anglais_, _englischer Garten_, _giardino inglese_, _jardin inglès_, etc., to muster the various well-established and revelatory foreign terms for the more or less naturalistic mode that succeeded the architecturally ordered French gardens of the Le Nôtre type. By 1800 the Picturesque was as familiar in theory as were the international tenets of Romantic Classicism. But for all the garden fabricks that were built in Europe in the English taste, the point of view tended to remain alien. Moreover, from the continuance of Orléans Cathedral[138] in Gothic, ordered as early as 1707 by Louis XIV though not finally finished until 1829, to Schinkel’s painted Gothic visions of the opening of the nineteenth century, there is no lack of evidence of Continental interest in Gothic forms. In France there was also a very considerable theoretical interest in Gothic methods of construction that can hardly be matched in eighteenth-century England (see Introduction). But there followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century no such effective crystallization of an earlier dilettante interest in the Gothic as in England, no popular fad for building fake castles, no flood of cheap Commissioners’ Churches.
Yet, in France as in England, a new and more serious phase of the Gothic Revival did open in the late thirties, stimulated by the ideals of Catholic Revival of a series of writers from Chateaubriand to Montalembert. No great Gothic public monument like the Houses of Parliament in London was initiated in these years in Paris—nor for that matter at any later date—but several churches designed around 1840 were at least intended to be as exemplary as Pugin’s; they were also considerably more ambitious in their size and their elaboration than most of those his Catholic clients and the Camdenians’ Anglican ones were sponsoring in England at this point.
A curious example of the change in taste is the Chapelle-Saint-Louis at Dreux.[139] The original chapel was built in 1816-22 by an architect named Cramail (or Cramailler) as a Classical rotunda to serve as the mausoleum of the Orléans family. In 1839 Louis Philippe ordered its remodelling and enlargement in Gothic style by P.-B. Lefranc (1795-1856), desiring thus to associate the Orleanist dynasty with the medieval glories of French royalty in a manner already fashionable[140] with intellectuals to the left and to the right, if not with many architects. The new exterior, completed in 1848 just as the Orléans rule came to an end, is in a very lacy and unplausible sort of Gothick, not without a certain still rather eighteenth-century Rococo charm but quite inharmonious with the Classical interior. Like another Royal mausoleum of these years, the Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand in the Avenue Pershing in Neuilly, built in 1843 in memory of an Orléans prince who had been killed in an accident near its site, the Chapelle-Saint-Louis has stained glass windows designed in 1844 by no less an artist than Ingres. These are even less appropriate in association with Lefranc’s Gothic than with the Romanesquoid mode that the elderly Fontaine—who knew, like Talleyrand, how to maintain his position under several successive regimes—used for the Neuilly chapel. They are hardly superior in quality, moreover, to the glass, whether imported from Germany or produced locally, that was being used in the early forties in England for Neo-Gothic churches.
A more important Gothic project of this date than the Chapelle-Saint-Louis was that for the large new Paris church of Sainte-Clotilde prepared in 1840 by F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), German-born but a pupil of Lebas. Doubts as to the extensive use of iron proposed by Gau held up the initiation of the construction of Sainte-Clotilde until 1846, so that several provincial Neo-Gothic edifices of some consequence were executed first. These may be compared, but only to their disadvantage, with Pugin’s churches of around 1840 as regards their plausibility, their intrinsic architectonic qualities, and the elegance of their detail. However, several of them are larger and more ambitious—being Catholic churches in a Catholic country—than are even his various cathedrals.
In any case the character of real Gothic architecture in France, as in most other European countries, made unlikely a programme of revival based chiefly on parish churches in the way of Pugin’s. The Continental Middle Ages had most notably produced cathedrals, and it was for new churches of near-cathedral scale that the re-use of Gothic was likely to be proposed. Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, built by J.-E. Barthélémy (1799-1868) in 1840-7 on the heights of Ste Cathérine above Rouen, opens the serious phase of the Revival in France. It has a superb site and is best appreciated from a considerable distance, but the silhouette is not happy and the execution is rather hard and cold. Saint-Nicholas at Nantes was begun in 1839 just before the Rouen church by L.-A. Piel (1808-41), a confused Romantic character who died a monk, and taken over in 1843 by J.-B.-A. Lassus (1807-57), a pupil of Lebas and Henri Labrouste. It is very hard to accept this church as even in part the production of Lassus, the erudite archaeologist who brought out in 1842 the first volume of a major monograph on Chartres Cathedral and who undertook in 1845, together with the better-known E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), the restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris after sharing with Duban the responsibility for restoring the Sainte-Chapelle. Rather more plausible—at least in the sense that it merges fairly successfully with the original fourteenth-century nave to which it is attached—is the façade of Saint-Ouen at Rouen built in 1845-51 by H.-C.-M. Grégoire (1791-1854), a pupil of Percier.
Sainte-Clotilde was finally begun in 1846, as has been noted, and completed after Gau’s death by Ballu in 1857 (Plate 55B). This ambitious urban church of cathedral scale lacks almost as completely as those just mentioned the personal qualities of design and the integrity of revived medieval craftsmanship that give character, if not always distinction, to the churches of Pugin, Carpenter, and other leading English Gothic Revivalists of the forties. Nor does it have the grandeur of proportion of Scott’s Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, to which it is more comparable in size and pretension (Plate 52B). The style is Rayonnant, or French fourteenth-century, and the material good freestone, but deadly mechanical and quite characterless in the detailing. The parts seem somehow too large for the whole. Ballu’s west towers, for example, are excessively tall for so stubby a plan, and the chapel-surrounded chevet is too elaborate for even an urban parish church.
Two later churches by Lassus, Saint-Nicholas at Moulins, built in collaboration with L.-D.-G. Esmonnot (1807-80) in 1849, and Saint-Pierre at Dijon of 1853 hardly rival Sainte-Clotilde in size, elaboration, or even plausibility. Viollet-le-Duc was rather more of an executant architect than Lassus, even though in this decade and the next most of his vast energy and very considerable archaeological knowledge went into the restoration of medieval monuments. At Notre-Dame in Paris the Chapter House that he designed is a wholly new construction of 1847 not unworthy of comparison with the best work of Scott in these years. The block of flats (Plate 56) he built at 28 Rue de Berlin (now de Liège) in Paris in 1846-8—his first executed building—may better be compared with the most advanced English secular Gothic of its date, Salvin’s Peckforton, say, or Butterfield’s St Augustine’s College, Canterbury. The front is so simple and straightforward in composition that it fits between more conventional façades with no awkwardness, and the rather plain detailing has the ‘realism’ that was coming to be admired by this date in the most advanced English circles.
The Romanesquoid design of Fontaine’s Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand of 1843 has been mentioned. The use of such forms was in the forties even more exceptional in France than in England. In 1852 Didron estimated—probably with some exaggeration—that over two hundred Neo-Gothic churches had been built or were building in France, a record which compares statistically, if in no other way, with English church production in this period. None of them, however, is as impressive to later eyes as Saint-Paul at Nîmes, which follows with notable success the alternative Romanesquoid mode of Fontaine’s chapel. C.-A. Questel (1807-88), a pupil of Blouet and Duban, the architect of this church, had evidently studied the Romanesque with the care and enthusiasm usually lavished on the Gothic by his generation, and the result is so great an advance over Fontaine’s work that the resemblance is merely nominal. Thus might the Camdenians have hoped to build had they considered the twelfth-century Romanesque of France as worthy of conscientious emulation as the fourteenth-century Gothic of England. Saint-Paul is a large cruciform edifice, rib-vaulted throughout in a proto-Gothic way, and crowned with a great central lantern. The detail is plausible in its design, neither too skimpy nor too elaborate, although the execution lacks any real feeling for medieval craftsmanship in stone. Questel’s church, however, is as much of an exception as Fontaine’s chapel. No Romanesque Revival got under way in the forties in France in the way that one did to a certain extent in Germany, and the few other Romanesquoid churches of high quality belong to the next period (see Chapter 8).
Minor evidence of French interest—and rising interest—in the Picturesque is not hard to find in these decades, but that is all there is. No Picturesque modes comparable to those of the Anglo-Saxon world became widely popular. In the first decade of the century the brothers Caccault built at Clisson[141] in the Vendée a whole village based on their memories of the Roman Campagna, a more considerable essay in the Italian Villa vein than anything carried out in England. But the asymmetrically towered Italian Villa[142] did not mature in France in the way that it did in England, Germany, and the United States. Séheult’s _Recueil_ of 1821, of which a second edition appeared in 1847, is one of the earliest and richest repositories of inspiration drawn from rustic Italian building; but the edifices Séheult illustrated, however Picturesque in other ways, are all symmetrical and quite in the Durand tradition. J.-J. Lequeu (1758-_c._ 1824)[143] had produced bolder projects a generation earlier. These are often asymmetrical, generally quite wildly eclectic, and very vigorously plastic; but such things rarely, if ever, came to execution in France except as garden fabricks. Lequeu had no success at all in his later years.
Moreover, the Rustic Cottage mode seems to have struck no real roots in France, even though the painter Hubert Robert and the architect Richard Mique (1728-94), in designing the fabricks of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau at the Petit Trianon in 1783-6, had followed native rather than English rural models. Under the Restoration and the July Monarchy inspiration came generally from English Cottage books. Visconti’s Château de Lussy, S.-et-M., of 1844, though a fairly large structure, is really in the English Cottage mode with an asymmetrically organized plan and an irregularly composed exterior. This is almost unique and, in any case, quite undistinguished. A more vigorous flow of rustic influence entered France via Alsace and directly from Switzerland. The Chalet aux Loges of 1837 by Bonneau near Versailles was, as its name implies, a Swiss Chalet, but it quite lacked the integrity of structural expression and the originality of plastic organization of Eidlitz’s Willoughby house in Newport, R.I., which is, of course, considerably later in date. Occasional imitations of the _style François I_, such as the already mentioned country house by Canissié at Draveil, S.-et-O., have some irregularity both of outline and of plan; but in general the _François I_ of the July Monarchy, like so much of the Jacobethan of Early Victorian England, is Picturesque only in detail, not in general conception.
In 1840 the elder Bridant, who also built Chalets in the succeeding years around the lake at Enghien, a watering-place on the outskirts of Paris, built a Gothic ‘Castel’ on the plain of Passy, then a fairly open suburb. This was markedly asymmetrical and consistently medieval in detail. The contemporary fame of this enlarged garden fabrick—for such it really was—indicates its unique position in contemporary production, as unique as Moffatt’s Gothic house in Park Lane in London. L.-M. Boltz, an architect of Alsatian if not German origin but a pupil of Henri Labrouste, had some success with a less feudal mode, half-timbered and asymmetrical, in the forties—a house of 1842 at Champeaux, S.-et-M., was typical.
This modest influx into France of Picturesque models from contemporary Germany as well as from contemporary England might lead one to assume that the Picturesque, if not the Gothic Revival, was more significant in Central Europe. In Germany and Austria, however, as also in Scandinavia, Picturesque and medievalizing tendencies mostly merged with Romantic Classicism in the _Rundbogenstil_ rather than standing apart, thus constituting neither an opposition eventually rising to triumph in the English way, nor a mere gesture of aberrant protest as in France.
Schinkel’s interest in Gothic has already been touched on, but none of his more ambitious Gothic projects ever got beyond the drawing-board (see Chapter 2). There are fewer such, in any case, belonging to his later than to his earlier years. Moreover, the Gothic of the early projects naturally belongs to the contemporary High Romantic world of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey and Latrobe’s alternative design for the Baltimore Cathedral, not to the ethical and archaeological milieu of Pugin and the Camdenians. Most of the virtues—by no means negligible—of his Berlin Werder Church of the twenties are not Gothic virtues—not at any rate as Englishmen of the succeeding decades understood them—they are rather Romantic Classical virtues. The principal interest of his earlier Kreuzberg Memorial lies in its cast-iron material, a material anathema to Pugin as a ‘modernistic’ innovation. The Babelsberg Schloss, based principally on the modern castles that he saw on his visit to England in 1826, makes no pretensions to archaeological correctness in the way of Pugin’s Alton Castle of about 1840 or Salvin’s still later Peckforton.
A few Castellated mansions of more local inspiration, such as Hohenschwangau in Upper Bavaria, as reconstructed by J. D. Ohlmüller (1791-1839) in 1832-7, are closer in spirit to Pugin’s and Salvin’s ideals. Hohenschwangau, like certain castles built in this period on the Rhine, exploits the Picturesque possibilities of a fine site and the nostalgic overtones of a district with a romantic medieval past. Schloss Berg in Bavaria, which owes its present very domesticated Gothic character to the work done there by Eduard Riedel (1813-85) in 1849-51, hardly deserves mention in this connexion any more than do Schinkel’s more or less medievalizing country houses, so crisp and regular is their design. Curiously enough, the vast Schloss at Schwerin, begun by G. A. Demmler (1804-86) in 1844, is a more elaborate and extensive example of _François I_ than anything this period produced in France (Plate 57B). It is also notably Picturesque, with innumerable towers and gables disposed around the sides of an irregularly polygonal court. Stüler carried this extraordinary pile to completion after Demmler left Schwerin in 1851. Not very Picturesque, but representing another sort of medievalism, were two Venetian Gothic houses Am Elbberg in Dresden, built with considerable archaeological plausibility by an architect named Ehrhardt in the mid forties. They provide a curious premonition of Ruskin and the High Victorian Gothic of England (see Chapter 10). Semper’s Gothic Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden has already been mentioned.
As in France, much energy went at this time into the restoration and completion of major medieval churches in Germany. Most notable in this connexion was the work on Cologne Cathedral begun in 1824 by F. A. Ahlert (1788-1833), continued by E. F. Zwirner (1802-61), and finally completed by Richard Voigtel (1829-1902) in 1880. Assisting Zwirner, who had worked earlier under Schinkel on the Kolberg Town Hall, was (among others) Friedrich von Schmidt (1825-91), after 1860 the most important Gothic Revivalist in Austria (see Chapters 8 and 11). No more than in France did this activity in ‘productive archaeology’ in Germany lead to new building of much interest, not at least until Schmidt began to work in Vienna.
Ohlmüller’s Mariahilfkirche outside Munich, begun in 1831 and completed after his death by Ziebland, the next considerable essay in ecclesiastical Gothic in Germany after Schinkel’s Berlin church, is certainly much less appealing than is his mountain castle. The hall-church form, authentically German though it was, produced a clumsily proportioned mass, at the front of which a stubby tower ending in an openwork spire seems to be ‘riding the roof’. This church is as ‘advanced’, in the sense of being fairly plausible archaeologically, as Barthélémy’s Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours built a decade later, but that is about all one can say for it. It certainly does not stand up to comparison with Rickman’s or Savage’s English churches of the twenties.
De Chateauneuf’s Petrikirche in Hamburg begun in 1843, or at least its tower, has already been mentioned (Plate 57A). This is superior in design, and in some ways also better built, to most of Pugin’s churches of this date. It is, for example, rib-vaulted throughout in a quite plain but very competent way. The interior lacks, however, the strikingly simple proportions and the warm colour of the red brick exterior; above all, the complex spatial development of the transeptal members lacks clarity, although the plan was probably taken over from the medieval Petrikirche that had been burned. The Gothic churches of K. A. von Heideloff (1788-1865), beginning with his Catholic church in Leipzig built in the Weststrasse there in 1845-7, are hardly above the level of Ohlmüller’s and certainly much less successful than the Petrikirche, though Heideloff had a much higher reputation than de Chateauneuf with contemporaries as a specialist at Gothic on account of his published studies of medieval architecture.[144]
In Berlin most of the new churches of this period by Stüler, Strack, and others were in a Romanesquoid version of the _Rundbogenstil_. Of these elaborated and coarsened versions of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects of a decade earlier, Stüler’s Jacobikirche of 1844-5 was basilican in plan; his Markuskirche, begun in 1848, was of the central type but with a tall campanile rising at one side. The Berlin Petrikirche, built by Strack in 1846-50, was Gothic, however, and even clumsier than Ohlmüller’s much earlier Mariahilfkirche, which it very closely resembles. Nor was Stüler’s one important essay in Gothic, the Bartholomäuskirche, begun in 1854 and completed by Friedrich Adler (1827-?) in 1858, much better. In general, the first half of the century was well over before Gothic churches of any great size and pretension were built either in Germany or Austria. The largest and most prominent, the Votivkirche in Vienna (Plate 99A), for the designing of which Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) won the competition in 1853 when he was only twenty-five, was not begun until 1856 nor completed until 1879 (see
## Chapter 8).
In England the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival were effective solvents of Romantic Classicism, because both, and particularly the latter, were consciously nationalistic, emphasizing in an increasingly nationalistic period the recovery of local rather than of universal building traditions. For a good part of their local acceptability they were dependent, moreover, on certain warm connotations which their visual forms had for English patrons. The Rustic Cottage, the Tudor Parsonage, the Castellated Mansion had all, supposedly, been autochthonous products of the insular past. On the other hand, even though the English of the eighteenth century had adopted as their own such foreign painters as Claude and Poussin, from whose canvases the Italian Villa mode principally derived both its forms and its prestige, that mode was certainly not English in its ultimate prototypes. It is readily understandable, therefore, that it was the Italian Villa, of all the established vehicles of the Picturesque, which had the greatest success in a Germany romantically mad about Italy. But such superb compositions as the Court Gardener’s House by Schinkel (Plate 14A) or Persius’s Friedenskirche at Potsdam (Plate 15), perhaps the highest international achievements in the Picturesque genre, owed only their basic concept, if even that, to England. Their elements were for the most part borrowed directly from Italian sources, and they were carefully composed according to a formal discipline not inconsonant with the standards of Romantic Classicism.
The Swiss Chalet, an even more alien mode in England than the Italian Villa, was a native one in Central Europe. Hence one finds Schinkel first, and then his pupils, exploiting it with considerable virtuosity as the _Tirolerhäuschen_. Indeed, the particular form of wooden fretwork which came to be called ‘gingerbread’ in English, one of the favourite forms of later Picturesque detail everywhere in the western world from Russia to America, is more likely to be derived from Alpine chalets via nineteenth-century German than via nineteenth-century English intermediaries.
Romantic Classicism, being founded on the basic Western European heritage of Greece and Rome, could readily broaden its sources to include the Early Christian and the Italian Renaissance. But to men of the early nineteenth century the Gothic was not a universal European style as we are likely to consider it today; it was ‘Early English’ or ‘Altteutsch’ or (with far more justification) ‘l’architecture française’. The bigotry of the English Gothic Revival was so intense in the forties that Scott was denounced in _The Ecclesiologist_ for even entering a competition for a church in Germany since, if successful, his clients would be Lutherans not Anglicans. Such insular narrowness made the Catholic Pugin’s Gothic paradoxically intransmissible to Catholic countries abroad, quite as intransmissible in effect as the Jacobethan. Scott won his Hamburg competition by modulating, to the horror of puristic compatriots, his usual fourteenth-century English Decorated towards its German equivalent, on the whole a grander style as he exploited it there.
Continental nationalism, like Continental Neo-Catholicism outside France,[145] favoured earlier—or later—modes than the Gothic, down at least to the mid century. The _Rundbogenstil_, moreover, despite the fact that the precedent for its detail was quite as often Italian as local, received warm support from nationalists in Germany; when exported, moreover, as to the Scandinavian countries and the United States, it was properly recognized as a German product (see Chapters 2 and 5). In Latin countries, and particularly in Italy, Gothic continued to seem alien; hence there are few examples of revived medieval design of any sort there or in Spain and Portugal before 1850. Jappelli’s highly exceptional work at Padua, mentioned earlier, is rich and delicate but not in the least plausible to Northern eyes in the way of Ehrhardt’s somewhat similar Italian Gothic houses in Dresden.
A European consensus of taste had been achieved by the late seventeenth century, despite the division of Europe into Catholic and Protestant countries, and this consensus was maintained, and even grew in strength, for another hundred years and more. When it finally broke down in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it necessarily broke down in different ways and to a different degree in each country. No new cultural synthesis was achieved, at least as regards architecture, before our own day. The resultant stylistic patchwork that the second half of the nineteenth century inherited was largely the product of the increasing nationalism of the two decades that preceded the mid century. This particularistic nationalism, rather than the concurrent increase in mere eclecticism of taste—for such eclecticism had existed to a greater or lesser degree since the mid eighteenth century—explains the major difference in the architectural climate around 1850 from that around 1800; at least it is some part of the explanation. To be Roman in architecture, to be Greek, even to be Italian, one need not cease to be English or French or German. But to be Tudor one must be English, as to be _François I_ one must be French, or so it seemed to most architects and their clients in the forties.
From this pattern of growing nationalistic divergence, this Late Romantic disintegration of the cultural unity that had remained strong and vital through the first few decades of the century, it is important now to turn to an aspect of architecture that derived from a different international absolute, that of science and technology. The English led in most technological developments affecting building methods from the mid eighteenth century on, both in the introduction of new materials and in the exploitation of new types of construction to serve new needs. But they led only because the Industrial Revolution, at once the result of certain major technological changes and the cause of innumerable others, had its origins and its early flowering in England. Before the first half of the nineteenth century was over, other countries to which the Industrial Revolution came relatively late were rapidly catching up. After the fifties technological leadership in building passed from Britain to the United States and to the Continent. Some consideration of the increased use of iron and glass between 1790 and 1855 may well conclude the first part of this book.
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## CHAPTER 7
BUILDING WITH IRON AND GLASS: 1790-1855
ARCHITECTURAL history has many aspects. Ideas and theories, points of view and programmes can have real importance even when, as with the Picturesque and the earlier stages of the Gothic Revival, most of the buildings which derive from them or follow their prescriptions are lacking in individual distinction. Volume of production is also significant; the disproportion between the previous chapter and the four that precede it expresses fairly accurately the difference in the amount of building in the first half of the century belonging, at least by a broad definition, to the rubric of Romantic Classicism and the very much smaller amount—up to 1840 at least and outside England—that can be considered essentially Picturesque or programmatically Neo-Gothic. But the history of architecture must include the history of building as a craft or technic; sometimes the story of technical development is—or has appeared to posterity to be—more important than any other aspect of a
## particular historical development. Such has been the case until quite
lately with the rise of the Gothic in the twelfth century in France; it has also seemed true in varying degree for the nineteenth century to many historians and critics.
The Industrial Revolution induced a parallel but gradual revolution in building methods; even today, after two hundred years, the potentialities of that revolution have not been fully actualized. The technical story, particularly as it concerns the structural use of ferrous metals, first cast iron,[146] next wrought iron, and then steel, begins well before 1800. There has already been occasion to mention, in passing, technical innovations in various edifices where those innovations had a determinant effect on the total architectural result. But it is worth while, partly for the intrinsic interest of the subject,
## partly as preparation for subsequent technical developments of great
importance later in the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, to go back to the beginning and to recount sequentially the episodes in the rise of iron as a prime building material, as also to touch at least on the concurrent use of other ‘fireproof’ materials and the vastly increased exploitation of glass. This sequence of episodes reaches a real culmination in the fifties with the construction of a considerable number of ‘Crystal Palaces’, first in London and then all over the western world, edifices that were almost entirely of iron and glass.
A marked change in the situation came around 1855. For one thing, it was in that year that Sir Henry Bessemer invented a new method of making steel in quantity so that it could be profitably used for large building components. However, the full architectural possibilities of the use of structural steel were hardly grasped before the nineties. There was also in the fifties an increasingly general realization that unprotected iron was not as fire-resistant[147] as had hitherto been fondly supposed. Then, too—and perhaps most significantly—a sharp shift in taste at this time, leading to a predominant preference for the massively plastic in architecture, made unfashionable both the delicate membering suitable to iron and the smooth transparent surfaces provided by large areas of glass (see Chapters 8-11).
The technical development of the use of ferrous metals in building continued unbroken beyond the fifties; indeed, most of the quantitative records of the first half of the century, in the way of distances spanned and volumes enclosed, were progressively exceeded in the sixties, seventies, and eighties (see Chapter 16). From the point of view of architecture, however, the story passes more or less out of sight for a generation. To a certain extent metal literally ‘went underground’ as new types of foundations were evolved for taller and heavier buildings; but more generally metal structure was masked with stone or brick, as was first proposed in the forties in England, to provide protection against the adverse effects of extreme heat in urban fires (see Chapter 14). When the use of exposed metal and glass became significant again in the nineties that use was to be a major constituent of general architectural development as it has remained ever since (see Chapters 16, 22, 23, and 25). But down to the 1850s the rise of iron and glass is best considered as a separate story.
This story is not confined to the most advanced countries. The tall, slim columns used by Wren in 1706 to support the galleries in the old House of Commons _seem_ to have been of iron[148]; but short ones, introduced in 1752, can still be seen in the kitchen of the Monastery of Alcobaça in Portugal, and a very early use of iron beams was in the Marble Palace at Petersburg built by Antonio Rinaldi (1709-94) in 1768-72. The main line of development, however, was undoubtedly English, French, and American. Definitely dated 1770-2 were the iron members supporting the galleries in St Anne’s, Liverpool.
A much more notable and better publicized use of iron followed shortly after this when metal replaced masonry for the entire central structure of the Coalbrookdale Bridge in Shropshire. This was begun in 1777 by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (?-1777) with the active co-operation of Abraham Darby III, an important local ironmaster.[149] Darby’s Coalbrookdale Foundry cast the iron elements that were needed and the bridge was completed in 1779. Pritchard was an architect, and architects played a more important part in the story of the early development of iron construction than is generally realized. Soon, however, the importance of special problems of statics to which such construction gave rise and, above all, the need to measure accurately the strength of various components required the expert assistance of civil engineers, and often the engineers came to build on their own without the collaboration of architects.
At this point the story crosses the channel to France.[150] There Soufflot, the very technically minded architect of the Paris Panthéon—one of the edifices with an account of which this book began—assisted by his pupil Brébion, provided in 1779-81 an iron roof over the stair-hall[151] that he built to lead up to the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. In the next few years two rather obscure French architects, Ango and Eustache Saint-Fart (1746-1822), were occupied, respectively, with the introduction of iron framing and of ‘flower-pot’ (i.e. hollow-tile) elements supported on timber framework to produce more or less fireproof types of floors. Over the years 1786-90 the great French theatre architect J.-V. Louis (1731-1800), horrified by the recurrent fires at the Palais Royal, combined these two ideas when he designed the roof of the new Théâtre Français in Paris.
Now the main line of advance returns to England. In 1792-4 Soane avoided timber altogether in the fireproof vaults of his Consols Office at the Bank of England, using nothing but specially made earthenware pots; he also covered the twenty-foot oculus in the central vault with a lantern of iron and glass (Plate 3). The architectural qualities of this interior have already been stressed. Even more important for later architecture, however, although effectively invisible, had been the adoption just before this of French principles in a calico mill at Derby and the West Mill at Belper, both begun in 1792. These were planned and carried out by the millowner-engineer William Strutt (1756-1830) who used specially designed iron stanchions throughout carrying timber beams and, in the top storey only, ‘flower-pot’ vaults between the beams such as Saint-Fart had first introduced, but flat brick vaults or ‘jack-arches’ elsewhere.
Other mills soon followed. The first to have iron beams as well as stanchions seems to be the Benyons, Marshall & Bage flax spinning mill in St Michael’s Street, Shrewsbury. This was built in 1796-7 from the designs of Charles Bage (1752-1822) a friend and correspondent of Strutt. The much-publicized Salford Twist Company’s cotton mill at Salford of 1799-1801, designed and built by Boulton & Watt of steam-engine fame—they knew Bage’s mill since they had installed his steam-engine—was according to present evidence the second[152] to be erected with a complete internal skeleton of iron. By 1800, then, a system of fire-resistant construction using cast-iron stanchions and cast-iron beams, carrying what are sometimes called ‘jack-arches’ of brick, had been established in the world of English mill-building. By 1850 such construction was in use in Britain for almost all high-grade building. The system was significantly modified, however, after about 1845 by the substitution of rolled—that is wrought—iron beams, as proposed by Sir William Fairbairn (1789-1874),[153] since cast-iron ones had proved dangerously brittle.
It is not necessary here to do more than sketch out the steps by which the new iron skeleton structure became generally accepted. In 1802-11 James Wyatt introduced it in the Castellated New Palace that he built at Kew for George III, an edifice of which little is otherwise known since it was demolished in 1827-8. In line with this curious conjunction of technical and stylistic innovation, already noted in Schinkel’s somewhat later cast-iron Gothic monument of 1819-20 in Berlin, is Porden’s profuse use of iron for the Gothic traceries and balustrades at Eaton Hall[154] in Cheshire in 1804-12, as also by Hopper in the even more ornate Gothic Conservatory at Carlton House in London in 1811-12 (Plate 60B).
Isolated columns of iron appeared in many edifices from the 1790s on. The most notable extant examples, perhaps, are those in the kitchen and in several of the rooms that were added by Nash to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton in 1818-21 (Plate 58A). His ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 there are entirely of decorative pierced ironwork and the framing of his big onion dome is also of metal, although of course invisible. From the early use of iron columns for gallery supports in churches, increasingly general by the early 1800s, there shortly developed the aspiration to exploit iron still more extensively in such edifices. In three churches that Rickman and the ironmaster John Cragg built in Liverpool, St George’s, Everton, and St Michael’s, Toxteth Road, both begun in 1813, and St Philip’s, Hardman Street, completed in 1816, the entire internal structure is of iron. At St Michael’s the new material is not restricted to the interior but appears on the outside as well. Rickman’s increasing archaeological erudition and that of his contemporaries soon limited the use of iron in Gothic churches, however; by Pugin and the Camdenians it was rigidly proscribed. Structural elements of iron in churches of any architectural pretension became acceptable again only in the fifties (see Chapter 10).
Turning to what long remained the most notable field of metal construction, bridge building,[155] one finds a rapid increase in the numbers and the spans of English metal bridges from the mid 1790s on. In Shropshire, where the first iron bridge and the first all-iron-framed factory had been built, one of the greatest English engineers, Thomas Telford (1757-1834),[156] built the Buildwas Bridge with a span of 130 feet in 1795-6. At the same time the much longer and handsomer metal arch of the Sunderland Bridge in County Durham was rising to the designs of Rowland Burdon. He was assisted, it appears, by certain ideas supplied by Thomas Paine (1737-1809), better known for his political writings than as a technician, who had had some association with bridge-building in America. Burdon was a Member of Parliament and neither an architect nor an engineer. Telford, however, though not professionally trained as an architect, had worked for Sir William Chambers as a journeyman-mason on Somerset House in his youth; throughout his career he built masonry toll-houses and even, on occasion, modest churches in a competent if rudimentary Romantic Classical vein.
In connexion with his work on the Bridgewater Canal and on the road system of the Scottish Highlands, Telford designed and built innumerable bridges, the majority of them of stone. But some of his later iron bridges, more skilfully devised technically and more graceful visually than the Buildwas Bridge, deserve mention here. On the Waterloo Bridge of 1815 at Bettws-y-Coed in Wales he used an openwork inscriptional band and floral badges rather than architectural detail to give elegance and even richness to a modest cast-iron arch. A longer and simpler bridge of similar design but unknown authorship built in 1816 still spans the Liffey in Dublin.
The same year as the Waterloo Bridge, at Craigellachie, amid austere Scottish mountains, Telford bridged the Spey with a plain latticed iron arch. But it is worth noting that he elaborated the masonry abutments as battlemented towers in a wholly Picturesque way (Plate 59). For the Menai Bridge, built in 1819-24 between North Wales and Anglesey, Telford used a new principle in metal construction, suspending his roadbed from metal chains (Plate 58B). This was a principle of great antiquity already exploited with success in America.[157] Telford’s masonry towers at the Menai Bridge are of extremely elegant Romantic Classical design, tapered like Egyptian pylons and pierced with delicate arches. In the twin bridge to this at Conway, also in North Wales, the close proximity of the Edwardian castle led him to provide Castellated towers. In a still later arched bridge at Tewkesbury of 1826 the latticed metalwork itself has the cuspings of Gothic tracery.
The Menai Bridge remains the longest of its type in the British Isles. I. K. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, for which he won the competition in 1829, but which was begun only in 1837, has already been mentioned because of the Egyptian detailing proposed for the piers. This bridge was finally completed only in 1864 by W. H. Barlow (1812-92) using the materials of Brunel’s earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London. Of early arched metal bridges there are very many and by all the leading English engineers of the first half of the century: John Rennie (1761-1821), I. K. Brunel (1806-59), George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59), as well as Telford. The new railways, from the early thirties on, required even more bridges than the canals constructed by the previous generation.
In France Napoleon’s engineers built two arched iron bridges across the Seine. L.-A. de Cessart (1719-1806) designed before 1800 and Delon in 1801-3 executed the Pont des Arts, the first French bridge of iron, and Lamandé completed the Pont du Jardin du Roi in 1806.[158] Neither is comparable in span or in logic of design to the earlier English examples, thus reversing the pre-eminence which the French had held as bridge-builders so long as masonry was used. The much later Pont du Carrousel in Paris, built by A.-R. Polonceau (1788-1847) in 1834-6, was considerably superior to these Napoleonic examples, though hardly epoch-making. But already in 1824, just as Telford’s Menai Bridge was completed, Marc Séguin (1786-1875) was spanning the Rhône near Tournon with a suspension bridge hung on wire ropes[159] instead of chains.
From the early forties Séguin’s cable principle was developed much further in America in bridges at Wheeling, W. Va., Pittsburgh, Penna., and Cincinnati, Ohio, by the German immigrant John A. Roebling (1806-69). Those at Wheeling[160] and Cincinnati are still in use. The more dramatically sited Niagara Falls Bridge of 1852, which attracted world-wide attention when it was new, is no longer extant (Plate 60A); its success, however, led to Roebling’s being commissioned to build the famous Brooklyn Bridge[161] in New York. Begun by him in 1869 and completed by his son Washington A. Roebling (1837-1926) in 1883, this is still one of the principal sights of New York. It is sad to record that work in the caissons sunk for the foundations of the piers killed the designer.
Bridges are at the edge of the realm of architecture. Fairly early, moreover, they came almost entirely under the control of men without architectural training or standards—Roebling, for example, was such a one. Ordinary buildings, all of iron or with much use of iron, are more significant as the century proceeds, both in France and in England. Hopper’s Carlton House Conservatory (Plate 60B) has been mentioned. In 1809 the architect F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818), a pupil of Brongniart, replaced the domed wooden roof of the Halle au Blé in Paris, added in 1782 by J.-G. Legrand (1743-1807) and J. Molinos (1743-1831), with one of metal. The Marché de la Madeleine, designed by M.-G. Veugny (1785-1850) possibly as early as 1824 but not built until 1835-8, was apparently all of metal internally; its masonry exterior, however, was quite conventional. Already in 1835, in the fish pavilion which formed part of his rather Durandesque Hungerford Market in London, Charles Fowler had outstripped this in the direct and elegant use of light metal components, here with no surrounding shell of masonry at all.
Some further Continental examples of the use of iron in the late twenties and thirties deserve mention at this point. Alavoine—at whose suggestion Duc’s Bastille Column, begun in 1831, was made of metal, though the metal is bronze not iron—designed in 1823 a flèche 432 feet tall to rise over the crossing of Rouen Cathedral in the form of an openwork cage of iron. Begun in 1827 and interrupted in 1848, this was finally completed by the younger Barthélémy (Eugène, 1841-98) and L.-F. Desmarest (1814-?) in 1877. In 1829-31 Fontaine roofed the Galeried’Orléans, which he built across the garden of the Palais Royal, with iron and glass. This structure, now destroyed, was more prominent and also much wider than most of the many _passages_ and _galeries_[162] with glass roofs that had been built in Paris and elsewhere in France from the 1770s on. The most impressive extant French example is the Passage Pommeraye in Nantes, built by Durand-Gasselin and J.-B. Buron (?-1881) in 1843; in this the circulation moves upwards from one end to the other through three storey-levels. A modest Milanese example of 1831, the Galleria de Cristoforis by Andrea Pizzala (?-1862), might be mentioned here also, as it was the local prototype for the greatest of all these characteristic nineteenth-century urban features, Mengoni’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele begun in the sixties (Plate 75B). Of the many early nineteenth-century ones that remain in other European cities, the Galerie Saint-Hubert in Brussels, built by J.-P. Cluysenaer (1811-80), a pupil of Suys, in 1847, is one of the largest and best maintained. Warren’s Providence Arcade in Providence, R.I., has been mentioned earlier.
Related to the _galeries_, and sometimes also so-called, were the large Parisian enterprises of this period that were really early department stores. The Bazar de l’Industrie, built by Paul Lelong (1799-1846) in 1830, had a large glass-roofed and iron-galleried court of the sort that was to be continued in Parisian department stores down into the present century (see Chapter 16). Even larger and bolder were the similar courts in the department store known as the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie, built by Grisart and Froehlicher in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in 1838, which has already been mentioned for its richly arcaded Renaissance façades (Plate 62A). Shop-fronts of iron were also frequent in Paris[163] by this time. Thus in France, as in England and America, the use of iron was closely associated with structures for business use, but more usually with sales emporia than with office buildings (see Chapter 14). Such, however, were not unknown in England and America, though they were generally less extensive and made less use of glass-roofed courts.
Glass held in wooden frames had for some time been extensively employed for greenhouses. How early iron began to be substituted for wood is not clear, and not perhaps of much consequence.[164] Hopper’s ornately Gothic Conservatory of iron and glass at Carlton House in London, demolished in the twenties, has been mentioned several times already (Plate 60B). In 1833, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75) built a very large and handsome iron greenhouse without any stylistic decoration. The structure of the square pavilions was as transparent and rectilinear as the interior framework of Veugny’s slightly later market seems to have been, and the ranges between were covered, just as so many wooden greenhouses had been, with transparent roofs rising in two quadrants. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire the Great Conservatory was built in 1836-40 by the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65), possibly with some minor assistance from Decimus Burton. This quite outclassed the largest earlier greenhouse, the Anthaeum at Brighton, designed in 1825 and built in 1832-3 for the horticulturist Henry Phillips, with a dome of iron and glass 160 feet in diameter which collapsed before it was quite completed. The Chatsworth conservatory was a still larger rectangle, 227 feet by 123 feet, with the exterior rising in a double cusp like the side ranges of Rohault’s Paris greenhouse—or, for that matter, like the section of the Anthaeum. The columns and beams here were of iron, but the great arched principals of the ‘nave’ and the ‘aisles’ were of laminated wood and four-foot long panes of glass were held in wooden sashes arranged in a ridge-and-furrow pattern. A particular invention of Paxton’s, whose name was given to such roofs, was the hollowing out of the wooden members at the base of the furrows to serve as gutters.
Decimus Burton’s still extant Palm Stove at Kew, carried out by the contracting engineer Richard Turner of Dublin in 1845-7, with rounded ends and a higher central area, is more bubble-like than Paxton’s because of the absence of ridges and furrows on its continuously glazed surface (Plate 67A). But both these great greenhouses were among the most striking monuments of their Early Victorian day and were never exceeded later in elegance though often in size. French rivals, long since destroyed, were the Jardins d’Hiver in Lyons and Paris of 1841 and 1847 by Hector Horeau (1801-72), the latter a rectangle 300 by 180 feet and 60 feet tall.
With the thirties begins the story of a new building type, the railway station,[165] in whose sheds the mid century was to realize some of the largest and finest examples ever of ‘ferrovitreous’, or iron-and-glass, construction. The structures utilizing iron thus far mentioned have been of two sorts, some, such as bridges, markets, greenhouses, etc., with only subsidiary masonry elements, if any at all; others, examples of mixed construction with metal providing only the internal skeleton or the roof. Railway stations were generally—and before the fifties always—examples of mixed construction, but of a rather special sort. The iron and glass portions, that is the sheds, and the masonry portions are likely to be merely juxtaposed, not truly integrated. Such a masonry frontispiece as Hardwick’s Euston Arch in London of 1835-7 had no connexion at all with the functional elements of the station behind—here by Robert Stephenson—although Euston was an extreme case. But a happy co-ordination of the masonry and the iron-and-glass portions of stations was rarely achieved anywhere.
Of the earliest railway station, that at Crown Street in Liverpool of 1830, nothing remains; it was in any case a very modest structure.[166] Of its successors at Lime Street the present station is the fourth on the site. Even the ‘Arch’ at Euston, the next major station to be built, is now gone, despite the strenuous efforts of the Victorian Society and others in Britain and overseas to save this symbolic portal to the Victorian Age. However, the first station at Temple Meads in Bristol, which was built by Brunel in 1839-40, is physically intact, though supplanted in present-day use by a larger and later one. Castellated as regards the masonry block in front, the shed here is equally medievalizing; for its roof is of timber, not of iron, and based on the fourteenth-century hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall in London, whose width it exceeds by a few feet only.
Of the once far finer Trijunct station at Derby, built in 1839-41, the last portions of Francis Thompson’s brick screen have finally been destroyed; the three original sheds provided by Robert Stephenson, with Thompson’s collaboration on the detailing, were each 56 feet wide in comparison to the 40-foot width of Stephenson’s earlier ones at Euston (Plate 62B). The tie-beam roof had much of the graceful directness and linear elegance of Rohault’s greenhouse or Veugny’s market.
More and more, the use of iron was being generally accepted as a technical necessity in the forties. At Buckingham Palace Blore, in adapting one of Nash’s side pavilions as a chapel for Queen Victoria in 1842-3, used visible iron supports just as Nash had done so long before in the interiors of the Brighton Pavilion for her uncle. Yet generally the use of iron in important masonry structures in the thirties and the early forties was quite invisible, being confined to the floors and the substructure of the roofs. In 1837-9 C.-J. Baron (1783-1855) and Nicolas Martin (1809-?), for example, provided a complete iron roof above the vaults of Chartres Cathedral, a work of very considerable scale and technical elaboration that provided the immediate prototype for the iron roof of Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, designed in 1840 and begun in 1846. At the Houses of Parliament, the actual construction of which started only in 1840, Barry capped the whole with iron roofs—the external iron plates are actually visible, of course, but the fact of their being of iron is rarely recognized. Fireproof floors built according to various French and English patent systems were increasingly thought necessary in all high-grade construction. Queen Victoria’s Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, constructed without the aid of an architect by the builder Thomas Cubitt, had them throughout, as did many other well-built country houses of the forties, at least in the passages and stair-halls.
Here and there in the commercial buildings of this decade the iron skeleton used inside came through to the exterior, as it had on one of Rickman’s Liverpool churches a generation earlier. A small office building at No. 50 Watling Street in London, with visible iron supports and lintels in the upper storeys but with brick corner piers and brick spandrels, was a case in point, probably dating from early in the decade. By 1844 Fairbairn was recommending in a report that fireproof construction should be used in all warehouses. Increasingly this was done in Lancashire and, before long, elsewhere; Fairbairn himself had introduced it ten years earlier in the Jevons Warehouse on the New Quay in Manchester.
Closely associated with the development of iron construction is the development of prefabrication; indeed, the parts of an elaborate iron edifice, such as a bridge or a greenhouse, are necessarily prefabricated and merely assembled at the site. From the early forties, and perhaps even before that, lighthouses were frequently erected in ironmasters’ yards in Britain, disassembled, shipped to Bermuda or the Barbadoes, and then reassembled. In 1843 John Walker of London provided a prefabricated palace for an African king and, by the end of the decade, prefabricated warehouses and dwellings of iron were being supplied to gold-diggers in California and emigrants to Australia in very considerable quantity. A look at the prefabricated houses of the 1940s will perhaps explain why almost none of these ancestors of a century earlier seems to have survived, at least in recognizable form. None the less, the advance of prefabrication remains a notable technical—though hardly architectural—achievement of the 1840s and 1850s.
To the mid and late forties belong several splendid examples of mixed construction in various countries that not only represent technical feats of a high order but are also fully architectural in character. Some are by architects, others by teams of architects and engineers working in close collaboration. In building the Britannia Bridge,[167] which crosses the Menai Strait near Telford’s Menai Bridge, the Derby Trijunct team of Stephenson and Thompson in 1845-50 utilized with great success the rectangular tubes built up of wrought-iron plates that Fairbairn, the consulting engineer, recommended (Plate 61). The Holyhead railway line still passes through these tubes. The masonry entrances and the tall towers, taller than they need have been because of Stephenson’s original intention to use suspensory members for additional support to his rigid tubes, were superbly detailed by Thompson. Contemporaries called them Egyptian, but the design has already been noted as fully consonant with Romantic Classicism though quite devoid of Grecian elements. At least the sculptor John Thomas’s pairs of gigantic lions at the entrances are Nubian!
At the London Coal Exchange[168] built in 1846-9 in Lower Thames Street, the City Corporation’s architect Bunning arrived at no such complete co-ordination of masonry and metallic design as did Stephenson and Thompson on the Britannia Bridge. The masonry exterior consists of two _palazzo_ blocks set at a fairly sharp angle to one another and loosely linked by a very Picturesque round tower, free-standing in its upper stages. Behind all this the dome of the interior court can barely be glimpsed. Inside this court, however, no masonry at all is visible; one sees only an elegant cage of iron elements rising to the glazed hemisphere above (Plate 63). The metal members are richly but appropriately detailed, and there is even more appropriate decorative painting by Sang in such panels as are not glazed.
In France two monuments of comparable distinction have already been mentioned, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of 1843-50 and Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est of 1847-52 (Plate 22B). Unfortunately the original shed of the latter, with arched principals of 100-foot span, was taken down when the station was doubled in size in the present century. Inside the library a central row of iron columns of somewhat Pompeian design—that is, resembling the slender, metallically scaled members seen in Pompeian wall paintings—still carries the two barrel roofs on delicately scrolled arches of openwork iron (Figure 14). Since the masonry walls with their ranges of window arches are visible all round, the effect produced is less novel than in the iron-and-glass court of the Coal Exchange; but Labrouste achieved much greater integration between interior and exterior (Plate 21). The Dianabad in Vienna, built by Karl Etzel in 1841-3, had a fine iron roof; the circular bracing of the iron principals, a frequent motif in large openwork members of cast iron at this time, was most appropriate to the _Rundbogenstil_ detailing of the masonry walls (Plate 66B).
Monferran’s cast-iron dome on St Isaac’s in Petersburg, completed about 1842, has already been mentioned (Plate 27A). This was rivalled before very long by several American examples,[169] most notably Walter’s enormous dome, built in 1855-65, above the Capitol in Washington (Plate 82A). Baroque in silhouette and rather Baroque in detail also, this may have encouraged—along with the rising taste for elaborately plastic effects of which it was itself a notable expression—the increasingly common practice of casting the exposed iron elements of American commercial façades in the form of rich Corinthian columns and heavily moulded arches.
Around 1850 cast-iron architecture was coming to its climax everywhere. James Bogardus (1800-74), a manufacturer of iron grinding machinery, not an architect or engineer, began to erect in Center Street in New York in 1848 a four-storeyed urban structure for his own use as a factory with an exterior consisting only of cast-iron piers and lintels. This was one of the earliest[170] and most highly publicized of the cast-iron fronts which Bogardus and various other ironmasters in New York and elsewhere made ubiquitous in the principal American cities before and after the Civil War. But his earliest completed iron front was that of the five-storey chemist shop of John Milhau at 183 Broadway erected within the year 1848. An extant work by Bogardus, the range of four-storey stores built for Edward H. Laing at the north-west corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New York, was begun in 1849 and finished within two months, well before his own building was completed. These early cast-iron fronts are very logical and expressive in the way the attenuated Grecian Doric columns and flat entablatures are used to form an external frame; but the Laing stores have lost most of the applied ornament that appealed so much to mid-century taste (Plate 67B). Later façades are richer and heavier, generally with Renaissance or Baroque arcading, as has just been noted. For the Harper’s Building in New York built in 1854, which incorporated the first American rolled-iron beams, the architect John B. Corlies provided a design of ornate Late Renaissance character. Curiously enough, in executing this building Bogardus used for the upper four storeys the same castings as in the Sun Building that he had erected in 1850-1 in Baltimore to the designs of R. G. Hatfield (1815-79). To the typical cast-iron fronts of New York,[171] of which the most extensive and one of the simplest was that of the old Stewart Department Store on Broadway begun in 1859 by John W. Kellum (1807-71), vacated several years ago by Wanamakers and burned during demolition in 1956, one may well prefer the delicacy of a Glasgow example, the Jamaica Street Warehouse[172] of 1855-6, or a remote Far Western department store like the Z.C.M.I. of 1868 in Salt Lake City, rivalling amid the Rocky Mountains those of Paris. Neither of these is the work of architects.
Great Britain and Europe saw few all-iron façades. This was in large part because the danger of their collapse when exposed to the extreme heat of urban conflagrations, a danger made real to Americans only by the fires of the seventies in Boston and Chicago, was appreciated very early. Yet it was not in America but in Britain that the greatest masterpieces of iron construction of the fifties were built. The succeeding turn of the tide against the visible use of iron also had its origins in Britain, not in America where the material had early become so tediously ubiquitous.
In 1850 Paxton was completing at Chatsworth a relatively small new greenhouse to protect the _Victoria regia_, a giant water-lily imported from Africa by the Duke of Devonshire. With its arcaded walls of iron and glass and its flat ridge-and-furrow roof, this seemed to Paxton to provide a suitable paradigm for the vast structure[173] needed by May 1851 to house the Great Exhibition, the first international exposition, which was scheduled to open at that time. The Commissioners of the Exhibition had held an international competition that produced several extremely interesting ferrovitreous projects, notably an Irish one by Turner, Burton’s collaborator at Kew, and a French one by Hector Horeau. Rightly or wrongly, all of them were rejected, and the Commissioners’ own Building Committee, including the chief architectural and engineering talents of the age, then produced a project of their own. Reputedly in large part the work of the engineer Brunel and the architect T. L. Donaldson (1795-1885), this manifestly impractical scheme, a sort of _Rundbogenstil_ super-railway-station intended to be built of brick—the project actually provided the inspiration for Herholdt’s Central Station in Copenhagen of 1863-4, or so it would appear—was already out for bids when Paxton presented in July 1850 his own scheme based on the Chatsworth Lily House. Published in the _Illustrated London News_ and offered with a low alternative bid by the contractors Fox & Henderson, this was accepted and—with much significant modification—erected in the incredibly short space of nine months.
[Illustration:
Figure 14. H.-P.-F. Labrouste: Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, (1839), 1843-50, section ]
Inside this vast structure, with its tall central nave, galleried aisles, and arched transept, Paxton and his engineer associates, Sir Charles Fox (1810-74) and his partner Henderson (to the two of whom a considerable part of the credit must go), created unwittingly a new sort of architectural space. So large as in effect to be boundless, this space was defined only by the three-dimensional grid of co-ordinates which the regularly spaced iron stanchions and girders provided (Plate 64). These elements, designed for mass-production, and also in such a way that they could be disassembled as readily as they were assembled, had a new sort of mechanical elegance towards which the design of metal components had hitherto been moving only very gradually. The character of the casting process made it only too easy to impose on cast-iron elements all sorts of more or less inappropriate decorative treatments from Gothic to Baroque; only rarely had stylistic detail been successfully reinterpreted, as by Bunning in the Coal Exchange, in terms of the fat arrises and broad radii that are suitable to the material and to the particular method of its production. Even at the Crystal Palace a few touches of ornament provided by Owen Jones (1806-89), who was also responsible for the highly original and rather Turneresque colour treatment, suggest the gap—and, alas, it was in the 1850s a widening gap—between the technicians’ and the architects’ ambitions for iron.
Contemporaries had no words for what the Crystal Palace offered. Even today, when the aesthetic possibilities of the new sort of space it contained as well as the technical advantages of its method of assembly from mass-produced elements have been more generally explored, it is not easy to describe Paxton’s and Fox & Henderson’s achievement despite the remarkably complete documentation that exists. The space inside the tall transept (an afterthought designed to allow the saving of a great elm), arched on laminated wooden principals, was more readily appreciated in its day than that in the long nave, because it was more familiar. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Crystal Palace was disassembled and rebuilt in 1852-4 at Sydenham, where it lasted down to its destruction—ironically by fire—in 1936, the entire nave was arched although with principals of openwork metal rather than of laminated wood.
The Crystal Palace’s structural vocabulary—though not, alas, the quality of its space—can be appreciated in the Midland Station at Oxford, built by Fox & Henderson with identical elements in 1852. There one can still see how the new methods enforced a modular regularity more rigid than that of Romantic Classicism and also encouraged a tenuity of material quite unknown to the Neo-Gothic as executed in masonry. Thus the visual result ran doubly counter to the rising fashions in architecture in the fifties (see Chapters 9 and 10). Within five years of the moment when the Crystal Palace was greeted with such general—though never universal—acclaim the climactic moment of the early Iron Age was already over. In those few years, however, Crystal Palaces rose in many other major cities. The finest was perhaps that built in Dublin in 1852-4 by Sir John Benson (1812-74) with its bubble-like rounded ends; the least successful that in New York[174] of 1853 by G. J. B. Carstensen (1812-57), the founder of the Tivoli in Copenhagen, and Charles Gildemeister (1820-69). The prompt destruction of this last by fire was a fearful early warning of the limitations of iron construction unsheathed by masonry. The burning of Voit’s Glaspalast of 1854 in Munich, like that of the Sydenham Palace, occurred in our own day, as also the similar end of the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam, which was built by Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75) in 1856.
The prestige of iron construction was never higher than in the early fifties. For Balmoral Castle, not yet rebuilt in its final form, the Prince Consort ordered in 1851 a prefabricated iron ballroom by E. T. Bellhouse of Manchester modelled on the houses for emigrants to Australia by Bellhouse that the Prince had seen at the Great Exhibition. In the Record Office in London, begun by Pennethorne in this same year, even more iron was used for the internal grid of separate storerooms and for the window-sash than in the great mill that Lockwood & Mawson built for Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1854. The internal structure of this last represented another major contribution by Fairbairn. Characteristically, however, the detailing of the external masonry of the Record Office is more or less Tudor, if rather crude and over-scaled, while that of the Saltaire mill is picturesquely Italianate.
In two new London railway stations, both happily extant, these years produced the chief rivals to the Crystal Palace. At King’s Cross, planned by the architect Lewis Cubitt in 1850 and built in 1851-2, the two great arched sheds somewhat resembled technically the transept of the original Crystal Palace, their principals having been of laminated wood. These had eventually to be replaced in 1869-70 with the present steel principals which are, however, still held by Cubitt’s original cast-iron shoes. The masonry block of the station on the left, or departure, side is undistinguished but fairly inconspicuous. The great glory of the station is the front, with its two enormous stock-brick arches that close the ends of the sheds towards the Euston Road (Plate 66A). The idea had been Duquesney’s at the Gare de l’Est, but here there is no irrelevant Renaissance detail, only grand scale and clear expression of the arched spaces behind.
Paddington Station, built in 1852-4, has no such grand exterior, being masked at the southern end by the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. The engineer Brunel here called in the architect M. D. Wyatt (1820-77) as collaborator, and for the metal members of the shed Wyatt devised ornamentation which—as Brunel specifically requested—is both novel and suited to the materials (Plate 65). There is a slightly Saracenic flavour both to the stalagmitic modelling of the great stanchions and to the wrought elements of tracery that fill the lunettes at the ends and even run along the sides of the great elliptically-arched principals. But the detailing of these, if unnecessarily elaborate, is certainly quite original and not inappropriate to the materials or to the complex spatial effects of the three great parallel sheds crossed by two equally tall transepts. The cool spirit of Cubitt’s station recalls that of earlier Romantic Classicism; the richer forms of Paddington are related to the rising ‘High’ styles of the third quarter of the century, of whose initiation the Great Western Hotel was one of the earliest indications (see Chapter 8).
By 1853 the craze for iron construction was so great that the Ecclesiological Society, forgetting their Puginian principles—Pugin had died the previous year, but not before issuing a severe critique of the metal-and-glass construction of the Crystal Palace—commissioned their favourite and most ‘correct’ architect, Carpenter, to design for them an iron church. It was not Carpenter’s death two years later but the refusal of the English bishops to consecrate prefabricated structures for permanent use that brought to nothing this interesting project along the lines of Rickman’s and Cragg’s Liverpool churches of forty years earlier. The general flood of prefabrication, now producing all sorts of structures for the Antipodes and other remote areas that still lacked their own building industries, slowed down in 1854, when the demands of the War Office for barracks (on account of the Crimean War) deflected prefabricators from civil production.
In that year, however, Sydney Smirke began one of the last major monuments of cast iron in England, the domed Reading Room in the court of his brother’s British Museum. Awkward in proportion and encased in stacks, this is not to be compared in distinction of design with the Reading Room that Henri Labrouste added to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1862-8[175] (Plate 69). That superb interior, with its many light domes of terracotta carried on the slenderest of metal columns and arches, is a great advance over his earlier Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Figure 14). The Reading Room in Paris has no proper exterior, however, any more than does that in London, for it is incorporated in a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures that Labrouste adapted and enlarged (see Chapter 8). Even more striking are Labrouste’s stacks, visible from the Reading Room through a great glass wall, for in them the entire spatial volume is articulated by vertical and horizontal metal elements in a fashion somewhat like the interior of the Crystal Palace. But in the sixties such things were exceptional.
In 1853-8 L.-P. Baltard’s son Victor (1805-74) built the Central Markets[176] of Paris with the assistance of F.-E. Callet (1791-1854) in a mode much less elegant but still franker, exposing his metal structure outside as well as in, at Napoleon III’s personal insistence. Saint-Eugène, an almost completely iron-built church of Gothic design, was erected in Paris in 1854-5 by L.-A. Boileau (1812-96).[177] Boileau’s Saint-Paul at Montluçon, Allier, completed in 1863, is a second French example of a cast-iron church, and he made designs for several others. His Notre-Dame-de-France off Leicester Square in London, a modest church of 1868, has been completely rebuilt since the last war.
However, to house the first Paris international exhibition, that of 1855, F.-A. Cendrier (1803-92) and J.-M.-V. Viel (1796-1863), both pupils of Vaudoyer and Lebas, provided in 1853-4 not another Crystal Palace, such as Dublin, New York, Copenhagen, Munich, Amsterdam, and Breslau, among other cities, had built or were building, but an example of mixed construction. The great iron-and-glass arched interiors were all but completely masked externally by a very conventional masonry shell. It was not until the Paris Exposition of 1878 that iron and glass were frankly exposed and decoratively treated on the exterior of such a structure in France (see Chapter 16). The curve of enthusiasm for iron was evidently taking a downward dip; in Britain the Age of Cast Iron came to an end even more suddenly and much more dramatically than in France.
In 1855 Sir Henry Cole, the prime mover of the Great Exhibition of 1851, had to provide on the estate at Brompton, in the part of London now called South Kensington that the Commissioners had just acquired from the proceeds of the Exhibition, temporary housing for the collections that were being formed by the Government’s Department of Practical Art. Having to build in great haste and in war-time, it is perhaps not surprising that Cole employed, properly speaking, neither an architect nor an engineer, but allowed the Edinburgh contracting firm of C. D. Young & Son to design as well as erect the structure subject to some nominal control from the engineer Sir William Cubitt (1785-1861). It was certainly a surprising product of a Government agency devoted to raising the standard of ‘art-manufactures’! Although we can today appreciate some of the practical virtues of this edifice as a Museum of Science and Art, it must be admitted that it was inferior even to the general contemporary run of prefabricated structures to which it belongs technically. Derisively christened the ‘Brompton Boilers’ by George Godwin (1815-88), editor of the _Builder_, it roused a chorus of disapproval as loud if not as widespread as the Crystal Palace had done of approval five years before.
After this time British and Continental interest in iron construction waned rapidly; for fifteen years or so exposed iron was chiefly exploited in the commercial façades of the United States, themselves now more and more masonry-like in scale and in detailing, as has been noted. Structural steel began to be used here and there from the early sixties, but the serious beginnings of the Age of Steel lay a quarter of a century ahead (see Chapter 14).
At least in England, its principal home, the Age of Cast Iron, so paradoxically interrelated with the Gothic Revival in its very early stages, came to an end in considerable part because of the triumph of the Gothic Revival around 1850 (see Chapter 10). For several decades the characteristic new architectural developments were stylistic rather than technical. Yet it was the later theories—not the practice—of a French medievalist, Viollet-le-Duc, which played a great part in the renewed interest in the frank use of metal on the Continent in the eighties and nineties (see Chapter 16).
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