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 595 portion of tlie work. The subject Offices in London forms in itself an recent architectural history. The Office block was finished in 1874 ; a

of the Government important chapter in Home and Foreign sumptuous, but weak

Fig. 16.—Oxford Town Hall, (flare.)

Fig. 17.—Northampton Institute. (Mountford.)

Fig. IS.—Cragside. (R. Norman Shaw, B.A.) and ill-planned building designed by Scott, invitd Minerva, in a style alien to his own predilections. In 1884 took place the great competition for the War and Admiralty Offices conjointly, won by a commonplace but admirably drawn design, presenting some good points in planning.

The building was to stand between Whitehall and St James’s Park, with a front both ways. The competition came to nothing, and the successful architects were eventually employed to build the new Admiralty as it now stands, a mean and commonplace building with no street frontage, in which economy was the main consideration, and totally discreditable to the greatest naval power in the world. In 1898-99 it was at last resolved to build a War Office and other Government Offices much needed, and an irregular site opposite the Horse Guards was selected for the War Office and one in Great George Street for the others. In this case there was no competition, but the Government selected two architects after inquiry as to their works (“classic” architecture being a sine qua non)', Mr Young for the War Office, and Mr Brydon for the Great George Street block. The War Office site is inadequate and totally unsymmetrieal, the boundary of the building being settled by the boundary of the street curb, and the inner courtyards will be of very mean proportions compared with the great courtyard of the Home and Foreign Office. Both architects have produced grandiose designs, but in regard to the War Office at least the Government have thrown away a great opportunity. Unfortunately, throwing away great opportunities has been the history of the Government buildings ever since the Houses of Parliament, a really fine building, was completed. There can only be further enumerated a few of the more important buildings carried out in England during the later years of the 19th century, and mention made of the general course which architecture has taken in regard to special classes of buildings. The Natural History Museum (Fig. 10, see Plate), completed in 1881 by Mr Alfred Waterhouse, may stand as a type of the taste for the employment of terra cotta, with all its dangerous facilities in ornamental detail, which that architect specially set the example of. Detail is certainly overdone here, but the building is strikingly original; a point not to be overlooked in these days of architectural copying. The Imperial Institute, the result of a competition among six selected architects, represents also a type of architecture which its architect, Mr Collcutt, may be said to have matured for himself, and which has been extensively imitated ; a refined variety of free classic, always quiet and delicate in detail, though perhaps rather wanting in architectonic force (Fig. 11). The next great architectural competition was that for the completion of the South Kensington Museum, the bare brick exterior of which, waiting for architectural completion, had long been a national disgrace. The competition produced some fine and striking designs, some of them perhaps more so than the selected one by Mr Aston Webb, whose fine plan, however, justified the selection. Another competition which excited general interest was that in 1894, for the rebuild-