Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/475

 extensively to Oxford without spoiling it; while his school buildings in different parts of the country have a refinement and domesticity of feeling which is the true note of school architecture. Among buildings of an educational class, the move in technical education has led to the erection of a good many large polytechnic and similar institutions, which in many cases have been well treated architecturally; the Northampton Institute at Clerkenwell (fig. 104), by Mountford, being perhaps one of the boldest and most effective of recent public buildings. In the building of hospitals and asylums much has been done, and great progress made in the direction of hygienic and practical planning and construction, but the tendency has been (perhaps rightly) towards making this practical efficiency the main consideration and reducing architectural treatment to the simplest character. St Thomas’s hospital at Lambeth exemplifies the treatment of hospital architecture at the commencement of the last quarter of the 19th century; the separate pavilion system had been already adopted on practical grounds, but the building is treated in a sumptuous architectural style, as if representing so many detached mansions—a treatment which would now be deprecated as an expenditure foreign to the main purpose of the building. One recent hospital, however, that at Birmingham, by W. Henman, combining architectural effect with the latest hygienic improvements, was the first large hospital in Great Britain in which the system of mechanical ventilation was completely and consistently carried out.

In theatre building there has been an immense improvement in regard to planning, ventilation and fireproof construction, but little to note in an architectural sense, since theatres in England are never designed by eminent architects, the financial and practical aspects being alone considered.

In domestic architecture the tendency has been to quit picturesque irregularity for a more formal and more dignified treatment. Such a house as Norman Shaw’s “Cragside,” built in the earlier part of our period (fig. 105), however its picturesque treatment may still be admired, would hardly be built now on a large scale; its architect himself has of late years shown a preference for a symmetrical and regular treatment of house architecture sometimes to the extent of making the mansion look too like a barrack. In street architecture, however, the tendency has been towards a more characteristic and more picturesque treatment; nor is there any class of building in which the improvement in English architecture has been more marked and more unquestionable. Many of the new residential streets in the west end of London present a really picturesque ensemble, and many shops and other commercial street buildings have been erected with admirable fronts from the designs of some of the best architects of the day. Norman Shaw’s building at the corner of St James’s Street and Pall Mall was one of the first, and is still one of the best examples of modern street architecture, though surpassed by the same architect’s more recent building opposite, at the south-west angle of St James’s Street—one of the finest and most monumental examples of street architecture in London. Among other examples may be cited T. E. Collcutt’s London City & Midland Bank in Ludgate Hill (fig. 106) and R. Blomfield’s narrow house-front in Buckingham Gate (fig. 107). The introduction of sculpture in street fronts is also beginning to receive attention; and a simple house-front recently erected in Margaret Street, London, from the design of Beresford Pite (fig. 108), is an excellent example of the use of sculpture in