Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/121

 ae gd —— Fer. 9, 1872. ©~ THE BUILDING NEWS. 105 THE BUILDING NEWS. —»—_ LONDON, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1872. CONTEMPORARY CHAPEL BUILDING. j MN HE « Congregational Year Book for 1872” and the ‘‘17th Annual Report of the Wesleyan Chapel Committee” may supply us now, as they have done before, with a general _ idea of the state of religious architecture out-

side the Established Church. There is no very marked change, no such general growth and transformation as one would wish to see, and there are few attempts to grapple with the main difficulties of church design for con- gregations. The essence of the problem, how to combine perfect convenience with noble and impressive‘design, is left untouched ; but we are thankful to say there is some slight abatement of vulgarity in detail. Mr. Tarring, indeed, goes on his way rejoicing, and shows in his “‘ Congregational Memorial Hall” that he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Mr. E. C. Robins, on the other hand, has taken a step in advance, at least in the matter of style. His church at Streatham Hill* is quiet and unobtrusive ; it has a useful and effective feature in the shape of an entrance loggia of four arches, and a tower which would have been tolerable enough if its belfry stage had been raised a few feet higher. Judging, however, from the printed descrip- tion, Mr. Robins has receded rather than ad- vanced as regards the interior of his church. He has been able to think of nothing better than the stereotyped plan of naye and aisles, and has added one more to those compromises which sacrifice the useful without gaining the beautiful. In other words, he has employed stone nave piers, big enough to cause con- siderable obstruction to sight, and yet a great deal too small to give any dignity or nobleness to his design. There is something marvellous about the scarcity of original ideas in this matter of church-planning. Architect follows architect, as sheep follows sheep through a gap, and with equal indifference to results. “Yes,” said in effect the writer of an article on church-planning which we met with a shorttime since—‘ Yes, it is true that we build all our churches on an inconvenient plan; it is true that their arrangement from first to last is absurdly unfitted for their purpose, but then we cannot really help it. We should like to change; we are burning to strike outsome- thing fresh ; we are consumed by the passion to be original, but our pastors and masters will not let us. Deliver us from the clergy- men and archeologists who are set over us, and we will astonish the world directly.” Well, in cases like the present, the deliverance is complete. There are neither clergymen nor archzeologists to deal with ; not a soul on the committee cares anything about prece- dent, or, in all probability, so much as knows whether it is being respected. Such pastors and masters as these are, protest with might and main against any inconvenience being foisted on them in the name of architecture, and would wish the regulation rows of nave piers at the bottom of the sea rather than in the way of their congregations. They are ready to examine any design on its merits, without troubling themselves for one moment whether the plan is a new or an old one, and if their architect has really got anything in him, he has nothing to do but to bring it out. He shakes his head, according to Lord Bacon’s remark, ‘‘ as men shake a bottle, to see whether it be empty or no,” and discovers the dregs of an exhausted idea at the bottom. He cannot conceive of any plan without two rows of nave columns ; but, glorious inspira- tion, he will starve these columns down to twelve or fourteen inches thick. The archi- tecture will not be so very trumpery after all, and the piers will not he 2 nuisance to more than ten or fifteen per cent. of the people. This seems to be the trum which congrega- tional'church-planning has taken lately, and while we welcome the slightest amelioration in its detail, we regret the resort to an ab- surdly inappropriate type of plan. The nave and aisles plan is ill-fitted enough to the services of the Church of England, and even there the most eminent ecclesiastical architects have *been making efforts to transform it: nay, even the Roman Catholics, who originated it, and for whose worship it was at first ex- pressly intended, no longer bind themselves down to it in this slavish way, as witness the vast open nave of Messrs. Hansom’s new church at Manchester. Protestant Noncon- formists have fifty-fold more reason to find fault with it. It can by no possibility be bent to their purposes without being totaily ruined. ‘To be carried out with the slightest success it must have massive stone piers, and must have them just where they are most inthe way. ‘To thin these piers down is only to make a wretched parody. The congrega- tion, most of whom probably were never inside a really good church in their lives, may think the interior ‘‘ very pretty ;” but even they do not like haying their pews spoilt to gain this prettiness, while people who really know what architecture is laugh at the whole affair. The poor designer’s ghost of an idea was not worth shaking his head to find: e has been content to starve his architecture, and yet he has blocked up his pews. It is, after all, of little use to urge people to do what nature has left then incapable of doing. The sheep who are now following each other through this gap will doubtless continue to follow each other through it till some erratic member of the flock makes a new one, and then, in all probability, they will follow him with the precise amount of intel- ligence which they now display in following each other. Still, if the new gap happens to be a better one than the old, something will be gained, and as it can hardly be much worse we look wit» interest on all attempts to break it through. One such attempt we may note in Mr. Fuller’s Clapton Park Chapel, and another, not very dissimilar, in Mr. Simpson’s chapel at Brighton; the latter is arrayed externally in all the horrors of Portland cement ; it is egg-shaped on plan, and has a vast low-pitched roof, anything rather than beautiful. ‘There is a high tower of an ordinary German Romanesque pattern. The building widens out from 386ft. at the narrowest point to 72ft. at the widest, being adapted to the shape of the site, and has, apparently, no internal columns. ‘The most effective feature in the exterior is the upper arcade, pierced with numerous lights, erroneously called, in the ‘‘ Year Book,” a clerestory. The porches work picturesquely into the view, and with a better tower anda better roof (this last item involving a general re-casting of the design), the leading form might not be altogether displeasing. What it looks like inside we can hardly say; but one thing the dimensions prove,—namely, the awkwardness of its proportions. A build- ing 72ft. wide, with side walls 382ft. high, and a ceiling only 40ft. from the floor in the centre, is not a promising subject for architectural treatment, nor are Portland cement and plaster promising materials with which to treat it. Clapton Park Chapel, unlike this, has its sides straight and parallel, though its front is circular on plan. It is, in fact, as complete a specimen of the theatre arrangement of chapel as we have happened to meet with. A gallery, three or four seats deep, runs round it and follows the sweep of the walls; the pews for the most part face the pulpit, and the place is successful acous- tically. ‘The best thing we can say for its architecture is that there is no disguise about it. With a certain section of Nonconform- ists the theatre plan has long found favour ; but while they have willingly adopted it for the inside of their chapels, it has been a con- stant desideratum with them to fit a church- front—a pretence at nave, aisles and clere- story on to its outside. At Clapton Park the vain attempt is abandoned, and the arrangement shows itself for what it is. So far, the architect deserves praise for the honesty of his design, and the committee for the courage which they showed in selecting it. Of the two things, a theatre plan, avowing it- self such,is better than a theatre plan like that of Westminster Chapel, with a slice of church stuck against the end to make it look eccle- siastical ; but no theatre plan at all would be infinitely preferable to either. The merits of the arrangement are chiefly imaginary, while its faults are glaring and almost incurable. It looks very plausible on paper, but it is alto- gether unsatisfactory in practice. For in- stance, it makes cast iron columns almost a necessity, with all the trashy detail which they lead to—and itinvolves so many of them, that, even in spite of their thinness, they cause a very considerable obstruction. At Clapton Park there are hetween twenty and thirty of them, half below the gallery and half above, and each interferes with the view of the pulpit from several sittings. It is a characteristic of the theatre plan that this should be so, and we are not blaming the architect for making it worse in this example than it is everywhere else. For this crowd of badly-placed columns it is evidently out of the question to use stone. They must be attenuated to the last degree, or the congre- gation would not endure them ; and with such attenuation, what possibility can there be of good architecture? These theatre plans, again, are wide and short ; what can be made of them on the outside? Plenty of wide and short churches, it is true, may be found which are picturesque and even graceful ex- ternally. Given a few strong stone piers, which will carry arches and clerestories and gabled roofs, and the most shapeless-looking area may be skilfully and artistically covered. Here, however, we are bound down to thin iron props, good for nothing on the outside. All that can be done is to put a one-span roof from wall to wall, and thus, freed from its disguises, the theatre plan works out exter- nally as a round-ended barn. ‘The barn may, of course, be a well-built and costly one ; it may have, as at Clapton, walls of ashlar and balustrades of Portland stone; it might even have well-studied details and admirable decoration, but nothing would ever remedy the meanness of its general form. For any- thing worth calling religious architecture, the theatre plan seems to us one of the most un- promising models conceivable. Still, however, as a sign of life, and as an indication that here and there a Noncon- formist architect is setting himself to master the difficulties with which he has to deal, at- tempts like these are not to be despised. Itisa pity that care and thought should be spent on types radically bad, but even this is better than that no care and thought should ever be given to the subject. The misfortune has long been that. Noneonformists haye not insisted sufficiently on these things,—that they have made matters too easy for their architects, and have satisfied themselves with a tithe of the excellence, both artistic and practical, which they might have obtained if they had liked. Something of course depends on out- lay, and if chapels are to be built for £2 or £3 per sitting, their architecture must be, not necessarily vulgar, but excessively slight. Suppose, however, the case of a committee willing to give three or four times that price, and anxious to obtain a really satisfactory result, the best thing they could do would be to lay down these three conditions: 1. The building must be well shaped and proportioned in every part, inside and outside. 2. There must be no iron columns, and no unduly thin 3. There must be no obstruction, either to sight or hearing; and the utmost license in the breach of this last rule should not extend to more than 3 or 4 per cent. of the sittings. Such a committee must be pre-
 * See BuiLpInc NEWS, No, 844, Vol. XX.
 * Stone ones.