Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/354

 334 THE BUILDING NEWS. _ Aprm 26, 1872. and there are, moreover, just as many angles in the line of wall. This infirmity of outline naturally gives the elevation a very feeble, dislocated look ; and, unfortunately, it has no positive redeeming merit. The windows are ugly and mean, the pinna- cles absurd, and the tower not worth the cost of its foundations. This will never do. Simplicity must not be dili- gently lost, nor dignity; and power be frittered all away. These necessary characteristics would be at once attained if the lines of roof and walling were made continuous and straight, interrupted only by the gable of the hall, which might be brought for- ward to the front, and by the projecting tower, which must be re-designed. The octagon staircases can be changed in form with no loss of convenience, a range of dormer windows might decorate the roof, and an arcade of shops would enliven the ground- floor frontage abutting on the Strand. The pinna- cles and carved bands would be omitted with advan- tage in every way; andif Mr. Street is unable to design windows and tracery in the graceful manner of the fourteenth century, an advertisement in the Builder will discover plenty of help for him in this rather important branch of Gothic art. Many a “ professional” reputation has been made by the “assistance” of some clever drawing clerk, whose name, however, does not transpire beyond the nar- row range of “ office” notoriety. A successful rail- way jobber of “pushing” habits, or a bankrupt builder with efficient patronage, may do wonders as an architect by a judicious expenditure in office salaries. Now what we have proposed for Mr. Street’s de- sign is, in fact, extinction; but there is small blame to Mr. Street for this necessity. He, like the rest of his class, has to please or satisfy a public whose taste in all that concerns the building art is univer- sally degraded. Accustomed through life to the most hideous extent of building that the world ever saw, regarding any knowledge of the house in which he lives as common and vulgar, fit only for builders and low fellows of the baser sort, the average Lon- doner, in presence of the art that most affects bis comfort and his life, is supercilious and ignorant, conceited and debased. Even of the external aspect of the streets he has no clear perception, and has never formed an intelligent opinion. With the ar- chitecture of Wigmore-street he feels quite at home: Cromwell-road and Grosvenor-place he thinks are “very fine,” and the British Museum, he is in- structed, is a masterpiece. This, then, is the quality of person or mind that an architect who would be successful must seek to satisfy. And, if he has ordinary experience and knowledge of the world, he naturally adopts the most direct and easiest method to command success. Prettiness is, of course, essential. What else is ar- chitecture for, if not to be pretty? Of the short- comings and bad taste of his design he may be per- fectly or imperfectly aware, but he overlays it with ornament, and encrusts it with carving, until the whole is pronounced to be beautiful. In this great requisite of modern architecture Mr. Street fails. He has no sense of ‘prettiness,” and he substitutes confusion. He was afraid of simple expressiveness, and he has become incoherent. He has grievously erred, not, however, from negligence or want of will, but merely from natural incapacity. Every man is not a born confectioner; and if his work fails through subjection to the influence of adepraved and vulgar public taste, which yet he is unable to satisfy, Mr. Street can hardly be reproached for this unfor- tunate result. But there is also the class of dilettanti who have to be appeased. ‘These are the people that know all about styles and dates—travelled men, sketchers, ecclesiologists, and the like. Among these Mr. Street appears to have fallen, and to have found their patronage to be as damaging by its priggishness as the demands of the public are from their igno- rance. The influence of this class is occasionally useful, but many a well-meaning architect must haye found himself grievously burdened by their equivocal patronage, which becomes a weight quite as often as a support. Mr. Street has been greatly injured by their awkward advocacy. The knowing talk about ‘“‘skylines” and ‘ fenestration,” and all the cant of the literary amateur, has for some months been the language of a certain class of news- papers and magazines. Such “knowingness” is, however, only that half-knowledge “that puffeth up; but its habitual effect is painfully evident in Mr. Street's buildings, which seem either to be para- lysed by a pseudo-clerical infirmity, or designed by some sacerdotal epicene. Mr. Street is not the only sufferer from this cause. A large number of our recent churches evince the pernicious influence of this emasculated tone of criticism, and are made mere specimens of the transient ecclesiastical fashion, instead of permanent monuments of art. The true artist, however, rejects all these influ- ences, and works to please or satisfy himself, re- gardless alike of public or patrons. That such is the only sound method of practice may be clearly shown by examples of success and failure due to the observance or neglect of this very fundamental law of good design. In the remarks which we think it our duty to make on the present state, and practical difficulties of English architecture, we are influenced by no personal or professional prejudice or feeling, and to avoid at first all questions about styles and schools, we will begin by referring to the works of modern engineers. Rennie and Telford had little or no need to regard the opinion of the public. They had the intelligent support and generous confidence of a few men of influence and good sense. And, as the result, the Menai and London bridges are two of the most simple, dignified, and noble buildings in the world. Times and methods have changed. Now we have competitions eyen for bridges; and engi- neers being men of business, and careful to keep safely on the road to professional success, most readily abandon all reserve, and start on a career of extravagance and pretence, Their success may be held to be their justifica- tion. With Blackfriars Bridge, for instance, we find the public thoroughly well pleased, though the design is really a wonder of depravity. Polished granite columns of amazing thickness, with carved capitals of stupendous weight, all made to give shop-room to an apple-woman, or a convenient plat- form for a suicide. The parapet is a fiddle-faddle of pretty cast-iron arcading, out of scale with the columns, incongruous with the capitals, and quite unsuited for a work that should be simply grand in its usefulness; and at each corner of the bridge is a huge block of masonry ¢ propos of nothing, a well known evidence of desperate imbecility. On the Thames Embankment, again, these big blocks, which were probably suggested by the late Mr. John Martin’s architectural vagaries, are very freely used, so that, from the river, it would appear that they were the chief object for which the em- bankment itself was made. The new lamp-posts, of which we have heard so much in the newspapers, are a senseless jumble of “objects,” from colossal and very ugly fishes to miniature and meaningless faces, thrown together without reference to scale or order of any kind. The garden railing is little better than the lamp-posts, and is even more vexa- tious from its greater quantity. The comparatively simple railing round Hyde Park is far preferable to this pretty panelling, which will completely hide the flowers when they grow, and which is in curious contrast with the heavy granite parapet and piers on the other side of the road. This parapet, with its pedestals and piers, is a sad waste of space and money. If it were all cleared away, and replaced by a simple stout iron railing, and a narrow sloping bank of grass, we should have the true effect of an embankment, instead of a mere parapet wall. The road and the river would both look considerably wider, and the prospect along the curve of the em- bankment would be unobstructed. A clear view of the river would be gained for pedestrians, who now see little but the smoke of the passing steamboats; and the view from the river itself would be less dis- mal, and not so unpleasantly suggestive of canal locks where “ drags are in constant readiness.” The river, in fact, would look beautiful instead of ghastly, and the saving in hewn granite would be sufficient to provide for every care and protection that could be required. On the outer face of these parapet piers there are large metal lions’ heads and rings. They look like door-knockers; but, suppos- ing they are meant for mooring-rings, why are they hung up high in the parapet out of reach, instead of being fixed solidly down in the quay wall, at or below the high-water line? As mere ornaments they are childish; their large size diminishes the apparent scale of the work to which they are at- tached ; and their repetition every thirty yards for some five or six miles will be a weary monument of the dulness of the engineer who designed them. At Westminster Bridge, the engineer has spent his energy in devising another gimerack pattern of lamp-post, and a series of bad imitations of Gothic detail; and while so neglecting his special engineer- ing duty, he has committed a very unworkmanlike blunder. The fascia of each arch is much broader than the fascia of the bridge, which spreads over all the arches. Where these two intersect at the crown of the arch, the greater width is lost in the narrower. The mere statement of this in words is sufficient to show that every arch must appear to be crippled, suggesting the idea of weakness and insta- } bility, which the construction and the remarkable | vibration of the bridge seem further to justify. These are a few specimens of the absurdities that the proverbially “ practical” engineers commit when they pretend to gratify the public taste. Let us now turn to the architects. In the immediate neighbourhood is the railing round the grass plats in Palace Yard, bad in every possible way, and very manifestly so in the extravagance of such an expenditure for the preservation of a few Tom Thumb geraniums. Why cannot architects and engineers learn that the object of a fence is not to distract attention from, but to be subordinate to, that which it encloses? The new areade or cloister is a similar mistake, with a terrible look of perma- nence about it. The railings we may hope to clear away, but these deformities in stone are too heavy to be easily moved. It happened that the base for a tall building was remarkably high; and in making the addition of a very short building, this very high and heavy base was continued as part of the new design. Perhaps ineptitude could do no worse. We do, therefore, call special attention to this bit of recent Gothic; and if our readers will take a few dimensions, showing the proportion of area to pier, and will compare these with the cloisters at West- minster Abbey close by, they will be able to under~ stand the value of ‘names and things” in the archi- tectural profession. Of S. Thomas’s Hospital it is scarcely fair to speak in this category of public favourites, or can- didates for public approval. Public opinion is divided on its merits; and probably its designer, now that he discovers what his drawings really meant, may in this respect agree with the public. About the Midland Railway Terminus, however, there are not two opinions. Here the public taste has been exactly suited, and every kind of architec tural decoration has been made thoroughly common andunclean. ‘The building inside and out is covered with ornament, and there is polished marble enough to furnish a cathedral. The very parapet of the cab road is panelled and perforated, at a cost that would have supplied foot-warmers to all the trains for years to come. This monument of confectionery is a fair specimen of the result of competition among architects for the approval of judges whom they know to be incompetent. The ‘ Midland” directors are able administrators of the railway business, and probably of their own; but was there any evidence that they were qualified in any way to decide upon the respective merits of the competitors, or to select a design to be built in an important metropolitan thoroughfare? Is any one of these gentlemen fur- nished with the necessary knowledge? and if not, how can their accumulatedignorance become efficient in its stead? These are questions that—in the in- terests of the art, about which they are so very care- ful when their own interests are equally involved— the competing architects ought, as a condition pre- cedent, to have had satisfactorily answered. Judg- ing by the building, however, we imagine that quite a different course was pursued; and in the success- ful design, at any rate, the noble art of building has been treated as a mere trade advertisement. Showy and expensive, it will, for the present, be a striking contrast with its adjoining neighbour. The Great Northern Terminus is not graceful, but it is simple, characteristic, and true. No one would mistake its nature and use. The Midland front is inconsistent in style and meretricious in detail; a piece of com~- mon ‘art manufacture” that makes the Great Northern front appear by contrast positively charm- ing. There is no relief or quiet in any part of the work. Theeyeis constantly troubled and tormented, and the mechanical patterns follow one another with such rapidity and perseverance, that the mind be- comes irritated where it ought to be gratified, and goaded to criticism where it should be led calmly to approve. There is herea complete travesty of noble associations, and not the slightest care to save these from a sordid contact. An elaboration tbat might be suitable for achapter-house, or a cathedral choir, is used as an “advertising medium” for bagmen’s bedrooms and the costly discomforts of a terminus hotel, and the architect is thus a mere expensive rival of the company’s head cook in catering for the low enjoyments of the great travelling crowd. To be consistent, the directors should not confine their expression of artistic feeling to these great buildings. only. Their porters might be dressed as javelin men, their guards as beefeaters, and their station-masters don the picturesqne attire of Garter King-at-arms. Their carriages might be copied from the Lord Mayor’s Show, and even the engine wheels might imitate the Gothic window near their terminus at York, These things, however, will eventually come ; the water-tank, we see, is moulded in the Gothic style. Yet who is to blame for all this? The directors meant well, no doubt, and are in a state of childisln