A History of Giggleswick School from its Foundation, 1499 to 1912Bell, Edward Allen
History
A History of Giggleswick School from its Foundation, 1499 to 1912
Bell, Edward Allen
Giggleswick School (Giggleswick, England) -- History
The aim of all the best Architecture is to construct a building of such
a kind that it will withstand the ruin of the ages and will prove an
opportunity for doing well whatever it is built for. The purpose of a
house is that a man should be able to live in it. The essence of a
church is that it should provide a place of worship. It is easy enough
to construct a four-square building with accommodation for a required
number of people but brick walls are not sufficient. Utility does not
consist only in adequate space; it has many other features, closely
inwoven with it. Fitness is the keynote of beauty. Taken by themselves
there is little beauty to be seen in two parallel straight iron lines
running through the country-side, but conceive of them as railway lines,
adequately and without any unnecessary waste of material performing the
office for which they were made, and few sights can be more charged with
the very essence of beauty. The purpose that underlies the construction
and the complete fulfilment of that purpose is beauty.
But a Church cannot be content only with a building sufficiently
well-built to hold its worshippers and sufficiently in tone with its
surroundings to express the unity of art and nature. It has a further
form of expression that it must satisfy. It is a religious building, and
as such its characteristics and its form must exemplify religious
tendencies and thought. A barn can be supremely beautiful, but it does
not radiate the atmosphere of worship. A Church must be characterized by
certain great and instinctive elements of grandeur, it must breathe the
spirit of reverence, it must, as Ruskin says, "speak well and say the
things it was intended to say in the best words." Giggleswick School
Chapel may justly be said to fulfil all these conditions. It is in
harmony with its surroundings, and it is a structure of great
architectural beauty, that is to say, it expresses its purpose in the
best way.
[Illustration: THE CHAPEL EXTERIOR.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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