Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
Somewhat more appropriately, prisons were likely to be Castellated in
the forties and fifties, thus echoing the design as well as the planning
of Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The Reading Gaol of
1842-4 by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) and his partner W. B.
Moffatt (1812-87) and the Holloway Gaol in London of 1851-2 by J. B.
Bunning (1802-63) are the most striking examples. Both are essentially
Picturesque essays; but by the time the latter was built the accepted
standards of fake-castle building had entirely changed. The
reconstruction of Alton Castle in Staffordshire, about 1840, by A. W. N.
Pugin (1812-52) was archaeological in intention; even more
archaeological is Peckforton Castle in Shropshire, newly erected by
Anthony Salvin (1799-1881) in 1846-50, and his extensive ‘restoration’
of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland carried out in the next decade.
Thanks to its magnificent hill-top site and its present state of
disrepair, Peckforton is in fact notably Picturesque; but the fine,
hard, structurally expressive detailing of the beautiful pink sandstone
may almost be considered anti-Picturesque—contemporaries praised it for
its ‘realism’.
The welter of alternative Picturesque modes is most entertainingly
epitomized in the model village of Edensor,[115] built by Joseph Paxton
in 1839-42 at Chatsworth. He was probably assisted by John Robertson, a
draughtsman for that encyclopaedist of the Picturesque, J. C.
Loudon.[116] One particular mode, however, had begun to take the lead
even before this ‘point of view’ came closest to dominance in the early
decades of the new century. The use of Gothic[117] for new churches was
common enough from the mid eighteenth century. Down to about 1820,
however, this was usually done without much archaeological pretension.
The mood of the protagonists of what was then called ‘Gothick’, whether
architects or clients, was not very serious. Architects lacked accurate
illustrations of old work such as the volumes of Stuart and Revett and
other similar treatises were providing for the Grecian. In the first two
decades of the new century the more thorough and general study of
ancient Gothic monuments in England and the handsome publications of
John Britton (1771-1857)[118] and of Nash’s Gothic specialist, the elder
Pugin,[119] were gradually changing the situation. Thomas Rickman
(1776-1841), a pharmacist turned medievalist, began to put his
knowledge[120] of old churches to practical use; his St George’s,
Birmingham, built 1819-21, is a not unsuccessful essay in revived
Perpendicular. Several others had built or were building by this time
churches whose relationship to monuments of the medieval past was about
as close as that of most of the contemporary Grecian work to its ancient
models. St Mary’s, Bathwick, in Bath, of 1814-20 is at once very early
and exceptionally well-scaled. The local architect John Pinch
(1770-1827) even vaulted it throughout in Bath stone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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