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
A larger, more complete, and more expensively decorated example of the
Old Swan model was St Giles’s, Cheadle, of 1841-6 (Plate 52A). This has
a quite magnificent, if hardly very original, spired tower and interior
walls all patterned in colour. Here Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin’s most
important patron, provided sufficient funds to furnish the church as the
architect intended. Pugin’s largest churches, unfortunately, never
received the carved work, stained glass, and painted decoration that he
planned for them. At St Barnabas’s, Nottingham, now the Catholic
Cathedral there, of 1842-4 he achieved externally a rather fine piling
up of related masses at the rear, the whole crowned by a central tower.
For lack of any decoration, however, this is grim without and barren
within, despite all the spatial interest of the very complex east end.
Pugin, always his own severest critic, was most nearly satisfied with
the church that he built for himself next door to his own house, the
Grange, at Ramsgate.[126] The house dates from 1841-3, the church from
1846-51. Externally of Kentish knapped flint and internally of Caen
stone with a very heavy roof of dark oak, this edifice is worthy of his
highest standards of revived medieval construction. But it is rather
less original and interesting in external massing and internal spatial
development than such a big bare church as St Barnabas’s. To the house
we will be returning later (see Chapter 15).
Pugin’s production is largely concentrated in the years 1837-44, between
the two periods of his employment by Barry on the Houses of Parliament.
By 1844 other architects, Anglican and not Roman Catholic, were
accepting his principles and rivalling his success. G. G. Scott, for
example, never a really great architect but a notable self-publicist,
after modest beginnings designed the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford in 1841
in the form of a fourteenth-century Eleanor Cross and followed up that
prominent commission by building the large suburban London church of St
Giles’s, Camberwell, in 1842-4. At that time he was still in partnership
with Moffatt. Then, in 1844, he signalized the international standing of
the English Gothic Revival by winning alone the competition for the
Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, which he carried to completion over the years
1845-63.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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