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
Although the body of this church was all but completely destroyed by
bombs, the tower and spire still dominate the Hamburg skyline (Plate
52B). It is interesting to compare this grand scenic accent with the
tower and spire of the Petrikirche, almost equally prominent, built in
1843-9 by de Chateauneuf and Fersenfeld (Plate 57A). Although built,
with a curious echo of London’s characteristic stock brick, of an
unpleasantly yellowish brick, while the Petrikirche is of a handsome
deep-red brick like de Chateauneuf’s Alte Post, the silhouette is so
enriched with elaborate fourteenth-century stonework—part English, part
German in derivation—that it almost rivals in richness of effect Kemp’s
Walter Scott Monument in Edinburgh. Yet the scale is grand, the parts
well related, and in every way it represents a more advanced, almost
mid-century taste, in contrast to the simplicity and the geometrical
clarity of de Chateauneuf’s square brick tower with its plain triangular
gables and its very tall and svelte metal-clad spire.
From 1845 down to 1855, when Henry Clutton (1819-93) and William Burges
(1827-81) won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France and G. E.
Street (1824-81) received the second prize, the pre-eminence of English
architects at plausible revived Gothic was generally recognized abroad.
Though few of the innumerable churches built by Scott and his rivals at
home in the forties are in any way really memorable, by the middle of
that decade the characteristics of English church edifices had been
completely revised, largely thanks to the propaganda of the Cambridge
Camden Society. There is no more typical nineteenth-century product than
a Victorian Gothic church of this period built to the Camdenian canon;
yet the real achievement of the most original architect who designed
such churches, Butterfield, belongs to the next, or High Victorian,
phase (see Chapter 10). The more Puginian Carpenter, the other favourite
architect of the Society, who died in 1855, is hardly as interesting a
designer—however ‘correct’ he may be—in such prominent works as St
Paul’s in West Street, Brighton, of 1846-8 and St Mary Magdalen’s,
Munster Square, in London of 1849-51, as in what he built for Lancing
College in 1851-3. There the plain high-roofed ranges with their fine
smooth walls of knapped flint and very flat and simple cut-stone
dressings have a quality of precision quite lacking in most contemporary
churches. Almost finer is St John’s College, Hurstpierpoint, although
largely posthumous in execution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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