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
As in the United States, there is plenty of more-or-less Gothic domestic
work in Canada, most of it relatively late. An early and rather
pretentious secular edifice was the so-called Old Building of Trinity
College, Toronto, erected in 1851 by Kivas Tully (1820-1905). This was a
by no means incompetent example of Collegiate Gothic, but more like
Wilkins’s or Rickman’s work of the twenties at Cambridge than the
advanced Camdenian edifices of its own period. Canadian Neo-Gothic rose
to a certain autochthonous distinction only in the next period (see
Chapter 10).
If early illustrations of the Picturesque point of view and of the
mature Gothic Revival are on the whole of minor interest in the
English-speaking world outside Great Britain, that whole world from
California to Tasmania was absorbing the propaganda of the English
exponents of the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival. This had its effect
in the succeeding period when the High Victorian Gothic of England was
exploited to more considerable purpose than the Neo-Gothic of the Early
Victorian period. By the time a great English critic came to the support
of the Gothic Revival, John Ruskin (1819-1900), he had almost from the
original publication of his _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ in 1849 more
readers beyond the seas than at home.[137]
Neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival has the same importance
on the Continent of Europe as in English-speaking countries. The
Picturesque point of view was carried abroad by the great British
artistic invention of the eighteenth century, the English garden—_jardin
anglais_, _englischer Garten_, _giardino inglese_, _jardin inglès_,
etc., to muster the various well-established and revelatory foreign
terms for the more or less naturalistic mode that succeeded the
architecturally ordered French gardens of the Le Nôtre type. By 1800 the
Picturesque was as familiar in theory as were the international tenets
of Romantic Classicism. But for all the garden fabricks that were built
in Europe in the English taste, the point of view tended to remain
alien. Moreover, from the continuance of Orléans Cathedral[138] in
Gothic, ordered as early as 1707 by Louis XIV though not finally
finished until 1829, to Schinkel’s painted Gothic visions of the opening
of the nineteenth century, there is no lack of evidence of Continental
interest in Gothic forms. In France there was also a very considerable
theoretical interest in Gothic methods of construction that can hardly
be matched in eighteenth-century England (see Introduction). But there
followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century no such
effective crystallization of an earlier dilettante interest in the
Gothic as in England, no popular fad for building fake castles, no flood
of cheap Commissioners’ Churches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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