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
The site of Brodrick’s Grand Hotel is a superb one on the edge of the
Scarborough cliffs above the North Sea, as different as possible from
the setting of the New Louvre. Its corner pavilions are capped, not with
ordinary high mansards, but with curious roofs like pointed domes,
richly crowned with elaborate cornices. In the intricacy of their
silhouette these are not unworthy rivals of Barry’s Halifax tower. The
massive walls are not of freestone in the manner of Paris nor yet of
pallid Suffolk brick with light coloured stone or cement trim as in
London. Instead, they are of warm red brick with incredibly lush
decorative trim of tawny terracotta—a combination that M. D. Wyatt also
used on the most elegant Second Empire mansion in London, Alford House,
which stood from 1872 until 1955 in Prince’s Gate at the corner of
Ennismore Gardens (Plate 83A).
Public and private architecture could hardly hope to rival the
sumptuousness of the new hotels, and in Britain rarely attempted to do
so. At Liverpool T. H. Wyatt in 1864-9 carried a U-shaped range of
ornately pavilioned and mansarded blocks that housed the Exchange around
the open space at the rear of the Town Hall, somewhat as Outshoorn
carried his Galerij around the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam; but
that is now all gone.
In the English countryside, the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County
Durham, built in 1869-75 by J.-A.-F.-A. Pellechet (1829-1903), and
Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire by another French architect, G.-H.
Destailleur (1822-93), largely of 1880-3, are unique examples of
extensive mansions completely in the Second Empire mode (Plate 76B). In
London Montagu House, designed in 1866 by the elderly Burn for the Duke
of Buccleuch, once raised in Whitehall the mansarded pavilions that
Barry and the winners of the Government Offices competition had proposed
in 1857, but this has now been demolished.
The most notable Second Empire ensemble in London, however, still partly
survives (Plate 80B). Facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace and
extending southward from the group of Late Georgian monuments around
Hyde Park Corner, are the terraces of Grosvenor Place. These were
designed[208] in 1867 and built in the following years. They provide one
of the more striking features of the London skyline inherited from the
Victorian period. Rivalling the high roofs and, almost, the tall
steeples of the Victorian Gothic, the mansards over the end houses are
carried to fantastic heights and capped with pointed upper roofs,
providing several storeys of attics; while the centre houses have convex
mansards like square domes taken straight from the New Louvre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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