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 architect of All Saints’, Butterfield, had been for some years,
together with Carpenter, the favourite of the ecclesiologists because of
the Pugin-like ‘correctness’ of his revived fourteenth-century English
Gothic. Now, quite suddenly, he and his sponsors embarked on new paths.
As soon as the walls began to rise, their startling character became
apparent; for the church is of red brick, a material long out of use in
London, and that red brick is banded and patterned with black brick, a
theme varied on the tower by the insertion of broad bands of stone.
‘Permanent polychrome’, achieved with a variety of materials, thus made
its debut here. In the interior, moreover, the polychromatic effect was
even richer and more strident, with marquetry of marble and tile in the
spandrels of the nave arcade and over the chancel arch, not to speak of
onyx and gilding in the chancel itself (Plate 85). The very exiguous
site forced any expansion upwards; the nave is tall, the vaulted chancel
taller, and the subsidiary structures flanking the court are even higher
and narrower in their proportions.
While the construction of All Saints’ proceeded there was much
concurrent and complementary activity in the English architectural
world. In 1849 a young critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900), had brought out
an influential book, _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which many of
the recommendations ran parallel to, if indeed they did not influence,
Butterfield’s latest stylistic innovations. Notably, Ruskin urged the
study of Italian Gothic: if All Saints’ is, in fact, not specifically
Italian in the character of its polychromy, it seemed so to most
contemporaries. The real foreign influences here, as in the profile of
the fine plain steeple, are German if anything. Butterfield’s moulded
detail continued to follow quite closely English fourteenth-century
models.[218]
In this same year 1849 Wild[219] was building on an even more obscure
London site in Soho his St Martin’s Northern Schools with pointed
arcades of brick definitely derived from Italian models. Moreover, he
was being acclaimed for doing this by the very ecclesiological leaders
who had ten years before condemned his Christ Church, Streatham, as
‘Saracenic’. With the publication of the first volume of Ruskin’s next
book, _The Stones of Venice_, in 1851 (the two less important later
volumes came out in 1853) and the appearance of _Brick and Marble
Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy_ by G. E. Street (1824-81) in
1855, Italian influence increased. Street’s name, moreover, introduces
the third of the three men most responsible for the sharp turn that
English architecture was taking in the fifties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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