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
Without depending on polychromy, Butterfield designed in 1850 and built
in 1851-2 St Matthias’s off Howard Road in Stoke Newington, a London
suburb, another church of novel character. Unconfined by a closed-in
urban site, this also showed in its great scale and the bold silhouette
of the gable-roofed tower—still standing today above the bombed ruin of
the church—how the timid Early Victorian Gothic of the forties could be
invigorated. Moreover, at St Bartholomew’s at Yealmpton in Devonshire,
built in 1850, Butterfield introduced in a country church striped piers
of two different tones of marble and considerable coloured marquetry
work. A former fellow assistant of Street in G. G. Scott’s office,
William H. White (1826-90), at All Saints’ in Talbot Road, Kensington,
in London, begun in 1850, also used the new polychromy that soon became
the principal, though by no means the only, hallmark of High Victorian
Gothic.
A large country house of stone by S. S. Teulon (1812-73), Tortworth
Court in Gloucestershire, built in 1849-53, has no polychromy, although
its architect was soon to be the most unrestrained of all in its
exploitation. His patrons, moreover, would be notably ‘lower’ in their
churchmanship than the members of the Ecclesiological Society who
employed Butterfield. But in the boldly plastic massing of Tortworth,
leading up to a tall central tower of the most complex silhouette,
Teulon exemplified the new architectural ambitions, ambitions that would
soon be finding as striking expression in secular work as in
ecclesiastical building whether ‘high’ or ‘low’.
Street had been a favourite of the High Church party since he first
began building small churches and schools of a most ‘correct’ sort in
Cornwall on leaving Scott’s office.[220] He was also the author of
several critical articles published in _The Ecclesiologist_, notable for
their cogency. In these he commented, for example, on the applicability
of the arcades of Wild’s school to commercial building; he also attacked
the curious habit of the forties, most prevalent with the
ecclesiologists, of designing urban churches on confined sites as if
they were to sprawl over ample village greens. Street began his first
important church with associated school buildings, All Saints’, Boyn
Hill, at Maidenhead, in 1853. Here he employed red brick and almost as
much permanent polychrome as Butterfield at All Saints’, Margaret
Street. He also handled the detail, particularly on the schools, with
something of the same sort of brutal ‘realism’ (to use the catchword of
the period) that Butterfield used on his subsidiary buildings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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