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
In the same year in London Street’s former employer Scott, long
established as the most successful, if hardly the most ‘correct’, of
Early Victorian Gothic practitioners, and since 1849 Architect to
Westminster Abbey, built in Broad Sanctuary contiguous to the façade of
the Abbey a Gothic terrace. That the use of Gothic should have been
encouraged here by the Abbey authorities is not surprising. But they
themselves may well have been surprised at what their architect
produced; for this is no flat range of Neo-Tudor fronts in stock brick,
but a plastic mass of stonework bristling with oriels and turrets and
capped with a broken skyline of stepped gables. Nothing here recalls the
rather French thirteenth-century Gothic of the Abbey itself; instead the
effect is Germanic, recalling the medieval houses of the Hansa cities.
The work was executed with a boldness of detail doubtless less personal
in character than Butterfield’s or Street’s, but quite as striking to
the casual observer.
Scott’s houses had little influence, however. Gothic terraces were no
more popular in the fifties and sixties in England than in the preceding
decades. In residential districts the flood of more-or-less Renaissance
stucco continued to spread, little affected by the High Victorian
Gothic. As we have seen, the Second Empire mode also had only a very
limited success in this field of construction, a field dominated not by
architects but by builders.
In 1853 also Scott provided for the Camden Church in the Peckham Road in
South London—Ruskin’s own family church—a new east end in a round-arched
and banded medievalizing mode; Ruskin himself collaborated on the window
design, or so it is said. There is sufficient Gothic ‘realism’ in the
detail here to justify considering this a round-arched variant of the
High Victorian Gothic; but it is definitely of Italian inspiration. It
seems also to be related to the later _Rundbogenstil_ of this decade in
Germany and Austria; nor is it altogether without resemblance to such a
contemporary French church as Vaudoyer’s Byzantinesque cathedral of
Marseilles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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