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
A more modest Oxford building by Deane & Woodward, the Union Debating
Hall of 1856-7, has more vigour on the whole than does the Museum,
particularly in its characteristically notched brick detailing. It also
has the advantage of murals by the young Pre-Raphaelites. One of these,
who had just left Street’s architectural office to turn briefly to
painting, was William Morris (1834-96).[223] His ceiling here initiated
the most distinguished career of architectural decoration of the second
half of the century. Morris as a critical writer was destined, moreover,
to be at least as influential on later architecture as Ruskin or
Viollet-le-Duc.
Of the same date, 1856, is perhaps the most successful of Butterfield’s
extant churches, that at Baldersby St James near Beverley in Yorkshire,
with its contiguous group of vicarage, schools, and cottages. All of
stone externally, the polychromy here is rather a sort of ‘poly-texture’
most effectively handled in the banding of the tall pyramidal spire
above the plain square tower (Plate 87). Internally a delicate harmony
of pink and grey-blue bricks, with accents of creamy stone, replaces the
acid chords of All Saints’ in London, a harmony rivalled in the Welsh
church of St Augustine’s at Penarth near Cardiff built a decade later in
1866. At the same time, Teulon at St Andrew’s in Coin Street off
Stamford Street south of the Thames in London was using the boldest of
brick-and-stone banding externally and, inside, elaborate patterns of
light-coloured brickwork. Moreover, the rather Germanic planning of this
church, demolished since the Second World War, was highly unorthodox by
ecclesiological standards. Already it was evident that within the High
Victorian Gothic there were to be two streams, one High Church in its
patronage and led by architects of considerable learning and
sophistication like Butterfield and Street, another more
characteristically Low Church and often quite secular; this was
generally coarser and more philistine, not to say outright illiterate.
Yet not all the best work of the High Church architects was
ecclesiastical. By 1857 J. L. Pearson (1817-97) had already built some
respectable if not very interesting churches distinguished chiefly by
their very fine spires; but his first work of positive High Victorian
character was Quar Wood, a country house he built in Gloucestershire in
that year. The skilful asymmetrical massing around the stair tower here,
the plastic variety provided by several different types of steep roofs,
the crisp precision of the detailing, all combine to produce a modest
mansion that is as different in effect from Teulon’s mountainous
Tortworth as both are characteristic of the beginnings of the High
Victorian Gothic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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