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 other most conspicuous High Victorian Gothic public monument, the
Law Courts in London, is the work of Street, an older and far more
distinguished architect; but it came very late indeed in Street’s
career, so late that he died before it was finished in 1882. Designed
originally for a competition held in 1866, many years dragged by during
which the site was twice changed—once southward to the river’s edge and
then back to the north of the Strand—before it was even begun in 1874.
Other work of the late sixties and early seventies by Street indicates
how completely his own taste had turned away from this sort of French
thirteenth-century Gothic even before the Law Courts were started.
At St Margaret’s in Liverpool, for example, which he designed in 1867,
Street reverted to English fourteenth-century models; thus, like Bodley
at All Saints’, Cambridge, he seemed to be returning to the particular
stylistic ideal with which the ecclesiologists had started out
twenty-five years before. In the Guards’ Chapel at the Wellington
Barracks in London, however, which was all but completely destroyed in
the blitz, he in 1877 remodelled the interior of an engineer-built
Grecian edifice with incredible sumptuousness in a sort of Byzantinoid
Italian Romanesque, using a stone-and-brick banded barrel vault and a
glittering investiture of gold and glass mosaic that quite outshone the
comparable work of Continental architects in the _Rundbogenstil_. Then,
in remodelling the interior of St Luke’s, West Norwood, near London,
built by Francis Bedford (1784-1858) in 1823-5, equally Grecian, he used
in 1878-9 round-arched Italian detail. Despite the bold banding in brick
and stone, this is certainly not Gothic or Byzantine, but rather recalls
the Tuscan Proto-Renaissance, or even the _quattrocento_.
Certain buildings by Deane & Woodward and by Scott at Oxford and
Cambridge have already been mentioned; much more exists by Scott,
Waterhouse, and various others, very little of it of any distinction,
yet sometimes fitting not too uncomfortably into the general scene. The
most striking example of Victorian Gothic architecture at Oxford,
fortunately on an isolated site opposite the Parks, where it had no
neighbours earlier than the Museum, is Butterfield’s Keble College, a
complete entity in itself, largely built in 1868-70. With its walls so
violently striated with bricks of various colours, Keble would have been
a most disturbing increment to any existing college; on the other hand,
Butterfield’s quietly stone-banded chapel at Balliol of 1857 is that
college’s happiest feature, the rest being largely the work of
Waterhouse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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