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 Gothic of C. F. Arnold (1823-90) at Dresden, as seen in his secular
Kreuzschule of 1864-5 or the two-towered Sophienkirche of the same
years, is inferior to Schmidt’s, both in command of the idiom and in
architectonic organization, as indeed is most such German work of these
decades. The Johanniskirche in Dresden of 1874-8 by G. L. Möckel
(1838-1915), however, has a rather fine tower set in the transeptal
position so much favoured in Victorian England. This is bold in scale
and carefully detailed in a literate twelfth-century—not to say ‘Early
French’—way much as Burges or Pearson might have designed it in England.
More characteristic of German work of these decades is the Munich
Rathaus, built in 1867-74 by G. J. von Hauberrisser (1841-1922) and
extended by him in 1899-1909. Excessively spiky, this seems almost to
have borrowed back from G. G. Scott the more Germanic features of his
Broad Sanctuary terrace in London of fifteen years earlier. But the
Neo-Gothic of the seventies and eighties in Germany is in general no
more aggressive and gawky than the popular Meistersinger mode that
revived so turgidly the forms of the Northern Renaissance (see Chapter
10).
Holland, which made almost no significant architectural contribution in
the first half of the nineteenth century, now produced in P. J. H.
Cuijpers (1827-1921) a sort of Dutch Viollet-le-Duc. In addition to
undertaking important restorations, he built many vast new Gothic
churches of brick which he exposed once more in reaction against the
earlier nineteenth-century practice of stucco-coating. Cuijpers was
learned and ambitious, and in such work he could be rather more original
than Viollet-le-Duc in France, if less so perhaps than Schmidt in
Austria. His Vondelkerk, a church of 1870 near the Vondel Park in
Amsterdam, is not centrally planned like Schmidt’s Fünfhaus church in
Vienna, but he obtained a somewhat similar spatial effect by making the
crossing octagonal. The brickwork of the piers and the vaults is very
richly treated but in a fashion as much polytonal as polychromatic. The
banding is in bricks of different sizes and textures rather than of
different colours, and the result has something of the subtlety of the
interior of White’s Aberdeen Park church in London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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