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
On the other hand, the reduction of relief and the linear stylization of
the constituent elements of the Loggia in the Waiting Room Court of
1804, equally personal to Soane, illustrated an anti-Baroque tendency to
reduce to a minimum the sculptural aspect of architecture (Plate 4A).
Planes were emphasized rather than masses, and the character of the
detail was thoroughly renewed as well as the basic formulas of Classical
design that Soane had inherited. This was even more apparent in the New
Bank Buildings, a terrace of houses, begun in 1807, that once stood
across Prince’s Street. Except for the paired Ionic columns at the ends,
conventional Classical forms were avoided almost as completely as in the
Bank offices of the previous decade, and the smooth plane of the stucco
wall was broken only by incised linear detail.
Perhaps the most masterly example of this characteristically Soanic
treatment is still to be seen in the gateway and lodge of the country
house that he built at Tyringham in Buckinghamshire in 1792-7 (Plate
6A). There the simple mass is defined by flat surfaces bounded by plain
incised lines. The house itself is both less drastically novel and less
successful; various other Soane houses of these decades have more
character.
Summerson has claimed that Soane introduced all his important
innovations before 1800. However that may be, there is no major break in
his work at the end of the first decade of the century, nor did his
production then notably increase. It is therefore rather arbitrary to
cut off an account of his architecture at this point; but it is
necessary to do so if the importance of the Picturesque countercurrent
in these same years, not as yet of great consequence as an aspect of
Soane’s major works, is to be adequately emphasized. His concern with
varied lighting effects, however, if not necessarily Picturesque
technically, gave evidence of an intense Romanticism; more indubitably
Picturesque was his exaggerated interest in broken skylines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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