Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries — John Shaqi
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
For larger buildings a definite Greek Revival was now beginning to take
form within the general frame of Romantic Classicism. More young
architects were visiting Greece and, for those who could not, two
further volumes of Stuart and Revett’s _Antiquities of Athens_,
appearing in 1787 and in 1794, and the parallel _Ionian Antiquities_,
which began to be issued in 1769, provided many more models for
imitation than had been available earlier. The Greek Doric order had
first been introduced into England by Stuart himself in 1758 in the
Hagley Park temple, as has been mentioned earlier; a little later, in
1763, he used the Greek Ionic on Litchfield House which still stands at
15 St James’s Square in London. From the nineties, the Greek orders were
in fairly common use, as such a splendid group as the buildings of
Chester Castle, of 1793-1820 by Thomas Harrison (1744-1829), handsomely
illustrates. However, the handling of them was not as yet very
archaeological.
Summerson credits the attack made by the connoisseur Thomas Hope
(1770?-1831) in 1804 on Wyatt’s designs for Downing College, Cambridge,
with helping to establish a more rigid standard of correctness. However
that may be, the winning and partly executed design of 1806-11 for this
college by William Wilkins (1778-1839) well illustrates the new ideals.
Wilkins had made his own studies of Greek originals in Sicily and
Southern Italy, and was publishing them in the _Antiquities of Magna
Graecia_ at this very time (1807). The inherited concepts of medieval
college architecture, largely maintained through the earlier Georgian
period, were all but forgotten at Downing. The group was broken down
into free-standing blocks, each as much like a temple as was feasible,
and repeated Ionic porticoes provided almost the only architectural
features. There was no Soanic originality here, no Picturesque
eclecticism; perhaps unfortunately, however, this provided a codified
Grecian mode which almost anyone could apply from handbooks of the Greek
orders.
Wilkins was also responsible for the first[21] British example of a
giant columnar monument, the Nelson Pillar of 1808-9 in Dublin. This
134-foot Greek Doric column in Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, of
which the construction was supervised by Francis Johnston (1760-1829),
initiated a favourite theme of the period usually, and not incorrectly,
associated with Napoleon (see Chapter 3).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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