Early Renaissance Architecture in England: A Historical & Descriptive Account of the Tudor, Elizabethan, & Jacobean Periods, 1500-1625Gotch, J. Alfred (John Alfred)
History
Early Renaissance Architecture in England: A Historical & Descriptive Account of the Tudor, Elizabethan, & Jacobean Periods, 1500-1625
With our next plan we enter upon the Elizabethan era, an era marked
by an extraordinary amount of house-building, which led to a great
degree of attention being bestowed upon the planning. This attention,
it is true, does not seem to have been directed so much towards comfort
or economy as towards magnificence and display. No doubt comfort of
a kind was aimed at, but people did not then require comfort as we
understand it, and designers were not likely to be much in advance
of their clients. The sacrifices of common sense to architectural
effect were nevertheless few. The relative positions of the principal
apartments were settled by considerations of convenience, not of
external grouping. The kitchens, for instance, were always fairly in
touch with the hall, not, as in later days, when Palladian architecture
was in vogue, located some hundreds of feet away in a detached wing,
connected by a curved colonnade, and balanced on the other extremity by
the stables or the remainder of the servants' rooms, in a similar wing.
Nor were the servants' bedrooms hidden away in the roof with windows
looking out on to the back of a solid pediment, or even looking inwards
and only lighted by borrowed light. It was the architects of a more
strict Italian school who were reduced to such expedients in the early
part of the eighteenth century; but in the late sixteenth the prevalent
style was sufficiently elastic to enable the dictates of common sense
to be obeyed. No doubt bay windows were placed in useless situations in
order to balance others that were useful. Lofty windows were sometimes
divided by floors halfway up their height in order that the uniformity
of the front should not be interrupted; but the rooms themselves
were cheerful enough and had good prospects. The features which the
Elizabethan designer had to marshal were smaller and more manageable
than those which fell to the lot of his successor in the days of Anne
and the Georges; and this was particularly the case with his windows.
In a mullioned window an additional row of lights in the width, or even
the height, can be managed without attracting undue attention, but the
sash window has to conform to the size and situation of its brethren.
Economy of planning, in the sense of avoiding waste spaces, or saving
the footsteps of the inmates, was not much studied. The only evidence
we have of its consideration lies in the occasional lopping off of
extravagant features, or the substitution of a reduced set of plans for
one of more extensive area.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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