6. THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL…

6. THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL

THE principal modern treatise on the Picturesque with a capital P, Christopher Hussey’s of 1927, is subtitled ‘Studies in a Point of View’. By the opening years of the nineteenth century the term had come to have a far more precise, if also a more complex, meaning than the adjective ‘picturesque’ as it is generally used today. But Hussey is perfectly correct: the Picturesque is no more a style than is the Sublime, it is a point of view. That point of view nevertheless influenced architecture[105] increasingly as the first half of the nineteenth century wore on. It had a solvent, and eventually a destructive, effect on the dominant Romantic Classical style as has already been suggested in discussing the later work of various leading architects in several countries.

The Picturesque had its early eighteenth-century origins[106] in England, and its most notable theorists were English. In the first quarter of the century, moreover, there was no British architect so resolutely Grecian that he did not, either on his own initiative or in deference to his clients’ wishes, experiment with alternative modes in conscious pursuit of the Picturesque. Despite the stringencies of the Greek Revival as represented, early, in Wilkins’s Downing College or, later, in Smirke’s British Museum, Smirke had built several Castellated mansions in the years before Waterloo and Wilkins the Gothic screen and the hall range at King’s College, Cambridge, in the twenties; while at the National Gallery in the thirties he handled standard Classical elements in a markedly Picturesque way. Nash was the initiator of one characteristically Picturesque mode, the asymmetrically towered Italian Villa, at Cronkhill in 1802; he also exploited in an exemplary way another longer-established one, the Rustic Cottage, in Blaise Hamlet in 1811 (Plate 50A). The score or more of Castellated mansions that Nash built were always Picturesque and irregular whether their detailing was Norman[107] or some sort of Gothic. Above all, he handled the urbanistic development which was his greatest achievement in a thoroughly Picturesque way. Soane’s Picturesque was of a less usual order and his personal tendency was as much or more towards the Sublime, otherwise a largely forgotten category after 1810.

But from 1810 on new buildings in which the basic principles of Romantic Classicism were ignored and exotic stylistic alternatives to the Grecian exploited were generally larger, more prominent, and also more creatively original than they had ever been before. C. A. Busby (1788-1838) was responsible as late as 1827 for one of the finest, most formal, and most extensive examples of Romantic Classical urbanism, Kemp Town at Brighton. Yet in 1814 he exhibited at the Royal Academy his design for Gwrych Castle, completed in 1815, which he was building in North Wales near Abergele, presumably in collaboration with his client, Lloyd Bamford Hesketh, a notable amateur (Plate 49).

The next year Nash began for the Regent the transformation of his favourite residence, the Royal Pavilion[108] at Brighton. This was at that time an elegant early example of a Romantic Classical house as first remodelled and enlarged by Henry Holland[109] (1745-1806) just before the Napoleonic Wars began. Nash now made of it an extraordinary oriental confection (as had already been proposed by Repton[110] in 1806). Part Chinese, part Saracenic, and part Indian, this is quite in the spirit of Porden’s earlier Dome near by (Plate 48). Festive and frivolous, the Pavilion resembles an oversized garden fabrick or sumptuously ornamented marquee; but the scale is fully architectural, even monumental, both externally and in the principal apartments. Not least interesting is Nash’s frank use of visible iron elements. These are not masonry-scaled like the columns he employed later in the Regent Street Quadrant and on Carlton House Terrace, but delicate and playfully decorative. The pierced ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 have naturalistically coloured bamboo detailing and the tops of the four columns that carry the monitor over the kitchen of 1818-21 are embellished with copper palm-leaves (Plate 58A).

The Pavilion had no real sequel; even the Regent, King as George IV from 1820, tired of it almost as soon as it was finished. Indeed, he forsook Brighton for good in 1823 just as the general building activity there,[111] commonly but incorrectly called ‘Regency’, was getting under way. Turning his attention to Windsor Castle, the King employed Sir Jeffrey Wyatville (1776-1840) to remodel the accumulated mass of heterogeneous construction there into a Picturesque mansion of the Castellated sort in which the real medieval elements were quite submerged. But Windsor, being much more obviously a remodelling than was the Pavilion when Nash completed it, is not a very exemplary specimen of a fake castle. Busby’s Gwrych, set against a hanging wood, its round and square towers simply detailed and tightly though asymmetrically composed, is a better instance of that abstract sculptural massing which critics of the mid century would sometimes define as ‘architecturesque’ (Plate 49). For this sort of three-dimensional composition the Italian Villa mode provided on the whole a better vehicle. Wyatville, for example, did his best to turn the vast regular mass of late seventeenth-century Chatsworth[112] into a more Picturesque adjunct to its landscape setting by Capability Brown (1715-83), by adding a long service wing on the north side and terminating that with a very large and tall loggia-topped tower.

Well before George IV undertook the remodelling of Windsor, a relatively modest mansion linked the Castellated mode more closely to the rising enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. The author of the immensely popular Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott, employed Blore in 1816 to build Abbotsford near Melrose in Roxburghshire in this vein—it was much extended along the same lines by William Atkinson (c. 1773-1839) in 1822-3. With its definitely Scottish features Abbotsford initiated a special mode, the Scottish Baronial, that eventually received Royal sanction when Queen Victoria acquired Balmoral Castle near Ballater in 1848, a modest residence built in the late thirties by John Smith of Aberdeen. At the time she and Prince Albert first occupied this Scottish retreat Balmoral was quite small, but it was reconstructed in 1853-5 on a vastly larger scale in the same Scottish Baronial mode by William Smith, son of the original architect, working in close collaboration with Prince Albert. Thus the Queen’s two private residences, Osborne and Balmoral, both in part at least designed by the Consort, illustrated—in neither case very happily—the two major types of determinedly Picturesque design for edifices of some consequence, the Italian Villa and the Castellated; the viability of the Rustic Cottage mode was necessarily rather limited and hardly suitable for Royal use.

Castellated design was not restricted to the field of country-house building. At Conway, in Wales, the engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834) in his suspension bridge of 1819-24 and, after him, Robert Stephenson and his associated architect Francis Thompson in the tubular bridge[113] there of 1845-9 castellated the piers out of deference to the nearby thirteenth-century Castle. Another example of Engineers’ Castellated is the first Temple Meads Railway Station at Bristol, built in 1839-40 by I. K. Brunel (1806-59). Brunel, however, had preferred Egyptian forms for the piers of the Clifton Suspension Bridge[114] near Bristol that he designed in 1829.

Somewhat more appropriately, prisons were likely to be Castellated in the forties and fifties, thus echoing the design as well as the planning of Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The Reading Gaol of 1842-4 by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) and his partner W. B. Moffatt (1812-87) and the Holloway Gaol in London of 1851-2 by J. B. Bunning (1802-63) are the most striking examples. Both are essentially Picturesque essays; but by the time the latter was built the accepted standards of fake-castle building had entirely changed. The reconstruction of Alton Castle in Staffordshire, about 1840, by A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) was archaeological in intention; even more archaeological is Peckforton Castle in Shropshire, newly erected by Anthony Salvin (1799-1881) in 1846-50, and his extensive ‘restoration’ of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland carried out in the next decade. Thanks to its magnificent hill-top site and its present state of disrepair, Peckforton is in fact notably Picturesque; but the fine, hard, structurally expressive detailing of the beautiful pink sandstone may almost be considered anti-Picturesque—contemporaries praised it for its ‘realism’.

The welter of alternative Picturesque modes is most entertainingly epitomized in the model village of Edensor,[115] built by Joseph Paxton in 1839-42 at Chatsworth. He was probably assisted by John Robertson, a draughtsman for that encyclopaedist of the Picturesque, J. C. Loudon.[116] One particular mode, however, had begun to take the lead even before this ‘point of view’ came closest to dominance in the early decades of the new century. The use of Gothic[117] for new churches was common enough from the mid eighteenth century. Down to about 1820, however, this was usually done without much archaeological pretension. The mood of the protagonists of what was then called ‘Gothick’, whether architects or clients, was not very serious. Architects lacked accurate illustrations of old work such as the volumes of Stuart and Revett and other similar treatises were providing for the Grecian. In the first two decades of the new century the more thorough and general study of ancient Gothic monuments in England and the handsome publications of John Britton (1771-1857)[118] and of Nash’s Gothic specialist, the elder Pugin,[119] were gradually changing the situation. Thomas Rickman (1776-1841), a pharmacist turned medievalist, began to put his knowledge[120] of old churches to practical use; his St George’s, Birmingham, built 1819-21, is a not unsuccessful essay in revived Perpendicular. Several others had built or were building by this time churches whose relationship to monuments of the medieval past was about as close as that of most of the contemporary Grecian work to its ancient models. St Mary’s, Bathwick, in Bath, of 1814-20 is at once very early and exceptionally well-scaled. The local architect John Pinch (1770-1827) even vaulted it throughout in Bath stone.

The ultimate purging away of the frivolity of Georgian Gothick detail and the effective substitution of archaeological for Picturesque ideals in over-all composition was by no means always a gain. In two later Birmingham churches, St Peter’s, Dale End, of 1825-7, and Bishop Ryder’s of 1837-8, Rickman did not improve on St George’s, while St Luke’s, Chelsea, built in London by James Savage (1779-1852) in 1819-25, despite its great size and its stone vaulting, is as cold and dry as the Grecian churches of the day and quite inferior to Pinch’s.

Edward Garbett’s Holy Trinity, Theale, of 1820-5—with tower added after the architect’s death by John Buckler (1770-1851) in 1827-8—is rather more interesting and also premonitory of what was coming. Here the detail, imitated from Salisbury Cathedral, is thirteenth-century in character, not fifteenth-sixteenth-century, as in the churches of Pinch, Rickman, and Savage. Moreover, Theale is more boldly scaled and more plastically handled altogether than are theirs. The placing of the tower, far to the rear on the south side, while more Picturesque in its asymmetry than the standard position at the centre of the west front, is also an archaeological echo of the free-standing tower which still existed then beside Salisbury Cathedral.

Most Gothic churches built in the twenties and thirties under the Act of 1818—Commissioners’ Churches as they are called—were neither very satisfyingly Picturesque nor at all archaeological. The usual reason for preferring Gothic to Grecian, indeed, was to save money by avoiding the need for expensive stone porticoes! Barry’s Commissioners’ Churches around Manchester and in north-eastern London are among the better examples; but only his St Peter’s, Brighton, of 1824-6 (not financed by the parsimonious Commissioners) is at all elaborate. Among the most successful contemporary examples are several by one of Soane’s pupils, R. D. Chantrell, at Leeds. His Christ Church there of 1823-6 has considerable spatial grandeur in its tall nave and aisles, while the Perpendicular detailing is rich and even fairly plausible.

Generally preferable to the ecclesiastical Gothic of this decade is the collegiate work; of this more exists both at Oxford and at Cambridge than is generally realized. At King’s College, Cambridge, Wilkins’s Gothic screen fronting the quadrangle and the hall range at right angles to it are not altogether unworthy of the magnificent Perpendicular chapel and Gibbs’s Fellows Building that form the other two sides. Wilkins won the competition for this work in 1823, and it was all completed by 1827. Still more appealing, because an effectively independent entity, is Rickman’s New Court at St John’s College, also at Cambridge,[121] built by him with the aid of his pupil Henry Hutchinson (1800-31) in 1825-31 (Plate 50B). This is not very plausibly Gothic perhaps, but the papery planes of the light-coloured ashlar walls of the U-shaped quadrangle, now richly hung with creeper, form an eligibly Picturesque composition above and behind the open gallery across the south side despite their total symmetry.

By the thirties standards of Gothic design were generally rising, both in the greater degree of plausibility attained by the leading practitioners and in their more positive command of various borrowed idioms. Thus Barry’s King Edward’s Grammar School in Birmingham, designed in 1833 and built 1834-7, seems to have been a rather satisfactory Neo-Tudor design, notably Barryesque in the breadth of the composition and in the use of strong terminal features. This building was unusually literate in detail owing to the assistance of the younger Pugin, who was just about to make a tremendous personal reputation as a Gothic expert thanks to his books.[122]

Pugin’s Contrasts, published 1836, marks a turning point even more than does the acceptance in that year of Barry’s Gothic design for the Houses of Parliament. Newly converted to Catholicism, Pugin believed the building of Gothic churches to be a religious necessity. His programme of Gothic Revival was far more stringent than any existing programme of Greek Revival or, a fortiori, of Renaissance Revival. If the Gothic were really to be revived, Pugin saw that its basic principles must be understood and accepted. Merely to copy Gothic forms was as futile, and to him as immoral, as merely to copy Grecian or cinquecento ones. The methods of building of the Middle Ages must be revived; architecture must again derive its character, in what he considered to have been the true medieval way, from the direct expression of structure; and at the same time it must serve the complicated ritual-functional needs of revived medieval church practices.

In some ways Pugin’s ideas are closely parallel to those of the most rationalistic Romantic Classical theorists in France; doubtless they could be traced back, through his father, to French eighteenth-century sources (see Introduction). However, Pugin’s primary motivation was devotional and sacramental. Approaching all matters of building with passion, he could not but reject the frivolous emphasis on visual qualities that had always been characteristic of the Picturesque point of view.

The mature Gothic Revival that began with Pugin, essentially an English manifestation despite its presumptive French background and carried eventually wherever English culture extended—as far as the West Coast of the United States and to the remotest Antipodes—grew out of the Picturesque yet is itself basically anti-Picturesque. One must build in a certain way because it is right to do so, not because the results are agreeable to the eye. The Gothic Revival thus came to be, for about a decade, as absolute as the most doctrinaire sort of Grecian Classicism. When the Anglicans of the Established Church just after 1840 took over and began to apply rigidly the principles of the Catholic Pugin, a new church-architecture came into being. This is quite as characteristic of the nineteenth century as is Romantic Classicism, even though the mode was—nominally at least—entirely dependent on English medieval Gothic of the fourteenth century. Within a decade, however, Puginian Gothic, after being accepted and codified by the Cambridge Camden Society,[123] developed into a much more original mode, the High Victorian Gothic, very remote indeed from the models which Pugin had recommended as providing the only proper precedents for the Revival (see Chapter 10).

Here it will be well to consider two exceptional Gothic monuments, designed in the late thirties and built in the forties, one very large, the other rather small, which did not follow the new Puginian standards, even though in the case of one of them Pugin collaborated on the design from the first. The most Picturesque addition to the Romantic Classical scene in Edinburgh, curiously effective by contrast with the big-scaled and very cold Grecian structures near by, is the Sir Walter Scott Monument in Prince’s Street Gardens (Plate 51). This was designed in 1836 and executed in 1840-6 by G. Meikle Kemp[124] (1795-1844). His project had originally been placed below both Fowler’s and Rickman’s in a competition; as the local contender, however, he had eventually obtained the commission in 1838. The lacy elaboration of this florid shrine, if less appropriate to Sir Walter’s own brand of medievalism than Abbotsford, is certainly in the richest Late Georgian tradition of the Picturesque.

Picturesque also are certain aspects of the Houses of Parliament, notably the contrast in shape and placing of the two towers at the ends and, above all, the silhouette of the Clock Tower, almost certainly one of Pugin’s personal contributions to the design (Plate 54). But essentially the Houses of Parliament, as might be expected of Barry, their architect, are one of the grandest academic productions of the nineteenth century. Summerson has suggested a relationship to Fonthill Abbey in the way the plan is organized round a central octagon; there may also be an echo of Wyatville’s east front of Windsor in the composition of the river front. But except for the incorporation of the medieval Westminster Hall, the Crypt Chapel, and the Cloister Court, which necessitated irregularity along the landward side, the plan is almost as regular and as classically logical in its balanced provision for multiple functions as a pupil[125] of Durand might have developed. Equally regular are the façades and, in the case of the principal front towards the river, elaborately symmetrical as well.

The rich Late Gothic detail was provided in incredible profusion by Pugin, who worked under Barry against his own developing taste for earlier and less lacy Gothic forms. Doubtless, like the towers, this detailing reflects the Picturesque, but the extreme regularity of the façades provides also the characteristic reiterations of Romantic Classicism. Pugin is supposed to have said that the river front was ‘all Greek’, a considerable exaggeration. But just as Highclere shows what Barry’s basic principles of design could produce when expressed in the revived Jacobethan mode, so without too great a strain one can imagine this front executed with some sort of Renaissance detailing, if hardly in columnar Grecian guise.

Commissioned in 1836, the Houses of Parliament rose slowly. The House of Lords was opened in 1847; the House of Commons only in 1852, the year of Pugin’s early death. Even at the time of Barry’s death in 1860 the whole group was still not finished, although his eldest son (Edward Middleton, 1830-80) made but few personal contributions when he took over control and finally completed the job later in the decade. During this extended period of about thirty years the Puginian phase of the Gothic Revival had been initiated and run its entire course; even the succeeding High Victorian Gothic was more than half-way over by the mid sixties. Like the Napoleonic monuments of Paris, which were also a generation a-building, the Houses of Parliament belong historically to the period of their beginning. They are not quite pre-Victorian, since construction above ground began only in 1840 after considerable revision of the competition design, but they are definitely Early Victorian.

Not all of Pugin’s own work is as remote in character from the Houses of Parliament as his mature principles would lead one to expect. His first church of any consequence, St Marie’s, Derby, of 1838-9, is Perpendicular in style and very crisp and flat in treatment. Nevertheless, both in its detailed ‘correctness’ and in Pugin’s real command of the national Late Gothic idiom, this church marks a great advance over the work of Rickman and the other Gothic architects of the older generation who were still in practice. Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, a remodelling, is confused by the retention of earlier elements and also by a considerable addition made by Pugin’s son (Edward Welby, 1834-75) in the sixties. But the portions carried out in 1837-52 are quite consonant with Pugin’s work done in association with Barry. The great hall is a definitely archaeological feature of the plan yet also a feature that would be of great significance in the later development of the nineteenth-century house (see Chapter 15).

If Scarisbrick is not exactly anti-Picturesque, comparison with such a great house as Harlaxton near Grantham, first designed by Salvin in the Jacobethan mode in 1831 and rising under Burn’s supervision from 1838 on, reveals how little the Picturesque really influenced Pugin even at the beginning of his career. However, Neo-Tudor Lonsdale Square in London, begun by R. C. Carpenter (1812-55) in 1838, is still less Picturesque than Scarisbrick because of its extreme regularity. This example makes evident how far other young architects—and Carpenter was precisely Pugin’s contemporary—were behind him in understanding and exploiting even Late Gothic forms; yet within a very few years Carpenter became the most ‘correct’ of Anglican church architects by following Pugin’s lead.

In 1839 and 1840 Pugin designed two modest churches that provided favourite paradigms for Anglo-American church-building for a generation and more. St Oswald’s, Old Swan, Liverpool, built in 1840-2, adopts the fourteenth-century English parish-church plan with central western tower broach-spired, aisles, deep chancel, and south porch, each element being quite clearly expressed in the external composition. Internally the effect is low and dark, since Pugin provided no clerestory, roofed the nave with much exposed timber, and filled the traceried windows with stained glass. More original is St Wilfred’s, Hulme, Manchester, built in 1839-42, in that the tower—never completed, alas—was set at the north-west corner. The detail of St Oswald’s is fairly elaborate, including a rather rich east window. St Wilfred’s is simpler, with lancet windows to avoid the expense of fourteenth-century tracery.

A larger, more complete, and more expensively decorated example of the Old Swan model was St Giles’s, Cheadle, of 1841-6 (Plate 52A). This has a quite magnificent, if hardly very original, spired tower and interior walls all patterned in colour. Here Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin’s most important patron, provided sufficient funds to furnish the church as the architect intended. Pugin’s largest churches, unfortunately, never received the carved work, stained glass, and painted decoration that he planned for them. At St Barnabas’s, Nottingham, now the Catholic Cathedral there, of 1842-4 he achieved externally a rather fine piling up of related masses at the rear, the whole crowned by a central tower. For lack of any decoration, however, this is grim without and barren within, despite all the spatial interest of the very complex east end.

Pugin, always his own severest critic, was most nearly satisfied with the church that he built for himself next door to his own house, the Grange, at Ramsgate.[126] The house dates from 1841-3, the church from 1846-51. Externally of Kentish knapped flint and internally of Caen stone with a very heavy roof of dark oak, this edifice is worthy of his highest standards of revived medieval construction. But it is rather less original and interesting in external massing and internal spatial development than such a big bare church as St Barnabas’s. To the house we will be returning later (see Chapter 15).

Pugin’s production is largely concentrated in the years 1837-44, between the two periods of his employment by Barry on the Houses of Parliament. By 1844 other architects, Anglican and not Roman Catholic, were accepting his principles and rivalling his success. G. G. Scott, for example, never a really great architect but a notable self-publicist, after modest beginnings designed the Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford in 1841 in the form of a fourteenth-century Eleanor Cross and followed up that prominent commission by building the large suburban London church of St Giles’s, Camberwell, in 1842-4. At that time he was still in partnership with Moffatt. Then, in 1844, he signalized the international standing of the English Gothic Revival by winning alone the competition for the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, which he carried to completion over the years 1845-63.

Although the body of this church was all but completely destroyed by bombs, the tower and spire still dominate the Hamburg skyline (Plate 52B). It is interesting to compare this grand scenic accent with the tower and spire of the Petrikirche, almost equally prominent, built in 1843-9 by de Chateauneuf and Fersenfeld (Plate 57A). Although built, with a curious echo of London’s characteristic stock brick, of an unpleasantly yellowish brick, while the Petrikirche is of a handsome deep-red brick like de Chateauneuf’s Alte Post, the silhouette is so enriched with elaborate fourteenth-century stonework—part English, part German in derivation—that it almost rivals in richness of effect Kemp’s Walter Scott Monument in Edinburgh. Yet the scale is grand, the parts well related, and in every way it represents a more advanced, almost mid-century taste, in contrast to the simplicity and the geometrical clarity of de Chateauneuf’s square brick tower with its plain triangular gables and its very tall and svelte metal-clad spire.

From 1845 down to 1855, when Henry Clutton (1819-93) and William Burges (1827-81) won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France and G. E. Street (1824-81) received the second prize, the pre-eminence of English architects at plausible revived Gothic was generally recognized abroad. Though few of the innumerable churches built by Scott and his rivals at home in the forties are in any way really memorable, by the middle of that decade the characteristics of English church edifices had been completely revised, largely thanks to the propaganda of the Cambridge Camden Society. There is no more typical nineteenth-century product than a Victorian Gothic church of this period built to the Camdenian canon; yet the real achievement of the most original architect who designed such churches, Butterfield, belongs to the next, or High Victorian, phase (see Chapter 10). The more Puginian Carpenter, the other favourite architect of the Society, who died in 1855, is hardly as interesting a designer—however ‘correct’ he may be—in such prominent works as St Paul’s in West Street, Brighton, of 1846-8 and St Mary Magdalen’s, Munster Square, in London of 1849-51, as in what he built for Lancing College in 1851-3. There the plain high-roofed ranges with their fine smooth walls of knapped flint and very flat and simple cut-stone dressings have a quality of precision quite lacking in most contemporary churches. Almost finer is St John’s College, Hurstpierpoint, although largely posthumous in execution.

Scott, Carpenter, and Butterfield all supplied designs for churches in various parts of the British Empire; other English architects emigrated to the Dominions and to the United States, carrying with them the doctrine of the Gothic Revival, just as French architects half a century earlier had carried a rather different sort of doctrine all over the western world. As a symbol of Britain’s major world position, moreover, English churches now rose in many Continental cities, from German watering-places and French Riviera towns to remote capitals such as Athens and Istanbul. Remarkably alien in their foreign contexts, these express the vigour and the assurance, if rarely the real creative possibilities, of the Victorian Gothic.

The Established Church in England was the great patron of the revived Gothic, although other denominations were not far behind. But the use of Gothic was by no means confined to churches, nor indeed to country houses as it had largely been in the late eighteenth century. No other Gothic public buildings rivalled the Houses of Parliament; but in 1843-5 Philip Hardwick, designer of the most Grecian of railway stations, with his son (P. C., 1822-92) built the Hall and Library of Lincoln’s Inn in London of Tudor red brick with black brick diaperings and cream stone trim. This offered a foretaste of the external polychromy which would be the sign-manual of the next period of revived Gothic in England. An earlier, more severe, sort of Tudor, carried out in stone, served Moffatt, Scott’s former partner, for a mansion at No. 19 Park Lane. But this house was most exceptional; in the forties London architects and builders generally eschewed Gothic of any sort except for churches. Generically medieval, if not specifically Gothic, inspiration would eventually play a major part in forming the advanced commercial mode of the late fifties and sixties however (see Chapter 15).

The success that Victorian Gothic, initiated by a Romanist and supported by the Catholicizing wing of the Church of England, had with non-Anglicans in England and throughout the English-speaking world is surprising. Ritualistic planning, almost the essence of the Revival to Pugin and his Camdenian followers, was naturally avoided; but the Gothic work of the best Nonconformist architects, such as the Independent Church of 1852 in Glasgow by J. T. Emmett, is by no means unworthy of comparison with Scott’s, if not the more puristic Carpenter’s. Samuel Hemming of Bristol even employed a few touches of Gothic detail on the prefabricated cast-iron churches that he exported all over the world from Bristol in the early fifties.

The mature Gothic Revival, as has been said, is more anti-Picturesque than Picturesque, at least in the realm of theory; as a writer in The Ecclesiologist expressed the matter succinctly, ‘The true picturesque derives from the sternest utility.’ Yet the revived Gothic could only be expected to appeal widely to architects and to a public who had long fully accepted the Picturesque point of view. All its irregularity and variety of silhouette, its plastically complex organization and its colouristic decoration, its textural exploitation of various traditional and even near-rustic materials is profoundly opposed to the clear and cool ideals of Romantic Classicism, but fully consonant with the Picturesque.

The significance of the English Gothic Revival of the thirties and forties is manifold, and no two critics will agree how to assess it. Certainly the functional doctrines of the Revival and its renewed devotion to honest expression of real construction remain of great importance, even though much of this runs parallel to—if, indeed, it does not follow from—the more rationalistic aspects of Romantic Classical theory. In this way the Revival made a positive historical contribution, if not perhaps as new and original a one as has sometimes been maintained in recent years.

Negatively, the English Gothic Revival was clearly of very great effectiveness as a solvent, not only of the rigidities and conventionalities of Romantic Classicism, but also of the older and deeper Classical traditions that had been revived by the Renaissance and maintained for several centuries. The lack of an equally effective solvent on the Continent helps to explain why the revolutionary developments of the next period, particularly in the domestic and in the commercial fields, were so largely Anglo-American.

Even in the twentieth century it may be said that part of the profound difference between a Wright and a Perret lay in the fact that one had the tradition of the English Gothic Revival in his blood—largely through reading Ruskin—while the other had not (see Chapters 18 and 19). Still later, the California ‘Bay Region School’ of the 1930s and 1940s implies a Gothic Revival background, however little its leaders may be aware of the fact; the coeval ‘Carioca School’ of Brazil manifestly has no such background (see Chapter 25). It is therefore of more consequence to see how the ideals of the Picturesque, and concurrently the anti-Picturesque doctrines of the Gothic Revival, were accepted in the United States, than to give comparable attention to Europe, where neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival were very productive of buildings of distinction. For that matter, most of the American buildings that fall under these rubrics are but feeble parodies of English originals. The Greek Revival architects of America were no unworthy rivals of the Europeans of their day; the exponents of the Picturesque and the followers of Pugin—sometimes the same men—produced little of lasting value. But when seen in relation to the later development of the American house, the contribution of the Picturesque period, lasting in America down to the Civil War and even beyond, is of real significance (see Chapter 15).

There was not much eighteenth- or very early nineteenth-century Gothick of consequence in America. Latrobe’s Sedgeley of 1798, Strickland’s Masonic Hall in Philadelphia of 1809-11, and Bulfinch’s contemporary Federal Street Church in Boston were none of them of much intrinsic interest, and all are now destroyed. Other early manifestations of the Picturesque were even rarer, and it was not until the thirties that a concerted Gothic movement got under way. Haviland’s Eastern Penitentiary of 1821-9 was very modestly Castellated; Strickland’s St Stephen’s in Philadelphia, a rather gaunt two-towered red-brick structure of 1822-3, more or less Perpendicular, represents but a slight advance in plausibility over his Masonic Hall.

The finest works of the next decade are a group of churches in and around Boston, all built of granite. Willard’s Bowdoin Street Church in Boston of 1830 and St Peter’s of 1833 and the First Unitarian or North Church of 1836-7, both in Salem, Mass., are the best extant examples (Plate 55A). The material discouraged detail, but provided, when used rock-faced, an almost antediluvian ruggedness. Tracery is generally of wood and much simplified; the most characteristic decorative features are very plain crenellations and occasional quatrefoil openings. Thus, on the whole, these monuments are closer to Romantic Classicism than to the Picturesque and have little in common with English work of their own day or even of the preceding period. However, the wooden Gothic of this period is in general of a rather lacy Late Georgian order.[127]

The mid thirties saw some quite elaborate Gothic houses of stone, such as A. J. Davis’s Blythewood of 1834 at Annandale, N.Y., and Oaklands, built by Richard Upjohn (1802-78) the next year at Gardiner, Maine. Both architects were capable of designing at the very same time Greek edifices of considerably higher quality—Davis’s Indiana State Capitol of 1831-5 at Indianapolis and Upjohn’s Samuel Farrer house of 1836 at Bangor, Maine, for example—but both were already leaders in the rising revolt against the Grecian.

Upjohn’s Trinity Church in New York completed in 1846 is the American analogue of Pugin’s St Marie’s, Derby, and by no means inferior despite its plaster vaults (Plate 53A). With Trinity to his credit Upjohn, English-born but not English-trained, became the acknowledged leader of the American ecclesiologists. At Kingscote, Newport, R.I., which he built in 1841, Upjohn also rivalled Davis as a designer of Picturesque Gothic houses. But he was almost equally addicted to Italianate forms, even in the church-building field, for there his rigid ecclesiological principles made him unwilling to use Gothic except for Episcopalians. His non-Gothic work ranges from a vague sort of Rundbogenstil, as illustrated in his Congregational Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn of 1844-6, once provided with a highly original spire of scalloped outline, and the more Germanic Bowdoin College Chapel in Brunswick, Maine, of 1844-55, to Italian Villas, such as that built in Newport, R.I., for Edward King in 1845-7 (now the Free Library), and even to public buildings in the Italian Villa mode, such as his City Hall in Utica, N.Y., of 1852-3 (Plate 53B). His basilican St Paul’s in Baltimore, Maryland, of 1852-6—its style is rather surprising, since the parish was Episcopalian—is more successful than most of his later Gothic churches. His Corn Exchange Bank of 1854 in New York, round-arched if not exactly Rundbogenstil, was one of the most distinguished early approaches to the use of an arcaded mode for commercial building (see Chapter 14). Of very similar character and comparable quality was the H. E. Pierrepont house in Brooklyn completed in 1857.

But Upjohn’s reputation, rightly or wrongly, is based on his Gothic churches. Externally these are usually quite close to contemporary Camdenian models; internally they are often distinguished by very original—and also very awkward—wooden arcades rising up to the open wooden roofs above. St Mary’s, Burlington, NJ., of 1846-54 is perhaps the most attractive and English-looking of his village churches, the modest cruciform plan culminating in a very simple but delicate spire over the crossing. Not least significant, moreover, are Upjohn’s still more modest wooden churches[128] of vertical board-and-batten construction, such as St Paul’s in Brunswick, Maine, of 1845. They illustrate, like his openwork wooden arcades, a real interest in expressing the stick character of American carpentry. This interest is intellectually similar to, but visually very different from, Pugin’s devotion to the direct expression of masonry construction. At building churches in stone British immigrants like Notman and Frank Wills (1827-?)[129] were not surprisingly Upjohn’s rivals in the quality of their craftsmanship.

Running parallel with Upjohn’s career is that of Davis, but with the difference that he built few churches and, as Ithiel Town’s former partner, continued on occasion, even after the latter’s retirement in 1835, to provide Grecian as well as Gothic designs. He was perhaps most successful, however, with Italian Villas such as the Munn house in Utica, N.Y., or the E. C. Litchfield house in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y., both of 1854. At Belmead, in Powhatan County, Virginia, built in 1845, he introduced Manorial Gothic to the southern plantation, but this mode never rivalled the Grecian peripteral temple in popularity in the South. Walnut Wood, the Harral house in Bridgeport, Conn., of 1846, was more typical and long retained all its original furnishings. With the building of Ericstan, the John J. Herrick house in Tarrytown, N.Y., in 1855 Davis brought the fake castle to the Hudson River valley—so frequently compared to that of the Rhine and favourite subject in these years of a new American school of landscape painters of the most Picturesque order. As a scenic embellishment Ericstan was not unlike the ruins that Thomas Cole introduced in his most Romantic and imaginary landscapes.

Despite Davis’s ranging activity, extending westward into Kentucky and Michigan, elaborate Gothic houses, whether Castellated or manorially Tudor, were relatively rare in the America of the forties and fifties. But a type of gabled cottage with a front veranda and elaborate traceried barge-boards was rather popular. This is well represented by the extant Henry Delamater house in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and also by that of William J. Rotch of 1845 in New Bedford, Mass., both by Davis himself. The mode was energetically supported by Davis’s great friend, the landscape gardener and architectural critic A. J. Downing (1815-52).

Downing was a characteristic proponent of the Picturesque point of view, leaning heavily on earlier English writers. The designs for Picturesque houses, some by Davis, some by Notman, one at least—the King Villa—by Upjohn, and others presumably by himself, illustrated in Downing’s two house-pattern books[130] were quite as likely to be towered Italian Villas as Tudor Cottages or more pretentiously Gothic designs. Most significant of all are those called Bracketted Cottages by Downing for which he recommended the board-and-batten[131] external finish that Upjohn later took up for modest wooden churches. But these, which are neither very Picturesque—at least with the capital P—nor yet at all Gothic, are better considered in relation to the general development of Anglo-American house-design in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 15).

Rare in execution, as are indeed all the more exotic Picturesque modes, but also significant for its later influence, was the Swiss Chalet. Although chalets were illustrated in the English Villa books of P. F. Robinson (1776-1858)[132] and others from the twenties, the finest extant American example is fairly late, the Willoughby house in Newport, R.I., of 1854. As this is by Eidlitz, it may be presumed to derive from Swiss[133] or German sources rather than from Robinson’s or other English designs.

Thus at Newport, already rising towards its later position as the premier American summer resort, there were by the time the Civil War broke out in the early sixties examples of the Tudor Cottage (Upjohn’s Kingscote), the towered Italian Villa (his Edward King House)—as for that matter also the more Barryesque symmetrical villa without tower, the Parish House of 1851-2 by the English-trained Calvert Vaux (1824-95)[134]—and the Swiss Chalet, not to speak of other more formal houses which here in Newport began to show very early the influence of the French Second Empire. There were also several big hotels of this period, now all destroyed. Two Grecian examples have been mentioned earlier; but the second Ocean House, built by Warren in 1845, was Gothic, a gargantuan version of a Davis-Downing Tudor Cottage. On this the Tudoresque veranda piers were carried to a fantastic height in naïve competition with the columned porticoes of the previous Ocean House and the Atlantic House.

If there were in America no castles of the scale and plausibility of Salvin’s Peckforton, no pavilions of the pseudo-oriental magnificence of Nash’s at Brighton, the will to build them was none the less present. Ericstan has already been mentioned; while at Bridgeport, Conn., P. T. Barnum erected Iranistan in 1847-8 in conscious emulation of the Regent’s pleasure dome at Brighton from designs he had obtained in England. This was carried out by Eidlitz. Longwood, near Natchez, Mississippi, by Samuel Sloan (1815-84), begun in 1860, is even more ambitiously oriental, but was left unfinished when the Civil War broke out the next year.[135] Rather curiously the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, set down like an enormous garden fabrick in L’Enfant’s Mall near the Mills obelisk, was at the insistence of its director, Robert Dale Owen,[136] designed as a Norman castle by James Renwick (1818-95). Built in 1848-9 of brownstone, this is a very monumental manifestation of the Picturesque and one of the more surprising features of a capital otherwise mostly Classical in its architecture. On the whole the happiest American achievements in the Picturesque vein were the towered Italian Villas, from Notman’s Doane house of the mid thirties down through Upjohn’s City Hall in Utica of the early fifties and Davis’s still later houses in the East and the Middle West (see Chapter 5).

The Gothic Revival in America, deriving after 1840 from Pugin and the Camdenians, was a much more alien movement than the Greek Revival. In the British Dominions and Colonies, even though the characteristic production of this period is in many ways more similar to that of the United States than to that of the homeland, the Neo-Gothic achievement appears somewhat less exotic. However, St John’s in Hobart, Tasmania, by John Lee Archer, which was completed in 1835 in the most rudimentary sort of Commissioners’ Gothic, is far inferior to the granite churches of its period in the Boston area. From that to Holy Trinity in Hobart, completed by James Blackburn in 1847, the advance in mere competence is very evident. Yet, as in the case of Upjohn in America, the Norman church that Blackburn built for the Presbyterians of Glenorchy and even more his Congregational Church at Newtown, an asymmetrically towered Italian Villa edifice, may well be preferred to his Gothic work.

Greenway’s Government House Stables of 1817-19 in Sydney, Australia, were already Castellated, but in a modest eighteenth-century way. M. W. Lewis’s Camden church of 1840-9 was based on plans sent out by Blore and simply executed in red brick. In W. W. Wardell (1823-99), who emigrated as late as 1858, Australia finally obtained an experienced Neo-Gothic architect of real ability. He had already made his mark in England a decade before his departure with Our Lady of Victories, Clapham, in London; but even that very decent early church of his required no specific mention in the English section of this chapter. His Australian work is too late to be considered here (see Chapter 11).

Across the Atlantic, communications were doubtless quicker than with the Antipodes, and the cultural climate of Canada was undoubtedly more similar to that of the homeland. The first important Neo-Gothic work in Canada, however, was built for the French and not the British community. Notre Dame, the Catholic Cathedral of Montreal, was originally designed and erected by an Irish architect, James O’Donnell (1774-1830), in 1824-9 somewhat to the disgust of most French Canadians, who considered O’Donnell’s Gothic to be Anglican when in fact it was merely Georgian. Equipped later with western towers and redecorated internally with operatic sumptuousness in the seventies, it is not easy to realize just what Notre Dame was like when O’Donnell completed it. It was bigger, certainly, but not more advanced than the New England churches of a few years later.

In 1845 Wills arrived in Canada from England and began the Anglican Cathedral at Fredericton, New Brunswick, as a moderate-sized cruciform parish-church with central tower, the whole of rather run-of-the-mill Camdenian character despite its pretensions. Very similar, but considerably larger and richer, is the Montreal cathedral which he began a decade later in 1856. His American churches, though smaller and less elaborate, have somewhat more character. Canadians must have sensed Wills’s inadequacy almost at once, for both Butterfield and G. G. Scott were asked to send out church designs in the forties. The former provided in 1848 a scheme for a more elaborate east end for Wills’s Fredericton Cathedral, which had been started only three years before. Scott’s Cathedral in St John’s, Newfoundland, initiated in 1846, deserves a relatively important place in the roster of his churches as Butterfield’s New Brunswick work does not. But this large edifice was completed only some forty years later by his son (G. G. II, 1839-97). Even the stone used here was imported from Scotland.

As in the United States, there is plenty of more-or-less Gothic domestic work in Canada, most of it relatively late. An early and rather pretentious secular edifice was the so-called Old Building of Trinity College, Toronto, erected in 1851 by Kivas Tully (1820-1905). This was a by no means incompetent example of Collegiate Gothic, but more like Wilkins’s or Rickman’s work of the twenties at Cambridge than the advanced Camdenian edifices of its own period. Canadian Neo-Gothic rose to a certain autochthonous distinction only in the next period (see Chapter 10).

If early illustrations of the Picturesque point of view and of the mature Gothic Revival are on the whole of minor interest in the English-speaking world outside Great Britain, that whole world from California to Tasmania was absorbing the propaganda of the English exponents of the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival. This had its effect in the succeeding period when the High Victorian Gothic of England was exploited to more considerable purpose than the Neo-Gothic of the Early Victorian period. By the time a great English critic came to the support of the Gothic Revival, John Ruskin (1819-1900), he had almost from the original publication of his Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 more readers beyond the seas than at home.[137]

Neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival has the same importance on the Continent of Europe as in English-speaking countries. The Picturesque point of view was carried abroad by the great British artistic invention of the eighteenth century, the English garden—jardin anglais, englischer Garten, giardino inglese, jardin inglès, etc., to muster the various well-established and revelatory foreign terms for the more or less naturalistic mode that succeeded the architecturally ordered French gardens of the Le Nôtre type. By 1800 the Picturesque was as familiar in theory as were the international tenets of Romantic Classicism. But for all the garden fabricks that were built in Europe in the English taste, the point of view tended to remain alien. Moreover, from the continuance of Orléans Cathedral[138] in Gothic, ordered as early as 1707 by Louis XIV though not finally finished until 1829, to Schinkel’s painted Gothic visions of the opening of the nineteenth century, there is no lack of evidence of Continental interest in Gothic forms. In France there was also a very considerable theoretical interest in Gothic methods of construction that can hardly be matched in eighteenth-century England (see Introduction). But there followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century no such effective crystallization of an earlier dilettante interest in the Gothic as in England, no popular fad for building fake castles, no flood of cheap Commissioners’ Churches.

Yet, in France as in England, a new and more serious phase of the Gothic Revival did open in the late thirties, stimulated by the ideals of Catholic Revival of a series of writers from Chateaubriand to Montalembert. No great Gothic public monument like the Houses of Parliament in London was initiated in these years in Paris—nor for that matter at any later date—but several churches designed around 1840 were at least intended to be as exemplary as Pugin’s; they were also considerably more ambitious in their size and their elaboration than most of those his Catholic clients and the Camdenians’ Anglican ones were sponsoring in England at this point.

A curious example of the change in taste is the Chapelle-Saint-Louis at Dreux.[139] The original chapel was built in 1816-22 by an architect named Cramail (or Cramailler) as a Classical rotunda to serve as the mausoleum of the Orléans family. In 1839 Louis Philippe ordered its remodelling and enlargement in Gothic style by P.-B. Lefranc (1795-1856), desiring thus to associate the Orleanist dynasty with the medieval glories of French royalty in a manner already fashionable[140] with intellectuals to the left and to the right, if not with many architects. The new exterior, completed in 1848 just as the Orléans rule came to an end, is in a very lacy and unplausible sort of Gothick, not without a certain still rather eighteenth-century Rococo charm but quite inharmonious with the Classical interior. Like another Royal mausoleum of these years, the Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand in the Avenue Pershing in Neuilly, built in 1843 in memory of an Orléans prince who had been killed in an accident near its site, the Chapelle-Saint-Louis has stained glass windows designed in 1844 by no less an artist than Ingres. These are even less appropriate in association with Lefranc’s Gothic than with the Romanesquoid mode that the elderly Fontaine—who knew, like Talleyrand, how to maintain his position under several successive regimes—used for the Neuilly chapel. They are hardly superior in quality, moreover, to the glass, whether imported from Germany or produced locally, that was being used in the early forties in England for Neo-Gothic churches.

A more important Gothic project of this date than the Chapelle-Saint-Louis was that for the large new Paris church of Sainte-Clotilde prepared in 1840 by F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), German-born but a pupil of Lebas. Doubts as to the extensive use of iron proposed by Gau held up the initiation of the construction of Sainte-Clotilde until 1846, so that several provincial Neo-Gothic edifices of some consequence were executed first. These may be compared, but only to their disadvantage, with Pugin’s churches of around 1840 as regards their plausibility, their intrinsic architectonic qualities, and the elegance of their detail. However, several of them are larger and more ambitious—being Catholic churches in a Catholic country—than are even his various cathedrals.

In any case the character of real Gothic architecture in France, as in most other European countries, made unlikely a programme of revival based chiefly on parish churches in the way of Pugin’s. The Continental Middle Ages had most notably produced cathedrals, and it was for new churches of near-cathedral scale that the re-use of Gothic was likely to be proposed. Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, built by J.-E. Barthélémy (1799-1868) in 1840-7 on the heights of Ste Cathérine above Rouen, opens the serious phase of the Revival in France. It has a superb site and is best appreciated from a considerable distance, but the silhouette is not happy and the execution is rather hard and cold. Saint-Nicholas at Nantes was begun in 1839 just before the Rouen church by L.-A. Piel (1808-41), a confused Romantic character who died a monk, and taken over in 1843 by J.-B.-A. Lassus (1807-57), a pupil of Lebas and Henri Labrouste. It is very hard to accept this church as even in part the production of Lassus, the erudite archaeologist who brought out in 1842 the first volume of a major monograph on Chartres Cathedral and who undertook in 1845, together with the better-known E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), the restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris after sharing with Duban the responsibility for restoring the Sainte-Chapelle. Rather more plausible—at least in the sense that it merges fairly successfully with the original fourteenth-century nave to which it is attached—is the façade of Saint-Ouen at Rouen built in 1845-51 by H.-C.-M. Grégoire (1791-1854), a pupil of Percier.

Sainte-Clotilde was finally begun in 1846, as has been noted, and completed after Gau’s death by Ballu in 1857 (Plate 55B). This ambitious urban church of cathedral scale lacks almost as completely as those just mentioned the personal qualities of design and the integrity of revived medieval craftsmanship that give character, if not always distinction, to the churches of Pugin, Carpenter, and other leading English Gothic Revivalists of the forties. Nor does it have the grandeur of proportion of Scott’s Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, to which it is more comparable in size and pretension (Plate 52B). The style is Rayonnant, or French fourteenth-century, and the material good freestone, but deadly mechanical and quite characterless in the detailing. The parts seem somehow too large for the whole. Ballu’s west towers, for example, are excessively tall for so stubby a plan, and the chapel-surrounded chevet is too elaborate for even an urban parish church.

Two later churches by Lassus, Saint-Nicholas at Moulins, built in collaboration with L.-D.-G. Esmonnot (1807-80) in 1849, and Saint-Pierre at Dijon of 1853 hardly rival Sainte-Clotilde in size, elaboration, or even plausibility. Viollet-le-Duc was rather more of an executant architect than Lassus, even though in this decade and the next most of his vast energy and very considerable archaeological knowledge went into the restoration of medieval monuments. At Notre-Dame in Paris the Chapter House that he designed is a wholly new construction of 1847 not unworthy of comparison with the best work of Scott in these years. The block of flats (Plate 56) he built at 28 Rue de Berlin (now de Liège) in Paris in 1846-8—his first executed building—may better be compared with the most advanced English secular Gothic of its date, Salvin’s Peckforton, say, or Butterfield’s St Augustine’s College, Canterbury. The front is so simple and straightforward in composition that it fits between more conventional façades with no awkwardness, and the rather plain detailing has the ‘realism’ that was coming to be admired by this date in the most advanced English circles.

The Romanesquoid design of Fontaine’s Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand of 1843 has been mentioned. The use of such forms was in the forties even more exceptional in France than in England. In 1852 Didron estimated—probably with some exaggeration—that over two hundred Neo-Gothic churches had been built or were building in France, a record which compares statistically, if in no other way, with English church production in this period. None of them, however, is as impressive to later eyes as Saint-Paul at Nîmes, which follows with notable success the alternative Romanesquoid mode of Fontaine’s chapel. C.-A. Questel (1807-88), a pupil of Blouet and Duban, the architect of this church, had evidently studied the Romanesque with the care and enthusiasm usually lavished on the Gothic by his generation, and the result is so great an advance over Fontaine’s work that the resemblance is merely nominal. Thus might the Camdenians have hoped to build had they considered the twelfth-century Romanesque of France as worthy of conscientious emulation as the fourteenth-century Gothic of England. Saint-Paul is a large cruciform edifice, rib-vaulted throughout in a proto-Gothic way, and crowned with a great central lantern. The detail is plausible in its design, neither too skimpy nor too elaborate, although the execution lacks any real feeling for medieval craftsmanship in stone. Questel’s church, however, is as much of an exception as Fontaine’s chapel. No Romanesque Revival got under way in the forties in France in the way that one did to a certain extent in Germany, and the few other Romanesquoid churches of high quality belong to the next period (see Chapter 8).

Minor evidence of French interest—and rising interest—in the Picturesque is not hard to find in these decades, but that is all there is. No Picturesque modes comparable to those of the Anglo-Saxon world became widely popular. In the first decade of the century the brothers Caccault built at Clisson[141] in the Vendée a whole village based on their memories of the Roman Campagna, a more considerable essay in the Italian Villa vein than anything carried out in England. But the asymmetrically towered Italian Villa[142] did not mature in France in the way that it did in England, Germany, and the United States. Séheult’s Recueil of 1821, of which a second edition appeared in 1847, is one of the earliest and richest repositories of inspiration drawn from rustic Italian building; but the edifices Séheult illustrated, however Picturesque in other ways, are all symmetrical and quite in the Durand tradition. J.-J. Lequeu (1758-c. 1824)[143] had produced bolder projects a generation earlier. These are often asymmetrical, generally quite wildly eclectic, and very vigorously plastic; but such things rarely, if ever, came to execution in France except as garden fabricks. Lequeu had no success at all in his later years.

Moreover, the Rustic Cottage mode seems to have struck no real roots in France, even though the painter Hubert Robert and the architect Richard Mique (1728-94), in designing the fabricks of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau at the Petit Trianon in 1783-6, had followed native rather than English rural models. Under the Restoration and the July Monarchy inspiration came generally from English Cottage books. Visconti’s Château de Lussy, S.-et-M., of 1844, though a fairly large structure, is really in the English Cottage mode with an asymmetrically organized plan and an irregularly composed exterior. This is almost unique and, in any case, quite undistinguished. A more vigorous flow of rustic influence entered France via Alsace and directly from Switzerland. The Chalet aux Loges of 1837 by Bonneau near Versailles was, as its name implies, a Swiss Chalet, but it quite lacked the integrity of structural expression and the originality of plastic organization of Eidlitz’s Willoughby house in Newport, R.I., which is, of course, considerably later in date. Occasional imitations of the style François I, such as the already mentioned country house by Canissié at Draveil, S.-et-O., have some irregularity both of outline and of plan; but in general the François I of the July Monarchy, like so much of the Jacobethan of Early Victorian England, is Picturesque only in detail, not in general conception.

In 1840 the elder Bridant, who also built Chalets in the succeeding years around the lake at Enghien, a watering-place on the outskirts of Paris, built a Gothic ‘Castel’ on the plain of Passy, then a fairly open suburb. This was markedly asymmetrical and consistently medieval in detail. The contemporary fame of this enlarged garden fabrick—for such it really was—indicates its unique position in contemporary production, as unique as Moffatt’s Gothic house in Park Lane in London. L.-M. Boltz, an architect of Alsatian if not German origin but a pupil of Henri Labrouste, had some success with a less feudal mode, half-timbered and asymmetrical, in the forties—a house of 1842 at Champeaux, S.-et-M., was typical.

This modest influx into France of Picturesque models from contemporary Germany as well as from contemporary England might lead one to assume that the Picturesque, if not the Gothic Revival, was more significant in Central Europe. In Germany and Austria, however, as also in Scandinavia, Picturesque and medievalizing tendencies mostly merged with Romantic Classicism in the Rundbogenstil rather than standing apart, thus constituting neither an opposition eventually rising to triumph in the English way, nor a mere gesture of aberrant protest as in France.

Schinkel’s interest in Gothic has already been touched on, but none of his more ambitious Gothic projects ever got beyond the drawing-board (see Chapter 2). There are fewer such, in any case, belonging to his later than to his earlier years. Moreover, the Gothic of the early projects naturally belongs to the contemporary High Romantic world of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey and Latrobe’s alternative design for the Baltimore Cathedral, not to the ethical and archaeological milieu of Pugin and the Camdenians. Most of the virtues—by no means negligible—of his Berlin Werder Church of the twenties are not Gothic virtues—not at any rate as Englishmen of the succeeding decades understood them—they are rather Romantic Classical virtues. The principal interest of his earlier Kreuzberg Memorial lies in its cast-iron material, a material anathema to Pugin as a ‘modernistic’ innovation. The Babelsberg Schloss, based principally on the modern castles that he saw on his visit to England in 1826, makes no pretensions to archaeological correctness in the way of Pugin’s Alton Castle of about 1840 or Salvin’s still later Peckforton.

A few Castellated mansions of more local inspiration, such as Hohenschwangau in Upper Bavaria, as reconstructed by J. D. Ohlmüller (1791-1839) in 1832-7, are closer in spirit to Pugin’s and Salvin’s ideals. Hohenschwangau, like certain castles built in this period on the Rhine, exploits the Picturesque possibilities of a fine site and the nostalgic overtones of a district with a romantic medieval past. Schloss Berg in Bavaria, which owes its present very domesticated Gothic character to the work done there by Eduard Riedel (1813-85) in 1849-51, hardly deserves mention in this connexion any more than do Schinkel’s more or less medievalizing country houses, so crisp and regular is their design. Curiously enough, the vast Schloss at Schwerin, begun by G. A. Demmler (1804-86) in 1844, is a more elaborate and extensive example of François I than anything this period produced in France (Plate 57B). It is also notably Picturesque, with innumerable towers and gables disposed around the sides of an irregularly polygonal court. Stüler carried this extraordinary pile to completion after Demmler left Schwerin in 1851. Not very Picturesque, but representing another sort of medievalism, were two Venetian Gothic houses Am Elbberg in Dresden, built with considerable archaeological plausibility by an architect named Ehrhardt in the mid forties. They provide a curious premonition of Ruskin and the High Victorian Gothic of England (see Chapter 10). Semper’s Gothic Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden has already been mentioned.

As in France, much energy went at this time into the restoration and completion of major medieval churches in Germany. Most notable in this connexion was the work on Cologne Cathedral begun in 1824 by F. A. Ahlert (1788-1833), continued by E. F. Zwirner (1802-61), and finally completed by Richard Voigtel (1829-1902) in 1880. Assisting Zwirner, who had worked earlier under Schinkel on the Kolberg Town Hall, was (among others) Friedrich von Schmidt (1825-91), after 1860 the most important Gothic Revivalist in Austria (see Chapters 8 and 11). No more than in France did this activity in ‘productive archaeology’ in Germany lead to new building of much interest, not at least until Schmidt began to work in Vienna.

Ohlmüller’s Mariahilfkirche outside Munich, begun in 1831 and completed after his death by Ziebland, the next considerable essay in ecclesiastical Gothic in Germany after Schinkel’s Berlin church, is certainly much less appealing than is his mountain castle. The hall-church form, authentically German though it was, produced a clumsily proportioned mass, at the front of which a stubby tower ending in an openwork spire seems to be ‘riding the roof’. This church is as ‘advanced’, in the sense of being fairly plausible archaeologically, as Barthélémy’s Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours built a decade later, but that is about all one can say for it. It certainly does not stand up to comparison with Rickman’s or Savage’s English churches of the twenties.

De Chateauneuf’s Petrikirche in Hamburg begun in 1843, or at least its tower, has already been mentioned (Plate 57A). This is superior in design, and in some ways also better built, to most of Pugin’s churches of this date. It is, for example, rib-vaulted throughout in a quite plain but very competent way. The interior lacks, however, the strikingly simple proportions and the warm colour of the red brick exterior; above all, the complex spatial development of the transeptal members lacks clarity, although the plan was probably taken over from the medieval Petrikirche that had been burned. The Gothic churches of K. A. von Heideloff (1788-1865), beginning with his Catholic church in Leipzig built in the Weststrasse there in 1845-7, are hardly above the level of Ohlmüller’s and certainly much less successful than the Petrikirche, though Heideloff had a much higher reputation than de Chateauneuf with contemporaries as a specialist at Gothic on account of his published studies of medieval architecture.[144]

In Berlin most of the new churches of this period by Stüler, Strack, and others were in a Romanesquoid version of the Rundbogenstil. Of these elaborated and coarsened versions of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects of a decade earlier, Stüler’s Jacobikirche of 1844-5 was basilican in plan; his Markuskirche, begun in 1848, was of the central type but with a tall campanile rising at one side. The Berlin Petrikirche, built by Strack in 1846-50, was Gothic, however, and even clumsier than Ohlmüller’s much earlier Mariahilfkirche, which it very closely resembles. Nor was Stüler’s one important essay in Gothic, the Bartholomäuskirche, begun in 1854 and completed by Friedrich Adler (1827-?) in 1858, much better. In general, the first half of the century was well over before Gothic churches of any great size and pretension were built either in Germany or Austria. The largest and most prominent, the Votivkirche in Vienna (Plate 99A), for the designing of which Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) won the competition in 1853 when he was only twenty-five, was not begun until 1856 nor completed until 1879 (see Chapter 8).

In England the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival were effective solvents of Romantic Classicism, because both, and particularly the latter, were consciously nationalistic, emphasizing in an increasingly nationalistic period the recovery of local rather than of universal building traditions. For a good part of their local acceptability they were dependent, moreover, on certain warm connotations which their visual forms had for English patrons. The Rustic Cottage, the Tudor Parsonage, the Castellated Mansion had all, supposedly, been autochthonous products of the insular past. On the other hand, even though the English of the eighteenth century had adopted as their own such foreign painters as Claude and Poussin, from whose canvases the Italian Villa mode principally derived both its forms and its prestige, that mode was certainly not English in its ultimate prototypes. It is readily understandable, therefore, that it was the Italian Villa, of all the established vehicles of the Picturesque, which had the greatest success in a Germany romantically mad about Italy. But such superb compositions as the Court Gardener’s House by Schinkel (Plate 14A) or Persius’s Friedenskirche at Potsdam (Plate 15), perhaps the highest international achievements in the Picturesque genre, owed only their basic concept, if even that, to England. Their elements were for the most part borrowed directly from Italian sources, and they were carefully composed according to a formal discipline not inconsonant with the standards of Romantic Classicism.

The Swiss Chalet, an even more alien mode in England than the Italian Villa, was a native one in Central Europe. Hence one finds Schinkel first, and then his pupils, exploiting it with considerable virtuosity as the Tirolerhäuschen. Indeed, the particular form of wooden fretwork which came to be called ‘gingerbread’ in English, one of the favourite forms of later Picturesque detail everywhere in the western world from Russia to America, is more likely to be derived from Alpine chalets via nineteenth-century German than via nineteenth-century English intermediaries.

Romantic Classicism, being founded on the basic Western European heritage of Greece and Rome, could readily broaden its sources to include the Early Christian and the Italian Renaissance. But to men of the early nineteenth century the Gothic was not a universal European style as we are likely to consider it today; it was ‘Early English’ or ‘Altteutsch’ or (with far more justification) ‘l’architecture française’. The bigotry of the English Gothic Revival was so intense in the forties that Scott was denounced in The Ecclesiologist for even entering a competition for a church in Germany since, if successful, his clients would be Lutherans not Anglicans. Such insular narrowness made the Catholic Pugin’s Gothic paradoxically intransmissible to Catholic countries abroad, quite as intransmissible in effect as the Jacobethan. Scott won his Hamburg competition by modulating, to the horror of puristic compatriots, his usual fourteenth-century English Decorated towards its German equivalent, on the whole a grander style as he exploited it there.

Continental nationalism, like Continental Neo-Catholicism outside France,[145] favoured earlier—or later—modes than the Gothic, down at least to the mid century. The Rundbogenstil, moreover, despite the fact that the precedent for its detail was quite as often Italian as local, received warm support from nationalists in Germany; when exported, moreover, as to the Scandinavian countries and the United States, it was properly recognized as a German product (see Chapters 2 and 5). In Latin countries, and particularly in Italy, Gothic continued to seem alien; hence there are few examples of revived medieval design of any sort there or in Spain and Portugal before 1850. Jappelli’s highly exceptional work at Padua, mentioned earlier, is rich and delicate but not in the least plausible to Northern eyes in the way of Ehrhardt’s somewhat similar Italian Gothic houses in Dresden.

A European consensus of taste had been achieved by the late seventeenth century, despite the division of Europe into Catholic and Protestant countries, and this consensus was maintained, and even grew in strength, for another hundred years and more. When it finally broke down in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it necessarily broke down in different ways and to a different degree in each country. No new cultural synthesis was achieved, at least as regards architecture, before our own day. The resultant stylistic patchwork that the second half of the nineteenth century inherited was largely the product of the increasing nationalism of the two decades that preceded the mid century. This particularistic nationalism, rather than the concurrent increase in mere eclecticism of taste—for such eclecticism had existed to a greater or lesser degree since the mid eighteenth century—explains the major difference in the architectural climate around 1850 from that around 1800; at least it is some part of the explanation. To be Roman in architecture, to be Greek, even to be Italian, one need not cease to be English or French or German. But to be Tudor one must be English, as to be François I one must be French, or so it seemed to most architects and their clients in the forties.

From this pattern of growing nationalistic divergence, this Late Romantic disintegration of the cultural unity that had remained strong and vital through the first few decades of the century, it is important now to turn to an aspect of architecture that derived from a different international absolute, that of science and technology. The English led in most technological developments affecting building methods from the mid eighteenth century on, both in the introduction of new materials and in the exploitation of new types of construction to serve new needs. But they led only because the Industrial Revolution, at once the result of certain major technological changes and the cause of innumerable others, had its origins and its early flowering in England. Before the first half of the nineteenth century was over, other countries to which the Industrial Revolution came relatively late were rapidly catching up. After the fifties technological leadership in building passed from Britain to the United States and to the Continent. Some consideration of the increased use of iron and glass between 1790 and 1855 may well conclude the first part of this book.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

7. BUILDING WITH IRON AND GLASS: 1790-1855

ARCHITECTURAL history has many aspects. Ideas and theories, points of view and programmes can have real importance even when, as with the Picturesque and the earlier stages of the Gothic Revival, most of the buildings which derive from them or follow their prescriptions are lacking in individual distinction. Volume of production is also significant; the disproportion between the previous chapter and the four that precede it expresses fairly accurately the difference in the amount of building in the first half of the century belonging, at least by a broad definition, to the rubric of Romantic Classicism and the very much smaller amount—up to 1840 at least and outside England—that can be considered essentially Picturesque or programmatically Neo-Gothic. But the history of architecture must include the history of building as a craft or technic; sometimes the story of technical development is—or has appeared to posterity to be—more important than any other aspect of a particular historical development. Such has been the case until quite lately with the rise of the Gothic in the twelfth century in France; it has also seemed true in varying degree for the nineteenth century to many historians and critics.

The Industrial Revolution induced a parallel but gradual revolution in building methods; even today, after two hundred years, the potentialities of that revolution have not been fully actualized. The technical story, particularly as it concerns the structural use of ferrous metals, first cast iron,[146] next wrought iron, and then steel, begins well before 1800. There has already been occasion to mention, in passing, technical innovations in various edifices where those innovations had a determinant effect on the total architectural result. But it is worth while, partly for the intrinsic interest of the subject, partly as preparation for subsequent technical developments of great importance later in the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, to go back to the beginning and to recount sequentially the episodes in the rise of iron as a prime building material, as also to touch at least on the concurrent use of other ‘fireproof’ materials and the vastly increased exploitation of glass. This sequence of episodes reaches a real culmination in the fifties with the construction of a considerable number of ‘Crystal Palaces’, first in London and then all over the western world, edifices that were almost entirely of iron and glass.

A marked change in the situation came around 1855. For one thing, it was in that year that Sir Henry Bessemer invented a new method of making steel in quantity so that it could be profitably used for large building components. However, the full architectural possibilities of the use of structural steel were hardly grasped before the nineties. There was also in the fifties an increasingly general realization that unprotected iron was not as fire-resistant[147] as had hitherto been fondly supposed. Then, too—and perhaps most significantly—a sharp shift in taste at this time, leading to a predominant preference for the massively plastic in architecture, made unfashionable both the delicate membering suitable to iron and the smooth transparent surfaces provided by large areas of glass (see Chapters 8-11).

The technical development of the use of ferrous metals in building continued unbroken beyond the fifties; indeed, most of the quantitative records of the first half of the century, in the way of distances spanned and volumes enclosed, were progressively exceeded in the sixties, seventies, and eighties (see Chapter 16). From the point of view of architecture, however, the story passes more or less out of sight for a generation. To a certain extent metal literally ‘went underground’ as new types of foundations were evolved for taller and heavier buildings; but more generally metal structure was masked with stone or brick, as was first proposed in the forties in England, to provide protection against the adverse effects of extreme heat in urban fires (see Chapter 14). When the use of exposed metal and glass became significant again in the nineties that use was to be a major constituent of general architectural development as it has remained ever since (see Chapters 16, 22, 23, and 25). But down to the 1850s the rise of iron and glass is best considered as a separate story.

This story is not confined to the most advanced countries. The tall, slim columns used by Wren in 1706 to support the galleries in the old House of Commons seem to have been of iron[148]; but short ones, introduced in 1752, can still be seen in the kitchen of the Monastery of Alcobaça in Portugal, and a very early use of iron beams was in the Marble Palace at Petersburg built by Antonio Rinaldi (1709-94) in 1768-72. The main line of development, however, was undoubtedly English, French, and American. Definitely dated 1770-2 were the iron members supporting the galleries in St Anne’s, Liverpool.

A much more notable and better publicized use of iron followed shortly after this when metal replaced masonry for the entire central structure of the Coalbrookdale Bridge in Shropshire. This was begun in 1777 by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (?-1777) with the active co-operation of Abraham Darby III, an important local ironmaster.[149] Darby’s Coalbrookdale Foundry cast the iron elements that were needed and the bridge was completed in 1779. Pritchard was an architect, and architects played a more important part in the story of the early development of iron construction than is generally realized. Soon, however, the importance of special problems of statics to which such construction gave rise and, above all, the need to measure accurately the strength of various components required the expert assistance of civil engineers, and often the engineers came to build on their own without the collaboration of architects.

At this point the story crosses the channel to France.[150] There Soufflot, the very technically minded architect of the Paris Panthéon—one of the edifices with an account of which this book began—assisted by his pupil Brébion, provided in 1779-81 an iron roof over the stair-hall[151] that he built to lead up to the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. In the next few years two rather obscure French architects, Ango and Eustache Saint-Fart (1746-1822), were occupied, respectively, with the introduction of iron framing and of ‘flower-pot’ (i.e. hollow-tile) elements supported on timber framework to produce more or less fireproof types of floors. Over the years 1786-90 the great French theatre architect J.-V. Louis (1731-1800), horrified by the recurrent fires at the Palais Royal, combined these two ideas when he designed the roof of the new Théâtre Français in Paris.

Now the main line of advance returns to England. In 1792-4 Soane avoided timber altogether in the fireproof vaults of his Consols Office at the Bank of England, using nothing but specially made earthenware pots; he also covered the twenty-foot oculus in the central vault with a lantern of iron and glass (Plate 3). The architectural qualities of this interior have already been stressed. Even more important for later architecture, however, although effectively invisible, had been the adoption just before this of French principles in a calico mill at Derby and the West Mill at Belper, both begun in 1792. These were planned and carried out by the millowner-engineer William Strutt (1756-1830) who used specially designed iron stanchions throughout carrying timber beams and, in the top storey only, ‘flower-pot’ vaults between the beams such as Saint-Fart had first introduced, but flat brick vaults or ‘jack-arches’ elsewhere.

Other mills soon followed. The first to have iron beams as well as stanchions seems to be the Benyons, Marshall & Bage flax spinning mill in St Michael’s Street, Shrewsbury. This was built in 1796-7 from the designs of Charles Bage (1752-1822) a friend and correspondent of Strutt. The much-publicized Salford Twist Company’s cotton mill at Salford of 1799-1801, designed and built by Boulton & Watt of steam-engine fame—they knew Bage’s mill since they had installed his steam-engine—was according to present evidence the second[152] to be erected with a complete internal skeleton of iron. By 1800, then, a system of fire-resistant construction using cast-iron stanchions and cast-iron beams, carrying what are sometimes called ‘jack-arches’ of brick, had been established in the world of English mill-building. By 1850 such construction was in use in Britain for almost all high-grade building. The system was significantly modified, however, after about 1845 by the substitution of rolled—that is wrought—iron beams, as proposed by Sir William Fairbairn (1789-1874),[153] since cast-iron ones had proved dangerously brittle.

It is not necessary here to do more than sketch out the steps by which the new iron skeleton structure became generally accepted. In 1802-11 James Wyatt introduced it in the Castellated New Palace that he built at Kew for George III, an edifice of which little is otherwise known since it was demolished in 1827-8. In line with this curious conjunction of technical and stylistic innovation, already noted in Schinkel’s somewhat later cast-iron Gothic monument of 1819-20 in Berlin, is Porden’s profuse use of iron for the Gothic traceries and balustrades at Eaton Hall[154] in Cheshire in 1804-12, as also by Hopper in the even more ornate Gothic Conservatory at Carlton House in London in 1811-12 (Plate 60B).

Isolated columns of iron appeared in many edifices from the 1790s on. The most notable extant examples, perhaps, are those in the kitchen and in several of the rooms that were added by Nash to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton in 1818-21 (Plate 58A). His ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 there are entirely of decorative pierced ironwork and the framing of his big onion dome is also of metal, although of course invisible. From the early use of iron columns for gallery supports in churches, increasingly general by the early 1800s, there shortly developed the aspiration to exploit iron still more extensively in such edifices. In three churches that Rickman and the ironmaster John Cragg built in Liverpool, St George’s, Everton, and St Michael’s, Toxteth Road, both begun in 1813, and St Philip’s, Hardman Street, completed in 1816, the entire internal structure is of iron. At St Michael’s the new material is not restricted to the interior but appears on the outside as well. Rickman’s increasing archaeological erudition and that of his contemporaries soon limited the use of iron in Gothic churches, however; by Pugin and the Camdenians it was rigidly proscribed. Structural elements of iron in churches of any architectural pretension became acceptable again only in the fifties (see Chapter 10).

Turning to what long remained the most notable field of metal construction, bridge building,[155] one finds a rapid increase in the numbers and the spans of English metal bridges from the mid 1790s on. In Shropshire, where the first iron bridge and the first all-iron-framed factory had been built, one of the greatest English engineers, Thomas Telford (1757-1834),[156] built the Buildwas Bridge with a span of 130 feet in 1795-6. At the same time the much longer and handsomer metal arch of the Sunderland Bridge in County Durham was rising to the designs of Rowland Burdon. He was assisted, it appears, by certain ideas supplied by Thomas Paine (1737-1809), better known for his political writings than as a technician, who had had some association with bridge-building in America. Burdon was a Member of Parliament and neither an architect nor an engineer. Telford, however, though not professionally trained as an architect, had worked for Sir William Chambers as a journeyman-mason on Somerset House in his youth; throughout his career he built masonry toll-houses and even, on occasion, modest churches in a competent if rudimentary Romantic Classical vein.

In connexion with his work on the Bridgewater Canal and on the road system of the Scottish Highlands, Telford designed and built innumerable bridges, the majority of them of stone. But some of his later iron bridges, more skilfully devised technically and more graceful visually than the Buildwas Bridge, deserve mention here. On the Waterloo Bridge of 1815 at Bettws-y-Coed in Wales he used an openwork inscriptional band and floral badges rather than architectural detail to give elegance and even richness to a modest cast-iron arch. A longer and simpler bridge of similar design but unknown authorship built in 1816 still spans the Liffey in Dublin.

The same year as the Waterloo Bridge, at Craigellachie, amid austere Scottish mountains, Telford bridged the Spey with a plain latticed iron arch. But it is worth noting that he elaborated the masonry abutments as battlemented towers in a wholly Picturesque way (Plate 59). For the Menai Bridge, built in 1819-24 between North Wales and Anglesey, Telford used a new principle in metal construction, suspending his roadbed from metal chains (Plate 58B). This was a principle of great antiquity already exploited with success in America.[157] Telford’s masonry towers at the Menai Bridge are of extremely elegant Romantic Classical design, tapered like Egyptian pylons and pierced with delicate arches. In the twin bridge to this at Conway, also in North Wales, the close proximity of the Edwardian castle led him to provide Castellated towers. In a still later arched bridge at Tewkesbury of 1826 the latticed metalwork itself has the cuspings of Gothic tracery.

The Menai Bridge remains the longest of its type in the British Isles. I. K. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, for which he won the competition in 1829, but which was begun only in 1837, has already been mentioned because of the Egyptian detailing proposed for the piers. This bridge was finally completed only in 1864 by W. H. Barlow (1812-92) using the materials of Brunel’s earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London. Of early arched metal bridges there are very many and by all the leading English engineers of the first half of the century: John Rennie (1761-1821), I. K. Brunel (1806-59), George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59), as well as Telford. The new railways, from the early thirties on, required even more bridges than the canals constructed by the previous generation.

In France Napoleon’s engineers built two arched iron bridges across the Seine. L.-A. de Cessart (1719-1806) designed before 1800 and Delon in 1801-3 executed the Pont des Arts, the first French bridge of iron, and Lamandé completed the Pont du Jardin du Roi in 1806.[158] Neither is comparable in span or in logic of design to the earlier English examples, thus reversing the pre-eminence which the French had held as bridge-builders so long as masonry was used. The much later Pont du Carrousel in Paris, built by A.-R. Polonceau (1788-1847) in 1834-6, was considerably superior to these Napoleonic examples, though hardly epoch-making. But already in 1824, just as Telford’s Menai Bridge was completed, Marc Séguin (1786-1875) was spanning the Rhône near Tournon with a suspension bridge hung on wire ropes[159] instead of chains.

From the early forties Séguin’s cable principle was developed much further in America in bridges at Wheeling, W. Va., Pittsburgh, Penna., and Cincinnati, Ohio, by the German immigrant John A. Roebling (1806-69). Those at Wheeling[160] and Cincinnati are still in use. The more dramatically sited Niagara Falls Bridge of 1852, which attracted world-wide attention when it was new, is no longer extant (Plate 60A); its success, however, led to Roebling’s being commissioned to build the famous Brooklyn Bridge[161] in New York. Begun by him in 1869 and completed by his son Washington A. Roebling (1837-1926) in 1883, this is still one of the principal sights of New York. It is sad to record that work in the caissons sunk for the foundations of the piers killed the designer.

Bridges are at the edge of the realm of architecture. Fairly early, moreover, they came almost entirely under the control of men without architectural training or standards—Roebling, for example, was such a one. Ordinary buildings, all of iron or with much use of iron, are more significant as the century proceeds, both in France and in England. Hopper’s Carlton House Conservatory (Plate 60B) has been mentioned. In 1809 the architect F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818), a pupil of Brongniart, replaced the domed wooden roof of the Halle au Blé in Paris, added in 1782 by J.-G. Legrand (1743-1807) and J. Molinos (1743-1831), with one of metal. The Marché de la Madeleine, designed by M.-G. Veugny (1785-1850) possibly as early as 1824 but not built until 1835-8, was apparently all of metal internally; its masonry exterior, however, was quite conventional. Already in 1835, in the fish pavilion which formed part of his rather Durandesque Hungerford Market in London, Charles Fowler had outstripped this in the direct and elegant use of light metal components, here with no surrounding shell of masonry at all.

Some further Continental examples of the use of iron in the late twenties and thirties deserve mention at this point. Alavoine—at whose suggestion Duc’s Bastille Column, begun in 1831, was made of metal, though the metal is bronze not iron—designed in 1823 a flèche 432 feet tall to rise over the crossing of Rouen Cathedral in the form of an openwork cage of iron. Begun in 1827 and interrupted in 1848, this was finally completed by the younger Barthélémy (Eugène, 1841-98) and L.-F. Desmarest (1814-?) in 1877. In 1829-31 Fontaine roofed the Galeried’Orléans, which he built across the garden of the Palais Royal, with iron and glass. This structure, now destroyed, was more prominent and also much wider than most of the many passages and galeries[162] with glass roofs that had been built in Paris and elsewhere in France from the 1770s on. The most impressive extant French example is the Passage Pommeraye in Nantes, built by Durand-Gasselin and J.-B. Buron (?-1881) in 1843; in this the circulation moves upwards from one end to the other through three storey-levels. A modest Milanese example of 1831, the Galleria de Cristoforis by Andrea Pizzala (?-1862), might be mentioned here also, as it was the local prototype for the greatest of all these characteristic nineteenth-century urban features, Mengoni’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele begun in the sixties (Plate 75B). Of the many early nineteenth-century ones that remain in other European cities, the Galerie Saint-Hubert in Brussels, built by J.-P. Cluysenaer (1811-80), a pupil of Suys, in 1847, is one of the largest and best maintained. Warren’s Providence Arcade in Providence, R.I., has been mentioned earlier.

Related to the galeries, and sometimes also so-called, were the large Parisian enterprises of this period that were really early department stores. The Bazar de l’Industrie, built by Paul Lelong (1799-1846) in 1830, had a large glass-roofed and iron-galleried court of the sort that was to be continued in Parisian department stores down into the present century (see Chapter 16). Even larger and bolder were the similar courts in the department store known as the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie, built by Grisart and Froehlicher in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in 1838, which has already been mentioned for its richly arcaded Renaissance façades (Plate 62A). Shop-fronts of iron were also frequent in Paris[163] by this time. Thus in France, as in England and America, the use of iron was closely associated with structures for business use, but more usually with sales emporia than with office buildings (see Chapter 14). Such, however, were not unknown in England and America, though they were generally less extensive and made less use of glass-roofed courts.

Glass held in wooden frames had for some time been extensively employed for greenhouses. How early iron began to be substituted for wood is not clear, and not perhaps of much consequence.[164] Hopper’s ornately Gothic Conservatory of iron and glass at Carlton House in London, demolished in the twenties, has been mentioned several times already (Plate 60B). In 1833, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75) built a very large and handsome iron greenhouse without any stylistic decoration. The structure of the square pavilions was as transparent and rectilinear as the interior framework of Veugny’s slightly later market seems to have been, and the ranges between were covered, just as so many wooden greenhouses had been, with transparent roofs rising in two quadrants. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire the Great Conservatory was built in 1836-40 by the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65), possibly with some minor assistance from Decimus Burton. This quite outclassed the largest earlier greenhouse, the Anthaeum at Brighton, designed in 1825 and built in 1832-3 for the horticulturist Henry Phillips, with a dome of iron and glass 160 feet in diameter which collapsed before it was quite completed. The Chatsworth conservatory was a still larger rectangle, 227 feet by 123 feet, with the exterior rising in a double cusp like the side ranges of Rohault’s Paris greenhouse—or, for that matter, like the section of the Anthaeum. The columns and beams here were of iron, but the great arched principals of the ‘nave’ and the ‘aisles’ were of laminated wood and four-foot long panes of glass were held in wooden sashes arranged in a ridge-and-furrow pattern. A particular invention of Paxton’s, whose name was given to such roofs, was the hollowing out of the wooden members at the base of the furrows to serve as gutters.

Decimus Burton’s still extant Palm Stove at Kew, carried out by the contracting engineer Richard Turner of Dublin in 1845-7, with rounded ends and a higher central area, is more bubble-like than Paxton’s because of the absence of ridges and furrows on its continuously glazed surface (Plate 67A). But both these great greenhouses were among the most striking monuments of their Early Victorian day and were never exceeded later in elegance though often in size. French rivals, long since destroyed, were the Jardins d’Hiver in Lyons and Paris of 1841 and 1847 by Hector Horeau (1801-72), the latter a rectangle 300 by 180 feet and 60 feet tall.

With the thirties begins the story of a new building type, the railway station,[165] in whose sheds the mid century was to realize some of the largest and finest examples ever of ‘ferrovitreous’, or iron-and-glass, construction. The structures utilizing iron thus far mentioned have been of two sorts, some, such as bridges, markets, greenhouses, etc., with only subsidiary masonry elements, if any at all; others, examples of mixed construction with metal providing only the internal skeleton or the roof. Railway stations were generally—and before the fifties always—examples of mixed construction, but of a rather special sort. The iron and glass portions, that is the sheds, and the masonry portions are likely to be merely juxtaposed, not truly integrated. Such a masonry frontispiece as Hardwick’s Euston Arch in London of 1835-7 had no connexion at all with the functional elements of the station behind—here by Robert Stephenson—although Euston was an extreme case. But a happy co-ordination of the masonry and the iron-and-glass portions of stations was rarely achieved anywhere.

Of the earliest railway station, that at Crown Street in Liverpool of 1830, nothing remains; it was in any case a very modest structure.[166] Of its successors at Lime Street the present station is the fourth on the site. Even the ‘Arch’ at Euston, the next major station to be built, is now gone, despite the strenuous efforts of the Victorian Society and others in Britain and overseas to save this symbolic portal to the Victorian Age. However, the first station at Temple Meads in Bristol, which was built by Brunel in 1839-40, is physically intact, though supplanted in present-day use by a larger and later one. Castellated as regards the masonry block in front, the shed here is equally medievalizing; for its roof is of timber, not of iron, and based on the fourteenth-century hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall in London, whose width it exceeds by a few feet only.

Of the once far finer Trijunct station at Derby, built in 1839-41, the last portions of Francis Thompson’s brick screen have finally been destroyed; the three original sheds provided by Robert Stephenson, with Thompson’s collaboration on the detailing, were each 56 feet wide in comparison to the 40-foot width of Stephenson’s earlier ones at Euston (Plate 62B). The tie-beam roof had much of the graceful directness and linear elegance of Rohault’s greenhouse or Veugny’s market.

More and more, the use of iron was being generally accepted as a technical necessity in the forties. At Buckingham Palace Blore, in adapting one of Nash’s side pavilions as a chapel for Queen Victoria in 1842-3, used visible iron supports just as Nash had done so long before in the interiors of the Brighton Pavilion for her uncle. Yet generally the use of iron in important masonry structures in the thirties and the early forties was quite invisible, being confined to the floors and the substructure of the roofs. In 1837-9 C.-J. Baron (1783-1855) and Nicolas Martin (1809-?), for example, provided a complete iron roof above the vaults of Chartres Cathedral, a work of very considerable scale and technical elaboration that provided the immediate prototype for the iron roof of Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, designed in 1840 and begun in 1846. At the Houses of Parliament, the actual construction of which started only in 1840, Barry capped the whole with iron roofs—the external iron plates are actually visible, of course, but the fact of their being of iron is rarely recognized. Fireproof floors built according to various French and English patent systems were increasingly thought necessary in all high-grade construction. Queen Victoria’s Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, constructed without the aid of an architect by the builder Thomas Cubitt, had them throughout, as did many other well-built country houses of the forties, at least in the passages and stair-halls.

Here and there in the commercial buildings of this decade the iron skeleton used inside came through to the exterior, as it had on one of Rickman’s Liverpool churches a generation earlier. A small office building at No. 50 Watling Street in London, with visible iron supports and lintels in the upper storeys but with brick corner piers and brick spandrels, was a case in point, probably dating from early in the decade. By 1844 Fairbairn was recommending in a report that fireproof construction should be used in all warehouses. Increasingly this was done in Lancashire and, before long, elsewhere; Fairbairn himself had introduced it ten years earlier in the Jevons Warehouse on the New Quay in Manchester.

Closely associated with the development of iron construction is the development of prefabrication; indeed, the parts of an elaborate iron edifice, such as a bridge or a greenhouse, are necessarily prefabricated and merely assembled at the site. From the early forties, and perhaps even before that, lighthouses were frequently erected in ironmasters’ yards in Britain, disassembled, shipped to Bermuda or the Barbadoes, and then reassembled. In 1843 John Walker of London provided a prefabricated palace for an African king and, by the end of the decade, prefabricated warehouses and dwellings of iron were being supplied to gold-diggers in California and emigrants to Australia in very considerable quantity. A look at the prefabricated houses of the 1940s will perhaps explain why almost none of these ancestors of a century earlier seems to have survived, at least in recognizable form. None the less, the advance of prefabrication remains a notable technical—though hardly architectural—achievement of the 1840s and 1850s.

To the mid and late forties belong several splendid examples of mixed construction in various countries that not only represent technical feats of a high order but are also fully architectural in character. Some are by architects, others by teams of architects and engineers working in close collaboration. In building the Britannia Bridge,[167] which crosses the Menai Strait near Telford’s Menai Bridge, the Derby Trijunct team of Stephenson and Thompson in 1845-50 utilized with great success the rectangular tubes built up of wrought-iron plates that Fairbairn, the consulting engineer, recommended (Plate 61). The Holyhead railway line still passes through these tubes. The masonry entrances and the tall towers, taller than they need have been because of Stephenson’s original intention to use suspensory members for additional support to his rigid tubes, were superbly detailed by Thompson. Contemporaries called them Egyptian, but the design has already been noted as fully consonant with Romantic Classicism though quite devoid of Grecian elements. At least the sculptor John Thomas’s pairs of gigantic lions at the entrances are Nubian!

At the London Coal Exchange[168] built in 1846-9 in Lower Thames Street, the City Corporation’s architect Bunning arrived at no such complete co-ordination of masonry and metallic design as did Stephenson and Thompson on the Britannia Bridge. The masonry exterior consists of two palazzo blocks set at a fairly sharp angle to one another and loosely linked by a very Picturesque round tower, free-standing in its upper stages. Behind all this the dome of the interior court can barely be glimpsed. Inside this court, however, no masonry at all is visible; one sees only an elegant cage of iron elements rising to the glazed hemisphere above (Plate 63). The metal members are richly but appropriately detailed, and there is even more appropriate decorative painting by Sang in such panels as are not glazed.

In France two monuments of comparable distinction have already been mentioned, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of 1843-50 and Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est of 1847-52 (Plate 22B). Unfortunately the original shed of the latter, with arched principals of 100-foot span, was taken down when the station was doubled in size in the present century. Inside the library a central row of iron columns of somewhat Pompeian design—that is, resembling the slender, metallically scaled members seen in Pompeian wall paintings—still carries the two barrel roofs on delicately scrolled arches of openwork iron (Figure 14). Since the masonry walls with their ranges of window arches are visible all round, the effect produced is less novel than in the iron-and-glass court of the Coal Exchange; but Labrouste achieved much greater integration between interior and exterior (Plate 21). The Dianabad in Vienna, built by Karl Etzel in 1841-3, had a fine iron roof; the circular bracing of the iron principals, a frequent motif in large openwork members of cast iron at this time, was most appropriate to the Rundbogenstil detailing of the masonry walls (Plate 66B).

Monferran’s cast-iron dome on St Isaac’s in Petersburg, completed about 1842, has already been mentioned (Plate 27A). This was rivalled before very long by several American examples,[169] most notably Walter’s enormous dome, built in 1855-65, above the Capitol in Washington (Plate 82A). Baroque in silhouette and rather Baroque in detail also, this may have encouraged—along with the rising taste for elaborately plastic effects of which it was itself a notable expression—the increasingly common practice of casting the exposed iron elements of American commercial façades in the form of rich Corinthian columns and heavily moulded arches.

Around 1850 cast-iron architecture was coming to its climax everywhere. James Bogardus (1800-74), a manufacturer of iron grinding machinery, not an architect or engineer, began to erect in Center Street in New York in 1848 a four-storeyed urban structure for his own use as a factory with an exterior consisting only of cast-iron piers and lintels. This was one of the earliest[170] and most highly publicized of the cast-iron fronts which Bogardus and various other ironmasters in New York and elsewhere made ubiquitous in the principal American cities before and after the Civil War. But his earliest completed iron front was that of the five-storey chemist shop of John Milhau at 183 Broadway erected within the year 1848. An extant work by Bogardus, the range of four-storey stores built for Edward H. Laing at the north-west corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New York, was begun in 1849 and finished within two months, well before his own building was completed. These early cast-iron fronts are very logical and expressive in the way the attenuated Grecian Doric columns and flat entablatures are used to form an external frame; but the Laing stores have lost most of the applied ornament that appealed so much to mid-century taste (Plate 67B). Later façades are richer and heavier, generally with Renaissance or Baroque arcading, as has just been noted. For the Harper’s Building in New York built in 1854, which incorporated the first American rolled-iron beams, the architect John B. Corlies provided a design of ornate Late Renaissance character. Curiously enough, in executing this building Bogardus used for the upper four storeys the same castings as in the Sun Building that he had erected in 1850-1 in Baltimore to the designs of R. G. Hatfield (1815-79). To the typical cast-iron fronts of New York,[171] of which the most extensive and one of the simplest was that of the old Stewart Department Store on Broadway begun in 1859 by John W. Kellum (1807-71), vacated several years ago by Wanamakers and burned during demolition in 1956, one may well prefer the delicacy of a Glasgow example, the Jamaica Street Warehouse[172] of 1855-6, or a remote Far Western department store like the Z.C.M.I. of 1868 in Salt Lake City, rivalling amid the Rocky Mountains those of Paris. Neither of these is the work of architects.

Great Britain and Europe saw few all-iron façades. This was in large part because the danger of their collapse when exposed to the extreme heat of urban conflagrations, a danger made real to Americans only by the fires of the seventies in Boston and Chicago, was appreciated very early. Yet it was not in America but in Britain that the greatest masterpieces of iron construction of the fifties were built. The succeeding turn of the tide against the visible use of iron also had its origins in Britain, not in America where the material had early become so tediously ubiquitous.

In 1850 Paxton was completing at Chatsworth a relatively small new greenhouse to protect the Victoria regia, a giant water-lily imported from Africa by the Duke of Devonshire. With its arcaded walls of iron and glass and its flat ridge-and-furrow roof, this seemed to Paxton to provide a suitable paradigm for the vast structure[173] needed by May 1851 to house the Great Exhibition, the first international exposition, which was scheduled to open at that time. The Commissioners of the Exhibition had held an international competition that produced several extremely interesting ferrovitreous projects, notably an Irish one by Turner, Burton’s collaborator at Kew, and a French one by Hector Horeau. Rightly or wrongly, all of them were rejected, and the Commissioners’ own Building Committee, including the chief architectural and engineering talents of the age, then produced a project of their own. Reputedly in large part the work of the engineer Brunel and the architect T. L. Donaldson (1795-1885), this manifestly impractical scheme, a sort of Rundbogenstil super-railway-station intended to be built of brick—the project actually provided the inspiration for Herholdt’s Central Station in Copenhagen of 1863-4, or so it would appear—was already out for bids when Paxton presented in July 1850 his own scheme based on the Chatsworth Lily House. Published in the Illustrated London News and offered with a low alternative bid by the contractors Fox & Henderson, this was accepted and—with much significant modification—erected in the incredibly short space of nine months.

Inside this vast structure, with its tall central nave, galleried aisles, and arched transept, Paxton and his engineer associates, Sir Charles Fox (1810-74) and his partner Henderson (to the two of whom a considerable part of the credit must go), created unwittingly a new sort of architectural space. So large as in effect to be boundless, this space was defined only by the three-dimensional grid of co-ordinates which the regularly spaced iron stanchions and girders provided (Plate 64). These elements, designed for mass-production, and also in such a way that they could be disassembled as readily as they were assembled, had a new sort of mechanical elegance towards which the design of metal components had hitherto been moving only very gradually. The character of the casting process made it only too easy to impose on cast-iron elements all sorts of more or less inappropriate decorative treatments from Gothic to Baroque; only rarely had stylistic detail been successfully reinterpreted, as by Bunning in the Coal Exchange, in terms of the fat arrises and broad radii that are suitable to the material and to the particular method of its production. Even at the Crystal Palace a few touches of ornament provided by Owen Jones (1806-89), who was also responsible for the highly original and rather Turneresque colour treatment, suggest the gap—and, alas, it was in the 1850s a widening gap—between the technicians’ and the architects’ ambitions for iron.

Contemporaries had no words for what the Crystal Palace offered. Even today, when the aesthetic possibilities of the new sort of space it contained as well as the technical advantages of its method of assembly from mass-produced elements have been more generally explored, it is not easy to describe Paxton’s and Fox & Henderson’s achievement despite the remarkably complete documentation that exists. The space inside the tall transept (an afterthought designed to allow the saving of a great elm), arched on laminated wooden principals, was more readily appreciated in its day than that in the long nave, because it was more familiar. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Crystal Palace was disassembled and rebuilt in 1852-4 at Sydenham, where it lasted down to its destruction—ironically by fire—in 1936, the entire nave was arched although with principals of openwork metal rather than of laminated wood.

The Crystal Palace’s structural vocabulary—though not, alas, the quality of its space—can be appreciated in the Midland Station at Oxford, built by Fox & Henderson with identical elements in 1852. There one can still see how the new methods enforced a modular regularity more rigid than that of Romantic Classicism and also encouraged a tenuity of material quite unknown to the Neo-Gothic as executed in masonry. Thus the visual result ran doubly counter to the rising fashions in architecture in the fifties (see Chapters 9 and 10). Within five years of the moment when the Crystal Palace was greeted with such general—though never universal—acclaim the climactic moment of the early Iron Age was already over. In those few years, however, Crystal Palaces rose in many other major cities. The finest was perhaps that built in Dublin in 1852-4 by Sir John Benson (1812-74) with its bubble-like rounded ends; the least successful that in New York[174] of 1853 by G. J. B. Carstensen (1812-57), the founder of the Tivoli in Copenhagen, and Charles Gildemeister (1820-69). The prompt destruction of this last by fire was a fearful early warning of the limitations of iron construction unsheathed by masonry. The burning of Voit’s Glaspalast of 1854 in Munich, like that of the Sydenham Palace, occurred in our own day, as also the similar end of the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam, which was built by Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75) in 1856.

The prestige of iron construction was never higher than in the early fifties. For Balmoral Castle, not yet rebuilt in its final form, the Prince Consort ordered in 1851 a prefabricated iron ballroom by E. T. Bellhouse of Manchester modelled on the houses for emigrants to Australia by Bellhouse that the Prince had seen at the Great Exhibition. In the Record Office in London, begun by Pennethorne in this same year, even more iron was used for the internal grid of separate storerooms and for the window-sash than in the great mill that Lockwood & Mawson built for Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1854. The internal structure of this last represented another major contribution by Fairbairn. Characteristically, however, the detailing of the external masonry of the Record Office is more or less Tudor, if rather crude and over-scaled, while that of the Saltaire mill is picturesquely Italianate.

In two new London railway stations, both happily extant, these years produced the chief rivals to the Crystal Palace. At King’s Cross, planned by the architect Lewis Cubitt in 1850 and built in 1851-2, the two great arched sheds somewhat resembled technically the transept of the original Crystal Palace, their principals having been of laminated wood. These had eventually to be replaced in 1869-70 with the present steel principals which are, however, still held by Cubitt’s original cast-iron shoes. The masonry block of the station on the left, or departure, side is undistinguished but fairly inconspicuous. The great glory of the station is the front, with its two enormous stock-brick arches that close the ends of the sheds towards the Euston Road (Plate 66A). The idea had been Duquesney’s at the Gare de l’Est, but here there is no irrelevant Renaissance detail, only grand scale and clear expression of the arched spaces behind.

Paddington Station, built in 1852-4, has no such grand exterior, being masked at the southern end by the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. The engineer Brunel here called in the architect M. D. Wyatt (1820-77) as collaborator, and for the metal members of the shed Wyatt devised ornamentation which—as Brunel specifically requested—is both novel and suited to the materials (Plate 65). There is a slightly Saracenic flavour both to the stalagmitic modelling of the great stanchions and to the wrought elements of tracery that fill the lunettes at the ends and even run along the sides of the great elliptically-arched principals. But the detailing of these, if unnecessarily elaborate, is certainly quite original and not inappropriate to the materials or to the complex spatial effects of the three great parallel sheds crossed by two equally tall transepts. The cool spirit of Cubitt’s station recalls that of earlier Romantic Classicism; the richer forms of Paddington are related to the rising ‘High’ styles of the third quarter of the century, of whose initiation the Great Western Hotel was one of the earliest indications (see Chapter 8).

By 1853 the craze for iron construction was so great that the Ecclesiological Society, forgetting their Puginian principles—Pugin had died the previous year, but not before issuing a severe critique of the metal-and-glass construction of the Crystal Palace—commissioned their favourite and most ‘correct’ architect, Carpenter, to design for them an iron church. It was not Carpenter’s death two years later but the refusal of the English bishops to consecrate prefabricated structures for permanent use that brought to nothing this interesting project along the lines of Rickman’s and Cragg’s Liverpool churches of forty years earlier. The general flood of prefabrication, now producing all sorts of structures for the Antipodes and other remote areas that still lacked their own building industries, slowed down in 1854, when the demands of the War Office for barracks (on account of the Crimean War) deflected prefabricators from civil production.

In that year, however, Sydney Smirke began one of the last major monuments of cast iron in England, the domed Reading Room in the court of his brother’s British Museum. Awkward in proportion and encased in stacks, this is not to be compared in distinction of design with the Reading Room that Henri Labrouste added to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1862-8[175] (Plate 69). That superb interior, with its many light domes of terracotta carried on the slenderest of metal columns and arches, is a great advance over his earlier Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Figure 14). The Reading Room in Paris has no proper exterior, however, any more than does that in London, for it is incorporated in a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures that Labrouste adapted and enlarged (see Chapter 8). Even more striking are Labrouste’s stacks, visible from the Reading Room through a great glass wall, for in them the entire spatial volume is articulated by vertical and horizontal metal elements in a fashion somewhat like the interior of the Crystal Palace. But in the sixties such things were exceptional.

In 1853-8 L.-P. Baltard’s son Victor (1805-74) built the Central Markets[176] of Paris with the assistance of F.-E. Callet (1791-1854) in a mode much less elegant but still franker, exposing his metal structure outside as well as in, at Napoleon III’s personal insistence. Saint-Eugène, an almost completely iron-built church of Gothic design, was erected in Paris in 1854-5 by L.-A. Boileau (1812-96).[177] Boileau’s Saint-Paul at Montluçon, Allier, completed in 1863, is a second French example of a cast-iron church, and he made designs for several others. His Notre-Dame-de-France off Leicester Square in London, a modest church of 1868, has been completely rebuilt since the last war.

However, to house the first Paris international exhibition, that of 1855, F.-A. Cendrier (1803-92) and J.-M.-V. Viel (1796-1863), both pupils of Vaudoyer and Lebas, provided in 1853-4 not another Crystal Palace, such as Dublin, New York, Copenhagen, Munich, Amsterdam, and Breslau, among other cities, had built or were building, but an example of mixed construction. The great iron-and-glass arched interiors were all but completely masked externally by a very conventional masonry shell. It was not until the Paris Exposition of 1878 that iron and glass were frankly exposed and decoratively treated on the exterior of such a structure in France (see Chapter 16). The curve of enthusiasm for iron was evidently taking a downward dip; in Britain the Age of Cast Iron came to an end even more suddenly and much more dramatically than in France.

In 1855 Sir Henry Cole, the prime mover of the Great Exhibition of 1851, had to provide on the estate at Brompton, in the part of London now called South Kensington that the Commissioners had just acquired from the proceeds of the Exhibition, temporary housing for the collections that were being formed by the Government’s Department of Practical Art. Having to build in great haste and in war-time, it is perhaps not surprising that Cole employed, properly speaking, neither an architect nor an engineer, but allowed the Edinburgh contracting firm of C. D. Young & Son to design as well as erect the structure subject to some nominal control from the engineer Sir William Cubitt (1785-1861). It was certainly a surprising product of a Government agency devoted to raising the standard of ‘art-manufactures’! Although we can today appreciate some of the practical virtues of this edifice as a Museum of Science and Art, it must be admitted that it was inferior even to the general contemporary run of prefabricated structures to which it belongs technically. Derisively christened the ‘Brompton Boilers’ by George Godwin (1815-88), editor of the Builder, it roused a chorus of disapproval as loud if not as widespread as the Crystal Palace had done of approval five years before.

After this time British and Continental interest in iron construction waned rapidly; for fifteen years or so exposed iron was chiefly exploited in the commercial façades of the United States, themselves now more and more masonry-like in scale and in detailing, as has been noted. Structural steel began to be used here and there from the early sixties, but the serious beginnings of the Age of Steel lay a quarter of a century ahead (see Chapter 14).

At least in England, its principal home, the Age of Cast Iron, so paradoxically interrelated with the Gothic Revival in its very early stages, came to an end in considerable part because of the triumph of the Gothic Revival around 1850 (see Chapter 10). For several decades the characteristic new architectural developments were stylistic rather than technical. Yet it was the later theories—not the practice—of a French medievalist, Viollet-le-Duc, which played a great part in the renewed interest in the frank use of metal on the Continent in the eighties and nineties (see Chapter 16).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PART TWO

185O-19OO

8. SECOND EMPIRE PARIS, UNITED ITALY, AND IMPERIAL-AND-ROYAL VIENNA

MANY historians, in despair, have merely labelled the period after 1850 ‘Eclectic’ as if earlier periods of architecture—and notably all the preceding hundred years since 1750—had not also been eclectic, although admittedly to a lesser degree. Within the eclecticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there can readily be distinguished the two major stylistic divisions with which Part I has dealt separately (in Chapters 1-5 and in Chapter 6, respectively). So also in the fifties, sixties, and seventies two principal camps are discernible among the architects. Their programmes were less clear than in the previous half century, and in one case much less widely accepted internationally. Yet the High Victorian Gothic of England, taken together with the later Neo-Gothic elsewhere, on the one hand, and what may be loosely called the international Second Empire mode on the other, subsume between them a fair part of the more conspicuous architectural production of the third quarter of the century.

Both the Victorian Gothic of this period and the Second Empire mode were ‘high’ phases of style. Perhaps for that reason neither of them controlled, in the way that Romantic Classicism had done in the earlier decades of the century, all or even any very extensive segments of building activity; yet between them they gave colour to a very considerable proportion of it. The obvious stigmata of one or of the other, or even of both—external polychromy and high mansard roofs, respectively—are to be found on such modest things as mills and working-class housing blocks as well as on major public monuments. The High Victorian Gothic first developed in Anglican ecclesiastical architecture and always carried with it a rather churchy flavour—sometimes quite ludicrously, as in the case of Gothic distilleries, Gothic public-houses, and Gothic sewage plants. Continental Neo-Gothic was more largely confined to churches, especially in France. The international Second Empire mode found its inspiration in the grandiose extension of a palace in Paris; something of the Parisian and even the palatial clung to it when it was used—as often in the non-French world—for such things as factories and modest suburban villas.

Both the Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire had definite national homes, yet both were also full of elements of Italian origin. In that respect the High Victorian phase of the fifties and sixties was somewhat analogous to the Germanic Rundbogenstil, as well as being the direct heir of the earlier and more puristic Gothic Revival of the forties in England. Often the Second Empire mode was even more Italianate, since it was in the main but a pompous modulation of the earlier Renaissance Revival. The one had its roots in the Picturesque, but it differed from earlier Picturesque manifestations in being a ‘style’—or very nearly such—not merely the reflection of a point of view. The other had roots not only in Romantic Classicism but also farther back in the High Renaissance and the Baroque; some qualities of those earlier styles were both continued and revived. But neither High Victorian Gothic nor Second Empire were ‘revivals’ in the sense of those of the first half of the century; they lived with a vigorous nineteenth-century life of their own, not one borrowed from the past. In both cases one may more properly say that they had revived.

The Second Empire mode was the heir, or at least the successor, of the last universal style of the western world, the Romantic Classical. Moreover its wide international sway was hardly terminated by the end of Napoleon III’s reign in France any more than its beginning had waited for his enthronement. Concerning that sway it should be noted, however, that considered as a definite ‘style’ the Second Empire mode is very far from characterizing as much of French production in this age as of that in several other countries. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, its actual initiation may almost be said to have occurred outside France and before the political Second Empire actually began in 1852. In this chapter and the next, certain alternative developments in succession to the earlier Renaissance Revival have been associated with the Second Empire mode, sometimes a bit arbitrarily perhaps, for lack of a more appropriate place to deal with them.

Although France was less affected by the Picturesque in the first half of the nineteenth century than England, the Renaissance Revival had permitted some straying from the more rigid paths of Romantic Classicism in the thirties and forties (see Chapters 3 and 6). The earliest French work of the twenties that may seem of Italian Renaissance inspiration is very severe and flat, approximating occasionally the effects of the German Rundbogenstil yet consistently disdaining that mode’s tendencies towards either medievalism or originality in detail. Gradually, under Louis Philippe, there were changes: on the one hand, there arose an interest in later periods of the Italian Renaissance; on the other, there came an increasing and less peripheral use of sixteenth-century and even later native models. Common to both these developments was an evident desire for richer and more plastic effects.[178] What above all distinguishes the mature Second Empire mode, even more in other countries than in France, is the elaboration of three-dimensional composition by the employment of visible mansard roofs and of pavilions at the ends and centres of buildings, these last capped either with especially tall straight-sided mansards or, even more characteristically, with convex or concave ones. Such features are rare before 1850 in France and almost unknown elsewhere.[179]

The return of the mansard in France is harder to document than its appearance as a new element of architectural composition in other countries, for in France it had never passed out of use as a practical device for providing usable attics. With the increasing emulation of sixteenth-century French models in the second quarter of the century tall roofs of a more medieval sort began to be used with some frequency. Biet’s ‘Maison de François I’ of 1825 did not have them; but ten years later they are very prominent on the François I house Dusillion built in the Rue Vaneau. Moreover, Lesueur in the late thirties could hardly avoid their use when extending the sixteenth-century Hôtel de Ville (Plate 22A). As noted earlier, it seems to have been H.-A.-G. de Gisors, at the École Normale Supérieure built in 1841-7, who first re-introduced on a prominent building mansards of seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century character, and in association with detailing that suggests, vaguely at least, the style Louis XIV. By the late forties the use of such mansards was fairly common in France, although they rarely received much emphasis.

Had Dusillion in 1849-51 built the mansarded mansion for T. H. Hope[180] in Paris rather than in London therefore, or the Danish-born but Paris-schooled Detlef Lienau (1818-87)[181] his mansarded Hart M. Shiff house of the same date in France rather than in America, neither would have been especially notable. But in the England and the United States of the mid century emulation of French models was in itself novel. Dusillion’s and Lienau’s mansards, moderate enough by French standards, suggested to the English and the Americans a way by which edifices of generically Renaissance character could be given something of the bold silhouette that high pointed roofs provided for Victorian Gothic structures. Like Barry’s loggia-topped towers and his corner chimneys, mansards appealed directly to the mid century’s characteristic desire to break sharply away from the flat-surfaced, and nearly flat-topped, cubic blocks of Romantic Classicism. Pavilion composition offered a similar resource for the plastic modelling of façades.

In 1851, following immediately after the Hope house, came the designing of the Great Western Hotel at Paddington in London by the Hardwicks. This was still, one should note, before the Second Empire actually began in France. Gawky though this hotel is, and very uncertain in its use of French precedent, contemporaries generally recognized its inspiration as derived from the period of Louis XIV. The complex massing and the broken skyline, with roofs of different heights and pavilion-like towers at the ends, are much more obviously a premonition of the Second Empire mode in the form the world outside France would shortly adopt it than were the London and New York houses of two years earlier. Unlike Dusillion and Lienau, moreover, the architects of the Great Western Hotel, recognized masters of the dying Greek Revival as well as of the rising Gothic and Renaissance Revivals, were not French-trained.

If the international Second Empire mode had thus, in a sense, beginnings outside France, it is nevertheless true that its spiritual headquarters was in Paris. The prestige of the new Emperor’s capital, a prestige rapidly regained after more than a generation of desuetude, quite as much as the visual appeal of multiple mansards and pavilioned façades, explains the world-wide success of the mode during, and even well after, the eighteen years that the Second Empire lasted.

It was in 1852 that Napoleon, then Prince-President, made himself Emperor. He had already signalized, a few months earlier, his ambition to revive the splendours not alone of his uncle’s rule but those of earlier French monarchs by his decision to complete the Louvre[182]—or more accurately to connect the Louvre with the Tuileries. This was a project over which generations of architects had struggled on paper and at which several abortive starts had already been made. Visconti received the commission, not Duban, who had been engaged since 1848 on what was proving a highly controversial restoration of the old Louvre. Visconti was chosen not for his reputation as a private architect but largely because a succession of public projects for new library buildings in Paris that he had been asked to prepare under Louis Philippe and even under the Second Republic had all fallen through, and it was felt he deserved an important commission from the State. Perhaps also his Tomb of Napoleon I at the Invalides made him especially sympathetic to Napoleon III.

A viable scheme for the New Louvre was produced by the sixty-year-old Visconti with very great rapidity. Counting on the great size of the Cour du Carrousel to obscure the awkward lack of parallelism between the Louvre and the Tuileries, he planned two hollow blocks extending westward at either end of the existing western front of the old Louvre. Beyond these blocks narrower wings, in part built already, would connect with the two ends of the Tuileries Palace in which French rulers usually lived. In the middle of the court fronts of the side blocks there were to be large pavilions, echoing Le Mercier’s in the centre of the west wing of the old Louvre, and other smaller pavilions to mark the salient corners towards the Place du Carrousel. Although the new constructions were intended to house various things—two ministries, a library, stables for the Tuileries, etc.—they were designed comprehensively with no specific indication of what would go on behind the long walls and inside the various pavilions. The New Louvre was not a palace or Royal residence; but like the old Louvre, which by this time housed several disparate activities—most notably the chief art gallery of France—it was meant to be representationally palatial.

In 1853 Visconti died and H.-M. Lefuel (1810-80), a pupil of Huyot, took over. Lefuel very much enriched the design and thereby provided the prime Parisian exemplar of the Second Empire mode, at least as the world outside France came to know it in the late fifties and sixties. Heavily though Lefuel leaned on the precedents provided by the various sections of the old Louvre, it is important to stress that his design did not represent, in the way of the first half of the century, a specific ‘revival’. For one thing, the old Louvre, begun by Pierre Lescot late in François I’s reign and carried forward by a succession of architects in the next four hundred years, offered a wide range of suggestions but no one consistent model. The most characteristic and striking features of the New Louvre, the corner pavilions, were those that were most eclectic in inspiration and in their total effect most nearly original (Plate 68). No part of the old Louvre is as boldly plastic as these pavilions with their rich applied orders set far forward of the wall-plane; only Le Mercier’s Pavillon de l’Horloge on the old Louvre offered precedent for the great height of all the new pavilion roofs and in particular for the convex mansards, like square domes, over the central pavilions flanking the Cour du Carrousel.

Sumptuous as was Goujon’s sculptural investiture of the earliest work in the court of the old Louvre, this was delicate in scale and very flat; much of the sculptural decoration of the new pavilions follows Goujon fairly closely, but even more—some of it nearly in the round—is so bombastically plastic as almost to justify the term ‘Neo-Baroque’. Although there is actual early-seventeenth-century precedent for most of their individual details, the very lush stone dormers set against the high straight mansards of the corner pavilions are particularly novel in effect. For the next thirty years, and even longer, such features of the New Louvre would be imitated all over the western world yet, paradoxically, they had much less influence in France and almost none in Paris.

As far as the outside world—particularly perhaps England and the United States, but hardly less Latin America—was concerned the New Louvre was the prime architectural glory of Second Empire Paris and the symbol, par excellence, of cosmopolitan modernity. Burghers in Amsterdam and Montreal, vacationers in Yorkshire and silver-miners in the Rocky Mountains all expected to find echoes of it in the sumptuous new hotels they frequented; Latin Americans continued to emulate it even into the twentieth century. Yet in the real Paris of the Second Empire, the Paris which is largely still extant today, the New Louvre is but one prominent structure among many and, as has been said, not even a very typical one.

The first Napoleon had had no time to carry out any considerable urbanistic reorganization of his French capital. But for the goodwill of his successors, notably Louis Philippe, the architectural projects that he was able to initiate would never have been brought to completion. His nephew, however, vowed to peace and not to war, had nearly two decades in which to build. Well before his reign began, moreover, he had definitely made up his mind to replan Paris more drastically than any great city had ever been replanned before.[183] Only a few fine squares, the Champs Élysées, and the Rue de Rivoli remain in Paris from earlier campaigns of urban extension and replanning; but the Paris of the Second Empire, the Paris of the boulevards and the great avenues, is the urbanistic masterwork of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a period notably deficient in urbanistic achievement almost everywhere else except in Vienna.

For all the sumptuousness of the individual monuments with which the focal points of Napoleon III’s Paris were ornamented, their settings are generally more distinguished than the ‘jewels’ mounted in them; an exception, of course, is the Place de l’Étoile where, however, the jewel was inherited from an earlier period (Plate 7). This is because of the high standard of design that was maintained in the general run of new blocks of flats that lined the places, the boulevards, and the avenues (Plate 75A). Since in Second Empire Paris the urban totality is more significant than the individual buildings, and since over the years of the Empire—or for that matter down even to the eighties—there was very little stylistic development, the Parisian production of this period may well be presented more topographically than chronologically, as if one were outlining a tour[184] of its splendours.

There is one extant railway station of some distinction belonging to the period at which to arrive. Yet this station, Hittorff’s Gare du Nord designed in 1861 and built in 1862-5, is perhaps less advanced than Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est, which was just being completed as the Second Empire opened (Plate 22B). The flat Ionic pilasters of the façade and the great archivolt-surrounded openings between them are evidence of the firm resistance that Hittorff’s generation put up against the lusher tastes of the mid century as expressed in Lefuel’s work on the New Louvre. Even more characteristically Romantic Classical, and probably finer though less famous than the Gare du Nord, was Cendrier’s Gare de Lyon, since demolished, which had been built almost a decade earlier at the same time as his Palais de l’Industrie in the early fifties.

Proceeding from Hittorff’s station one strikes immediately the characteristic broad straight streets, often lined with trees, that were the new Second Empire arteries of Paris. The continuous ranges of grey stone buildings, their even skyline crowned with inconspicuous mansards, generally include shops below and always contain flats above. They are so designed as to attract very little attention to the individual structures,[185] almost as little as do the separate houses in London terraces. There is much less irregularity of outline than along Nash’s Regent Street, for example, and a general consistency in the size and phrasing of the windows. There is also very little noticeable variety in the handling of the conventional apparatus of academic detail so crisply carved in fine limestone. Even where, by great exception, some bolder architect such as Viollet-le-Duc used more original detail, the unity of character is barely disturbed, so consistent are the basic patterns of the façades (Plate 101A).

Since the plan of Paris has remained basically radial, the visitor has the choice of proceeding circumferentially along one of the lines of outer or inner boulevards or of turning inwards to the centre. It is more profitable, on the whole, to advance centripetally, for the outer boulevards are generally very monotonous. The Île de la Cité was the original core of Paris; the east-and-west axis of the Louvre, extended westward along the Champs Élysées all the way to the Étoile, already provided a central tract parallel to the Seine; the new cross axis was to be a north and south artery running from the Gare de l’Est to the Observatoire. On the Île the vast complex of the Palais de Justice, whose restoration and extension had been undertaken by Duc as early as 1840, received a notable Second Empire ornament in its western block, facing the Place d’Harcourt, which was built by Duc assisted by E.-T. Dommey (1801-72) in 1857-68. Rationalistic in its structural expression and Classical in most of its detailing, this façade and the hall behind it reflect the tastes of the period in the heavy scale of the parts and the rather cranky—and certainly studied—awkwardness of the modelling of the various conventional elements of the orders and minor features of detail. Duc’s earlier work at the Palais de Justice, on the other hand, was detailed with very great grace and elegance, it may be noted.

The principal Second Empire construction on the east-and-west axis of Paris, the New Louvre, has been described already. Along the north side of the Louvre the Rue de Rivoli was extended eastward in 1851-5 the entire length of the palace with no change in the original Percier and Fontaine design except for the addition of high quadrantal mansards throughout the entire length of the street and its subsidiaries. Even a large new hotel[186] was forced into this framework. Yet because of its island site, the high rounded roofs give this block as it is usually seen from the Place du Théâtre Français to the north something of the new plasticity; it thus provided eventually an appropriate terminus to the Avenue de l’Opéra, after that was finally completed under the Third Republic.

Facing the east side of the Louvre, Hittorff balanced the restored Gothic front of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois with the new front of the Mairie du Louvre built in 1857-1861. Characteristic of this period in France is the avoidance of Gothic detail on this secular façade in favour of something vaguely François I; yet the pattern of the front of the church is carefully repeated, even to the rose-window in the high-pitched gable, and the new tower by Ballu, on axis between the Church and the Mairie, is Gothic.

Up to the Rond Point, the Champs Élysées is flanked by parked areas on either side and decorated by fountains and other features designed by Hittorff (see Chapter 3). At the Rond Point there are a few very sumptuous hôtels particuliers, but beyond that the avenue was built up—or more accurately, for the most part, would eventually be built up—like a very broad boulevard flanked by large blocks of flats with shops and cafés below. In the open area on the left between the main axis, the river, and the new quarter which had taken its name ‘François I’ from Biet’s house, lay the Jardin d’Hiver of 1847 and the Palais de l’Industrie of 1853-4. Here also is the Rotonde des Panoramas of 1857 by G.-J.-A. Davioud (1823-81). Around the Arc de l’Étoile, at the far end of the Champs Élysées, are ranged pairs of dignified houses; these were designed by Hittorff with the collaboration of Rohault de Fleury in 1855 and executed in 1857-8 in a mode so academic as to be almost a revival of the style Louis XVI (Plate 7). The general layout of the place was determined by Haussmann, expanding a much earlier scheme of Hittorff’s.

What is most notable in all this mid-nineteenth-century construction along the main axis of the city is the continuity of taste between the Second Empire period and the period that preceded it. The only real echo of the New Louvre was in the big private houses set back from the Rond Point.

The Avenue de l’Opéra, extending north-westward from the Place du Théâtre Français, has become, since its completion in 1878, the major cross axis, rather than the earlier Boulevard Sébastopol to the east. The Place de l’Opéra, with a short spur of the avenue at its south end, was laid out in 1858; and the façades of the buildings (Plate 70C) around it began to go up in 1860 from the designs of Rohault de Fleury[187] and Henri Blondel (1832-97). The Opéra[188] (more properly Académie Nationale de Musique)—after the New Louvre the most conspicuous product of the Second Empire—was begun in 1861 from the design with which J.-L.-C. Garnier (1825-98), a pupil of Lebas who also worked briefly for Viollet-le-Duc, won the second competition held in that year. Although the Garnier design is often thought to be particularly characteristic of the taste of the Imperial couple, it was actually very unpopular with the Empress Eugénie; she had expected the project of her friend Viollet-le-Duc to be accepted and was furious when it failed to win. Substantially completed externally by 1870, the Opéra was not finally finished and opened until January 1875, so that neither Napoleon III nor Eugénie ever entered it.

Here, at its heart, the contrast between setting and monument in Second Empire Paris is at its most extreme, even though this setting is far richer and more plastic than that provided by the severely flat houses that surround the Arc de l’Étoile. Just as there, however, the use of a giant order on all the big blocks that form the place reveals the distinctly academic taste of the leading French architects in this period; but Blondel’s rounded pavilions, where two major streets come in on either side at an angle, provide an almost Baroque elaboration in the grouping of the various masses by which the complex space is defined (Plate 70C). Certainly the result is very different from the large open areas surrounded by discrete blocks of plain geometrical shape favoured by Romantic Classicism.

The Opéra is sumptuous in a rather different way from the New Louvre (Plate 70B). Yet in Garnier’s work, as in Lefuel’s, a generically Neo-Baroque effect is achieved with elements mostly High Renaissance in origin, but here Italian rather than French. The richly coloured marbles, the admirably placed sculpture by Carpeaux, and above all the fashion in which the masses pile up—from the ornate colonnade crowning the main façade, through the half-dome which expresses the auditorium externally, to the tall stage-house at the rear—is much richer plastically than the somewhat repetitive scheme of the New Louvre. The whole, moreover, is made fully three-dimensional by the comparable organization of the major elements at the sides and on the rear. Thus Garnier provided a visual equivalent to the complex ordering of his extremely elaborate plan, a plan the undoubted virtues of which can be fully appreciated only on paper (Figure 15). Inside the Opéra the great staircase, the foyer, and the actual auditorium drip with somewhat brassy gold and the profusion of detail has a curiously un-Renaissance spikiness and lumpiness (Plate 71). This quality underlines how un-archaeological was Garnier’s approach, how responsive he was (perhaps unconsciously) to the new tastes of the mid century that had produced the High Victorian[189] Gothic in England in the previous decade and fostered generally the international success of the Second Empire mode. When Eugénie asked him what the ‘style’ of the Opéra was—Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI—he replied with both tact and accuracy: ‘C’est du Napoléon III’.

Like the lushness of the New Louvre, Garnier’s lushness has an undeniably parvenu quality characteristic of the time and place; but the pace he set, however much emulated all over the world in later opera houses, and the peculiar capacity he showed for satisfying the taste for bombastic luxury of the third quarter of the century were never equalled by other architects, least of all by French ones. In the twin theatres flanking the Place du Châtelet,[190] which were built in 1860-2, Davioud, the architect of the Rotonde des Panoramas, made little attempt to vie with Garnier’s Opéra; but they are considerably more successful in their own right than is the Vaudeville in the Boulevard des Capucines of 1872 by A.-J. Magne (1816-85), which does. Garnier’s own Panorama Français of 1882 at 251 Rue Saint-Honoré has only a modest façade to the street.

Only one other work of Garnier himself rivals the Opéra, his Casino at Monte Carlo of 1878. The fine site that this occupies somewhat makes up for its tawdry finish in painted stucco, and the two-towered façade towards the bay has a properly festive air. The Casino and Baths he built at Vittel in 1882, his Observatory at Nice, and the Cercle de la Librairie of 1880 in the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris are considerably quieter in design. The Palais Longchamps[191] of 1862-9 in Marseilles by H.-J. Espérandieu (1829-74), who had worked for Questel and for Vaudoyer, two palatial museum blocks joined by a curved colonnade above an elaborate cascade, is more Neo-Baroque than most work of the period (Plate 70A); but much of the credit should go to the sculptor Bartholdi whose earlier fountain project Espérandieu took over.

Despite what has been said of the houses at the Rond Point, most Second Empire mansions in Paris, at least those built by leading architects, tend to be rather restrained in their general design and often quite archaeologically correct in their detailing. They are likely, moreover, to follow French seventeenth- or eighteenth-century models rather than those of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Italy. Already, in the Hôtel de Pontalba, Visconti had copied Versailles closely in the interiors, while his exterior followed the line of the early eighteenth-century hôtels particuliers. (This was drastically remodelled in the eighties.) Labrouste, in the Hôtel Fould, 29-31 Rue de Berri, which was built in 1856-8, was rather plausibly Louis XIII; while Alfred Armand (1805-88), a pupil of Leclerc and a frequent collaborator with Pellechet, in designing the Hôtel Pereire and its twin in the Place Pereire about 1855 approached the style Louis XVI as closely as Hittorff did round the Étoile. Nevertheless, study of Parisian exemplars inspired many foreign architects to design houses that could hardly be anything else but Second Empire.

This is largely explained by the special character of the publications[192] of C.-D. Daly (1811-93), a pupil of Duban, and of P.-V. Calliat (1801-81), a pupil of Vaudoyer, through which current French work of this period chiefly became known to the outside world. Almost as was the case at the opening of the century, when the volumes illustrating Prix de Rome projects made the higher aspirations of French architects better known to students abroad than their ordinary practice, the publications of this later day seem to have focused attention on certain aspects only of the French architectural scene, aspects prominent enough, but not altogether characteristic as regards public monuments and dominant official taste. Without knowledge of the French architectural past, without the inhibitions instilled early in French architects by their training at the École des Beaux-Arts, foreign architects readily derived from published sources a Second Empire mode considerably lusher than was generally approved for public use in French academic circles and made it very much their own. Even in public architecture foreigners must have seen current work with different eyes from the French.

For example, the Tribunal de Commerce on the Île de la Cité, an agency provided in 1858-64 with a building of its own instead of mere quarters in the Bourse, was supposed by French contemporaries to express in its detailing the Emperor’s personal enthusiasm for the quattrocento buildings that he had lately seen in Brescia. But posterity, like foreigners when the Tribunal was new, notes in this work of A.-N. Bailly (1810-92) the characteristic Second Empire mansards and the almost Neo-Baroque dome—which at Haussmann’s insistence was added to close the vista down the new north-south artery—not the uncharacteristically flat and delicately detailed façades. Far finer is the front of that section of the École des Beaux-Arts facing the Seine which was built by Bailly’s master Duban in 1860-2, finer and doubtless also truer to the most exigent taste of the day. Rather directly expressive of its interior uses—it houses exhibition galleries, etc.—the detailing of this façade is quite original without being at all cranky like Duc’s on the Palais de Justice, and the whole very subtle in composition (Plate 72B). Much of the cold severity characteristic of the previous half-century remains; but Duban was clearly trying to be creative, not archaeological, so that one cannot properly apply stylistic names from the past, not even to the extent that it is possible to do so in the case of the New Louvre and the Opéra. However, such high distinction of design as Duban achieved here was rather rare in Second Empire Paris; it parallels in this period the equally exceptional distinction of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of the forties.

The accepted range of stylistic inspiration was so wide that it is often only a certain syncretism that gives buildings of this period, nominally in any one of half a dozen ‘styles’, a recognizably contemporary flavour. So also new methods of construction, rather than superseding masonry in toto and thereby demanding original expression as in Victor Baltard’s Central Markets, were more characteristically fused with it, as in the reading-rooms of Labrouste’s libraries. Of these only the later, that in the Bibliothèque Nationale, was built under the Second Empire (Plate 69). Except for this Salle de Travail of 1861-9 and the Magasin or stacks, both so exciting to posterity, most of Labrouste’s other work at this institution, begun in 1855, is as derivative as his private houses; for the most part it is actually hard to say where the old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings stop and his nineteenth-century additions and those of his successor J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920) begin.

Despite the increasing use of metal in all sorts of buildings, there was undoubtedly less sympathy for it than earlier, and hence less success in finding appropriate expression of its qualities (see Chapter 7). By exception, however, the Central Markets in Lyons of 1858 by Antoine Desjardins (1814-82), a pupil of Duban, have a somewhat Labrouste-like elegance in the arched and pierced metal principals spanning the three naves that is not found in Baltard’s so much larger Central Markets in Paris.

In church architecture something like full eclecticism reigned in Paris under Napoleon III, although Gothic was most popular in the provinces. The new Parisian churches generally occupy focal points where major avenues join or boulevards change direction; but, like the Opéra, they have little visual relation to the sober settings provided by the blocks of flats among which they are placed. Instead, each one seems intended to illustrate an alternative mode quite different from the standard urban vernacular of the day.

Saint-François-Xavier in the Boulevard Montparnasse was begun by the elderly Lusson in 1861 and finished by T.-F.-J. Uchard (1809-91) in 1875. With its basilican plan and cold Early Renaissance detail, this might well have been built under Louis Philippe. Saint-Jean-de-Belleville by Lassus, on the other hand, begun in 1854 and completed in 1859 after his death, while larger and rather better built than his churches of the forties, hardly represents any advance over Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde, completed by Ballu only two years earlier. Neo-Gothic could hardly be duller. However, Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée (Plate 98), the parish church of the suburb of St-Denis, designed by Lassus’s associate and successor Viollet-le-Duc[193] in 1860 and built in 1864-7, is more comparable in quality to the contemporary High Victorian Gothic churches of England (see Chapter 11).

Victor Baltard’s church of Saint-Augustin, also of 1860-7, is not located, like the Gothic edifices by Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc, in a working-class district or suburb, but occupies a very prominent if awkwardly narrow triangular site in the Boulevard Malesherbes near its intersection with the Boulevard Haussmann. Considering the success of his Central Markets, it is not surprising that Baltard used iron here; but he did so with much less consistency and thoroughness than Boileau had done at Saint-Eugène (see Chapter 7). The arched iron principals of the roof accord very ill with the Romanesquoid-Renaissance design of the masonry structure below. The front, with its great rose window, is somewhat more effective. At least it provides a strong urbanistic focus among the standardized ranges of blocks of flats that line the boulevards in this quarter. Two other big Parisian churches are similar in quality although quite different in appearance. Ballu, in addition to finishing Sainte-Clotilde, built both Saint-Ambroise in the Boulevard Voltaire, which is certainly more plausibly Romanesque than Saint-Augustin, and also La Trinité in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, which is much less plausibly François I than his later work at the Hôtel de Ville. La Trinité was built in 1861-7, Saint-Ambroise in 1863-9. Both are vast and pretentious, but neither has much positive character. Like so many comparable examples of the eclecticism of this period in other countries, it is by their faults and not by any characteristic virtues that they are readily recognizable as products of the Second Empire.

Two Romanesquoid churches less prominently located, and hence less well known, are considerably more interesting. One is the parish church of Charenton, Seine, built by Claude Naissant (1801-79) in 1857-9; this is clearly composed and detailed with a somewhat eclectic elegance not unworthy of Labrouste or Duban. Much larger is Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix in the Rue Julien-Lacroix in the Menilmontant quarter of Paris. Built by L.-J.-A. Héret (1821-99), a pupil of Lebas, in 1862-80, this is a cruciform edifice with the vaulting ribs all of openwork iron like those of Saint-Augustin. For archaeological plausibility it compares not unfavourably with Questel’s church at Nîmes, begun some twenty years earlier, in the design of the masonry portions of the structure.

The only big Paris church of the sixties of much real distinction—the only French church, for that matter—is Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge at the intersection of the Avenue du Maine and the Avenue d’Orléans. This was built by J.-A.-E. Vaudremer (1829-1914), a pupil of Blouet and Gilbert, in 1864-70. Romanesque and Early Christian—perhaps more specifically Syrian—in inspiration,[194] this basilica is notably direct in its structural expression, nobly scaled, expressively composed, and restrained almost to the point of crudity in its detailing (Plate 72A). Vaudremer’s Santé Prison off the Boulevard Arago in Paris, which was commissioned in 1862 and built in 1865-85, is also Romanesquoid or at least in a sort of very simple Rundbogenstil. The still quite Durandesque character of this prison illustrates Vaudremer’s close linkage, through the work of his two masters, who had both specialized in designing prisons and asylums under Louis Philippe, with the classicizing rationalism of 1800. His much later Lycées of the eighties, Buffon and Molière in Paris and those at Grenoble and Montauban, on the other hand, reflect the more Gothic rationalism of Viollet-le-Duc (see Chapter 11).

Vaudremer’s work may have had some influence, around 1870, on the American Richardson, who was still a student in Paris when Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge was begun (see Chapter 13). However, no significant line of development led forward in France from his sort of church design. In a smaller and later Parisian church, Notre-Dame in the Rue d’Auteuil of 1876-83, Vaudremer himself showed no further development of his personal style, though the interior here is not unimpressive in its scale and proportions.

The vast and prominent church of the Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre in Paris was begun by Paul Abadie[195] (1812-84), a pupil of Leclerc, well after the Second Empire was over in 1874, and largely finished before the end of the century by the younger Magne (Lucien, 1849-1916). This is Romanesque in inspiration, too, but painfully archaeological—’painfully’, because its architect, in carrying out the restoration of his principal medieval exemplar, Saint-Front at Périgueux, seems to have sought to provide ‘precedent’ for several of the features that he introduced here! Yet the bold exploitation of the remarkable site of this church, dominating Paris from the heights of Montmartre, and the bubble-like silhouette of its cluster of domes when seen from a distance give the Sacré-Cœur positive qualities lacking in most other French ecclesiastical work of the later nineteenth century except Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge.

Architecture in France had been a highly centralized profession ever since the late seventeenth century. Under Louis XV a few provincial cities showed some capacity for independent activity, but this subsided during the unproductive years that followed the Revolution. Except to a certain extent in Lyons and Marseilles, local activity did not revive very notably in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the Second Empire most French cities still remained content to follow the lead of Paris. There is hardly a large provincial town which did not—to stress first the positive side of the picture—lay out broad boulevards or straight avenues and line them with more or less successful versions of the maisons de rapport of Paris; on the negative side, the public buildings and churches were usually derived from, and too often very inferior to, prominent Parisian models.

In the centres of the biggest cities one can well believe that one has not left Paris. Occasionally, however, there are urbanistic entities which have more vitality than the rigidly controlled and tastefully restrained new squares and streets of the capital. The fairly modest square in front of the cathedral at Nantes, with its ranges of high-mansarded blocks, is a case in point. Better known is the rising slope of the Cannebière, continued in the Rue de Noailles and the Allées de Meilhan at Marseilles, with the columnar dignity of the Chamber of Commerce on the left near the Vieux Port at the bottom and the paired Gothic towers of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul closing the vista at the top. Public buildings in smaller cities sometimes have a rather illiterate sort of gusto in their boldly plastic massing and exuberantly coarse detailing closer to Second Empire work abroad than to that of Paris; to some eyes these have a theatrical charm not unlike the period flavour of Offenbach’s operas. They often date from well after 1870.

Espérandieu’s Neo-Baroque Palais Longchamps at Marseilles has been mentioned (Plate 70A). Also at Marseilles is the enormous Romanesco-Byzantine cathedral of 1852-93, which was designed by the younger Vaudoyer (Léon, 1803-72), a pupil of his father and also of Lebas. Espérandieu became inspecteur on the job in 1858 and carried on the work after Vaudoyer’s death. This is hardly superior to Ballu’s Paris churches, much less to Vaudremer’s or even Abadie’s, but it is more striking plastically in its rather redundant combination of domed west towers, crossing dome, and transeptal domes; it is also exceptionally colouristic for France. There is an almost High Victorian Gothic brashness in the treatment of the exterior walls with bands of alternately white and green stone. Here the aggressive assurance of the period speaks with an even louder voice than at the New Louvre and the Paris Opéra; this assurance is echoed, moreover, near by in Espérandieu’s own high-placed church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde of 1854-64, a scenic accent of the most brazen Second Empire vulgarity.

The Marseilles Exchange, however, dominating its own tree-lined square, is rather similar to the Chamber of Commerce in the Cannebière as it rises among ranges of houses that are more Provençal than Parisian in the modesty of their painted stucco fronts. Originally begun in 1842 by Penchaud, the Exchange was largely built in 1852-60 by his pupil Coste, but its style remains Louis Philippe rather than Second Empire.

The great elaboration and consequent expensiveness of Second Empire modes of design, as generally executed in France in fine freestone, restricted their full exploitation to the capital and the largest provincial cities. There is a sort of economic striation, from the immense sums the Emperor and, after him, the authorities of the Third Republic—even though relatively impoverished—were willing to put into representational public construction at the top, through the level represented by what Parisian investors spent on blocks of flats or rich provincial cities on their principal monuments, down finally to the niggardly building budgets of small towns and villages. This striation provides a sort of analogue to the breakdown of that earlier stylistic unity which had been so marked and happy a characteristic of French architecture for at least a century and a half. That this breakdown was still relative in France is apparent when one turns to other countries where eclectic taste in this period was bolder and where the variation in expenditure on different sorts of buildings was at least as great.

French architectural prestige revived internationally in the fifties to remain surprisingly high for another two generations.[196] However, the Second Empire mode was gradually succeeded internationally by another Parisian mode to which it is convenient to apply the name ‘Beaux-Arts’, from the École des Beaux-Arts out of whose instruction it stemmed. More and more foreigners went to Paris to study as the second half of the century wore on, until Paris became almost what Rome had been in the eighteenth century. In architectural education the influence of the École was especially strong in the New World; the training of English and most Continental architects was much less affected. The first two architectural schools to be founded in the United States, both by William Robert Ware (1832-1915)—himself, curiously enough, a practitioner of a fairly aggressive sort of Victorian Gothic (see Chapter 11)—that at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston opened in 1865 and the somewhat later school at Columbia University in New York, were both based on the methods of the École.[197] French winners of the Prix de Rome were increasingly imported to serve as teachers, and three generations later the last of them had not yet left the United States. The influence of the École in Latin America was even more powerful, and the dominance of its ideas has lasted in some countries down almost to the present.[198]

Both in the New World and the Old most cities grew like weeds in the third quarter of the century; the analogy is, indeed, a rather accurate one, for the growth was characteristically rank, uncontrolled, and destructive of earlier architectural amenities. Various European capitals, however, imitating Napoleon III’s re-organization of Paris, took advantage of the clearing away of their fortifications to lay out something equivalent to the grands boulevards. Florence during the late sixties, for example, when it was very briefly the capital of Italy, saw the laying out, according to the general plan of Giuseppe Poggi (1811-1901), of a range of avenues and squares that extend around the city to the east, north, and west on the site of the old walls. These districts, built up over the years 1865-77, display little or none of the new Second Empire afflatus. For the most part everywhere in Italy in this period the architecture is of generically Renaissance revival character. Only in the much later Piazza della Repubblica, carved out of the slummy heart of the city in the 80s and 90s, is there a heavy pomposity of scale that is curiously un-Florentine—the centre of nineteenth-century Athens might be Neo-Greek, but it was Munich, not Florence, that became characteristically Neo-Tuscan!

In the old Savoy capital of Turin, where the first half of the century had seen such notable urbanistic projects, a vigorous local tradition continued to control most of the new work.[199] However, at the farther side of the Piazza Carlo Felice the Porta Nuova Railway Station was built in 1866-8, as was mentioned in Chapter 3, by the engineer Mazzuchetti and the architect Ceppi in a rather original sort of Rundbogenstil. The vast iron and glass lunette at the front still provides a handsome termination to the long axis of the Via Roma, although the rear of the station has been rebuilt since the War. Along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II the earlier arcades of Promis were continued almost indefinitely; but the detailing of the façades grew continually richer in evident emulation of Second Empire Paris. This influence also affected the building up of the contiguous quarter of the city. In the fine new square at the end of the Via Garibaldi, however, balancing the earlier Piazza Vittorio Veneto at the end of the Via Po, the Piazza dello Statuto opened in 1864, the façades by Giuseppe Bollati (1819-69) are not at all Parisian, but recall rather the local Academic Baroque of Juvarra. Especially effective, and rare in Turin, are the warm and tawny colours of the painted stucco walls here.

With the uniting of Italy and the eventual taking over of Rome as the capital of the kingdom of Italy on the downfall of Napoleon III in 1870, a tremendous expansion[200] of the old Papal city began. The two principal new streets extending eastward, the Via Venti Settembre and the Via Nazionale, were laid out in 1871 and built up over the next fifteen years. Vast and tawny-coloured like the Piazza dello Statuto in Turin, but much less distinguished in design, is the Finance Ministry in the former street built by Raffaele Canevari (1825-1900) in 1870-7. Equally grand in scale and much more dignified are the quadrantal façades of the Esedra built by Gaetano Koch (1849-1910) in 1885 at the head of the Via Nazionale facing Michelangelo’s Santa Maria degli Angeli (Plate 76A). With the fine later fountain by A. Guerrieri and Mario Rubelli in the centre this provides a most impressive piece of late-nineteenth-century academic urbanism. It still offers a not altogether unworthy preface to the Baths of Diocletian—of which it actually occupies the site of the largest exedra—and to the new railway station (Plate 183B), both so near, which epitomize between them the ancient and the modern worlds in the architecture of Rome.

Koch’s Palazzo Boncampagni in the Via Vittorio Veneto, now the American Embassy, built in 1886-90, is also very dignified. It represents very well the occasional tendency in that decade towards restraint and sobriety in Renaissance design, a tendency that balances the contemporary stylistic development towards the Neo-Baroque. In the Via Nazionale the two most prominent edifices[201] by Italian architects, the Palazzo delle Belle Arti of Pio Piacentini (1846-1928) begun in 1882 and Koch’s Banca d’Italia of 1889-1904, are both quite academic in a respectable Renaissance way, and in the latter case impressively monumental as well. The same applies a fortiori to the two principal public edifices begun in Rome in the eighties—not the respectability, goodness knows, but the monumentality. The enormous Palazzo di Giustizia, in a new quarter across the Tiber, is an incredibly brash example of Neo-Baroque loaded down with heavy rustication, doubtless of Piranesian inspiration. This was designed by Giuseppe Calderini (1837-1916) in 1883-7 and built in 1888-1910 without the intended high mansards.

But the most overpowering new structure in Rome, dominating the whole city and blocking the view of both the ancient Forum and the Renaissance Campidoglio, is the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, rising above the much enlarged Piazza Venezia at the head of the Corso. Largely the work of Count Giuseppe Sacconi (1854-1905),[202] who in 1884 won the third competition held for its design, this was begun in 1885 and continued after his death by Koch, Piacentini, and M. Manfredi (1859-1927), being finally brought to completion only in 1911 by the engineer R. Raffaelli. Hardly Second Empire nor yet quite ‘Beaux-Arts’, this most pretentious of all nineteenth-century monuments well illustrates the total decadence of inherited standards of Classicism in Europe towards the end of the century. It can be compared only with Poelaert’s Palace of Justice in Brussels, begun twenty years earlier, and entirely to the latter’s advantage even as regards mere gargantuan assurance.

In general, Italian production of the second half of the century is of relatively slight interest; moreover, it often seriously upsets the balance of earlier urban entities by its heavy scale. The great exception, and the one ranking Italian work of the period, is generally recognized to be the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan. In Genoa, behind the theatre, the Galleria Mazzini of 1871 also exceeds in length, in height, and in elaboration all the galleries and passages built in various European cities in the first half of the nineteenth century, yet it is not essentially very different from them in its scale or its detailing. The vast cruciform Galleria in Milan, however, extending from the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Scala, with a great octagonal space at the crossing, is in concept and in its actual dimensions more a work of urbanism than of architecture (Plate 75B). Built with English capital by an English firm, the City of Milan Improvement Company Ltd, and even, presumably, with some English professional advice—M. D. Wyatt was a member of the English board—this tremendous project more than rivals the greatest Victorian railway stations of London in the height, if not the span, of its metal-and-glass roof. But the actual designing architect was Italian, Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-77), and the Galleria de Cristoforis provided him with at least a modest local prototype. Erected in 1865-77 and now completely restored to its pristine richness and elegance, the Galleria scheme involved the enlargement of the Piazza del Duomo and the lining of two of its sides with related façades—executed only partly from Mengoni’s designs—as also the regularization of the Piazza della Scala. Alessi’s sixteenth-century Palazzo Marino, itself of almost Second Empire lushness, was enlarged to serve as the offices of the municipality and provided with a new façade in Alessi’s extreme Mannerist style across one side of the square facing La Scala. This was carried out in 1888-90 by Luca Beltrami (1854-1933), who had studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, to serve as municipal offices.

Like all the other most prominent buildings of this period, Mengoni’s Galleria makes its impression by its size, its elaboration of detail, and above all its unqualified assurance. From the triumphal-arch portal, rising as high as the nave of the medieval Duomo, to the gilded arabesques of the pilasters, all is obvious, expensive, and rather parvenu; yet the setting—at once so comfortable and so magnificent—that it provides for urban life, centre as it has always remained of so much Milanese activity, has not been equalled since.[203] The Galleria Umberto I in Naples is a late and rather inferior imitation whose ornate entrance most ungenerously overpowers the San Carlo Theatre across the street. This was built by Emmanuele Rocco in 1887-90.

After Paris the most extensive and sumptuous example of the re-organization of a great city carried out in this period is not in Italy but in Austria. Vienna had been relatively inactive architecturally in the first half of the nineteenth century under Francis I (see Chapter 2). His successor Francis Joseph, however, who came to the throne in 1848, set out in the following decades as Kaiser and König to see that his Imperial and Royal capitals should rival Napoleon III’s Paris. In 1857 the fortifications surrounding the old city of Vienna were removed, and the following year Ludwig Förster (1797-1863) won the competition for the layout of the Ringstrasse that was to take their place. The execution of this project, with many modifications, took some thirty years (Plate 74). Outside the actual walls there had been a wide glacis, and therefore the Ring could be developed not merely as a series of wide tree-lined boulevards like those of Paris but with large open spaces in which major public buildings were grouped. These edifices are even more various in style than the comparable ones in Paris, despite the fact that they were the work of a very closely knit group of architects. None of them is of specifically Second Empire character, though the high mansards and the pavilion composition of the New Louvre were used fairly frequently on private buildings in Vienna and throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The earliest major project of Francis Joseph was the construction of the Arsenal, begun in 1849, where most of the leading architects of the period worked (see Chapter 2). All in various versions of the Rundbogenstil, this group of buildings culminates in the centrally placed Army Museum of 1856-77 by Förster and his Danish son-in-law Theophil von Hansen (1813-91). On this the very ornate detail is Byzantinesque and Saracenic in inspiration, yet it is not without a distinctive flavour that is unmistakably of this particular period: the brilliant polychromy of the red and yellow brick walls almost seems to echo, like Vaudoyer’s Marseilles cathedral, the bolder effects of the contemporary High Victorian Gothic architects of England.

Ferstel’s bank in the Herrengasse of 1856-60, also Rundbogenstil, has been mentioned earlier. The North Railway Station of 1858-65 by Theodor Hoffmann was Rundbogenstil of an even more ornate sort, with only a rather modest iron-and-glass-roofed shed set between its two massive masonry blocks. This was badly damaged by bombing in the last War but not totally destroyed. On the other hand, the South Station, built in 1869-73 by Wilhelm Flattich (1826-1900), a pupil of Leins in Stuttgart, was of rather conventional High Renaissance character.

The typical and, one may suppose, the preferred stylistic vehicle of most Viennese architects in these decades was, indeed, a rather rich High Renaissance mode. This, for example, Hansen used very effectively for the Palace of Archduke Eugene of 1865-7 and for the Palais Epstein at 1 Parlamentsring of 1870-3. He and Förster, and after Förster’s death Hansen alone, as well as many other architects, employed this mode ubiquitously for various big blocks of flats along the Ring and elsewhere (Plate 74). Good examples are such new hotels of the period as the former Britannia, still standing in the Schillerplatz, and the Donau, which once rose opposite the North Station. Both are by Heinrich Claus (1835-?) and Josef Grosz (1828-?) and were built in the early seventies. Their rather Barryesque raised end-pavilions, without mansards, and the heavily sumptuous detailing of the façades are most characteristic. The better known Sacher’s Hotel behind the Opera House, built by W. Fraenkel in 1876, is somewhat smaller and less lush, at least externally. The block at 8 Operngasse, built by Ehrmann in the early sixties, was topped with Parisian mansards, as are also the long blocks in the Reichstrasse behind the Parlament and the University on either side of the Rathaus; these also have open arcades at their base somewhat like those in Turin.

As along the boulevards of Paris, there is a considerable homogeneity in the private architecture that lines the Ring and the many squares and streets that were built up at the same time. Only in the design of public monuments—often by much the same architects, it is worth noting—did a pompous and somewhat retardataire eclecticism rule. Consider the major works of Ferstel: his bank is Rundbogenstil; his Votivkirche of 1856-79 is Gothic; his University something else again.

Ferstel’s Gothic must be compared, not with the distinctly original High Victorian churches of its period in England (see Chapter 10), but with Gau’s earlier Sainte-Clotilde in Paris (see Chapter 6): it is certainly a considerable improvement over that in the general justness of the scale and the plausible laciness of the fourteenth-century detail. But in English terms the Votivkirche is still Early rather than High Victorian. The painted decoration by J. Führich and others, somewhat more discreet than that in the chief Rundbogenstil churches of Vienna, relieves effectively the coldness usual in these big Continental examples of Neo-Gothic.

Ferstel’s much later University of 1873-4, which stands next door to his church and balances Hansen’s precisely contemporaneous Grecian Parlament (see Chapter 2), is a richly plastic pavilioned composition of generically Renaissance character. It also has a high convex mansard over the central block like those on the New Louvre, a feature echoed on the Justizpalast in the Schmerlingplatz, built by Alexander Wielemans (1843-1911) after the University in 1874-81. So much for the main works of one leading architect of the period. Not all Ferstel’s contemporaries had quite so varied a stylistic repertory, however.

In Vienna, as in Paris, one of the most conspicuous and also one of the most successful and original of the new public buildings was the Opera House. This was built in 1861-9 by Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in a mode quite unrelated to their earlier work at the Arsenal but one not easy to define. The Vienna Opera House is a somewhat simpler and less boldly plastic structure than Garnier’s, both in its generally right-angled massing, with pairs of rectangular wings projecting on each side towards the rear, and in the rather flat, somewhat François I detail. Yet the vast curved roof, actually rather like that over the buildings along the Rue de Rivoli, does give it a distinctly Second Empire air (Plate 74). Less grandly sited than the Paris Opéra, it was none the less balanced across the Opernring by one of the largest and handsomest of Hansen’s private works, the Heinrichshof of 1861-3 (Plate 73B). This had a fine glass-roofed passage through its centre and ranges of flats behind the elaborate Late Renaissance façades. It has unfortunately been demolished since the War to make way for a very poor modern block of offices.

Here by the Opera House, as at the Place de l’Opéra in Paris, the Viennese urban achievement of the age was concentrated. The Heinrichshof, with its raised central portion matching the high roof of the Opera House opposite and its corner towers corresponding to the mansarded pavilions of more definitely French-styled blocks of flats, offered a handsomer Austrian equivalent of the Second Empire mode than does the Opera House itself; for the Opera House lacks externally the lushness and bombast characteristic of the period at its most assured, while the auditorium within, re-opened in 1955, is today a much simplified reconstruction by Erich Boltenstern (b. 1896). Yet the masonry exterior of the Opera House is clean and fresh today thanks to Boltenstern’s restoration and, with the great staircase and foyer regilded and refurbished generally, it offers a lighter and more festive vision of the period than do the vast majority of Viennese buildings whose stucco so often badly needs a coat of paint.

Hansen’s Musikvereinsgebäude of 1867-9 in the Dumbagasse is academic in an almost eighteenth-century way, both as regards the general organization of the exterior and the restraint of the detailing. In his still later Parlament of 1873-83, as has been noted earlier, he produced the last grandiose monument of the Greek Revival. More characteristic, however, is his contemporaneous Academy of Fine Arts of 1872-6 in the Schillerplatz. This is externally in the Renaissance mode that he presumably preferred after he left Athens, but it has Grecian detailing inside of a delicacy and elegance that recalls the thirties. Especially handsome is the colonnaded Aula in the centre, even though its rich painted ceiling of 1875-80 by Anselm Feuerbach is inappropriately Baroque in a rather Rubens-like way.

Another Austrian architect besides Ferstel was using Gothic for prominent Viennese edifices in this period (see also Chapter 11). After Ferstel’s Votivkirche the next Neo-Gothic structure was the Academische Gymnasium in the Beethovenplatz; this was built in 1863-6 by Friedrich von Schmidt (1825-91), who had worked earlier under Zwirner on the restoration and completion of Cologne Cathedral. But the school was soon outshone in size and in elaboration by Schmidt’s Rathaus of 1872-83. This stands between Hansen’s Parlament and Ferstel’s University but in a line with the Reichstrasse at their rear. The Vienna Rathaus is certainly not unrelated to G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic and that of Waterhouse in England, particularly in the side wings that end, eclectically enough, in high-mansarded pavilions. But the general fussiness of the turreted front recalls rather pre-Puginian Gothic, say Porden’s Eaton Hall of seventy years earlier (see Chapters 6 and 10).

Despite the total visual unlikeness of the Rathaus to its Grecian neighbour, the Parlament, both have a similarly obsolete air. It is as if Francis Joseph’s presumptive intention in the fifties of outbuilding Napoleon III had been succeeded by a belated and rather provincial desire to outrival the larger structures in other countries in the two leading modes of the previous period, the Greek Revival and the Gothic Revival, neither much represented hitherto in Vienna.

Yet an equally prominent public monument of the seventies and eighties, the Burgtheater, which stands just opposite the Rathaus, is of a Late Renaissance, almost Neo-Baroque order, with a distinctly Second Empire flavour to its bowed front and generally very plastic composition (Plate 73A). This, the most distinguished of all the public monuments along the Ringstrasse, was built in 1874-88 by Semper, whose international career in Germany, England, and Switzerland wound up in Vienna after he was called there in 1871 by Francis Joseph to advise on the extension of the Hofburg Palace. Except perhaps in its bowed front, this Viennese theatre does not much resemble the rebuilt Dresden Opera House of 1871-8 which Semper had just designed (see Chapter 9). Perhaps Semper and his Viennese partner Karl von Hasenauer (1833-94), a pupil of Van der Nüll and of Siccardsburg, were somewhat influenced by the plans on which they were working together for the extension of the nearby palace; these were, not inappropriately, in the Austrian Baroque of Fischer von Erlach’s unfinished Michaelertrakt of the Hofburg dating from the second quarter of the eighteenth century. However that may be, the theatre, boldly scaled and tightly composed, is a far more successful building than the very derivative Neue Hofburg projecting out towards the Ring as that was executed in 1881-94 by Hasenauer after Semper’s death. The post-War restoration of the theatre and the rebuilding of its auditorium are by Michel Engelhart (b. 1897).

Semper and Hasenauer’s two vast Museums of Art History and Natural History face each other on a large square across the Burgring from the Neue Hofburg. Of identical design, they were both largely built in 1872-81. In the treatment of the exteriors—they were finished internally only very much later—as also in some of Hansen’s very latest work in Vienna, one senses a conscious rejection of the bold plasticity and the compositional elaboration characteristic of the preceding decades, and most notably of the Burgtheater. The Renaissance detail is by no means sparse, but there is an academic sort of primness and orderliness belonging to the last quarter of the century such as has been noted earlier in Koch’s Roman work.

The Bodenkreditanstalt built by Emil von Förster (1838-1909), Ludwig’s son, in 1884-7 is still more severe in its Florentine quattrocento way, recalling the more Tuscan aspects of the Rundbogenstil. With this may be contrasted the unashamed Neo-Baroque of Karl König’s Philipphof of 1883, introducing one of the modes most characteristic of the end of the century in both Austria and Germany.

Budapest, the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was also much embellished with public buildings by Francis Joseph. Stüler from Berlin worked here, using a quiet version of the Rundbogenstil for the Academy of Sciences in 1862-4. But the later and more ornate Rundbogenstil of Berlin and Vienna had already been echoed in Budapest by Frigyes Feszl (1821-84) in the Vigado Concert Hall of 1859-65. This could easily be by Ferstel, so similar is it to his bank in Vienna. The leading Hungarian architect of the period, Miklós Ybl (1814-91), who was trained in Vienna, also used the Rundbogenstil, but of a rather more Romanesquoid sort, for the Ferenczváros Parish Church which he built in 1867-78. However, his Renaissance Revival Custom House of 1870-4 is more nearly up to the best Vienna standards of the day as maintained by Hansen. The Opera House that Ybl built in 1879-84, with its boldly convex mansards, vies in its rich plasticity with Garnier’s, but none too successfully. The Szent Lukásh Hotel by R. L. Ray (1845-99), a Swiss-born pupil of Gamier, is one of the largest mansarded Second Empire hotels anywhere in the western world. On the whole, the dominant influences in Hungary were Austrian and German, however, not Parisian, as is hardly surprising. No autochthonous note was struck; as is true of all Eastern Europe, the architecture of this age is as essentially colonial in character as in the outlying British Dominions or in Latin America, although the models emulated were rather different.

------------------------------------------------------------------------