American Architecture Studies
9781465624994
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
THE new departure is an apt name for what some of its conductors describe as the new “school” in architecture and decoration. It has still, after nearly ten years of almost complete sway among the young architects of England and of the United States, all the signs of a departure—we might say of a hurried departure—and gives no hint of an arrival, or even of a direction. It is, in fact, a general “breaking-up” in building, as the dispersion of Babel was in speech, and we can only and somewhat desperately hope that the utterances of every man upon whom a dialect has suddenly fallen may at least be intelligible to himself. From a “movement” so exclusively centrifugal that it assumes rather the character of an explosion than of an evolution, not much achievement can be looked for. In fact, the “movement” has not, thus far, either in England or in the United States, produced a monument which anybody but its author would venture to pronounce very good. Not to go back to the times when Gothic architecture was vernacular in England, it has produced nothing which can be put in competition with the works either of the English classical revival, or with the works of the English Gothic revival—with St. Paul’s and the Radcliffe Library, on the one hand, or with Westminster Palace and the Manchester Town-hall, on the other. Before the “movement” began, the architects of Europe and America were divided into two camps. They professed themselves either Renaissance or Gothic architects. The mediævalists acknowledged a subjection to certain principles of design. The classicists accepted certain forms and formulæ as efficacious and final. They were both, therefore, under some restraint. But the new movement seems to mean that aspiring genius shall not be fettered by mechanical laws or academic rules, by reason or by revelation, but that every architect shall build what is right in his own eyes, even if analysis finds it absurd and Vitruvius condemns it as incorrect. “Queen Anne” is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use. But it is rather noteworthy that the effect of what is most specifically known as Queen Anne is to restrain the exuberances of design. Whoever recalls Viollet-le-Duc’s pregnant saying, that “only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career,” would scarcely select the reign of Queen Anne out of all English history for a point of departure in the history of any one of the plastic arts. The bloated Renaissance of Wren’s successors, such as is shown in Queen’s College and in Aldrich’s church architecture in Oxford, was its distinctive attainment in architecture. The minute and ingenious woodcarving of Grinling Gibbons was its distinctive attainment in decoration. Nothing could show more forcibly the degeneracy of art at the period which of late years has been represented as an æsthetic renascence than the acceptance of these wood-carvings, which in execution and all technical qualities are as complete, and in design and all imaginative qualities are as trivial and commonplace, as contemporary Italian sculpture, as works of art comparable to the graceful inventions of Jean Goujon, and clearly preferable to the sometimes rude but always purposeful decoration of mediæval churches.
