Chapter 12: )

The similarity to the Northern Renaissance mode of this period in Germany is nearly as great, as also to such somewhat later Scandinavian buildings as Clason’s Northern Museum in Stockholm and Nyrop’s Town Hall in Copenhagen (Plate 173A). But Cuijpers’s touch is lighter than that of the Germans, and his precedent rather more Late Gothic than Mannerist, while his two chief works precede those that they most resemble in Sweden and Denmark by a decade or more. In both cases the frank incorporation of iron-and-glass elements is notable, a vast shed at the station and two almost equally vast covered courts in the museum. Above all, being the Gothic Revivalist he was, Cuijpers saw to it that the craftsmanship was excellent throughout; while his handling of scale, though ambiguous as in much work of these decades everywhere, is surprisingly successful. Both are very large buildings, placed in isolation where they can be seen from a distance and with carefully studied silhouettes varied by towers and other skyline features; yet the membering is delicate and almost domestic, quite as in the rather comparable English work of George (Plate 104B) or Collcutt (see Chapter 12).

In Italy projects of restoration led, as elsewhere, to the designing of certain fairly ambitious new façades in Gothic to complete medieval churches. The most conspicuous is that of the cathedral of Florence. After many abortive earlier moves, this was finally begun by Emilio de Fabris (1808-83) in 1866, when Florence became briefly the capital of Italy, and completed only in 1887. The earlier and less successful façade of Santa Croce in Florence had been carried out in 1857-63 by Niccoló Matas (1798-1872). It is characteristic of the international architectural scene in these decades that neither of these carefully archaeological compositions in polychrome Italian Gothic comes alive in the way that Italianate High Victorian Gothic often did in the hands of English architects, or even American ones, in the fifties and sixties.

Churches were built for Anglicans in most of the principal cities of Europe in the mid nineteenth century, usually by English architects and always in Victorian Gothic. Sometimes, as in the case of the Crimean Memorial Church by Street[256] at Istanbul and Shaw’s English Church at Lyons, these were by the most distinguished English designers of the day, but more often they were by hacks who lived abroad and specialized in such work. Among the ‘English churches’ of this period that provided good samples of the High Victorian Gothic for foreigners—many were still to all intents and purposes Early Victorian—are two by Street[257] in Rome, one for the English community, the other not ‘English’ at all in fact but built for American Episcopalians. The former, All Saints’, in the Via del Babuino, with a much later tower not by Street, provides internally a moderately successful example of his later work, although it is unimpressive and largely invisible externally. It was begun in 1880, a year before Street’s death, and opened in 1885.

Far finer is St Paul’s, the American church, prominently located among the contemporary banks and blocks of flats of the Via Nazionale and built in 1873-6. Boldly banded in brick and stone and with a tall square campanile at the front corner, this is indeed a richer and more striking example of an Italian Gothic basilica than the Middle Ages ever produced in Rome (Plate 100). The interior, with a rich apse mosaic by Burne-Jones on a glittering gold ground, has an originality and a coherence that is quite lacking in such Italian churches as were redecorated in the later nineteenth century. Late though this is in Street’s _œuvre_, it remains one of his best works.

If the English High Victorian Gothic was to some extent an article of export—and, of course, this account has hardly touched on the vast outlying areas of the British Empire, notably including India, to which it was exported in the greatest quantity—it was nevertheless largely without real influence outside the United States and the British Dominions. In the world picture, it was the British architectural critics of this period, Ruskin and Morris, who would have a vital influence, but that influence came for the most part rather later, around 1890 (see Chapter 16). Cuijpers, however, was a reader of Ruskin from the fifties.

Still to be discussed is the early work of one great architect, also reputedly a reader of Ruskin, whose career began in the seventies with a sharp revulsion from the Second Empire mode towards the Neo-Gothic. The Spanish (or more precisely Catalan) architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852-1926) was one of the most intensely personal talents that either the nineteenth or the twentieth century has produced. His style hardly matured before the nineties, and what are generally considered his typical works must be discussed later in connexion with the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 16). But what he had accomplished already in the seventies and eighties can be better appreciated here in relation to the contemporary work of those decades in other countries.

Gaudí’s earliest work was at the Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona, laid out in 1872, where he assisted the master of works Eduardo Fontseré, while still a student, in various projects for its embellishment. The elaborate Cascade there, incorporating an Aquarium, on which he worked in 1877-82 derives in the main from Espérandieu’s at the Palais Longchamps in Marseilles. But some of the detail, both plastic and incised, has a flavour more comparable to that of the wildest and most eclectic English and American Second Empire work of the previous decade than to anything French.

The first commission for which Gaudí was wholly responsible is the house of Don Manuel Vicens at 24-26 Carrer de les Carolines in Barcelona. This was erected in 1878-80, immediately upon his graduation from the local Escuela Superior de Arquitectura, and in it no trace of Second Empire influence, French or international, remains. A large suburban villa built of rubble masonry liberally banded with polychrome tiles, the Casa Vicens passes beyond the extravagances of a Teulon or a Lamb in the sixties into a world of fantasy that only one or two High Victorian designers such as the Scottish Frederick T. Pilkington (1832-98) ever entered. Yet Gaudí’s general inspiration came definitely from the medieval past. In Spain that past included the semi-Islamic Mudéjar, however, and much of the detailing which appears most original to non-Spanish eyes is, in fact, dependent on local precedents of one sort or another. For example, the floral tiles are merely what the Iberian world knows as _azulejos_ and has continued to use down to the present time, especially in Portugal and Brazil (see Chapter 25).

In all the flamboyance of the decoration of the Casa Vicens, the most personal note is in the ironwork. This is naturalistic in theme and bold in scale; it also includes curious linear elements that wave and bend in a way which is more than a little premonitory of the Art Nouveau of the nineties (see Chapter 16). The entrance grille is a masterpiece of decorative art of this period, rivalled only by some of Morris’s contemporary stained glass.

The very utilitarian industrial warehouse for La Obrera Mataronense of 1878-82 at Mataró, with its great arched principals of laminated wood, should be mentioned to balance the Casa Vicens. Here Gaudí’s prowess as an imaginative constructor—almost a straight engineer—was very evident, as also the fact that the unfamiliar forms he continually used—the shape of the arches here was parabolic not semicircular or pointed—were not a matter of personal crankiness but selected for statical reasons: Gothic in theory, that is, like some of Soufflot’s vaulting, though not very Gothic in appearance.

In 1884, however, Gaudí was made director of works for a large new Gothic church in Barcelona, and from this time forward a considerable part of his activity, extending down through his restoration of the cathedral of Palma on the island of Mallorca in 1900-14, was that of a Gothic Revivalist, if an increasingly unconventional one. Towards such a career his own intense religiosity inclined him quite as much as was the case with Pugin and reputedly also with Cuijpers—Viollet-le-Duc, by exception, was strongly anti-clerical. Unlike Pugin’s or Cuijpers’s, however, Gaudí’s career as an ecclesiastical architect was rather unproductive. Yet from the first he designed and executed church furnishings and, while still a student in 1875-7, he assisted the architect Francesc de Paula del Villar i Carmona (1845-1922) on a project for adding a porch to the monastery church of Montsarrat.

In 1881 Villar was made architect of the proposed Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia),[258] for which a large square site had been obtained between the Carrers de Mallorca, de Marina, de Provença, and de Sardenya in an outlying part of Barcelona, and the construction of the crypt of a great cruciform Gothic church was started in 1882. Two years later Gaudí took over charge of the work, as has been said, completing the crypt by 1891 almost entirely according to Villar’s original and quite conventionally thirteenth-fourteenth-century Gothic design. There followed the construction of the outer walls only of the chevet; these were finished by 1893. The further history of the church will be considered later; for Gaudí’s style underwent extraordinary changes in the nineties as he designed and built one transept façade of the church and its towers—which is about all that exists above ground even today (see Chapter 17).

Contemporaneously with Gaudí’s construction of the crypt and the chevet walls of the Sagrada Familia came four secular works, two of them also quite Neo-Gothic in character and two others of very great originality. The Bishop’s Palace at Astorga of 1887-93 and the Fernández-Arbós house, known as the Casa de los Botines, in the Plaza de San Marcelo at León of 1892-4 might well be mistaken for provincial High Victorian Gothic done in England or America twenty or thirty years earlier. But the city mansion of Don Eusebio Güell at 3-5 Carrer Nou de la Rambla (now Conde del Asalto) in Barcelona, built in 1885-9, is an edifice of the greatest distinction, rivalled for quality in its period only by the very finest late work of Richardson in America (see Chapter 13). The Teresian College at 41 Carrer de Ganduxer in Barcelona is also quite remarkable in its simpler way.

Far suaver than his earlier Casa Vicens, the Palau Güell is quite as strikingly novel all the same. At the base yawn a pair of parabolic arches, their tops filled above a plain reticulated grille with sinuous seaweed-like ornament of the most extravagant virtuosity (Plate 96B). The ‘Dragon Gate’ of the Finca Güell of 1887 in the Avenida Pedralbes is still stranger, with a nightmare quality which those of the house in town happily lack. On either side of the entrance arches and in the projecting first storey the façade of the Palau Güell is no more than a rather plain rectangular grid of stone mullions and transoms. In scale this grid is more like Parris’s Boston granite fronts of the twenties than like English window-walls, but it is detailed in a cranky medievalizing way that is more comparable to Webb’s handling of stonework (Figure 17). The rear façade towards the court includes in the middle a broad bay-window with curved corners protected by sunscreens as original but less fantastic than the grilles at the entrance. The most extraordinary features of the exterior, however, are the chimney-pots rising in profusion above the flat roof like an exhibition of abstract sculpture and entirely covered with a mosaic of irregular fragments of glass, rubble, or coloured tiles. In them the extravagance of his earlier houses was continued, and such terminal features remained characteristic of all his later secular work.

Figure 17. Antoni Gaudí: project for Palau Güell, Barcelona, 1885,
elevation
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The interiors of the Palau Güell are extremely sumptuous. There is much use of marble arcades of parabolic arches carried on round columns, both arches and columns being detailed with the greatest mathematical elegance and simplicity, yet with considerable variety. Some of the ceilings are of marble slabs carried by visible iron beams, but in the principal apartments there are incredibly elaborate confections of woodwork in the Moorish tradition.

The College of Santa Teresa de Jesús, built in 1889-94 immediately after the Palau Güell, is naturally much more modest than that great merchant’s palace, which continues the line of those that late medieval and Renaissance magnates often built. Rubble walls banded and stripped with brickwork are pierced alternately with ranges of narrow windows and with small square ventilators closed with quatrefoil grilles. The widely spaced windows are capped with steep parabolic ‘arches’ formed by cantilevering inward successive brick courses. The third storey is all of brickwork panelled with blind ‘arches’ between the windows and carried up into large, flat, triangular finials along the skyline. Less ingratiating than the Palau Güell with its luxurious use of fine materials inside and out, this college building is equally regular in composition and no more Gothic in appearance to a non-Spanish eye; in fact, however, it leans even more heavily on Mozarab and Mudéjar precedent than does the Casa Vicens. A certain amount of relatively plain wrought-iron grillework recalls that at the entrances of the earlier houses.

Only perhaps in England and America did the line of descent from the Gothic Revival lead so far away from the standard medievalism of the mid century in the seventies and eighties. But these early works of Gaudí represent only a part—to most critics the less important half—of his production. For strangeness they can be matched in work of equal consequence within this period only by Sullivan’s earliest commercial façades in Chicago (see Chapter 14). Teulon and Harris had reformed by the seventies; Lamb and Pilkington were forgotten. In character Gaudí’s work of the seventies and eighties could hardly be more different from the mature style of the English Shaw. Yet Shaw, at his occasional best, could compete with Gaudí in the quality of his achievement; while his influence, both at home and in the United States, was of very considerable historical importance, as Gaudí’s was not, even in Spain (see Chapters 12, 13, and 15).

For all that Gaudí was actually represented at the Paris Exhibition of 1878—by a glovemaker’s vitrine!—and later by pavilions designed for the Compañía Transatlántica in the Naval Exhibition of 1887 at Cadiz and in the Barcelona International Exhibition of the following year, his work was hardly known at all except to his compatriots before the nineties. In the mid twentieth century, however, his reputation is still rising, as the flood of new publications of the last decade makes evident. The reasons for this will be suggested later, since they apply chiefly to the work that he did after 1900 (see Chapters 16 and 20).

In the European picture as a whole a less notable shift of direction occurred around 1870 than in England and America. There was naturally continuity in the Vienna of Francis Joseph, since the Imperial government called the tune in Austrian architecture and the King-Emperor’s reign went on without a break—indeed, it lasted for another generation and more. What is surprising is that the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic brought so little change in France. There was, of course, a short hiatus in production like that which followed the fall of the first Napoleon. As around 1820, however, so around 1875 the story picks up again almost as if there had been no break at all. Gradually interest in exposed metal construction, in decline since the fifties, revived; by the time of the Paris Exhibition of 1889 French feats of metal construction, not so much the Galerie des Machines as the Eiffel Tower, became the talk of the world (see Chapter 16).

In the fugue-like composition of nineteenth-century architectural history different themes have differing durations. The English theme of High Victorian Gothic, picked up in any case only by the Anglo-Saxon sections of the orchestra, came effectively to an end with the early seventies; the Second Empire theme, whether it be considered in a specialized sense or in a broader one, was picked up at least selectively by the whole western world and not least boldly by the Anglo-American section; moreover, it continued in most countries, with some modulation, for at least a decade longer than the High Victorian Gothic. Yet both in England and America, the important new themes of the seventies and eighties were rooted not in the Second Empire but in the Victorian Gothic, even though they represent something much more original than mere modulations of that earlier theme.

The third quarter of the nineteenth century is notable for the stylistic diversity of its production. In principle there may, perhaps, be no more difference between Visconti’s and Lefuel’s New Louvre and a Butterfield church than between Nash’s Blaise Hamlet and his terraces around Regent’s Park, to cite merely work by one early nineteenth-century architect. Yet thanks to the fugal character of the general historical development, which meant that new modes were added to the architectural repertory—as they had been at least since the twenties—more rapidly than old modes were dropped, the over-all picture became extremely complicated after 1850. It belies the most valid and idiosyncratic achievements of this period, however, to stress too much its apparently limitless eclecticism.[259] The account given in the last four chapters undoubtedly exaggerates the importance of certain modes, if that importance be measured statistically in terms of quantity of production. Qualitative considerations have led to a drastic selectivity, emphasizing relatively limited but vital aspects of architectural production at the expense of others that were far more ubiquitous but generally very dull. With different criteria of selection, using different standards of architectural quality—attainment of archaeological plausibility, say; or success or failure in the incorporation of new technical developments; or realization of programmatic aims—several very different pictures could be, and indeed frequently have been,[260] given of the architecture of the western world in these decades.

At the expense of emphasizing architectural developments peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon world in this same, possibly unbalanced, fashion the next chapter is organized around the career, after 1870, of Norman Shaw, whose early work in the High Victorian Gothic has already received some attention. The chapter following that centres on the achievement of the American architect Richardson, whose somewhat parallel beginnings have also been described in this chapter.

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