Chapter XXIV: Dublin in 1924 201 (3)

In his training, too, the American architect’s methods have, till the last fifteen years, equally differed from our own. Firstly, I suppose, because the profession is a much more lucrative one in America with its larger commissions and more expensive buildings than it is with us, the American architect has been willing to spend more money on his specialised education. More than twenty years ago he gave up the method of apprenticeship which has come down to us from medieval times and still lingers among us. Instead he has followed the French in their system of architectural schools. These schools are now attached to all the leading Universities, with four-year courses supplemented in many cases with other scholastic work in Paris and Rome. In England some of our Universities have started schools of architecture too. There is also the school in London founded by the younger professional body of architects, but so far these schools have not had time to influence current architecture to the extent that the American ones have done. The mass of practising English architects are still office-trained men with the specialised and sometimes narrow outlook on their art, which they have gained from the master under whom they served their apprenticeship. The result is often charming individual work, especially in domestic building where the problems to be faced are not of so generalised a character. But the slightly eccentric and original solution, which may be pleasant enough in a small country house, becomes an absurdity in a bank or a municipal building. In such work the general restraint which knowledge brings is more valuable than the happy inventions of the individual designer. In our town architecture we have long suffered from an excess of originality. In the days when there was a generally accepted tradition, faith in that tradition prevented such blunders. The days of faith in architecture are past. Unless we are to be content with ignorance in our buildings knowledge must take its place. In the great complexity of detailed knowledge required to make a large modern building the minds of many men must be united. In that direction lies efficiency in its broadest sense, and in that sense efficiency is beauty. It therefore seems to me likely that in future we shall revert again to something like the conditions under which the great Gothic Cathedrals were built, when the architect, as an individual, was content to sink himself in the greatness of his work. He lost his soul to find it in his building. Perhaps the root explanation is that in England our architects have been a little too anxious about their souls and the expression due to them, while in America their architects have been thinking mainly of the greatness of the work they are called on to carry out.

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XV.

THE CHOICE OF A SMALL COUNTRY HOUSE.

CHOOSING a small country house by the man of average means who can afford one at all is like choosing a wife. You may lay down beforehand all kinds of rules you mean to follow—that the lady of your choice will be blonde and fair, with a placid, broad outlook on life, and you will almost certainly marry a sparkling brunette, quick, lively and sympathetic. So with a house. You may think your ideal is some rambling converted or convertible farmhouse, some picturesque Elizabethan or Jacobean manor house, and you will end with the primmest of Georgian proprieties, facing a village green or country high street, but with a large walled garden behind, where you can be as private and irregular as you like. You may think open raftered rooms with bare brick chimneypieces, where you can stalk about in rough country clothes, the thing you are in search of, and then you, or more probably your wife, will fall to some set of spacious, sunlit, white-panelled Queen Anne or Georgian chambers, looking out over trim lawns and well kept hedges. Or you may find something that does not fall into either category, picturesque or formal, but by a combination of both absolutely bewitches you and drives all preconceived ideas to the winds; indeed, a house of this kind generally does unless you are an absolute formalist and pedant. There is something so very lovable in the marks of time, not only the minor ones, such as floors slightly out of level, cornices softened with the colour-washes of generations, but the major ones which represent distinct past eras. The Jacobean house which has had parts of it Georgianised carries with it the same history with which we ourselves have been built up. It has, perhaps, its central hall with stone floor and oak beams and great chimney-piece with rude carving over it, answering to the rougher barbaric instincts which are deep in all of us; and it has its Georgian rooms with their refined cornices and fireplaces and long elegant windows calling for curtains of brocade or other fine material. In these latter we can cast aside our thick boots and tweeds and become civilised, urbane and even slightly cynical. In such a house, therefore, we have rooms for various moods, corresponding not only to the strata of our external civilisation but to the strata within us. In some modern houses such things have been consciously attempted, but their failure is generally complete. You may wear fancy dress for a night, but you cannot, if you are an ordinary mortal, endure it for a week. Affected age in a modern house is something of that sort, and it becomes worse when it is an affectation not of one age, but of several. No, a modern house needs unity; our grandchildren are the only people who can break that unity successfully, because they will break in answer to some new and real need not yet experienced by us.

Let us assume in this search for a small country house that it is no marriage of convenience we desire. We are not tied, that is to say, to a railway station, but with the help of a small car can reach a convenient line when we want to go to town or to fetch our friends. Obviously, the advent of the motor car has enormously increased the area of our choice. We can now live in real country even if we have to go to town four or five times a week. If London is our centre, we can get as far afield as the Cotswolds, South Downs or the remoter parts of Essex. We can therefore let our choice of a house range over modelled stone houses, warm brick ones or those of wood and plaster. We may even, if we are particularly interested in refined proportions, restraint and elegance of detail, consider Regency and early Victorian stucco. In this latter case, however, we must be prepared for a quinquennial paint bill, but we shall have other compensations, not least in the original price, for such houses are not yet popular. It will be noticed that I am ruling out of our purview all absolutely modern houses, say, those of the last sixty years or so. The reason is that you cannot generalise about such buildings. You may find one to fit your individual taste just as well as if you had instructed your architect to design it. But the chances are against it for many reasons, chief among which is that the last half-century has been a time of excessive individualism. To find, therefore, an entirely satisfactory modern house that will not only fit your material needs, but satisfy your spiritual ones too,—which is a much more difficult but far more important matter for real happiness—is highly improbable. I do not mean to say that there are not hundreds of beautiful modern houses by Lutyens, Newton, Norman Shaw and their followers, but each was designed for a particular client and in a particular way, which older houses, as far as we can tell, were not. In the days of a solid architectural tradition there were certain methods of planning, certain methods of decoration from which no one thought of departing. After the entire break-up of such traditions in the middle of last century even the best architects and their clients sought for individual solutions to problems and individual methods of expression. Those who did not went on building the coarse Victorian houses we see in all our suburbs. Obviously, these are out of the question. One would sooner not live in the country at all than live in a suburban country house, thereby preserving a blot on the countryside. But to return to the good modern country house built by a good architect. You may say, Why not buy that? What could be better? The construction is probably sound, the drains and water supply all good, and the roof not likely to be a source of expense for upkeep. I can only reply by comparing such a house with other people’s clothes. You might find a suit of someone else’s, or a ready-made one, which absolutely fitted you. It is unlikely; but, even if you did, you would be wearing borrowed plumes. Your distinction—and with a modern house, built for someone else, you could not escape a certain prominence—would be that someone else’s. With an old house, however modernised in its unessentials—unessential except from the housewife’s point of view—you make no pretence that you are more than a life tenant. You are merely the custodian and preserver of a beautiful thing you intend to hand on in the same or in a better state than you received it. Build a beautiful modern house by all means, and by so doing add to the real wealth of the nation. That is a very different proposition. Do it, though, with humility, as a man chooses a suit, not as a woman chooses a dress. Make it something reserved and quiet, answering not only to your special needs, but to the general ones of our time. Make it fit the landscape and adhere to the type of building traditional to the countryside. Do not introduce brick and tiles into a stone and slate neighbourhood, or _vice versa_. If you do, you will probably have to pay for your rashness in hard cash. I know a neighbourhood in Essex where in the heat of the summer all the modern brick buildings on the shrinking clay soil crack, whereas the old wood and plaster ones float on the moving ground like ships and remain intact.

If you are about to buy an old house, however, there are certain points, rather obvious perhaps, which may be worth recalling.

First there is the question of the site, and in this, of course, one has not the same freedom of choice as in a new house. For one thing, our ancestors especially those who lived before the romantic movement, had not the desire for extensive views from their windows that is characteristic of to-day. The sites they chose were usually sheltered ones, often in positive hollows. No doubt, access to roads, themselves less numerous than now, had something to do with this, but it was a question of temperament too. In Georgian times for the smaller houses they seemed to prefer seclusion and privacy on one side of the house even when they made a bold front to the road or village green on the other. I suppose if they wanted a view they climbed a neighbouring hill to get it. There is something, I think, to be said for this, especially if the view is over the sea or a wide estuary. Such a view continually before the eyes is apt to be depressing. A wide view is all very well in a holiday resort as a contrast to the shelter of one’s walled garden at home. To live on the mountain tops all the time, however, is too strenuous for most mortals. We are not all poets and seers who can look eternity in the face every hour of the day. There may, therefore, have been a certain wisdom in the builders of old houses in sheltered situations, an intuitive knowledge of psychology if not of hygiene. This being so, it is all the more necessary to make sure, not only that the house is dry or can be made so, but that the site itself does not exhale vapours. It is not pleasant when November comes to find each night and morning the chimneys of one’s house poking out of a cloud of mist while the rising ground on either side is free. Such mists, however, are not generally to be found above a chalk or gravel soil unless they come from the sea. With clay and loam the matter is different, and it is well, then, to make further enquiries if the house of one’s desire happens to be in a hollow.

The dryness of the structure is a different matter. Most old houses were built without damp-proof courses—I think an early nineteenth-century invention. These are layers of slates and cement or asphalt or other impervious material placed in the walls just above ground level to prevent the damp from the ground rising through the foundations into the walls above. Such things can be inserted yard by yard at a time, but it is an expensive proceeding. If damp courses do not exist and are too costly to put in, it is all the more necessary to see that the subsoil is a dry one, such as gravel, sand or rock. A flagged basement assists in keeping a house dry if it is dry in itself. If, however, it acts as a sump or drain-pit for the surrounding soil, it, of course, makes matters worse confounded, because it ensures damp even in dry weather. Some of the driest houses are the old timber-constructed ones; if such had been damp their timbers would have rotted away long ago. They, however, if not damp are rather apt to be cold in winter and warm in summer, in spite of the cavity in their walls. The inner and outer coats of lath and plaster or weather-boarding are not really sufficiently thick for comfort. Such houses, therefore, need more heating than those with substantial brick or stone walls.

Let us now consider the walls a little. In most old houses they are strong and substantial. They may, however, have been neglected. Rain-pipes may have been left unrepaired, and frost may have entered and disintegrated the mortar. This, however, is not a very serious matter. A little re-pointing will set it right if it has not gone far. What is more necessary is to look at the state of timbers built into the walls. In most old houses these are plentiful both as wall plates and ties. There are two chief dangers connected with them—worm and dry rot. Either will turn them to powder or to a frail semblance of themselves about to fall to powder. In both cases there is nothing to be done but to replace them. Dry rot, however, is not a usual complaint of old houses. It is much more often found in new. It comes not so much from damp as from bad ventilation. A wood floor laid on concrete which has had linoleum on top of it so that the wood is effectually smothered both above and below is the sort of place where it starts. Unfortunately, once it starts it spreads very quickly. Old houses by their age, therefore, generally show themselves proof against it. Worm in the timbers is the reverse. This works more slowly, and is to be found in the hard woods of old houses as well as the softer ones of new. As in chairs, a little dust like sawdust is the proof of its presence. Palliatives may be tried, but for the sake of one’s furniture, if for nothing else, it is better to take the timbers out.

The roof, however, is generally a more important matter, as regards maintenance, than the walls. Roughly speaking, the order of covering materials in cost of upkeep would be thatch, most expensive of all, and only suitable to quite small houses, then stone-slates, tiles and, last of all, slates. But more important than the material covering is the construction. Look to see whether there are internal valleys and flats where snow and leaves can collect and check the flow of water till it penetrates. The less of such gutters and flats the better. When they exist they should be of lead, as indeed, they usually are in any decent house. Repairs, however, in these hard times may have been done in zinc, and zinc has a very short life in our climate. If the roof is of tiles, it should have been boarded over the rafters and under the tiles. Generally speaking, the steeper the roof, except in a very exposed situation, where the wind can blow the covering off, the sounder it is likely to be, for, of course, the water runs off more quickly. The slope, however is determined by the style of the house, and the materials by the slope. Slate, for instance, is quite safely laid at a much less steep slope than tiles, thatch or split stones. Being a truer material it lies closer. An over-all roof in two or four plain slopes with no breaks in it is, whatever the material, the safest form. The water is then shot everywhere into gutters clear of the walls or into a simple lead trough behind a parapet. There are then no internal and half-hidden gutters to leak and pour water down the centre of the house. Indeed, it may be laid down as a general axiom that simplicity of mass and form, given equally good construction, means cheapness of upkeep. A simple cube or rectangular mass with a plain roof hipped all round with no gables or dormers would be the most compact and cheapest of shapes, not only to build, but to maintain. Such things, however, are obvious. Let us now consider the internal arrangements.

The first question in these semi-servantless days is whether the old house of one’s choice can be adapted to the restricted post-war service which is all that most of us can afford. It behoves one, therefore, to see whether the rooms can be so rearranged, without expensive alterations, that the kitchen is not only reduced to a reasonable size, but is sufficiently near the dining-room. Generally the spacious old kitchen, with its flagged floor, its stretch of cooking apparatus down one whole side, with open range, hot plates, ovens and boilers, had better be abandoned. Sometimes it will make a billiard-room later and sometimes even a garage. Perhaps the old pantry or scullery can be turned into a modern kitchen. The point is that in any case you will need new cooking apparatus on a reduced scale, but with greater efficiency. The expense is when you have to build a new room for it. See, therefore, whether you can avoid doing this by a readjustment of function in the various rooms. The ideal arrangement, both in a new and old house, is a small pantry between the dining-room and the kitchen with the service through it. The pantry so placed acts as a buffer to noise and smell from the kitchen, and yet is handy for setting things down. However do not spoil a vista or some real architectural feature by giving up a good sitting-room to a modern kitchen. If you love the beauties of your house you can often pay too dearly for conveniences. The same remark applies to baths. You will probably have to find extra space for them, but it is obviously a sacrifice to give up to one a good bedroom on the main front. With modern plumbing, in which the bath water is at once taken outside the house and discharged in the open into a rainwater-head, there is, in my opinion, no objection to a small bath in each bedroom provided a suitable recess or space can be found for it. The small American deep tub bath in which one can sit with the water over one’s shoulders, but not lie full length, takes little space and gets over many difficulties of placing. The safe general rule on all these questions of adapting an old house to the conditions of to-day is to see whether for kitchen, motor car or baths one can install the new requirements without rebuilding or serious additions. On every ground that is the safe proceeding, whether to preserve character, to avoid the clash of old work with new, or merely to save outlay.

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XVI.

WREN AS A BAROQUE ARCHITECT.

WHAT is the quality in Wren’s work which gives it the very human appeal it undoubtedly possesses? How is it different in this respect to the work of Inigo Jones? Why do we all in our hearts love any of the façades of St. Paul’s better than that of the Banqueting Hall, or, if that is to compare things that are incommensurable, what is the quality in Trinity Library, Cambridge, which endears it to us, while, as we pass down Whitehall, we view the Inigo Jones building with respect and admiration, but hardly with any sense of deep affection? We may even breathe a sigh of thankfulness that we did not have the mile or two more of it Jones intended.

It is an interesting problem, and one I think worth a little consideration. Twenty years ago, when Belcher and Macartney’s “Later Renaissance” was issued, Wren’s work appeared the final word in architecture. No one challenged it except the Gothicists. Gradually, however, the younger architects discovered architecture had not stood still since the 17th century. Each of us pushed our enthusiasm a little further, some pinned their faith to Chambers, some to Robert Adam. Some even went as far as measuring Cockerell and Elmes and the later Greek work. Finally there appeared Professor Richardson’s “Monumental classical Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland,” and at last we thought we saw the whole thing in perspective. All the time, however, there were very vital folk like Sir Edwin Lutyens and E. A. Rickards who stuck to Wren. The former is even reported to have said that the English Renaissance ought to have been spelt the English Wren-naissance. So to-day, especially with Wren bicentenary just past, we are all beginning to cast our eyes back to the great 17th century master and find that, incorrect as a great deal of his work was according to all the rules of the game—coarse as a great deal of his detail undoubtedly is, with faults of taste and inconsistencies of scale—there was something very rotund, full-blooded, almost Falstaffian, in the mass of his work, which makes us give him an affection we give no other. In comparison the work of the later men, especially of the Neo-Grec ones, seems hard, even spikey. It is all very well for the historians to tell us of Wren’s mathematical genius and the consequent sublimity of his conceptions. That, I beg leave to say as regards his architecture, with the possible exception of Greenwich, is what is vulgarly called ‘eye-wash.’ The dome of St. Paul’s is a paltry affair compared to the dome of St. Peter’s and only insular prejudice would say otherwise. Its tricks of construction are no doubt evidence of mechanical ability, but such are not architecture. Internally with its muddle of unequal supporting arches or externally with its tight unmodelled surface it is very inferior to its great prototype. Yet the lovable quality of the work remains especially in that nearer the eye. Think of the Dean’s doorway under the great recessed arch of the window on the side of the North tower, or that other lovable doorway, with its oval window and fat cherubs also under a recessed arch in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow. What comfortable happy invention! What richly curved surfaces; what cheery display, designed, one may be sure, with sheer enjoyment.

In a very obvious sense all Wren’s architecture is civil architecture, his cathedral and churches not less than the rest. He built in an age of humanism, when paganism was no longer feared. As Miss Milman has wisely said in her life of Wren, a church with him “would differ from a court of kings only in being more full of splendour.” This was the renaissance spirit, but it was the spirit more particularly of the baroque period when, freed from the rules, though remaining masters of them, men built for sheer swagger. It was in this spirit the Jesuit Churches of the counter-Reformation were built. Knowing human nature, those wise men chose a style for their sacred edifices full of dramatic human appeal. So did Wren, as far as he knew and could. I venture to suggest that it was because he had in himself a large share of this baroque spirit, this happy posturing, and not because he was a scholar and a mathematician—rather because he broke the rules instead of following them, because in essence he was not a Palladian like the majority of English architects—that he is loved to-day not only by architects, but by the great mass of the people as no other architect has ever been. I realise that in attaching the term “baroque” to Wren I am running the risk of libelling him in the minds of many. That is because of the unfortunate ill-odour which nowadays hangs to the word. The baroque is synonymous with decadence we are generally told. Indeed the ordinary text-books, like Anderson’s “Italian Renaissance,” either treat the great parent baroque work in Italy with a few contemptuous remarks, or leave it alone entirely. Yet one can hardly label as decadent a style which covered Italy with the most vigorous buildings it possesses, which gave the colonnade and baldacchino to St. Peter’s, which planted the superb mass of Santa Maria della Salute at the end of the great sweep of the Grand Canal—to mention but two examples.

What is the real function and intent of baroque architecture? Geoffrey Scott defines it very well—“to give the picturesque its grandest scope and yet to subdue it to architectural law.” “The baroque is not afraid to startle and arrest.” “It enlarged the classic formula by developing within it the principle of movement. But the movement is logical; it is logical as an æsthetic construction, even when it most neglects the logic of material construction. It insisted on coherent purpose, and its greatest extravagances of design were neither unconsidered nor inconsistent. It intellectualised the picturesque.” Baroque buildings, he goes on to say in effect, may do all the above, “yet their last and permanent impression is of a broad serenity; for they have that baroque assurance which even baroque convulsion cannot rob of its repose. They are fit for permanence: for they have that massive finality of thought, which, when we live beside them, we do not question, but accept.”

Now I do not want to suggest that the full baroque spirit is to be found in Wren’s work. It is obviously much too staid and too English for that. But I do think that there is more of it there than we have been accustomed to realise and that it is because it is there, giving vitality and humanity to his architecture, we return with more affection to his work than we do to that of either Inigo Jones, his more academic predecessor, or to any of his Palladian successors. To my mind it was very fortunate that instead of going to Vicenza, as Jones did, Wren escaped not only the plague by going to Paris, but went there at the very time the great Bernini visited that city. One can imagine that these two men, both so energetic, vigorous and long-lived, both to accomplish a prodigious amount of work in their lives, would be very much of the same kidney. The influence of the elder, at the height of his fame and treated as a prince by the French, on the young Englishman, who till then had built but one or two small structures, who came seeking information in every direction, was very likely immense. If one looks for similarities of thought in design in Wren’s later work with that of Bernini, they are not difficult to find. The great doorways of the Chigi Palace are echoed in those of the river front of Trinity Library, while the altar-piece of the Chapel of Chelsea Hospital might have been designed by Bernini himself. It has the same sumptuousness, the same great scale, and the same use of coupled columns. In the All Souls’ collection of Wren drawings there is, too, a design for a monument, with twisted columns covered with garlands, a sun-burst, gesticulating angels and fat descending cupids—all in the best baroque manner. This latter however is an extreme example, only quoted to show Wren’s knowledge of baroque detail. It is when Wren is most like Bernini in his decoration and less like the contemporary French artists, with their insistence on free foliage and asymmetrical ornament, that he is most satisfactory. The altar-piece at Chelsea is infinitely superior to the more often quoted one at Trinity College, Oxford, where indeed the baroque may almost be said to sink into the rococo.

“To give the picturesque its grandest scope and yet subdue it to architectural law”—what better description could we have of Wren’s towers? “The baroque is not afraid to startle and arrest.” Think of the sturdy chapel of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, swaggering with its big Corinthian order, its boldly broken pediment and its upstanding cupola, among the timidities of Tudor Gothic. “It enlarged the classic formula by developing within it the principle of movement.” Think of the barrel vaults and saucer domes in the chapels and aisles of St. Paul’s or the gay little Temple Bar neatly striding across the Strand. “Baroque buildings are fit for permanence. They have a massive finality of thought.” Trinity Library has just this quality in supreme degree. Its last and permanent impression is indeed of a broad serenity, which the back elevation to the river possesses in an even greater extent than the courtyard front. But other buildings can be serene beside baroque ones. The point is that this building of Wren’s has the rich modelling, the warm vital spirit which in classical architecture is the peculiar quality of the baroque and the baroque alone. All we know of the man himself bears out this view of his architecture. In a pedantic age he was no pedant. He had the enquiring mind so characteristic of the 17th century, which sought new knowledge in every direction, leaving it to be tabulated and scheduled by the colder and more precise 18th century. We have preserved in the Parentalia several of his exuberant letters, including one charming love-letter to the lady who was his first wife. We know that like Michael Angelo he worked till he was nearly ninety, compressing an immense amount of labour into his later years, and that like him, too, his fiery spirit could not brook opposition. The list of his executed works compares to-day in extent with that of a great American architect, but to superintend that work he had to travel many dreary days on horse back. He must have been a man of magnificent physique and we know that he had a gay happy spirit. All who met him delighted in his wit. His friends were legion. He knew everyone worth knowing and had achieved fame in other walks in life before he began his proper work. He was an honorary doctor both of Oxford and Cambridge before he became an architect. It is difficult to imagine such a man blindly following Vitruvius Palladio, Serlio, or any other theorist. He might, and no doubt did, confound the ignorant by quoting them; but in his own practice I feel confident he relied on his own innate genius for expressive form, and that genius led him towards those self-confident happy, almost swaggering, shapes we now in their fulness call baroque. It is in his combination of such forms with the more sober methods of English buildings that the great lovableness of his work lies.

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XVII.

THE ANTI-SOCIAL CONTRACT.

ONE of the troubles in obtaining good buildings to-day, as everyone who has tried in the capacity either as owner, architect or builder must realise, lies firstly in the system of asking for competing tenders from builders, and secondly in tying down the lowest tenderer to carry out the work under a strict and binding legal contract. We look on the builder as a contractor and call him such. His chief function in modern eyes is to undertake to do a carefully specified piece of building for a fixed sum. His profit is not specified and he is free to make as much as he likes out of his operations as long as he carries out the specified work in the specified way. The real difficulty is that by no manner of means yet devised can the work be specified beforehand with absolute accuracy, nor has any means yet been discovered by which, in all the multifarious processes of building, it can be ascertained whether what has been specified has been actually carried out. We may make drawings as complete and thorough as is humanly possible; we may write long specifications and have the number of bricks, and the amount of all other material and labour to be used, assessed beforehand by a quantity surveyor, yet quality of material and workmanship enters so largely into every stage that no one can definitely say at the end that the contract has been carried out to the letter. Further, we may appoint clerks-of-work and other watch-dogs to follow the contractor at every step on the building itself, or rather to attempt it, and yet we may be fooled by work made off the site and brought to it, or by work done on the job and covered up before the architect or any of his agents, including the clerk-of-works, can see it.

The contract system of building means that directly the contract is signed, the architect, representing the interests of his client, and the contractor are there watching one another like rival detectives in a divorce case. The contractor to obtain the contract has probably put in too low a price. Everywhere in material and labour he is anxious to save except where he can find, as in practice he always can, excuse in the specifications and drawings for extras, when he is equally anxious to spend unnecessary money. I do not want to suggest that the majority of builders are not honest. Without any dishonesty in carrying out a contract, which he knows will be strictly enforced against him, the builder uses his wits to make the best living he can. If he has done a good deal of work for the same architect he may take a long view and say “I had better not do such and such a thing, because if discovered this particular architect will not ask me to tender for his work again.” I admit this often happens and to a certain extent the rigours of the contract system are thereby tempered. But who, outside a lunatic asylum, under such a system and under modern conditions, would expect good craftsmanship to flourish and good sound building to arise? That it does flourish now and then, and that good sound buildings are put up occasionally is a miracle, which I, as an architect, can only put down to some strange innate goodness in the breasts of many builders. I am afraid this goodness is chiefly to be found in those who are styled old-fashioned, in firms that have a tradition and in craftsmen who love their work, whatever they may in a monetary sense make from it.

But why should this state of affairs exist? Why should the builder be on one side and the architect on the other? Why should they not be colleagues from first to last, each helping the other with his experience? The answer is that this happy state of affairs can only take place to the benefit of everyone concerned, and particularly of the building owner, if the ordinary contract based on cut-throat tendering is abolished. By far the most satisfactory work it has been my lot to carry out, as well as the most enjoyable, has been that done under a different system—a system of actual cost plus a fixed profit. In this, to begin with, a careful estimate is made by independent quantity surveyors of the cost of the proposed work, and both the builder and the architect’s remuneration is fixed from the outset. If the building costs more than the estimate, neither profits by the excess. Of course the architect’s commission of six per cent. is so small that it cannot be considered any temptation to him to increase the cost of the building for the sake of it. Still it is more satisfactory, as an example to everyone, and more pleasant for the owner, to know exactly what he is going to pay each person.

What is the result? Everyone starts on the building operations as friends and helpers. In place of antagonistic individual effort you have team work. The larger experience of materials, which the average builder who works for many architects possesses, is placed at the architect’s and consequently at the client’s disposal. If he suggests red deal instead of yellow for a certain piece of work the architect has no reason to suppose he has some hidden motive behind his suggestion. Under the present system the architect is wont to jump to the conclusion that the yellow must be the better, because the builder has suggested the red, and, if the yellow is in the contract, he will insist on it till all is blue, and if the contractor makes a loss, he will take care to make it good elsewhere. And after all, the red might have been better for the particular position. We all know, however, even as free-traders, that the desire to buy in the cheapest market has many qualifications. Among them is human nature, and there is a great deal of human nature in building, and especially in good building. If when we set out to build we want real value for our money, as well as buildings which will be of real value to the country when we have done with them, the sooner we abolish the ordinary form of building contract the better. That is why I have called it the Anti-Social Contract.

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XVIII.

AN INDICTMENT OF COAL SMOKE.

A LARGE northern city without smoke, or indeed any English town where human beings for business reasons have to live in close proximity, is a little difficult to conceive. If it came about suddenly we who live in such places might feel not a little naked and awkward, so accustomed are we to our own dirt. We are apt, indeed, to think that dirt and dignity go hand in hand. A poet friend of mine, who had gone to live in Leeds, told me that one day on visiting his bank in that city, instead of finding it the massive gloomy black pile he expected, it stood out before him as a trifling white building in glazed terra-cotta lately washed. All its dignity and half its financial credit in his eyes had gone. Such it is to be suddenly clean in black surroundings; where before the crudeness of the architecture had been decently covered in soot it now stood forth unashamed in all its absurdity. It was a test the Leeds bank building could not stand, and it is one very few of our more modern classical buildings could. To them the smoke deposit is a grateful one, softening their crudities.

Manchester, however, has lately been cleaning, with the aid of a sandblast, some of her older classical buildings dating from a pre-smoke era, and these have stood the test nobly. The Theatre Royal is a good example. From this one might argue, and I think with some fairness, that as the pall over our towns has become heavier so our architecture has deteriorated. I think it is really a case of cause and effect, though admittedly other things aided in the decline. What is the use of Greek delicacy and refinement in mouldings and ornament when an oily black deposit will very quickly obliterate them and, as has been proved time after time, in a few short decades crumble them away? The good architect is likely to give up hope, and devote himself to clean buildings in the country, where not only mouldings but even texture counts. So we have in our smoky English towns our heavy over-ornamented buildings trying by over-emphasis in every direction to force their way through the grime, and in a clean smokeless town, like New York, light gay buildings with clean line and surface and delicate ornament leaping up to the light and trusting to their general shape and mass for their main effect. The sunny city brings about bright clean-shaven buildings, the smoky one be-whiskered coalheavers grinning at us in their oily facetiousness.

What Manchester or Leeds would be like in a few years’ time for an architect to work in if the tons of tarry acids and soot from their domestic chimneys—the chief offenders—went down the sewers, as such refuse should as long as it remains refuse, instead of falling on our heads and our buildings, is difficult to imagine. They would, one may be sure, be towns of peculiar beauty, a beauty, too, very different to that of the sunny towns of the Mediterranean. Instead of the bright colours belonging to a lower latitude we should have the far more beautiful half-tones and pearly greys belonging to our northern climate. Our buildings to correspond would have to be more delicately modelled, with less strongly marked shadows. Deep porticoes would rarely be used save to mark points of special importance. The architect, instead of being a man accustomed to think in black lines, would become sensitive, not only to every shade of colour, but to every modulation of surface and texture. No longer could we tolerate the hard, bright, cheery reds of our machine-made pressed bricks. The black joints, too, in which we set our brickwork, grinding cinders into our mortar where the south uses sand, would seem to be what they are, so many dirty lines drawn across the fair faces of our buildings, and thereby adding most unnecessarily to the gloom. A vulgar moulding too, an over-emphasized piece of ornament, would become so conspicuous in proper daylight, when all the surroundings would be clean, that the author of it would begin to be cut by his fellow-architects, and even his lay friends as a man of bad and flamboyant taste. For it must be remembered we have already reached the stage where a sin against taste, when realised, is far worse than one against morals. Indeed, the reactions of clean air and the beautifully tempered sunlight which really belongs to Lancashire would be infinite. With the coating of soot removed from our lungs as well as the black from our buildings we should probably all talk with the sprightliness of the Athenians of old. An architectural public opinion would be one of the first things to form, and woe betide the architect and client who spoilt with his coarse work our modern Athens. An effect which old Athens lacked we could have in abundance. The foliage of beautiful feathery yet rounded trees suited to a town, which grow in our climate but not in hers, might make the foil to the buildings of our main streets which the London plane trees do to the painted buildings of the London squares. Our parks, too, would become clean. They might then cease to be the dreary recreation grounds, with asphalt paths and a weedy sprinkling of grass, we now assume, unrightly I think, to be all that is possible in the heart of a city.

All this I realise may be thought fanciful, though it is fancy based on fact. Here, then, are solid facts no one can dispute. Sir Frank Baines, chief architect to the Office of Works, than whom no one has more experience of the upkeep of buildings, stated in his evidence before the Committee on Smoke Abatement that the cost of the upkeep of a building would be reduced by at least half if a smoke-free atmosphere obtained. The material damage to Manchester by its own smoke has been calculated at £1,000,000 a year. But more important even than these figures is the disrepute and disregard into which its soot has brought such towns. There is the story, probably apocryphal and certainly unwarranted, though useful enough in pointing a moral, of the Cabinet Minister who had a speaking engagement, and not feeling very well went to see a leading consultant, and asked whether he was fit to keep his engagement, which happened to be in Manchester. “Manchester?” said the consultant, “certainly not. Nobody is well enough to go to Manchester.”

Owing to their smoke and dirt, no one now lives in our northern manufacturing towns who can afford to live outside them. They have become mere workshops, and, with the Englishman’s disregard for the surroundings in which he works, they are yearly losing what little amenities are left. When the eighteenth-century merchant lived in his square dignified Georgian mansion, with its touch of Dutch brightness and cleanliness, and walked to his equally dignified counting-house, the appearance of the city he walked through was a thing of some consideration to him. Now, when he motors into it for a few hours in the middle of the week and is landed at his office door with hardly time to see the buildings he passes, having his attention directed chiefly to the traffic and the policemen, not only his interest in his town but his knowledge of it is infinitely less. The place he makes money in is not worthy of his thoughts except for that purpose. With the more influential classes feeling like this, it is no wonder that the others feel even less interest and responsibility as they hurry away in their tram-cars to their distant suburbs. So the rot, started by the smoke, spreads until the town becomes the black, formless, slightly smelling abomination we begin to believe it must be. Yet all the time there are Paris, Vienna, New York, Düsseldorf, and Cologne, indeed almost any town but one of our own, to show that in reality the town is and may be something very different—the highest and finest expression of communal life, the place where service and work and the consequent enjoyment of them can alone be carried to the highest pitch.

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XIX.
THE BUSH BUILDINGS OF NEW YORK AND LONDON.

NOTHING could illustrate better the versatility of the leading American architects or the eclectic character of modern American architecture than the Bush Buildings in New York and London. If we wanted to go further we could illustrate this thesis from two other almost equally important works by the same architects, Messrs. Hemle and Corbett. There is their great and splendid Italian basilican church at Brooklyn and their Washington Memorial Masonic Temple, a vast and powerful monumental building in what we should call in England Neo-Grec architecture. These four great structures, either of which is sufficiently striking and competent in every implication of the word, to make the fame of an ordinary English architect, are therefore at the four poles of architectural expression, if we exclude modern attempts at futuristic design. In the England of the end of last century we should have explained this phenomenon easily enough, or at any rate the younger men would, on the simple hypothesis of ghostly designers. But that will not do in this case or in the similar cases of other American firms like Messrs. York and Sawyer, or McKim, Mead and White, which show the same universality in their work. In Mr. Corbett’s case, for his partnership is frankly and openly that of a designer and a business man, from experience of his office I happen to know that all this diverse yet splendid achievement is the work of one man, Mr. Corbett himself. Yet this does not measure his output of creative energy. Apart from his lesser architectural work, like apartment houses and the four great buildings mentioned, all erected or in the course of erection within the span of a few years—for he is still a young man as measured by the heads of the architectural profession in this country—Mr. Corbett finds time to carry on the most successful design atelier in Columbia University. Two nights a week he criticises the _projets_ of some 25-30 young architects, making the constructive suggestions every teacher worth his salt has to make. I met him late one night when he told me he had that evening sketched fifteen different solutions to the same problem on as many student drawing boards. How does this extreme competence, combined with almost absolute freedom from a predilection for any particular form of expression, arise? Obviously it is an intellectual phenomenon divorced from faith in any particular tradition. The only answer I can find to it, and I think it is a satisfactory answer, is that it lies in a combination of the extremely logical Beaux Arts system of education with the alertness of the quick-moving American mind, always open to fresh ideas. Mr. Corbett was trained in Paris, and after that had the usual period of assistantship in great offices like Mr. Cass Gilbert’s and Messrs. McKim, Mead and White’s. In his own case he has never believed in nor possessed a great office staff as measured by American standards. He once told me that he felt fifteen draughtsmen were as many as any man could feed with ideas. After that they began to feed you. It seems a rational limit though one knows it is one often exceeded even in England.

With these preliminary remarks let us consider his two great Bush Buildings both designed to answer the same programme—a permanent exhibition of travellers’ samples—and both converted or partially converted to office purposes, as foreseen would be the case, while the idea of such an exhibition gradually obtained acceptance. The programme from the outset therefore obviously divides itself into two aspects, that of providing large unencumbered exhibition floor space capable of temporary sub-division into offices, and that of giving the total building in each case the commanding appearance, which will make it a prominent feature in a great city. We know how well Mr. Corbett, even in the small section of his total scheme which has been built already, has solved this two-sided problem in London. His New York building, perhaps, is less well know. Let us therefore start with that.